Marc Handelman discusses the strange afterlife of the genre of landscape as it continues to resurface along the broader horizon of image culture. A range of representational idioms of nature and landscape today are re-examined in Handelman’s work, returned to and reconsidered in light of their now unfamiliar, if improper medium, and in new and sometimes unrecognizable forms. Considering a range of projects he has worked on over the last several years, Handelman will discuss how painting might approach the image as a force that rends it, but also one that problematically reassembles its affects. Landscape as such, far from being the mere and hollowed appearance of former identifications of the subject, the state and the corporation is discussed as the ongoing assembly of political order, “without due process.” Handelman will address why “Nature” is never what’s at stake in its representational infighting, and how painting’s stubborn tendency towards dissimulation, and the material, reorient relations to the visual.
The lectures are organized by Doug Ashford and Colleen Asper for The Interdisciplinary Seminar Lecture Series of The Cooper Union School of Art
