Whether they make paintings, photographs or installations, visual artists often sense that they are dealing with ‘space’ rather than ‘image’. They thus pose a question at once philosophical and artistic, critical, or curatorial, concerning the very idea of images -- what they are, how they work, what relations they have with space; how, for example they differ from ‘pictures’ or inner representations of external objects or from ‘the mirror of nature”. In this lecture, John Rajchman looks at two different sources of this larger problem: the attempt to substitute map or diagram for the proverbial ‘window’ as a principle of pictorial intelligibility; and the attempt to free ourselves from the ‘white cube’ or the display of distinct objects in favor of another conception, function and history of exhibition. A new idea of ‘diagrammatic spaces’ then emerges from the interconnections of these two questions. 

John Rajchman is a philosopher who has written extensively on art and architecture, He is Adjunct Professor, Department of Art History at Columbia University, and is the author of several books including Constructions (Writing Architecture) (MIT 1998), and The Deleuze Connections (MIT 2000). He is currently completing on book on art and art institutions in contemporary China. He is also a Contributing Editor for Artforum.

View Flyer