Seating is limited so please arrive early.

Brooklyn Commons, an occasional discussion series at ISCP, presents intellectual and artistic pairings between the established Brooklyn-based artist community and ISCP residents. This series puts artists in conversation who have not shared a dialogue in the past and focuses on cultural practitioners living and working in Brooklyn, both long- and short-term.

On April 15^th, Vito Acconci and Michel de Broin will discuss architecture, interaction between people and spaces, unfamiliar sites, and the utility of objects. Daniel Sherer will informally respond to their conversation.

Vito Acconci’s design and architecture comes from another direction, from backgrounds of writing and art. His poems in the late 60’s treated language as matter (words to look at rather than through) and the page as a field to travel over; his performances in the early 70’s helped shift art from object to interaction; later in the 70’s, his installations turned museums and galleries into interactions between spaces and people; in the early 80’s, his architectural-units were meant to be transformed by users. By the late 80’s his work crossed over and he formed Acconci Studio, a design firm that mixes poetry and geometry, computer-scripting and sentence-structure, narrative and biology, chemistry and social-science. The Studio uses computers to give form to thinking; they use forms to find ideas. They make not nodes so much as circulation-routes, they design time as much as space. Their design starts with clothing and ends with vehicles – in-between, they design buildings that slip into landscape and vice versa; they make spaces fluid, changeable and portable; they make architecture subservient to people and not vice versa – they anticipate cities on the move.

Michel de Broin’s work ranges from assemblage to video and photography. His multifaceted production deals with energy flows, entropic devolution, and the forms of visual, spatial and technological paradox that derive from these antithetical forces. Most of his works are retooled everyday appliances, found objects that disclose an ironic re-utilization not only of the mechanic universe but also of tropes of Conceptual Art and Minimalism, which in his hands take on a critical dimension. Although universally recognizable, their new behavior defies their functions and uses. Crafting unforeseen relationships between waste, productivity, risk and consumption, De Broin defamiliarizes established modes of signification in everyday technical environments. A mid-career survey of his work was mounted by the Musée d’Art Contemporain,  Montréal in 2013. De Broin has held solo exhibitions and projects like La maîtresse de la Tour Eiffel, Paris; Reciprocal Energy at Musée d’art contemporain Val-de-Marne, France; Reverse Entropy at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin; Disruption from Within at Plug In, Winnipeg, Canada;  Shared Propulsion Car at Exit Art, New York, Épater la Galerie at Villa Merkel, Esslingen, Germany.

Daniel Sherer is Assistant Professor (Adjunct) of Architecture at Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, and Visiting Lecturer in Architectural History, Yale University School of Architecture.

Brooklyn Commons is organized by Kari Conte, ISCP Director of Programs and Exhibitions.

Upcoming Brooklyn Commons Events:
May 20: Ursula Von Rydingsvard and Brett Graham