NSE #70 | Adam McEwen with Thyrza Nichols Goodeve

Adam McEwen (Instagram: @adam_mcewen), artist of obituary, joins host and Rail Editor at Large, Thyrza Nichols Goodeve (Instagram: @tgoodeve), for New Social Environment #70 to discuss the connection between writing obituaries for the Daily Telegraph and McEwen’s practice centered on “a space that conflates a beleaguered present with the afterlife of a potent and contentious moment in art history.”⁠ The conversation will be closed by poet Chris Martin. See the full event page: https://brooklynrail.org/events/2020/... In response to the imminent crisis of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Brooklyn Rail shifted our operations online. These New Social Environments provide a place to have vibrant conversations in a time of great physical distancing. Adam McEwen’s work resides somewhere between the celebratory and funereal. After writing obituaries for the Daily Telegraph in London, he began producing obituaries of living subjects such as Bill Clinton and Jeff Koons, highlighting the blurred line between history and fiction. In a reverse Midas-effect, McEwen has answered to the shimmering claims of Minimalist art by creating contemporary work that is freighted with the leaden melancholy of modern history. As a meditation on the many lives and deaths of art, he has created a space that conflates a beleaguered present with the afterlife of a potent and contentious moment in art history, in much the same way as his obituaries narrate the future-perfect of the rich, the famous, the beautiful, and the notorious. McEwen’s dead zone of dark relics and faded memories confronts us, literally and metaphysically, with the filthy lucre of our past and present. Adam McEwen was born in 1965 in London, England. He received his B.A. in 1987 from Christ Church, Oxford, and then received his B.F.A. in 1991 from California Institute of the Arts, Valencia. He lives and works in New York City. Thyrza Nichols Goodeve, PHD is the Senior Art Editor for the Brooklyn Rail. She is an art writer and hobby cartoodlist who writes “with” rather than “on” contemporary art and artists. Her interests range across art as a “structure of feeling”, human/nonhuman animal ontologies, the natural fantastic, the aesthetics of wonder, theories and practices of writing, the interview as essay, the history of modernism(s), surrealist methodologies, dystopias and utopias, and the metaphysics of technology. She has published in The Brooklyn Rail, Art Agenda, Artforum, Art in America, and numerous artist’s catalogs. She has a Masters in Cinema Studies from NYU, and a PhD from The History of Consciousness Program at UC Santa Cruz. She is the author of How Like A Leaf: A Conversation with Donna Haraway (1999) and is working on an updated forthcoming edition, and compiling her collected writings titled, No Wound Ever Speaks for Itself: Writing, Art, Vulnerability, Conversation, Attitude with a preface by Avital Ronell. Chris Martin’s fourth book of poetry, Things to Do in Hell, will be published by Coffee House Press in the fall and his first book of essays,May Tomorrow Be Awake: On Poetry, Autism, and Our Neurodiverse Future is forthcoming from HarperOne. He is the recipient of grants from the Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Minnesota Humanities Center.He is the co-founder and executive director of Unrestricted Interest, an organization dedicated to helping neurodivergent learners transform their lives though writing. He lives in Minneapolis, where he also teaches at Hamline University and Carleton College.