Molly Nesbit: Doubts and Habits of Actions in Time

Utopia Station – Venice · Sustainable Aesthetics · Sustainability – carrying things forward in time · Doing the work of history · Utopia Station: a mind bender · Education is the moving of minds · Utopia Station could not be seen as a totality · It had many forms of manifestation · Difficult to define and categorise · Art brings some form of knowledge · Education is a process of dawnings · Teaching and art have a delay built into it · Chris Marker · Nicola Bouvier 1953 · The Pragmatists in America · Charles Sander Peirce, John Dewey, etc. · William James · Pragmatism – dense and modern · The pragmatists brought their own catalysts · Peirce produced the first draft of Pragmatism · Nothing new can be learned by analysing definitions · Habits of action · Posing physical problems for logic · Reality as independent of an individual person’s thoughts · How to know? · Dewey · Knowing is viewing from the outside · Art as tool and practice in service of life · Consciousness is not a separate mode of being · Their pragmatism is not our script · History can remain live · History brought through the present via writing

Molly Nesbit, chair and professor in the Department of Art at Vassar College and contributing editor of Artforum. She is the author of Atget’s Seven Albums (1992), Their Common Sense (2000), and The Pragmatism in the History of Art (2013), the first volume in a collection of her essays. Since 2002, together with Hans Ulrich Obrist and Rirkrit Tiravanija, she has tri-curated Utopia Station, an ongoing book, exhibition, seminar, website, and street project.