Participants

Magdalena Holdar is Associate Professor in Art History and Curating at the Department of Culture and Aesthetics, Stockholm University. Her research focuses on Fluxus and performative art forms from the 1950s onwards, and she regularly contributes to international publications. As the subject coordinator for Curating, she founded Curating Studio, a platform that brings together researchers from different disciplines to jointly explore curatorial thinking.

A cake, a cow, and choreographies of sound: the unexpected unfolds in Five New York Evenings

Robert Rauschenberg is a constant presence at Moderna Museet. The bubbling Mud Muse (1968-71) and woolly Monogram (1955-59) are two prominent reminders of the deep connection between the artist and this institution. Indeed, even the museum’s logotype bears the trace of his hand. It is like a signature of sorts: Rauschenberg signing Moderna, as he would an artwork. He has also left less material yet nonetheless important marks that have been just as formative for the history of the museum. In September 1964, he joined a group of American composers, choreographers, and artists for five evenings of avantgarde music, dance, and performance. These events, entitled Five New York Evenings, helped shape Moderna Museet’s reputation as a premier international stage for experimentation in the arts. My presentation will explore these iconic yet elusive evenings.

Helen Molesworth is a writer, podcaster, and curator based in Los Angeles and Provincetown. In 2023 Phaidon published Open Questions, Thirty Years of Writing About Art, an anthology of her essays. Her podcasts include Death of an Artist a 6-part podcast about the intertwined fates of Carl Andre and Ana Mendieta and the inaugural season of Recording Artists with The Getty. She is also the host of DIALOGUES, a podcast that features interviews with artists, writers, fashion designers, and filmmakers hosted by the David Zwirner Gallery. Her major museum exhibitions include: One Day at a Time: Manny Farber and Termite Art; Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College 1933–1957; Dance/Draw; This Will Have Been: Art, Love & Politics in the 1980s; Part Object Part Sculpture, and Work Ethic. She has organized one-person exhibitions of Ruth Asawa, Moyra Davey, Noah Davis, Raoul De Keyser, Louise Lawler, Steve Locke, Anna Maria Maiolino, Josiah McElheny, Kerry James Marshall, Catherine Opie, Amy Sillman, and Luc Tuymans. She is the author of numerous catalogue essays and her writing has appeared in Artforum, Art Journal, Documents, and October. The recipient of the 2011 Bard Center for Curatorial Studies Award for Curatorial Excellence, in 2021 she received a Guggenheim Fellowship, and in 2022 she was awarded The Clark Art Writing Prize.

Thinking about, with, and through Monogram

Robert Rauschenberg’s Monogram (1955–59) is one of his most iconic combines, and its still radical combination of a goat and a tire continues to surprise, thrill, and confuse visitors today. If museum goers love Monogram, art historians and critics adore talking about the combines, Rauschenberg’s term for his merger of sculpture and painting into a new kind of art object. The academic conversation about Rauschenberg often hinges on an internal schism—there are historians who see him as a progenitor of an overwhelming and indiscriminate image world, while others see him as a purveyor of enigmatic and coded works that allude to his sexuality. The art historians interested in the problem of the image tend to downplay Rauschenberg’s biography while those interested in his sexuality often attach individual works of art to his identity. On the occasion of Rauschenberg’s 100th birthday one might wonder what else can be said? This paper turns to artists to see what they have made of Monogram. Can they offer us a way out of the impasse in current Rauschenberg studies? What questions and propositions have artists made about this most famous of Rauschenberg’s combines? And how as art historians can we incorporate the work of artists as interpreters and interlocutors into our work?

Kristoffer Svensson Noheden is Reader in Cinema Studies at Stockholm University. He has published extensively on surrealism across the art forms. Among his forthcoming publications are the volume Surrealism in the Nordic Countries, co-edited with Andrea Kollnitz and based on a symposium at Moderna Museet in 2023 (Bloomsbury), a catalogue essay for Leonora Carrington at Palazzo Reale, Milan, and articles in Konsthistorisk tidskrift/Journal of Art History and MAI: Feminism and Visual Culture. He co-curated a retrospective exhibition on the Canadian-Mexican artist Alan Glass at Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in 2024–25.

Assemblage in and After EROS: Exalting Death, Dreaming of Animals

In a frequently reproduced photograph, Robert Rauschenberg’s Bed (1955) hangs on the wall next to Alberto Giacometti’s Hands Holding the Void (Invisible Object) (1934). The setting is the Exposition inteRnatiOnale du Surréalisme, or EROS for short, organized by André Breton and Marcel Duchamp at Galerie Daniel Cordier in Paris in 1959–60. The carefully staged encounter between Giacometti and Rauschenberg juxtaposes a delicate, quietly erotic sculpture emblematic of interwar surrealism with a boundary-breaking and more messily erotic combine exemplifying wider surrealist influences and connections in the postwar period. EROS also showcased a significant number of assemblages that indicated that surrealist three-dimensional art was evolving in different directions. A box by the American artist Joseph Cornell and an object by Meret Oppenheim shared the space with assemblages by a slew of younger artists, including Mimi Parent, Adrien Dax, Jean Benoît, and Aube Breton-Ellóuët. In this paper, EROS is used as a point of departure to discuss the development of assemblage in surrealism after 1959, with a particular emphasis on the often intertwined presence of taxidermy and reliquary-like arrangements with a lingering eroticism in works by Parent, Benoît, Alan Glass, and Jan Švankmajer.

Gavin Parkinson is Professor of European Modernism at The Courtauld Institute of Art, London. He has published numerous essays and articles, mainly on Surrealism. His books are Picasso: The Lost Sketchbook (Clearview Books 2024); Robert Rauschenberg and Surrealism: Art History, ‘Sensibility’ and War (Bloomsbury 2023); Enchanted Ground: André Breton, Modernism and the Surrealist Appraisal of Fin-de-Siècle Painting (Bloomsbury 2018), Futures of Surrealism (YUP 2015), Surrealism, Art and Modern Science (YUP 2008), The Duchamp Book (Tate Publishing 2008) and the edited collection Surrealism, Science Fiction and Comics (LUP 2015).

Une véritable bombe: Hervé Télémaque’s ‘Cold Surrealism’ and Robert Rauschenberg’s Combine Paintings

When Hervé Télémaque left his native Haiti for the United States in 1957, he encountered abstract expressionism first hand and unsurprisingly tuned into it in his own work. A second migration to France in autumn 1961 brought him into close contact with a Surrealist group already positively assessing both Robert Rauschenberg’s combine paintings and select aspects of US Pop art. This paper examines how Télémaque’s art of the mid-1960s drew upon Rauchenberg’s since Hymnal (1955), recalled by Télémaque in 2013 as an ‘absolute bomb’ that ‘relit the torch of Dada.’ It aims to bring out Télémaque’s unique use of the form of the combine, processed through an autobiographical, psychoanalytical approach inspired by Surrealism and a hard-edged style that had its source in Pop, issuing in a ‘cold Surrealism’ that superseded the ‘warm Surrealism’ that Télémaque had earlier deployed during and shortly after his US sojourn under the stylistic guidance of modernist art from that of Joan Mirό to Arshile Gorky.

Dancer and choreographer Steve Paxton (1939-2024) was the founder of Contact Improvisation. Paxton began his movement studies in gymnastics and then trained in martial arts, ballet, and modern dance. In the summer of 1958, Paxton attended the American Dance Festival at Connecticut College, where he trained with choreographers Merce Cunningham and José Limón. After moving to New York City, he was a member of the José Limón Company in 1959 and of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company from 1961-64. He was a founding member of the legendary dance collectives Judson Dance Theater and Grand Union.

Stephen Petronio is recognized as one of the leading dance-makers of his generation. For over four decades, he has developed a singular movement language that explores the intuitive and complex possibilities of the body in relation to shifting cultural contexts. He is a graduate of Hampshire College, an early student of Steve Paxton, and was the first male dancer of the Trisha Brown Dance Company, where he danced from 1979 to 1986.

Petronio has received numerous honors, including a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, a New York Dance and Performance “Bessie” Award, and a 2015 Doris Duke Performing Artist Award, as well as grants from the Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts.

In 2014, Petronio conceived an ongoing initiative, Bloodlines, to honor the experimental Judson pioneers who have inspired him and Bloodlines(future), to more equitably support the next generation of dancers and choreographers in this artistic lineage.

Founded in 1984, Stephen Petronio Company has toured to more than 40 countries and performed 24 celebrated seasons at The Joyce Theater in New York. The Company has been commissioned by major festivals and presenters across Europe and the U.S. In 2017, it completed a five-week DanceMotionUSA residency in Southeast Asia. The Company’s historic final season is in 2025.

Ryan Pliss is a dance artist based in Nancy, France, originally from Ithaca, New York. He trained at De Amsterdamse Hogeschool voor de Kunsten and received a BFA in Dance Performance from the Conservatory of Dance (COD) at SUNY Purchase. Pliss has had the pleasure of touring across North America and throughout Europe performing the works of renowned choreographers such as Merce Cunningham, Trisha Brown, Steve Paxton, Johannes Wieland, and Marie Chouinard. He is a Cunningham Technique® teacher recognized by The Merce Cunningham Trust and has taught on its behalf as well as at Cornell University’s Department of Performing and Media Arts and the COD at SUNY Purchase. He has been a member of the Stephen Petronio Company since 20

Nicholas Sciscione was born and raised in Elizabeth, NJ. He graduated magna cum laude with a BFA in Dance from Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University. Sciscione has worked with Joshua Beamish, Kyle Marshall Choreography, and 10 Hairy Legs. He is a grateful student of Susan Klein and the Klein Technique. Sciscione joined Stephen Petronio Company in 2011 and was Assistant to the Artistic Director from 2016 to 2024. He was a 2017 NY New York Dance and Performance (Bessie) Award nominee.