#michael berube

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Demi Lich

Art for Monster Manual 5e

Art by Michael Berube

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One way to think about disability, democracy, and genetics is to imagine that the public is not public enough and the private is not private enough.

Michael Bérubé, “Disability, Democracy, and the New Genetics,” in The Disability Studies Reader, 4th edition 

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When Professors’ Speech Is Disqualifying

Should academic freedom really protect those who make false and morally repellent claims? It’s time for a rethink.

The main thing to note about the linked article above is the manipulation of extreme cases—biological racists, nanoparticles-in-the-vaccine people—to promote a policy that, if effected, would be consumed with marginal and ambiguous cases: to discipline and expel scholars offering interpretations that differ from consensus, especially when “false” and “morally repellent” are equated.

We therefore call on faculty senates across the country to develop “academic freedom committees” comprising faculty elected to adjudicate cases by establishing field-appropriate review panels in the physical sciences, social sciences, arts, and humanities. Some senates have standing committees with “academic freedom” as their charge already; their jurisdiction should be enlarged to ensure that cases of disciplinary incompetence can be brought to them and panels created by them.

That a committee whose job is to restrict freedom will have “freedom” in its name is, I trust, an irony too obvious to belabor. Since our authors, while reserving most of their rhetorical fire for racists and right-wingers, also make a great show of promising to censor the left too, let’s try to think of some marginal cases for them.

Perhaps the most decorated and well-known scholar in a department where I studied was happy to offer defenses of Stalin and Mao in the seminar room, though he does phrase that kind of thing somewhat more euphemistically in his published peer-reviewed work. (But then one of the co-authors of the linked article above knows this specific fact quite well.) Or what about, to take another example not quite at random, the pervasive defense of pederasty in queer theory from Foucault and Gayle Rubin forward? Will the authors’ proposed adjudicators of immorality and falsity censure this? Or perhaps they will be persuaded of its righteousness—pederasty is queer liberation—and censure its critics instead—anti-pederasts are homophobes. For someone in the end must be censured in this paradigm where academic speech is to be adjudicated for its truth and morality. 

Whether or not Mao’s revolution can be justified as anti-imperial action and whether or not what Wilde and Gide were doing in Algiers could be justified as queer liberation—these are open to interpretation only up to a point. Eventually, everyone considering the subject makes a yes/no decision. “No” in both cases from me, for whatever it’s worth, but then even that still leaves us in rough water. There is such a thing as western imperialism and legitimate (or even just existentially necessary) resistance against it; and Wilde and Gide remain major writers, hardly to be dismissed from the canon. How is the boundary among all these contradictory truths to be policed? Toni Morrison, as far as I can tell, believed Afrocentric counterhistory pretty much up and down the line, an example of what she herself called “discredited knowledge,” just the type of knowledge she liked to champion. Should a “freedom committee” at Princeton have discredited it further and kicked her out? What about today’s scholars of her work?

The whole conversation is, as they say, “academic” in the end, though. As a place for creativity and thought, for the production of new truths and new art, academe is over, this article being just one morbid symptom, a death-throe twitch. There is a world elsewhere.

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Michael Berube

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Depths by  Michael Berube

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The L Magazine reviews Brian Wood's show "Enceinte"

Posted by Paul D'Agostino on Thu, Mar 27, 2014 at 2:42 PM

The review reads in part: "... Michael Berube has curated a rather properly timed show of gracefully rendered, organically loose, at times elegantly conchological graphite drawings and photographs by Brian Wood. Nestled in the church's nave and gathered under the title Enceinte—a French term that most directly translates to 'pregnant,' but can also refer to a protective girding or enclosure—the works on show seem verged upon budding to life, effervescent in a way, or calmed into modes of repose. Fitting, to be sure, for a vernally timed show—burgeoning flora, reproductive forms, certain holidays. Fitting too, and quite touchingly, for an exhibit the artist has dedicated to his mother, who recently passed away ..."

To read the full review click here: http://www.thelmagazine.com/TheMeasure/archives/2014/03/27/4-art-exhibits-you-need-to-see

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Brian Wood Solo Exhibition at the Church of St. Paul the Apostle

BRIAN WOOD Enceinte

Quicken, 2012, Graphite on paper, 14 x 11 inches

March 7th-April 13th, 2014 Opening Reception: Thursday, March 13th, 7-9pm

Openings Collective is pleased to announce a solo exhibition by Brian Wood in the Church of St. Paul the Apostle curated by Michael Berube.

Works in this exhibition will include graphite drawings, ink/photo hybrid drawings, and a large-scale photograph. Wood’s explorations in these various media allow access to different states of mind and differing experiences of time and space. His highly attuned attention to consciousness and the fluctuating states of awareness manifest the core imagery of his work.

Wood states: “The pre-lingual lack of separation from one’s mother and the undifferentiated void of the infant’s world quickly give way to the necessary experience of difference, boundaries, self-awareness, language, and time. The death of Orpheus is an arresting image of the tail-end of this state: his body torn to pieces and cast into the landscape while his head is held by the flowing river Hebrus, singing as it is swept out to sea. In that head, floating to Lesbos, live memories of underworld and ecstasy.

I’m particularly interested in the mysterious way images constantly arrive in consciousness, fluoresce, and die. All this in a flash that remains largely unconscious as images instantly reify toward meaning and language and are then put to service as identity, self, and workaday narcissism. I experience the process of drawing as a tracing of arising being and imagery, shifting mental states, embodied experience, and fragments of memory. Once reaching a state of holding/stasis and fully immanent with meaning, but just before solidifying into a particular meaning, the drawing is complete. The resultant image often feels very alien to me and each drawing is quite different.

This exhibition has coalesced around mourning for my mother, Phyllis Cicily Ana Wood, who recently passed away. It will include work that refers to my earliest experience of mother and the show will be dedicated to her.”

Brian Wood is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Metropolitan Museum, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum, the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, the National Gallery of Canada, the Ludwig Museum in Cologne, and many others.

His awards include the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, the New York Foundation for the Arts Grant, numerous Canada Council Grants, and the Woodrow Wilson Fellowship. Recent exhibitions include The Printed Picture at the Museum of Modern Art, Brian Wood: Drawings at Jeannie Freilich Contemporary in Chelsea, Le Choix du Coeur with Gandy Gallery in Prague, and recent group shows at Julie Saul Gallery, Bernard Jacobson Gallery, and Schema Projects in Brooklyn.

The Church of St. Paul is located on the corner of West 60th Street and Columbus Avenue, New York, NY 10019. Gallery hours are Monday through Friday from 7:30 AM to 6:00 PM, Saturday and Sunday from 8:30 AM to 6:00 PM. For press inquires, please contact Frank Sabatte at [email protected] or call (212)-265-3209 extension 218.

Brian Wood: http://www.brianwoodstudio.com

Openings: Website: http://www.openingsny.com Twitter: http://twitter.com/openingsny (@openings) Facebook: http://facebook.com/openingscollective

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A Fierce Bliss Swells in the Church of St Paul the Apostle

A solo show of chic Renaissance and Baroque collages by Joel Carreiro, curated by Michael Berube.

To read full review click here.