Author: Liam Otten

The voice is commonly understood as a vehicle for communicating meaning and, alternatively, as a source of aesthetic pleasure — approaches personified by the military commander and the opera singer. But in A Voice and Nothing More (2006), Slovenian philosopher Mladen Dolar proposes a third paradigm: psychoanalysis. In October, Dolar, the Visiting Fannie Hurst Professor, will lead a three-day series, titled “From Hegel to Freud and Kafka,” exploring the linguistics, metaphysics, ethics and politics of the voice, as well as its use by Sigmund Freud, Georg W.F. Hegel and Franz Kafka.

The Saint Louis Art Museum and the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis have announced the selection of the next two Henry L. and Natalie E. Freund Teaching Fellows. Chelsea Knight, a New York-based artist whose narrative-based videos, photographs and participatory performances explore the nature of social control and the current state of democracy, will serve as the Freund Fellow for the 2011-12 academic year. Stih & Schnock, a Berlin-based collaborative team that focuses on issues relating to collective memory, will be Freund Fellows for 2012-13.

Art, of course, can be challenging, engaging, uplifting and enlightening. It also can be fun. On Saturday, Sept. 24, the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum will host Community Day, an all-ages afternoon of games, storytelling, art-making, workshops and tours led by museum curators and Washington University student docents. The event, which runs from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m., is free and open to the public.

Environmental designer Mitchell Joachim — one of Rolling Stone magazine’s “100 People Who Are Changing America” — and Chicago architect Carol Ross Barney will join Christopher Hawthorne, architecture critic for the Los Angeles Times, as jurors for Sukkah City STL, a design competition that reimagines traditional Jewish Sukkahs through the lens of contemporary art and architecture. Rounding out the jury will be Hyim Shafner, former Chief Rabbi of India; Nancy Berg, PhD, professor of Modern Hebrew Language and Literature; and Bruce Lindsey, dean of architecture.

Compression. Suspension. Torsion. Failure. The language of dance finds surprising echoes in the language of engineering. This fall, Lucy Guerin Inc., one of Australia’s premiere young dance companies, will launch the Edison Ovation Series with Structure and Sadness, an award-winning, evening-length work inspired by the 1970 collapse of Melbourne’s West Gate Bridge.  

German artist and photographer Thomas Demand will discuss his work Wednesday, Sept. 14, as part of the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts’ fall Public Lecture Series. The talk is held in conjunction with the exhibition Precarious Worlds: Contemporary Art from Germany, which opens at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum Sept. 9. Also opening Sept. 9 is Tomás Saraceno: Cloud-Specific. Additional museum events this fall will include a talk by Saraceno as well as film screenings, panel discussions and an all-ages Community Day.

Richard Meyer, associate professor of art history and fine arts at the University of Southern California and author of Outlaw Representation: Censorship and Homosexuality in Twentieth-Century American Art will launch the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts’ fall Public Lecture Series at 6:30 p.m. Wednesday, Sept. 7. The series continues through Nov. 9.

Joseph R. Passonneau, who served as dean of the School of Architecture at Washington University in St. Louis from 1956-67, died in his sleep Monday, Aug. 22, at his home in Washington, D.C., following an extended illness. He was 90.

The Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum has received an extraordinary gift from the David Woods Kemper Memorial Foundation to support the acquisition of new works by artists living and working in Germany. This fall, the Kemper Art Museum will present Precarious Worlds: Contemporary Art From Germany. The exhibition will feature the first five works acquired thanks to the Kemper gift — monumentally scaled pieces by Franz Ackermann, Thomas Demand, Sergej Jensen, Charline von Heyl, and Corinne Wasmuht — along with significant works already in the permanent collection by Michel Majerus, Manfred Pernice and Wolfgang Tillmans, as well as a major installation, on loan for the exhibition, by Hans-Peter Feldmann.

He may not run with scissors, but Mark Nizer is the juggler your mother always warned you about. Buzzing chainsaws, electric carving knives, 16-pound bowling balls, even a flaming propane tank — all are tossed aloft and twirled about with gleeful abandon. On Sept. 17, Nizer will launch Edison’s ovations for young people series with 3-D, his latest draw-dropping one-man show.