Masterstudiengang Kuratieren und Kritik
Pamela Lee: Pattern Recognition circa 1947

Pamela M. Lee is Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art in the Department of Art and Art History at Stanford University, Stanford, California. She is the author of *Object to Be Destroyed: The Work of Gordon Matta-Clark* (The MIT Press,2001); *Chronophobia: On Time in the Art of the1 1960s* (The MIT Press, 2004); *Forgetting the Art World* (The MIT Press, 2012); and most recently, *New Games: Postmodernism after Contemporary Art* (Routledge, 2012). Professor Lee is an art historian and critic whose work variously considers the relationship between art and technology, politics and aesthetics. She is a frequent contributor to magazines and journals such as Artforum, Texte zur Kunst, OCTOBER and Grey Room. Her current research concerns the aesthetic interests of the cold-war think tank as a reactionary model for interdisciplinary thinking and visual culture studies, and its implications for the art and the academy today.

"Pattern Recognition circa 1947" throws new light on an episode in the recent history of art: namely, the relationship between abstract expressionism, the cold war and mid-century anthropology. While a considerable literature on New York School painting describes anthropology's investment in such work in terms of terms of its primitivist sensibilities, Lee offers a radically new approach to the topic, considering the ways in which a Jackson Pollock might license approaches to the visual image formulated in the cold-war think tank. In particular she considers the work of Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead and their colleagues at the RAND Corporation to unpack the novel new techniques and methods deployed by social scientists to test  the range of contemporary visual culture from "high" art to popular culture.