An Organized System of Instructions

On the occasion of the launch of An Organized System of Instructions, architect and writer Keller Easterling talks with the artist Martin Beck, curator and former CCVA director James Voorhies about Beck’s two-year exhibition titled Program, which occurred from 2014 to 2016 at Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts and the publication that resulted from the project.

The book analyzes, situates and extends Beck’s work with Program, which manifested through a sequence of interventions, installations, events, and publications drawing on the exhibition histories and academic pursuits of the Carpenter Center and Department of Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard. This sequence—each node of which Beck considers an episode—lent particular attention to the founding program of the Carpenter Center, which sought to cultivate its position as simultaneously an iconic modernist building, school, and exhibition venue.

Edited by James Voorhies with contributions by Martin Beck, Keller Easterling, James Goggin, Alex Kitnick, and Voorhies, An Organized System of Instructions is both a document of Program and an extension of the exhibition.