Wednesday, December 4, 2024 - 12:00pm to 1:00pm
202 Frick Fine Arts
Emma Roberts
On the eve of Labor Day in 1983, the Canadian Broadcast Company aired a program anticipated to be “one of the most controversial works in recent memory to make it to the TV screen.” Who’s in Charge? offered a selective account of a four-day residential conference, in which thirty out-of-work participants were assigned a task: to explore and interpret the experiences of being employed and unemployed. In this talk, Emma Roberts examines how the project–encapsulating a live event, ephemeral television film, and public debate that unfolded across editorial and legal contexts–escalated public skepticism toward psychological expertise in the post-industrial 1980s. In turn, Roberts posits Who’s in Charge? as a precursor to the growing interest within contemporary visual arts in Group Relations—a methodology that combines psychoanalytic and open systems theory to study the dynamics of a temporally formed institution.