03.28.2020
Lecture
Hunger: A New Vision of the Spiral Jetty
“Hunger” is a new take on one of the twentieth century’s most iconic art works, Robert Smithson’s The Spiral Jetty (1970). In a wide-ranging talk connecting topics as diverse as anorexia, Franz Kafka, ancient mysticism, and Marie Kondo, Fernald positions asceticism, or lifestyles characterized by abstinence from sensual pleasures, as a hidden backbone animating a number of highly consequential proposals for art-making and being in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Join us as we uncover the asceticisms beneath Jetty’s unstable relation of mysticism and mud, and trace this timeless human impulse into the present.