MACCH Spark Session with Gregory Zinman on Art in 1980s NYC Nightclubs
We are thrilled to invite you to our first event of the year, a special Spark Session co-organised with the Law & Popular Culture Research Network, with visiting scholar Gregory Zinman, who will be presenting his work titled, Public Scenes and “Fugitive Video”: Art in 1980s NYC Nightclubs. The session will take place on 30th January, 2025 from 15.30 to 17.00 at GG76s 1.018.
This presentation shares the untold history of video art in New York City nightclubs of the 1980s. Shaped by communal practice, fueled by narcotics, and backed by the mob, clubs provided a radically different milieu than the art world for the making, exhibition, and reception of video art. This history allows us to shift our attention from media objects to an examination of publics, contexts, spaces, and bodies where art-making takes place; that asks us to consider histories of experience, pleasure, intoxication, and sociality at society’s margins; and that demands that we write histories of vibrant and broad communities, and not just heroic individuals.
Gregory Zinman is an associate professor in the Department of Film and Media at Emory University and the curator of Off The Wall @ 725 Ponce, a public screening program in Atlanta. His writing on film and media has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, among other publications. He is the author of Making Images Move: Handmade Cinema and the Other Arts (University of California Press, 2020) and co-editor, with John Hanhardt and Edith Decker-Phillips, of We Are in Open Circuits: Writings by Nam June Paik (The MIT Press, 2019). He recently received an Arts Writers Grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation for his next book, Public Scenes: Media Art Outside the Gallery and Museum.
We hope you will be able to join us for this unique and engaging presentation!
