Noam M. Elcott is Associate Professor for the history of modern art at Columbia. Elcott is the author of the award-winning book Artificial Darkness: An Obscure History of Modern Art and Media (2016), as well as essays on art and media from the 19th century to the present, published in leading journals, anthologies, and exhibition catalogues, including monographic essays on Anthony McCall, Stan Douglas, Vera Lutter, Walead Beshty, Jean Epstein, Kia LaBeija, James Welling, the London Film-Makers' Co-op, and others. He co-directed The August Sander Project (MoMA/Columbia, 2016-2021), co-edited a special issue of Grey Room on “Art Beyond Copyright” (2024), and is a principal investigator of the Data Science Institute grant on “Art Images and AI: Latent Space Interpretability, Art History, and the Law.” His current book projects are The Social Status Portrait: August Sander’s People of the Twentieth Century and Art™: A History of Modern Art, Authenticity, and Trademarks.
Talking Color, Transcendence, and Darkness: A Presentation by Noam M. ElcottSunday, 20 September 2025, 6 PM
Auditorium
Noam M. Elcott
Photo: Moritz Wehrmann
Art historian Noam M. Elcott—renowned for his scholarship on artificial darkness and its entanglement with Enlightenment ideologies, regimes of oppression, and practices of liberation—was invited to Schaulager to engage with Steve McQueen’s Bass (2024). The work floods Schaulager’s interior with light that moves seamlessly, almost imperceptibly, across the color spectrum, transforming color into an environmental condition. In doing so, Bass invites sustained reflection on perception, abstraction, and the cultural, historical, and affective resonances of light—and its absence. Framing his response around the question of what it means for color to become an environment, Elcott situates Bass within his broader research, probing the complexities of light and darkness as experiential states that shape the conditions of viewing and being.
The talk will be held in English.
The exhibition ticket also includes the talk and can be purchased here.