“Warhol was a master of repetition,” said Phelan. “He gave us soup cans, celebrities, electric chairs, car wrecks, green stamps and Jesus, over and over again. But why exactly was he so compelled to repeat his repetitions? What was he counting on and how did he count, then and now?”

An internationally recognized authority on contemporary performance and visual culture, Phelan is a professor of drama and English and holds the Ann O'Day Maples Chair in the Arts at Stanford University. She is the author of Unmarked: The Politics of Performance, Mourning Sex: Performing Public Memories and the survey essay in the anthology Art and Feminism (winner of amazon.com’s “top 25 best books in art and architecture" award ), and co-editor of the seminal works, Acting Out: Feminist Performances and The Ends of Performance. More than 60 of her articles and essays are found in scholarly, artistic and commercial magazines ranging from Artforum to Signs. Her insightful writings have informed a vast range of fields including architecture, art history, psychoanalytic criticism, visual culture, performance studies, theatre studies, and studies in film and video.

In welcoming Phelan to Stanford, her colleague Professor Terry Castle said: “...she has addressed just about all of the intellectual, aesthetic, political, philosophical and psychic themes that come into play when one starts talking about either ‘performance’ or ‘performance art’ ... in everything she writes [there is] a sober, luminous intelligence … an astonishing sensitivity to what other human beings do when they ‘perform’ for us…”

Phelan has been a Guggenheim Fellow and a fellow of the Getty Research Institute and the Humanities Institutes at the University of California, Irvine, and Australian National University, Canberra. She is a past president of Performance Studies International.

Phelan’s talk is the sixth in a series of annual, free public lectures made possible through the support of Joan and Martin Goldfarb, longstanding benefactors of the Faculty of Fine Arts and York University.

This lecture is presented by the Department of Visual Arts, York University, in association with the Toronto Photography Seminar with support from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and with support from the Department of Theatre, York University.

2009 Goldfarb Lecture in Visual Arts

Cultural Theorist Peggy Phelan speaks on “Andy Warhol Again: Repetition, Death and Counting”

Date: Thurs. November 12 at 2:30pm

Location: Room 312 Joan & Martin Goldfarb Centre for Fine Arts, York University, 4700 Keele St. [map]
Admission: Free
Information: www.yorku.ca/finearts/visa/events

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Media Contact:

Amy Stewart, Communications, Faculty of Fine Arts, York University

416.650.8469  |  amy.stewart@yorku.ca