Fluxus Forms: Author Natilee Harren in Conversation with Elizabeth Eager on Scores, Multiples, and the Eternal Network

Date: 5 February 2021
Time: 3:00–4:00 p.m. ET
Location: Zoom
Presented by: The Andrew W. Mellon Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography

A 40-minute presentation followed by 20 minutes of Q&A which was held Friday, 5 February 2021, 3:00–4:00 p.m. ET, via Zoom. 

Join Natilee Harren and Elizabeth Eager for a conversation about Harren’s book Fluxus Forms: Scores, Multiples, and the Eternal Network (University of Chicago Press, 2020). This event is part of a series celebrating new books in critical bibliography, and is sponsored by Rare Book School’s Andrew W. Mellon Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography (SoFCB).

Natilee Harren is a scholar of modern and contemporary art history and theory, with particular focus on experimental, interdisciplinary practices after 1960. Her research interests include Fluxus and the twentieth-century avant-gardes, intersections between visual art and music/sound/listening, experimental scores and notations, works on paper, conceptual art and performance, materiality and ephemerality, contemporary conservation, theories of appropriation, and feminist art and theory related to labor, care, and aging. Harren is author of Fluxus Forms: Scores, Multiples, and the Eternal Network (University of Chicago Press, 2020, winner of the Terra Foundation for American Art International Publication Grant) and Karl Haendel: Knight’s Heritage (LAXART, 2017). Harren’s essays and criticism have appeared in Art Journal, Art Journal Open, and Getty Research Journal, and she has been a regular contributor to Artforum since 2009. Her research has been supported by grants and fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, Getty Research Institute, Fulbright Program, Houston Arts Alliance, Menil Drawing Institute, and the University of California Office of the President. She is a Junior Fellow in the Andrew W. Mellon Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography at Rare Book School, and has served as president (2018–2020) and vice president (2015–2017) of the Society of Contemporary Art Historians, an affiliate society of the College Art Association. Harren’s current research projects include a study of the early-career drawings of Walter De Maria and their relation to experimental performance, sculpture, and conceptual art of the sixties; a critical history of listening practices in contemporary art; and a media-rich digital publication, forthcoming from the Getty Research Institute, that surveys and theorizes a range of twentieth-century experimental notations from the fields of visual art, music, performance, poetry, and dance. Harren holds a B.A. from Rice University, Ph.D. from UCLA, and currently teaches as assistant professor of art history at the University of Houston School of Art.

Elizabeth Bacon Eager is an assistant professor of art history at the Meadows School of the Arts at Southern Methodist University. Bacon Eager earned her B.A. in architecture from Yale University, her M.Arch from the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and her Ph.D. in the history of art and architecture from Harvard University. She specializes in the transatlantic history of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century art and material culture, with a focus on intersections between art, science and technology. Her current book project brings together images and objects from both the fine and the mechanical arts to consider the relationship between drawing, the body, and the production of technical knowledge in early America’s industrializing society. Her work has been supported by fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies/Luce Foundation, the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, and the American Antiquarian Society. She is a Junior Fellow in the Andrew W. Mellon Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography at Rare Book School.

Elizabeth Yale, Senior Fellow in the Andrew W. Mellon Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography at Rare Book School, will be moderating the event. She is a lecturer in the Department of History at the University of Iowa, where she teaches courses in the history of science, the history of the book, and European history. She is the author of Sociable Knowledge: Natural History and the Nation in Early Modern Britain (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016).

Follow the conversation on social media using hashtags #SoFCB, #RBSOnline, and #FluxusForms.