Faculty Talk: Kavior Moon
Moderated by Jake Matatyaou
Kavior Moon is an art historian who specializes in modern and contemporary art history, with a focus on experimental, post-studio art practices after 1960. She received a B.A. in Visual Arts from Columbia University and a Ph.D. in Art History from UCLA. She has worked in the curatorial and publications departments at The Drawing Center in New York and as a research assistant at the Hammer Museum, LACMA, and MOCA in Los Angeles. Currently, she is a Liberal Arts instructor at SCI-Arc and a lecturer in the Department of Art History at UCLA. As an art critic, she has publishing writings in Artforum and Kaleidoscope.
Instead of making artworks in the form of objects, what if an artist were to take an art institution’s site itself as the object of work? Beginning in the 1960s, U.S. artist Michael Asher (1943–2012) developed a situational, site-based method in which pre-existing elements found on-site were temporarily removed or rearranged to reveal the physical, social, and economic systems of a commissioning art institution. Whereas Asher is largely known today for his early architectural interventions in gallery and museum spaces, this talk will focus on how Asher’s concept of site transformed by the end of the 1990s to engage with a greater range of spatial, historical, and political dimensions.
