George Baker at Sam Fox School March 15

“In the world of contemporary art, the photographic object seems to be an object in crisis, or at least in severe transformation.”

So argues renowned critic George Baker, PhD, an editor of the journal October, in his influential 2005 essay “Photography’s Expanded Field.”

Once central to theories of postmodernism in the visual arts, photography is now torn between oppositional extremes: narrative vs. static, the still vs. moving image, the photographic object vs. its digital recoding.

Such tensions are central to the work of Sharon Lockhart, a conceptual photographer and filmmaker whose most recent project, Sharon Lockhart: Lunch Break is currently on view at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum. Just as Lockhart’s photographs reveal cinematic qualities of staging and casting, so do her films employ static and slow-moving cameras that suggest the practices of still photography.

At 6:30 p.m. Monday, March 15, Baker will discuss Lockhart’s work and the state of contemporary photography for the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts’ Public Lecture Series. Co-sponsored by the Kemper Art Museum, the talk is free and open to the public and will take place in Steinberg Hall Auditorium, located near the intersection of Skinker and Forsyth boulevards.

A 7:30 p.m. reception for Baker immediately will follow the lecture in the Kemper Art Museum, located adjacent to Steinberg Hall. For more information, call (314) 935-9300 or visit samfoxschool.wustl.edu.

George Baker

Sharon Lockhart, Still from Lunch Break (Assembly Hall, Bath Iron Works, Bath, Maine), 2008. 35mm film transferred to HD, edition of six, plus two artist’s proofs, 80 minutes. Courtesy of the artist.

Baker is associate professor of art history at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he has taught modern and contemporary art and theory since 2003. In addition to October, Baker is an editor for its publishing imprint, October Books, and throughout the 1990s, served as a New York- and Paris-based critic for Artforum magazine.

He regularly offers courses on all aspects of modernism and the historical avant-garde, on the history of photography in the 19th and 20th centuries, and on specialized topics in postwar and contemporary art history.

Baker is the author of several books, including The Artwork Caught by the Tail: Francis Picabia and Dada in Paris (2007), Gerard Byrne: Books, Magazines, and Newspapers (2003) and James Coleman: Drei Filmarbeiten (2002).

He has published essays on a variety of postmodern and contemporary artists, including Robert Smithson, Robert Whitman, Anthony McCall, Louise Lawler, Andrea Fraser, Christian Philipp Müller, Tom Burr, Rachel Harrison, Knut Åsdam and Paul Chan.

Current projects include Lateness and Longing, a book about the work of Lockhart and contemporaries Zoe Leonard and Tacita Dean, as well as a revisionist study of Picasso’s modernism.

Baker earned a doctorate from Columbia University and is a graduate of the art history program at Yale University and the Independent Study Program of the Whitney Museum of American Art. His many honors include an Andrew Mellon Fellowship in the Humanities, fellowships from the Whiting Foundation and the National Gallery of Art’s Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, and a postdoctoral fellowship from the Getty Research Institute.