The department is pleased to announce the final event in the 2015-2016 HAA Lecture Series, Taking Place, will be with Anthony McCall, an artist best known for his "solid-light" installations. He will show his seminal work, "Line Describing a Cone" (USA 1973, 16mm, b/w, silent, 30 min), and discuss his work and career with Professor Colin Gardner of the Department of Art.

Taking Place: When we think about people doing things, we inevitably imagine these events as "taking place" somewhere in time and space. Action and place are intimately linked, continually and reciprocally transforming one another. What we do shapes our sense of where we are; correspondingly, yet perhaps less familiarly, where we are shapes the how and why of what we do. In recent years, there has been much scholarly attention devoted to new conceptions of the materiality of place and of setting as lived experience. This series of talks aims to rethink the traditional view of architecture and space as merely backdrops to human activity. Guest scholars and artists working in different disciplines (art history, anthropology, classics, philosophy, and film) will address a number of useful and challenging ways we can begin to think through a variety of kinds of 'places' — houses, burials, theaters, even whole geographic regions — ranging in scale from a cone of light in a dark room to a collection of neighborhoods in late antique Asia Minor. Speakers will pay particular attention to the active functions of places, to the roles these material extensions of ourselves may have played (or may still play) in structuring the activities occurring within them — in preserving, maintaining, and transmitting to us the architecture of how we do what we do.