Creative Conversations/digital: David Levi Strauss with Roberto Tejada

Wednesday, August 12 | 6PM 

Cultural critic, essayist, and poet David Levi Strauss and poet, and art historian Roberto Tejada discuss Strauss’s latest book, Co-Illusion: Dispatches from the End of Communication (MIT Press, 2020), unpacking the evolving relationships between image, text, and the media's influence on public opinion.

The political crisis that sneaked up on America—the rise of Trump and Trumpism—has revealed the rot at the core of American exceptionalism. Recent changes in the way words and images are produced and received have made the current surreality possible; communication through social media, by design, maximizes attention and minimizes scrutiny. In Co-Illusion, the noted writer on art, photography, and politics David Levi Strauss bears witness to the new “iconopolitics” in which words and images lose their connection to reality. The collusion that fueled Trump's rise was the secret agreement of voters and media consumers—their “co-illusion”—to set aside the social contract.

Strauss offers dispatches from the epicenter of our constitutional earthquake, writing first from the 2016 Democratic and Republican conventions and then from the campaign. After the election, he switches gears, writing in the voices of the regime and of those complicit in its actions—from the thoughts of the President himself (“I am not a mistake. I am not a fluke, or a bug in the system. I am the System”) to the reflections of a nameless billionaire tech CEO whose initials may or may not be M. Z.

About the guests
David Levi Strauss is the author of Co-illusion: Dispatches from the End of Communication (The MIT Press, 2020), Photography and Belief (David Zwirner Books, 2020), Words Not Spent Today Buy Smaller Images Tomorrow (Aperture, 2014), From Head to Hand: Art and the Manual (Oxford University Press, 2010), Between the Eyes: Essays on Photography and Politics, with an introduction by John Berger (Aperture 2003, and in a new edition, 2012), and Between Dog & Wolf: Essays on Art and Politics (Autonomedia 1999, and a new edition, 2010). In Case Something Different Happens in the Future: Joseph Beuys and 9/11 was published by Documenta 13, and To Dare Imagining: Rojava Revolution, edited by Strauss, Michael Taussig, Peter Lamborn Wilson, and Dilar Dirik, was published by Autonomedia in 2016, and in an Italian edition by Elèuthera, in Milan, in 2017. The Critique of the Image Is the Defense of the Imagination, edited by Strauss, Taussig, and Wilson, was published by Autonomedia in 2020. Strauss was a Guggenheim fellow in 2003 and received the Infinity Award for Writing from the International Center of Photography in 2007. He is Chair of the graduate program in Art Writing at the School of Visual Arts in New York.

Roberto Tejada is the author of art histories that include National Camera: Photography and Mexico’s Image Environment (U Minnesota, 2009) and Celia Alvarez Muñoz (UCLA/CSRC; U Minnesota, 2009). His writings appear frequently in journals and exhibition catalogs, among them Images of the Spirit: Photographs by Graciela Iturbide (Aperture, 1996); Now Dig This! Art & Black Los Angeles 1960-1980 (UCLA Hammer Museum, 2011) and Groups and Spaces in Mexico, Contemporary Art of the 90s: Licenciado Verdad (Mexico City, Ediciones MP, 2017). He is the author of poetry collections that include Full Foreground (Arizona, 2012), Exposition Park (Wesleyan 2010), Mirrors for Gold (2006), selected poems in Spanish translation Todo en el ahora (2015), and Still Nowhere in an Empty Vastness (2019). He is the Hugh Roy and Lillie Cranz Cullen Distinguished Professor in Creative Writing and Art History at the University of Houston.