Arts: New Deal and Now Deal

The Philoctetes Center for The Multidisciplinary Study of Imagination (New York Psychoanalytic Institute) will host a free roundtable:

From the WPA to the NEA: Arts Funding Then and Now 

Saturday, September 25, 2pm

The WPA, one of the central programs of Roosevelt's New Deal, was pivotal in providing a template for government subsidy of arts projects, producing one of the great periods of creative expression in the history of American society. Playwrights like Arthur Miller and Elmer Rice flourished under the WPA’s Federal Theater Project, directed by Hallie Flanagan. Federally funded projects sowed the seeds for America's ascendency as the center of modern art, particularly with the emergence of abstract expressionism in the late ‘40s and ‘50s. The WPA and the New Deal fostered a renaissance that affected the very fabric of American society, instilling a confidence that helped lead the country back to prosperity. This panel will look at how and why the WPA stimulated creative growth during a crucial period in American history, and examine the ways in which government subsidy of the arts can foster a sense of social identity. 

Morris Dickstein is the author of Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression, winner of the 2010 Ambassador Book Award in American Studies. He is Distinguished Professor of English and Theatre at CUNY Graduate Center and the author of Gates of Eden and Leopards in the Temple, among other works. 

Rocco Landesman is the tenth chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). Prior to joining the NEA, he was a Broadway theater producer. After receiving a doctorate in Dramatic Literature at the Yale School of Drama, he served there for four years as an assistant professor. He ran a private investment fund until his appointment in 1987 as president of Jujamcyn, a company that owns and operates five Broadway theaters. Landesman has produced several Tony award-winning Broadway hits, most notably Big River, Angels in America, and The Producers. He has been active on numerous boards, including the Municipal Arts Society, the Times Square Alliance, The Actor's Fund, and the Educational Foundation of America. Landesman has spoken at forums and written numerous articles on the debate surrounding arts policy. 

Susan Quinn is the author of A Mind of Her Own: The Life of Karen Horney; Marie Curie: A Life; Human Trials: Scientists, Investors and Patients in the Quest for a Cure; and Furious Improvisation: How the WPA and a Cast of Thousands Made High Art Out of Desperate Times. Quinn received the Globe Winship award for A Mind of Her Own, and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and Rockefeller residency to work on her biography of Marie Curie, which was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, shortlisted for the Fawcett Book Prize in England, and won the Grand prix des Lectrices d'Elle in France. Quinn has been a staff writer at Boston Magazine, where she won the Penney-Missouri Magazine Award for investigative journalism, and has contributed to The Atlantic and New York Times Magazine, among other publications. She is currently at work on a book about the friendship of Harry Hopkins and FDR. 

Leslie G. Schultz is the Executive Director of BRIC Arts | Media | Bklyn, a non-profit cultural institution dedicated to supporting the creative process and presenting innovative and accessible contemporary art, performing arts, and community media programming that reflects the diverse communities of Brooklyn. Under her leadership, BRIC has rebranded, restructured, expanded its programming, developed and implemented a new strategic plan for institutional growth, and secured public and private support for the creation of BRIC Arts | Media House, a multidisciplinary arts and media center designed by award-winning Leeser Architecture that will double the size of BRIC's current facilities. Prior to BRIC, Leslie was a partner at the law firm of Manatt Phelps & Phillips and its predecessor firm, focusing on capital projects for a range of non-profits and on non-profit governance and corporate affairs. 

This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council. 

Events at Philoctetes are free and open to the public. Seating is on a first come basis. 

The Philoctetes Center for the Multidisciplinary Study of the Imagination was established to promote an interdisciplinary approach to the understanding of creativity and the imaginative process. To achieve its mission, the Center organizes roundtable discussions and music, poetry and film series. All programs are free and open to the public. Visit www.philoctetes.org for more information.

The Philoctetes Center 

247 East 82nd Street (between 2nd and 3rd Avenues), Manhattan
646-422-0544 or info@philoctetes.org 

Perspectives on Dylan

The Inventions of Bob Dylan

a roundtable with Christopher Ricks, Matthew von Unwerth and Sean Wilentz
November 15, 2:30pm (free)
Philoctetes
247 East 82nd Street, Manhattan
info@philoctetes.org
646-422-0544
In consideration of Bob Dylan's 2009 releases, Together Through Life and Christmas in the Heart, this discussion brings together two scholars with multidisciplinary perspectives on Bob Dylan. In his book Dylan's Visions of Sin, preeminent poetry critic Christopher Ricks gives Dylan's work and words their most sustained reading to date, and reveals him as an inheritor and interpreter of the Anglo-American poetic tradition. Sean Wilentz, a Princeton professor and Historian-in-Residence at bobdylan.com, situates Dylan in the cultural and historical contexts that thrust him into the core of 20th century American iconography. Moderated by Matthew von Unwerth, this roundtable will explore Dylan's work as an ongoing conversation with tradition—literary, musical, historical, cultural—as opposed to and in productive tension with his works' innovations, and their erstwhile reputation as new, groundbreaking, and prophetic. Panelists will address Dylan's borrowings—from scripture, Chaucer, Civil War poet Henry Timrod, vaudeville—as well as his prolific non-musical output, including his stint as host of Theme Time Radio Hour, interpreting his work through the prisms of their respective expertise.
Christopher Ricks is Warren Professor of the Humanities at Boston University. He was President of the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics and Writers from 2007 to 2008, and Professor of Poetry at Oxford from 2004 to 2009. In 2004, he published Dylan's Visions of Sin.
Matthew von Unwerth is the author of Freud's Requiem: Memory, Mourning and the Invisible History of a Summer Walk. He is Director of the A.A. Brill Library of The New York Psychoanalytic Institute and Coordinator of the Film Program at the Philoctetes Center. He is a candidate in psychoanalytic training in New York.
Sean Wilentz is Sidney and Ruth Lapidus Professor in the American Revolutionary Era at Princeton University. A recipient of the Bancroft and Beveridge Prizes in American history, he is also Historian-in-Residence at Bob Dylan's official website, www.bobdylan.com. His new book, Bob Dylan in America, will be published by Doubleday in 2010.

More information at Philoctetes

Posted via email from Eva Yaa Asantewaa's posterous

Dancing on the Ceiling: Music and the Brain

THE PHILOCTETES CENTER
FOR THE MULTIDISCIPLINARY STUDY OF IMAGINATION
at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute
(EDWARD NERSESSIAN AND FRANCIS LEVY, DIRECTORS)

invites you to a Roundtable
Saturday, March 14, 2009 at 2:30pm
at
The Philoctetes Center
247 East 82nd Street
(Phone: 646-422-0544; email: info@philoctetes.org)

Dancing on the Ceiling:
Music and the Brain

"Music is among the defining features of human culture, playing a central role in every society known to Western scholars. However, from the standpoint of evolution, music is also one of the most mysterious of human behaviors, as it serves no obvious function that might have driven its evolution." -Josh McDermott, M. Hauser

Advances in neuroscientific techniques, such as fMRI, have enabled researchers to better understand the parts of the brain that are involved in thought processes, in particular those related to the emotions released by creative and esthetic acitivities. This roundtable will explore music in relation to brain function in an effort to understand the evolution of music and its possible role as a precursor to language. The panel will address a number of related questions: how music communicates feeling and why the emotions it generates make us feel so good; why we like some music and not other music; why some music is inextricably connected to physical body movement; how music can induce meditative states of consciousness; what relationships exist between the perception of music and language in the mind; and what musicians can tell us about their state of mind when they perform, compose, or improvise. Five professionals from different disciplines—a neuroscientist, a psychoanalyst, an Arabic musician and scholar, a sound engineer, and a jazz saxophonist/composer—come together to talk about these questions and more.

Jim Anderson is an internationally recognized recording engineer and producer of acoustic music for the recording, radio, television, and film industries. His recordings have received nine Grammy awards and 25 Grammy nominations. His radio recordings have received two George Foster Peabody Awards and he has received two Emmy nominations for television programs. A graduate of the Duquesne University School of Music in Pittsburgh PA, Jim studied audio engineering at the Eastman School of Music and Sender Freies Berlin. In the 1970s, he was employed by National Public Radio and engineered and produced many award-winning classical, jazz, documentary, and news programs. Since 1980 Jim has had a career as an independent audio engineer and producer. He has been a lecturer and master-class guest faculty member at the Berklee College of Music, The New England Institute of Art, McGill University, The Banff Centre, Universite de Kunst in Berlin, University of Luleå in Sweden, the New School University, University of Georgia, and Penn State University. He is a professor and former chair of the Clive Davis Department of Recorded Music at the Tisch School of the Arts, New York University. He is the President of the Audio Engineering Society, 2008-2009.

Taoufiq Ben Amor was born in Tunis to a Sufi Family of the Qadiri order. With a musician father, he learned percussion and singing at a young age. Two decades ago, he started learning the Oud and the Arabic Maqam system with Mohammed Labbad, Jamal Aslan, Simon Shaheen and the Rashidiyya School of Andalusian music. He is an active music performer, educator and producer. Taoufiq Ben Amor is currently Senior lecturer in Arabic Studies at Columbia University. Some of his topics of research include, "Beur Rap in Paris: Language and Identity among young French-Maghrebian musicians;" "The Making of Tradition: Standardization of the Lyrics of the Tunisian Andalusian Malouf;" "The Politics of Language: Formalization of the Iraqi Maqam 1960-Present;" "Code-switching in Rai Music;" "Turning Point: Tarab as a Doorway to the Sufi Experience of the Divine;" and “Standardization and Colloquialization in Andalusian and Maghrebian Music Genres.”

Jane Ira Bloom is a soprano saxophonist, composer, and a pioneer in the use of live electronics and movement in jazz. She is the winner of the 2007 Guggenheim Fellowship in music composition, the 2007 Mary Lou Williams Women in Jazz Award for lifetime service to jazz, the Jazz Journalists Association Award and the Downbeat International Critics Poll for soprano saxophone, and the Charlie Parker Fellowship for jazz innovation. Bloom was the first musician commissioned by the NASA Art Program and has an asteroid named in her honor by the International Astronomical Union. She has received numerous commissions and has composed for the American Composers Orchestra, the St. Luke's Chamber Ensemble, the Pilobolus Dance Theater integrating jazz performers in new settings. She has recorded and produced 13 albums of her music and holds degrees from Yale University and the Yale School of Music. Bloom is currently on the faculty of the New School for Jazz & Contemporary Music in NYC. Her latest release is the award-winning CD, Mental Weather.

Josh McDermott recently joined the Center for Neural Science at NYU as a postdoctoral researcher. He studies sound and hearing, conducting experiments on humans and designing computational audio algorithms. He has longstanding research interests in music perception and cognition. Earlier in life he spent his free time DJing in clubs and on the radio, and to this day remains an avid collector of vinyl records. His scientific interests in music focus on understanding how musical structures are represented in the auditory system, and on what this can reveal about the origins of music.

Alexander Stein conducts a polymodal career as psychoanalyst, business consultant, author, journalist, teacher, and scholar. He is a member, training analyst, and supervisor of NPAP, and maintains clinical and business consulting practices in New York. A Principal of the Boswell Group LLC, a psychoanalytic consulting partnership, he advises business leaders and entrepreneurs. He also writes a monthly column for Fortune Small Business on the psychological dimensions of business and entrepreneurship. Drawing on his pre-psychoanalytic life as a conservatory-trained pianist, Stein writes and lectures extensively on the conjoined study of music and psychoanalysis. He is the author of numerous scholarly works that have been published in many of the leading peer-reviewed psychoanalytic journals, and is the author, most recently, of The Sound of Memory, which explores the formative influences of the early sound environment on psychological development. He recently delivered the Aaron Esman/Richardson History of Psychiatry Research Seminar Lecture on Music at Weill Cornell Medical College, and is organizing a weekend conference entitled “Singing (and Writing) with Tongues of Wood” for New Directions in Psychoanalytic Thinking in Washington DC.

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Events at Philoctetes are free and open to the public. Seating is on a first come basis.

The Center would like to thank you again for your generous response to our appeal for support as we negotiate our future in light of the disappearance of our operating funds—the result of the mismanagement of assets by Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities, LLC. For more information about how you can help to sponsor the Philoctetes Center, please visit our Support page.

The mission of the Philoctetes Center is to foster the study of imagination — funding research, organizing roundtable discussions, offering courses and programs open to the public. The Center publishes a newsletter, Dialog, and is developing a web-based clearing house on work related to imagination. The Center also publishes a journal, Philoctetes. Visit www.philoctetes.org for more information.

The Body and its Image roundtable

The Philoctetes Center for the Multidisciplinary Study of Imagination
at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute
(Edward Nersessian and Francis Levy, Directors)

invites you to a Roundtable
Saturday, October 4, 2008 at 3:30pm

The Philoctetes Center
247 East 82nd Street
(Phone: 646-422-0544; email: info@philoctetes.org)

Events at Philoctetes are free and open to the public. Seating is on a first come basis.

The Body and its Image

Over the past decade there has been a moral panic about inappropriate body size. Anorexia nervosa and obesity have become touchstones for discussions of social and personal failure, of the supremacy of genetics over human choice, of the global expansion of normative ideas of the body—indeed, for virtually all discussions about what has gone wrong in our contemporary world. Meanwhile, artistic representations offer another vision of what it means to inhabit a body. This panel will examine the interlocked questions of the meanings attached today to bodily difference and representation, and the role that these debates play in our psychological and physical well-being.

Marina Abramovic has been a pioneer of performance as a visual art form since beginning her career in Belgrade in the early 1970s. The body has always been both her subject and medium. She has explored her physical and mental limits in works that ritualize the simple actions of everyday life. From 1975–88, Abramovic collaborated with the German artist Ulay, addressing the nature of duality. Since returning to solo performances in 1989, she has presented her work at major institutions in the US and Europe, including the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris and the Neue National Galerie in Berlin. She has also participated in many large-scale international exhibitions, including the Venice Biennale and Documenta VI, VII, and IX in Kassel, Germany. Recent performances include "House with Ocean View" at New York's Sean Kelly Gallery and "7 Easy Pieces" at the Guggenheim Museum. Among her upcoming projects are a retrospective at MoMA and a theatre piece directed by Robert Wilson that will premier in 2011.

Paul Campos is Professor of Law at the University of Colorado and a syndicated columnist for the Scripps Howard News Service. He has written widely about the legal, medical, and social consequences of narrow definitions of what constitutes a "normal body." He is the author of The Obesity Myth. His work on this subject has been featured in Scientific American, The New York Times, The New Republic, The Los Angeles Times, and many other publications.

Sander Gilman (moderator) is a Distinguished Professor of the Liberal Arts and Sciences and Professor of Psychiatry at Emory University, where he is the Director of the Program in Psychoanalysis and the Health Sciences Humanities Initiative. A cultural and literary historian, he is the author or editor of eighty books. His Oxford lectures, Multiculturalism and the Jews, appeared in 2006. His most recent edited volume, Diets and Dieting: A Cultural Encyclopedia, appeared in 2007. He has held professorships in humanities and medicine at Cornell University, the University of Chicago and the University of Illinois at Chicago. He has also served as the Visiting Historical Scholar at the National Library of Medicine in Bethesda; as a fellow at Stanford's Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences; as a Berlin prize fellow at the American Academy in Berlin; and as the Weidenfeld Visiting Professor of European Comparative Literature at Oxford University.

Marcel Kinsbourne is a behavioral neurologist and Professor of Psychology at the New School. Educated at Oxford University, he has held professorships at Duke University and the University of Toronto. His research interests center on problems in neuropsychology and child development. He has published in excess of 400 medical and scientific articles and authored or edited eight books, including The Asymmetrical Function of the Brain, The Unity and the Diversity of the Human Brain, and Consciousness: The Brain's Private Psychological Field.

Julie Atlas Muz, Miss Exotic World and Miss Coney Island 2006, is a choreographer, actor and artist based in New York City. Muz was included in the Whitney Biennial 2004 and has performed her work all over the world. Her alter ego, Mr. Pussy was a main attraction at a show she co-curated with Kembra Pfahler at Dietch Projects, entitled Womanizer. She recently co-created and performed a new erotic version of "Beauty and the Beast" with Mat Fraser, a UK based artist with Thalidomide, at Dadafest in Liverpool.

Sabine Wilhelm is Associate Professor of Psychology at the Harvard Medical School. She is Director of the Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder and Related Disorders Program and Director of the Cognitive-Behavior Therapy Program at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School. Dr. Wilhelm is internationally recognized as a leading researcher on Body Dysmorphic Disorder, a distressing preoccupation with an imagined defect in one’s appearance. She currently is the principal investigator of two studies investigating treatments for the disorder funded by the National Institute of Mental Health. She wrote the book, Feeling Good About the Way You Look: A Program for Overcoming Body Image Problems and has many other publications. Dr. Wilhelm serves on several editorial boards and regularly provides continuing education workshops nationally and internationally.

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The mission of the Philoctetes Center is to foster the study of imagination — funding research, organizing roundtable discussions, offering courses and programs open to the public. The Center publishes a newsletter, Dialog, and is developing a web-based clearing house on work related to imagination. The Center also publishes a journal, Philoctetes. Visit The Philoctetes Center web site for more information.