On three consecutive Tuesdays this spring – May 21, May 28, and June 4 – The Drawing Center will present a new program series, Bellwethers: The Culture of Controversy, which will convene a prominent group of writers, cultural critics, and artists to respond to a cultural “bellwether” and take it in their own interpretative direction. Each session examines a timely indicator, word, or phrase emblematic of a polemical socio-political topic of our moment and that impacts art as well as broader cultural production.

Tuesday, May 28 at 6:30pm
PANIC
With Andrea Long Chu and Jamieson Webster
“Panic” is a pervasive, if abused, term used to describe our reaction to our contemporary landscape and is affixed to any number of issues: gender identity, immigration, climate, globalism, Brexit, Trump, and Russia. Our current Age of Anxiety is super charged by the 24-7 newstainment cycle, designed to keep us flickering through states of hysteria and scandal, worry and outrage. Is there any relief from this panic? How does this time relate to other periods of collective hysteria?

Andrea Long Chu is a writer, designer, doctoral candidate, and sad trans girl in Brooklyn. Chu’s writing has been published by the New York Times, Affidavit, Artforum, Bookforum, and n+1. She also publishes a monthly journal on television called Paper View. Her first book Females will be published by Verso this October.

Jamieson Webster is a psychoanalyst and cultural critic based in New York. Weber is the author of The Life and Death of Psychoanalysis (2011) and Conversion Disorder: Listening to the Body in Psychoanalysis (2018); she also co-wrote, with Simon Critchley, Stay, Illusion! The Hamlet Doctrine (2013). She teaches at the New School and supervises doctoral students in clinical psychology at the City University of New York. She co-writes a regular column for Spike with Alison Gingeras.

Image: L to R, Andrea Long Chu and Jamieson Webster.