929 E. 60th St.
Chicago, Illinois 60637
United States
Please join us Thursday, February 23rd, at 6 pm at the University of Chicago’s Richard and Mary L. Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry to celebrate the launch of Portable Gray issue 9: “Arts of Psychoanalysis” featuring a conversation between contributors to the issue: Adam Blum, writer & clinical psychologist; Anna Kornbluh, professor & unionist; John Neff, artist; and Hannah Zeavin, professor & writer; with Gray Center Director, Seth Brodsky moderating.
About the issue
Edited by Gray Center Director, UChicago musicologist, and Portable Gray executive editor Seth Brodsky, our ninth issue takes as its theme Arts of Psychoanalysis. Contributors dive into the “darkest art,” probing the still radical space that psychoanalysis opened over a century ago. The issue functions less as a survey of psychoanalytic art or a collective investigation into the “talking cure,” and more as a series of meditations on the suspensions and fermatas that psychoanalysis has afforded practical life—clinic, asylum, interregnum; etymological hunts, and formalist games; sketch and street. Each in their own way, through film, photography, poetry, essays, manifestoes, and diagrams, our fall 2022 authors traverse the artistic and theoretical work that frames the discourse and poetics of psychoanalysis today.
About the panelists
Adam Blum is a practicing clinicians and member of the Bay Area psychoanalytic community. With Peter Goldberg and Michael Levin, he authored Here I’m Alive: The Spirit of Music in Psychoanalysis, which will be published by Columbia University Press in 2023.
Anna Kornbluh is Professor of English and Director of Graduate Studies at the University of Illinois, Chicago. She is the author of The Order of Forms: Realism, Formalism, and Social Space (University of Chicago Press 2019), Marxist Film Theory and Fight Club (Bloomsbury 2019), and Realizing Capital (Fordham 2014), and, forthcoming from Verso in 2023, Immediacy, Or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism. Essays on psychoanalysis, climate fiction, academic labor, and tv have appeared in venues such as Theory & Event, SAQ, Mediations, Novel, the LA Review of Books, and The Chronicle of Higher Education. She is the founding facilitator for two scholarly collaboratories, The V21 Collective (Victorian studies for the 21st Century) and InterCcECT (The Inter Chicago Circle for Experimental Critical Theory).
John Neff makes art, curates exhibitions, and teaches art. He lives in Chicago, Illinois.
Hannah Zeavin is a scholar, writer, and editor, and works as an Assistant Professor at Indiana University and a Visiting Fellow at the Columbia University Center for The Study of Social Difference. Zeavin is the author of The Distance Cure: A History of Teletherapy (MIT Press, 2021) and at work on her second book, Mother’s Little Helpers: Technology in the American Family (MIT Press, 2024). Essays and criticism have appeared in or are forthcoming from differences, Dissent, The Guardian, Harper’s Magazine, n+1, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, Technology & Culture, and elsewhere. In 2021, Zeavin co-founded The Psychosocial Foundation and is the Founding Editor of Parapraxis, a new popular magazine for psychoanalysis on the left.
The event is free and open to the public. Food and drink will also be served. Attendees will receive a complimentary copy of Portable Gray.
About the Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry
The Richard and Mary L. Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry is a forum at the University of Chicago for experimental collaborations between artists and scholars. Gray Center activities take place all over campus (encompassing various divisions, departments, and programs), across the community, throughout the city, and beyond. Through its various programs—including the Mellon Residential Fellowships for Arts Practice and Scholarship, Portable Gray (the center’s journal published twice annually by the University of Chicago Press), exploratory research initiatives, the monthly Sidebar conversation series, Gray Sound, an experimental music and sound performance series, international conferences, and institutional collaborations—the Gray Center seeks to foster a culture of innovation and experimentation at the intersection of arts practice and scholarship.
Press contact: Mike Schuh, Gray Center Assistant Director of Fellowships and Operations, at mikes1 [at] uchicago.edu.
