Molly Nesbit

Academia

After spending a year in England to better understand British work in Marxist and social history, Nesbit returned to the United States when she got a visiting job at Berkeley for two years in the early '80s where she was exposed to the writings of Michel Foucault. While at Berkeley she was involved in the magazine Representations, founded by an interdisciplinary group in the humanities.

Nesbit then took a job at Barnard two years later, spending much of the '80s moving between New York and Paris while researching mechanical drawing and working on her first book, Atget's seven albums. She met Rosalind Krauss during this time, who was also involved in thinking about photography and how Foucault's questions could be used to modulate Greenbergian ones. However, Krauss did not support Nesbit's second publication, Their Common Sense, which laid out Nesbit's more Marxist research on mechanical drawing and the "new orders of modern language".

Since 1993, Nesbit has worked as a Professor of Art at Vassar College, teaching courses on modern and contemporary art, film, and photography. For several years she has led a half-credit course at Dia:Beacon for a handful of student interns interested in learning and writing about contemporary art education.^[4]

Writer

Nesbit has served on the advisory board for October (journal), and has contributed several essays to the publication, including Ready-Made Originals (Vol. 37, Summer, 1986, pp. 1–2), The Rat's Ass (Vol. 56, High/Low: Art and Mass Culture, Spring, 1991, pp. 1–2). and Wild Shanghai Grass (Vol. 133, Summer 2010).

After the then Editor-in-Chief of Artforum Jack Bankowsky (1992–2003) had read and taken an interest in Nesbit's first article for October about Marcel Duchamp (originally entitled, The Copy), Hilton Als, a previous student of Nesbit's from Columbia, had decided to take her to meet Bankowsky, opening the door for Nesbit's writing career at Artforum. Her essay had been written for a special session at the College Art Association in 1986, organized by Rosalind Krauss to confront a "soft revolution" or shift in the theoretical frameworks for understanding art history in American universities, from German formalism to French structuralism and psychoanalysis.

Lecturer

Nesbit has led many talks at major institutions of art and higher learning. In 1994 she gave a lecture at the Walker Art Center about Marcel Duchamp's The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even.^[5] In 2004 she participated in the Dia Art Foundation's Robert Lehman Lecture Series at Dia:Chelsea, speaking on Pierre Huyghe's film project, Streamside Day Follies.^[6] In 2009 she spoke at the opening ceremony for Olafur Eliasson's Parliament of Reality at Bard College, speaking on the history of democratic gathering in the Hudson Valley.^[7] In 2010 she led a talk at the Museum of Modern Art on Gabriel Orozco and his work in the public space.^[8]

Nesbit has also led talks at the University of Pennsylvania's Slought Foundation with filmmaker Agnès Varda,^[9] at the Tate Modern with Tamar Garb, Professor of Art History at University College London in 2002,^[10] at Oslo Pilot with artist Lex Brown (artist) on the difficulties of introducing art into the public realm,^[11] and at HangarBicocca in 2003 with artist Tomás Saraceno.^[12]

She has given lectures for the Institut Für Raumexperimente, an education research project established by Studio Olafur Eliasson in collaboration with the Berlin University of the Arts, for the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art on new sensitivities in contemporary architecture, and at the Center for the Humanities at City University of New York where she discussed Pragmatism with Joan Richardson.^[13]

In 2008 she gave the J. Kirk T. Varnedoe Memorial lectures at the New York University Institute of Fine Arts, teaching a course on Marcel Duchamp.^[14]

Utopia Station

Since 2002, together with art curator, critic and historian of art Hans-Ulrich Obrist and contemporary artist Rirkrit Tiravanija, she has curated Utopia Station, a collective and ongoing book, exhibition, seminar, website, and street project, located in Poughkeepsie, New York, Frankfurt, Venice, Munich, Porto Alegre, and at the Brooklyn Museum. Participating artists include Marina Abramovic, Matthew Barney, Louise Bourgeois, Olafur Eliasson, Thomas Hirschhorn, Yoko Ono, Martha Rosler, Anri Sala, Patti Smith, and Lawrence Weiner, among many others.^[15] The exhibition began at the Venice Biennale in 2003, and later traveled to the Haus der Kunst in Munich, with additions and modifications, in 2004.^[1]

The Pragmatism in the History of Art

In Pragmatism, the first of Nesbit's Pre-Occupations series of essay compilations, Nesbit outlines the questions modern art historians address to make sense of the changes in art and life during the early 20th century. Through a pragmatic study of the societal changes of this time period, Nesbit attempts to understand the break towards abstraction, best characterized by artists Pablo Picasso and George Braque with the rise of Cubism, in which Nesbit interprets the Cubist line as an "embrace of the language of industry". She asserts that it was the introduction of rationalized methods of drawing into the French school curriculum by arts administrators Jean-Baptiste Claude Eugène Guillaume and Antonin Proust in 1881 that led to the break between representational and abstract art.^[16]

She explores these inquiries by studying the writings of art historians Meyer Schapiro, Henri Focillon, George Kubler, Robert Herbert, T. J. Clark, and Linda Nochlin, the philosophies of Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, and the films of Chris Marker and Jean-Luc Godard. Artists discussed include Vincent van Gogh, Isamu Noguchi, Lawrence Weiner, and Gordon Matta-Clark, among others.

Midnight: The Tempest Essays: Pre-Occupations 2

In Midnight, the second of Nesbit's "Pre-Occupations" series of essay compilations, Nesbit returns the question of pragmatism to the everyday critical practice of the art historian, illustrated with case studies on Eugène Atget, Marcel Duchamp, Jean-Luc Godard, Cindy Sherman, Louise Lawler, Rachel Whiteread, Gabriel Orozco, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Lawrence Weiner, Nancy Spero, Rem Koolhaas, Martha Rosler, Gerhard Richter, Mathew Barney, and Richard Serra, among others, in a continuity of investigation.^[17]

The essays were originally published between 1986 and the early 2000s, and reflect Nesbit's interest in "the genealogy of ideas".^[18] In an interview with Hyperallergic, Nesbit describes her approach to thinking as being based in the "set of developments that took place in art history in Europe and the United States in the 1970s and 1980s", referring to structuralism and later postmodernism, post-structuralism, and deconstruction. Nesbit asserts that art historians can make use of philosophical questions as starting points in understanding 20th and 21st century art.