Talk

MFA Art Practice presents a conversation between former MFA Art Writing Chair David Levi Strauss and anthropologist Michael Taussig.

David Levi Strauss is the author of Co-illusion: Dispatches from the End of Communication (The MIT Press, 2020), Photography & 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. Over the past year, he’s been writing “dispatches” responding to the autocratic take-over of the U.S., and these dispatches (64 so far) have been posted online for The Brooklyn Rail.

Michael Taussig is professor emeritus of anthropology at Columbia University. He was born in Sydney, Australia, in 1940 of Austrian refugees and became a medical doctor and earned a PhD in anthropology at the London School of Economics. Activated by the U.S. war in Vietnam, he went to Colombia with the intention of using his medical skills with progressive forces there. He then became a professor of performance studies and anthropology in New York. He is the author of many books, from The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in 1980 and Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing in 1987 to Mastery of Non-mastery (Chicago, 2020) and Corpse Magic (Chicago, 2025). Taussig and Strauss have co-edited two books together: To Dare Imagining: Rojava Revolution (2016) and The Critique of the Image Is the Defense of the Imagination (2020) and are two of the three surviving members of what Taussig once called “The Shawangunk School of Art and Philosophy, Anarchy and Mysticism.”