Book Launch
4.30 pm & 5.30 pm, Video Screenings
6 – 7 pm, Conversation with Dr. Christina Landbrecht, Director Art Program, Schering Stiftung
Drinks until 10 pm
Friederike Schäfer: “An Anarchitectural Body of Work. Suzanne Harris and the Downtown New York Artists’ Community in the 1970s”, De Gruyter, Berlin, 2023
On the Book
The artist, dancer, and educator Suzanne Harris (1940–1979) was a protagonist of the downtown New York City artist community in the 1970s. With her boundary-transgressing practice, she played a decisive part in avant-garde projects such as the Anarchitecture group, 112 Greene Street, FOOD, and the Natural History of the American Dancer. Harris was also a part of the Heresies editorial collective. Despite all this, Harris’s own oeuvre fell into abeyance.
In the book, Friederike Schäfer reconstructs Harris’s dispersed, postminimalist body of work, which broke the mold of art categories, art practices, art spaces, and the common notion of space. The author draws on post-Marxist feminist theory to trace how Harris transcended both sculpture and dance to create site-specific, ephemeral installations. She shows how these geometric structures need to be understood as body-oriented, choreographic settings, and in terms of the newly emerging materialist paradigm of the social production of space.
- People Friederike Schäfer
