Claire Bishop: Publications Reviews Podcasts etc

Top Ten 2011

2011-12-27T04:31:00.002-08:00

An unsolicited top ten, because I want to remember how much I adored these events:

1. Sarah Michelson, Devotion (The Kitchen, NY, January): unspeakably intense, pounding, repetitive; the solos by an insect-thin, white-clad Non Griffiths are seared in my mind, as well as the obsessional finale in which Eleanor Hullinan runs and leaps over and again into the arms of a stoic Jim Fletcher.

2. Kenny Goldsmith at the White House (Washington DC, May): click here – Kenny appears about eight and a half minutes in. I can’t get enough of this.

3. The return of installation art (Venice Biennial, June): Mike Nelson, Thomas Hirschhorn, Christoph Schlingensief, and the unexpected bonus of Ed Kienholz’s Roxy’s. Large scale immersive environments by some of the best.

4. The Pilgrim, The Tourist, The Flaneur (and the Worker) (Van Abbe Museum, Eindhoven, June): the most adventurous experiment in museum mediation I have seen to date. I confess I enjoyed the flaneur most: gliding round the galleries listening to prog rock, pouring rain and excerpts of film, I accessed works that had never spoken to me before, and in totally unexpected ways.

5. Björk’s Biophilia (Manchester International Festival, July): watching Björk belt out Thunderbolt in a vast red wig and sparkly blue gown, accompanied by huge musical contraptions, one of which buzzed with electricity, gave me shivers. May I, can I, or have I too often? Craving miracles...

6. Christoph Büchel’s Piccadilly Community Centre (London, July). Not a perfect work of art, but a perfectly controversial talking point, and the best art/life crossover I’ve seen in years – not to mention a delightfully encrypted fuck you to Cameron’s Big Society (if not also to Hauser and Wirth).

7. Jean Genet (Nottingham Contemporary, July): once again Alex Farquharson shows us how to mix documentary, historical footage and works of art. In Part I, Marc-Camille Chaimowicz ran wild with The Maids, all wallpaper, Giacommetti, Tillmans and domestic politesse. In Part II, Prisoners of Love, an unexpected group of artists circled around Genet’s anti-colonial involvements in Palestine and the Black Panthers.

8. La Carte d'après Nature, curated by Thomas Demand (Matthew Marks, NY, Sept): Ghirri, Magritte, van Elk and many others in an exquisite group show that strolls curiously around the garden of man-made takes on nature.

9. Boris Charmatz, Musée de la Danse: Expo Zéro (Performa, NY, Nov). I have seen the cutting edge of performance and participation, and it is deft, sly, witty, durational, punchy, beautiful and moving.

10. Gatz, by ERS (McCarter Theater, Princeton, Dec): this time last year I would have said I was no fan of theatre. Then I caught ERS’s The Select in October and loved it; Gatz goes one better, becoming a meta-reflection on the mediums of literature and theatre. And to be reminded of great prose is a great way to end the year.

Unhappy Days in the Art World: De-skilling Theatre, Re-skilling Performance

2011-12-10T11:27:00.000-08:00

An article on white cube vs black box performance, for the Brooklyn Rail's series of Al Held essays. It combines the outcome of last year's De-skilling seminars with my experiences co-curating Prelude.11 and being a judge of the Malcolm Award for Performa 11.

Visual art performance has since its inception sought to de-skill theatre, and this places artists in a difficult position when they are now invited to produce performance in a black box/proscenium setting. A link to the article is here.

Post-Discipline? Contemporary Artists and Research

2011-10-13T10:01:00.000-07:00

A new public seminar series, co-organised with Lindsay Caplan and Katherine Carl for the Center for the Humanities at CUNY Graduate Center.

What can artistic approaches to research tell us about the relationship between history and its interpretation? And what creative lessons might artistic examples offer to researchers in the humanities? Does the restlessly hybrid character of these artistic endeavours provide a model for post-disciplinary research?

30 September - Walid Raad
28 October - Andrea Geyer
9 December - Trevor Paglen

Spring dates tbc - Jill Magid, Eyal Weisman and Antoni Muntadas

Reading and registration required - please sign up here.

Prelude.11

2011-09-15T16:19:00.000-07:00

Save the date! I'm co-curating this year's Prelude.11 festival at the Martin Segal Theatre Center at CUNY Graduate Center, together with Rob Marcato (Producer, Signature Theatre) and Helen Shaw (Theatre Critic, Time Out). I have brought in the following projects: Jackson Pollock Bar (Joseph Beuys in America), Nina Beier (Complete Works, performed by Gus Solomons Jr), Rob Fitterman, Donelle Woolford and Will Holder (the latter three grouped as Extreme Appropriation). 12-14 October, 4-10pm daily, with a closing party on Friday 14 October at the Gershwin Hotel.

Venice Review in Artforum

2011-08-30T08:40:00.000-07:00

A long, diplomatic review of IllumiNATIONS, the main exhibition at this year's Venice Biennale, in the September 2011 issue of Artforum.

Two catalogue essays for Venice

2011-06-10T12:16:00.000-07:00

(1) 'And That is What Happened Here': an experimental essay comprising interviews with the participants of Hirschhorn's Bijlmer-Spinoza Festival (Amsterdam, 2009), published to accompany Hirschhorn's Crystal of Resistance installation in the Swiss Pavilion at Venice. This was done in great haste so there are many flaws; more work should have been done looking at ethnographic field studies before embarking on this text.

(2) 'Zones of Indifferentiation': an excerpt from my forthcoming book, Artificial Hells, focusing on the work of Collective Actions Group. Published to accompany the presentation of Andrey Monastyrsky in the Russian pavilion at Venice, curated by Boris Groys.

Creative Time - Living as Form

2011-05-26T09:26:00.000-07:00

'Spectacle and Participation: Where are we now?' - a lecture to inaugurate Creative Time's Living as Form project, with a discussion chaired by Mariam Ghani. The video can be watched online here.

The Now Museum: Contemporary Art, Curating Histories, Alternative Models

2011-05-26T09:19:00.000-07:00

A major four day conference 10-13 March 2011, organised by myself (on behalf of the PhD Program in Art History at CUNY Graduate Center), in collaboration with Kate Fowle (Independent Curators International) and Eungie Joo (New Museum). Highlights include papers by Manolo Borja-Villel, Okwui Enwezor, Annie Fletcher, Zdenka Badinovac, and the discussion between Dominic Willsdon and Katy Siegel. The graduate student presentations on Sunday 13th are also worth checking out. All panels can be watched online here.

Althamer feature

2011-03-02T11:58:00.003-08:00

An essay on Polish artist Pawel Althamer, whose recent project Common Task has involved taking his neighbours on trips to Brasilia, Brussels and Mali, all the time wearing gold bodysuits. His idiosyncratic approach to collaboration invites us to devise idiosyncratic new criteria for analysing it. Artforum, February 2011.

Con-Demmed to the Bleakest of Futures

2011-01-11T14:06:00.000-08:00

A hastily penned response to the UK government's cuts to culture and education, for e-flux journal #22 - a special issue reporting on the rise of the right in Europe, guest edited by Paul Chan and Sven Lütticken.

Delegated Performance: Outsourcing Authenticity

2010-12-06T09:55:00.001-08:00

A Spanish translation of my essay on delegated performance, in revista Otra Parte (Argentina) no.22, Winter 2010-11. The full version will appear in my forthcoming book Artificial Hells (Verso, Spring 2011).

Deskilling - The Aesthetics of Amateurism

2010-10-22T04:07:00.001-07:00

A five-part interdisciplinary seminar series at CUNY Graduate Center, co-organised with Lindsay Caplan (graduate student, Art History), and open to everyone in the city (further info and registration click here).

Guest speakers:
15 October 2010: Caroline Jones, MIT
19 November 2010: Kenneth Goldsmith, writer and ubu.web
10 December 2010: Randy Martin, NYU
25 February 2011: Kristin Ross, NYU
8 April 2011: Gary Genosko, Lakehead

A blog about the seminar series can be found here.

APG feature

2010-10-01T13:13:00.001-07:00

A feature on the Artist Placement Group in the October issue of Artforum. Available online here. It's the short version of a chapter from my book, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship to be published by Verso in 2011.

Conversation with David Riff

2010-05-24T14:18:00.001-07:00

A conversation with David Riff (of Chto Delat) in Moscow, January 2010 - for Open Space magazine. NB it's all in Russian! Email me for the English version.

Conversation with Xavier Le Roy

2010-05-11T12:52:00.000-07:00

On the back of Xavier Le Roy's amazing performances at Boston ICA in April, I organised a lecture by this leading proponent of so-called 'conceptual dance' at the Martin Segal Theatre Centre (at CUNY Graduate Center). The audio will be available online soon.

Art and the Social: Exhibitions of Art in the 1990s

2010-05-05T09:04:00.000-07:00

This was another case of doing research through an event - this time preparing a chapter on the 'social turn' for my forthcoming book (to be published by Verso next year). The day looked at exhibition making in the early 1990s, and was produced in collaboration with Afterall magazine and Former West. Highlights included Doug Ashford, Renate Lorenz, and Christian Phillipp Müller. Click here for information on the day-long symposium at Tate Britain - it should be web archived soon.

1968-1989: Political Upheaval and Artistic Change

2010-04-13T07:42:00.001-07:00

A selected record of the seminar 1968-1989 which I organised at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw in July 2008 - finally published as an anthology of papers, discussions, and artists' projects. Highlights include essays by Piotr Piotrowski, Branislav Jakovljevic, Tomas Pospiszyl, and a discussion between Grzegorz Kowalski and Artur Zmijewski. Designed by Ludovic Balland.

Where the West Ends?

2010-04-12T09:22:00.000-07:00

This was the name of a two-day seminar I organised (with Marta Dziewanksa) at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, 18-19 March 2010, under the framework of 'Former West'. It focused on art in the former Soviet Union and its immediate zone of influence after the transition of 1991. Highlights of the event include papers by and discussions with Boris Groys, Ekaterina Degot, David Riff, Tomas Pospiszyl, and Edit Andras. Video clips can be found here.

Compromiso comprado

2010-02-21T12:43:00.000-08:00

Another interview in Buenos Aires, this time with Dolores Curia for Página/12.

¿Cuál es hoy el arte comprometido?

2010-02-21T12:30:00.000-08:00

Interview with Ana Maria Batistozzi while I was doing research in Buenos Aires in December, in Revista de Cultura Ñ, January 2010. I didn't get to see this before editing so it's probable that I may sound very stupid.

Trauma, Antagonism and the Bodies of Others: A Dialogue on Delegated Performance

2010-02-21T12:18:00.000-08:00

Not my choice of title! An interview with Julia Austin in Performance Paradigm 5.1, May 2009

Bring the Noise!

2010-01-04T06:22:00.000-08:00

Discussion between myself and Boris Groys in the Summer 2009 issue of Tate Etc magazine: http://www.tate.org.uk/tateetc/issue16/futurism1.htm

Tenth Havana Biennial

2009-04-29T12:44:00.000-07:00

Original version of a review of the Tenth Havana Biennial; an edited version appeared in Artforum, Summer 2009.

Any discussion of the Tenth Havana Bienal necessitates a brief recap of its particular history. In recent years it’s become a something of a cliché to lament the biennial as prime symptom of the art world’s increasing homogenisation. To visit the Tenth Havana Bienal, however, is to be confronted with an exception to this rule. This is partly due to Cuba’s unique situation as a country under economic blockade, enduring the final, disintegrating flourishes of state socialism. But it is also due to the specific remit of the Havana Bienal, which has since its inception asserted consciousness of centre-periphery relations and the need to establish an alternative model to the West. The first three biennials (1984, 1986, 1989) set out to promote dialogue across the Southern hemisphere – the Caribbean, South America, and Africa. As such it was the first international biennial to pay serious attention to the post-colonial theory and to reflect this in its selection of artists – a discourse that would become the norm, indeed the expectation, for most Western biennials after 1989. The early Havana biennials were also the first to support the exhibition with a conference – another innovation that would only later become current in the West a decade later.

What this means historically, as Rafal Niemojewski has argued, is that the Havana Bienal arguably stands as the model for today’s discursive, transnational biennial – in contrast to Venice, which emerged from a nineteenth-century framework of the nation-state. Yet although many of the characteristics of early Havana biennials have been absorbed by the Western model, there remain important differences that continue to reflect the anti-hegemonic attitude of the island. Those expecting to see the big-name biennial players should expect disappointment: with the exception of Stan Douglas and Cai Guo-Qiang, such artists are almost entirely absent in favour of a focus on practitioners in the Caribbean, Central and South America. There are no celebrated superstar curators. And there’s very little sense of the show being mounted for the sake of international visitors. Although the 1997 Bienal received criticism for courting tourism, my experience of the 2009 edition was of an exhibition almost obstructively resistant to hasty consumption. Foreigners are charged a small fortune to see the show ($60) and the press even more ($250); Cubans pay $3. It was five days before I found a map of the venues, and this didn’t include opening times, which led to frequent and frustrating encounters with closed buildings.

In terms of venues, in recent years the Bienal has tended to occupy the Centro Wilfredo Lam, and the fortress of San Carlos de la Cabaña, a series of long thin buildings each containing an enfilade of low-ceilinged rooms. For this Bienal – its twenty-fifth anniversary as well as the fiftieth anniversary of the Revolution – an unprecedented number of these military buildings were taken over, along with fourteen other venues in Habana Vieja and Vedado, including the Fototeca de Cuba, the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, and the Convento San Francisco de Asis. Accompanying this was a collateral programme of over 100 exhibitions, including work by respected Cubans not included in the main Bienal, such as the conceptual painter Lazzaro Saaveda.

Curated by an eight-person team from the Centro Wilfredo Lam, the 10th edition has the quintessentially biennialish title Integration and Resistance in a Global Era. The main exhibition at the Fortaleza de la Cabaña was disappointing, indeed grindingly bad. It was gruelling to encounter so many dated instances of installation art: poorly realised mises-en-scène, or decisions to fill a room with large amounts of pipes, tyres, leaves, etc. (The Mexican performer Silverio pithily summarised the aesthetic as ‘overproduced with no budget’.) There was an abundance of photographic practices making simplistic denunciations of global capitalism (eg images of indigenous peoples wearing branded t-shirts); an exception was Ananké Asseff’s Potencial (2005-7), a series of life-size photographs of average-looking citizens in their homes, all of whom were discreetly holding firearms – weapons of self-protection as one more extension of their domestic furnishings. Video works were rather few on the ground, and of interest primarily for their studium rather than any conceptual twist, such as Yong Soon Min’s subterfuge footage of North Korea, or Chen Xiaoyun’s vignette of a Chinese orchestra for disabled and disfigured musicians. There was very little by way of the social, interdisciplinary, and research-based work that has come to be a mainstay of Western biennials. The most poignant piece was a five minute video by Adrián Paci (Centro di Permanenza Temporanea, 2007), a concise portrait of illegal immigrants at San Francisco airport, climbing the stairs to board a plane. As the camera panned back, it became clear that there was no plane to board, only a bleak tableau of fify or so men and women standing on a portable staircase to nowhere.

Paci’s work was a moment of relief amongst a slew of weakly curated juxtapositions at Cabaña: unrelated works crammed together in one space, having either no relation to each other or far too much. Other venues had a more thematic focus: the Pabellón Cuba seemed to focus on architecture and mapping, but the 1960s tropical modernist building was more memorable than most of the works on display. The Centro Cultural Bertolt Brecht was one of the venues whose doors were perpetually shut to me, but good reports were heard about its gender-themed show, which featured a live performance of two transsexuals re-enacting Yves Klein’s Anthropométries in shocking pink paint. Displays of work by respected older figures were small but consistently rewarding: an extremely cogent selection of three recent works by the Uruguayan conceptualist Luis Camnitzer (at the Centro Wilfredo Lam), an illuminating show of 70s and 80s mail art by the Brazilian Paulo Bruscky (at the Biblioteca Pública), and a retrospective of the ever-wonderful León Ferrari (at Casa de las Américas). Although somewhat shabbily presented, the Ferrari retrospective was far more faithful to the vision, range and political commitments of this senior Argentinian than the concurrent show of his work at MoMA.

In terms of younger art with energy and substance to match Ferrari, the most dynamic project by far was Estado de Excepción, held over nine nights at the Galería Habana. Since 2003, the Cuban artist Tania Bruguera has run Catédra de Arte de Conducta, an informal art school as a work of art, dedicated to producing a new generation of Cuban artists committed to working politically with their social reality. Estado de Excepción was her farewell to the school, and the consolidation of six years’ work. Every evening between 5-9pm, Bruguera and her co-curator Mailyn Machado produced a different group show from work produced at the school, tightly curated around themes such as ‘Jurisdiction’, ‘Useful Art’ and ‘Trafficking Information’. Many of these short, sharp interventions outstripped everything else in the biennial in terms of their subversive wit and relevance to the Cuban situation, frequently dealing with issues of censorship, internet restrictions and social taboos. Each exhibition also included a ‘special guest’, selected from one of the many former tutors who had come to teach on the project, including Dora García, Thomas Hirschhorn, and Artur Žmijewski. Of these, Elmgreen and Dragset’s Performance (2009) was the most compelling: two young men sat on chairs either side of a bed, then stood up, undressed and spooned on the bed, before dressing and sitting again. These actions were repeated for the four hours of the show, as if on a video loop.

Since setting up Arte de Conducta, Bruguera has tried to avoid producing acolytes by not showing her own work in Cuba. Since Estado de Excepción marked the end of this school, she could break her rule and, at the invitation of Guillermo Gomez-Peña, produced an untitled event on Sunday 29 March in the central courtyard at Centro Wilfredo Lam. A large brown curtain hung as a backdrop to a stage with podium and microphones. Two hundred disposable cameras were issued to the crowd, who were informed that for the duration of the performance they had freedom of speech for one minute. In contrast to the innumerable efforts of Western artists to provide ‘soap box’ type events for the democratic airing of grievances, in Cuba such freedom of speech is strictly prohibited. As the media thronged around, the atmosphere was utterly electric; would anyone take up the opportunity to speak their mind and face the consequences? The first person on stage was clearly primed by Bruguera: a woman took to the podium, where she stood and wept, hands shaking as she clutched the microphone. She was flanked, as were all the subsequent speakers, by a man and woman in military garb who placed a single white dove on her shoulder – a visual echo of Fidel Castro’s post-Revolutionary speech in 1959. The second speaker was the well-known ‘dissident’ Yoani Sanchez, who pleaded for freedom of access to the internet. Those who spoke for longer than a minute were forcibly bundled off stage by the fatigue-clad duo.

The combination of formal precision (the set-up of the podium, the militaristic assistants, the uncontrolled dissemination of documentation via the cameras) was countered by the the unpredictability of the flapping dove and the mixed emotions of those who chose to speak. As with all participatory works, the content was somewhat hit and miss: for every pained call for ‘Libertad!’ and ‘One day freedom of speech won’t be performance art!’, there were self-promotional foreigners jumping on the bandwagon to chip in. After one hour Bruguera closed the piece by pointedly thanking all the Cubans. In the following days, the organizing committee of the biennial published a communique repudiating the comments of the speakers who took over the microphone, arguing that they had hijacked the event to ‘strike a blow at the Cuban Revolution’. This document didn’t indict Bruguera directly – but as Yoani Sanchez notes in her blog Generation Y, without this official reaction, the piece would not be complete; indeed, its absence would have proven that Bruguera’s event was staged for the benefit of international visitors.

The painful reality is that there is no freedom of speech in Cuba, and this is one reason why so much work in the Bienal was ideologically correct and so utterly tepid. Innocuous expressions of anti-globalisation sit unproblematically within the anti-imperialist discourse of the Cuban authorities. In the following days, this was apparently compounded in the conference (Evento Teoretico), which a friend described to me as ‘an extension of the rhetoric of the biennial, with a lot of old Spanish Marxists speaking for endless hours belaboring the same apocalyptic points around how the market has killed any possibility of art-making’. Significantly, no Cubans were invited to speak at the event. This is a great pity. Historically, the Havana Bienal has shown great initiative in rethinking the purpose and realisation of large-scale international exhibitions; this year, it seems, only Bruguera’s projects looked to the future, rather than serving to reinforce a false present.

(1) Rafal Niemojewski, The rise of the contemporary biennial: a new topography for the contemporary art world, forthcoming PhD, Royal College of Art, London.
(2) Dermis P León, ‘Havana, Biennial, Tourism: The Spectacle of Utopia’, Art Journal, vol.60, no.4, Winter 2001, pp68-73

Transnational Communities

2009-04-23T07:47:00.000-07:00

Discussion with Tania Bruguera as part of TJ Demos's research network Zones of Conflict, at Tate Britain, 14 February 2009. Click here for info and here for a recording of the event.

Interview with Eleftherotypia

2009-04-01T08:29:00.001-07:00

An interview with George Karouzakis from the Greek newspaper Eleftherotypia about social engagement in art. In Greek.

Conversation with Thomas Hirschhorn

2009-03-19T15:04:00.001-07:00

A research question to Thomas Hirschhorn that found its way onto his website for the Bijlmer Spinoza Festival... [click here]

Update (29 August) - this site seems to have been removed, which is a shame, as it contained an immense amount of information about the project and pdfs of all the newspapers produced during the festival.

Double Club

2009-03-11T14:31:00.001-07:00

A brief return to Artforum diary with a review of Carsten Höller's Double Club in London. [here]

What is a curator?

2009-02-10T01:15:00.003-08:00

'What is a Curator?', Shifting Practice, Shifting Roles: Artists' Installations and the Museum, Tate Modern, March 2007 (webcast )

The Social in Art

2009-02-10T01:15:00.001-08:00

The Social in Art: Between Ethics and Aesthetics, Forum Permanente, University of Sao Paulo, Brazil, November 2006 (webcast)

Documenta 12, 2007

2009-02-10T01:14:00.001-08:00

'Vienna Inc.: The Analytic Documenta', Journal of Visual Culture, vol. 7, no.2, August 2008, pp.206-214

10th Istanbul Bienali, 2007

2009-02-10T01:13:00.001-08:00

Review of 10th Istanbul Bienali, Artforum, October 2007 (online)

New Performativity

2009-02-10T01:11:00.001-08:00

New Performativity, panel discussion at Frieze Art Fair 2006 with curator Francesco Bonami, dramaturg/theorist Eda Cufer, artist Surasi Kusolwong, and artists Elmgreen & Dragset (audio)

Art in Public

2009-02-10T01:05:00.000-08:00

Art in Public, panel discussion at Frieze Art Fair 2004 with artist Jeremy Deller, curator James Lingwood, producer Yvonne Force-Villareal, and curator Per Gunnar Tverbakk (audio)

Ranciere/Sloterdijk

2009-02-10T01:04:00.001-08:00

Jacques Rancière/Peter Sloterdijk, co-organised with the Centre for Philosophy, Literature and the Arts, Warwick University, May 2008 (podcast click here).

Rethinking Spectacle

2009-02-10T01:01:00.002-08:00

Rethinking Spectacle, Tate Modern, March 2007, co-organised with Mark Godfrey. (webcast)
This symposium aimed to address recent claims that contemporary art is 'spectacularised' and increasingly inseparable from the marketing of large-scale museums. But what do we really mean by 'spectacle' today? And how useful are Guy Debord's ideas (Society of the Spectacle, 1967) for analysing new conditions of the display of contemporary art? Organised to mark the end of Carsten Höller's Test Site (2006) in the Turbine Hall, the symposium sought to question whether this work is really comparable to other forms of mass entertainment. Speakers included: Ina Blom (University of Oslo), Andrea Fraser (UCLA), Frances Morris (Tate Modern), and Sven Lütticken (Free University, Amsterdam).
My lecture was geared towards my undergraduate students at Warwick University, with whom I was producing the research website Rethinking Spectacle (link).

The Social Turn

2009-02-10T01:01:00.001-08:00

'The Social Turn: Collaboration and Its Discontents', Artforum, February 2006 (online). This essay that questions the current tendency to judge socially-engaged art by 'ethical' humanist criteria, and argues, via a discussion of the recent writing of Jacques Ranciere, for a more integrated mode of analysis for this work. (pdf available here)

Installation Art

2009-02-10T00:59:00.000-08:00

Installation Art: A Critical History (London: Tate, 2005). This book argues that installation art can be can be categorised by the type of experience that it structures for the viewing subject; it is also a critique of installation art and its claims to both ‘activate’ and ‘decentre’ the viewer.

Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics

2009-02-10T00:56:00.000-08:00

‘Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics’, October, no. 110, Autumn 2004, is a critique of Nicolas Bourriaud's Relational Aesthetics (1998) and its claims to be a political and emancipatory mode of artistic practice.

Double Agent

2008-12-04T21:03:00.000-08:00

Double Agent, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London (+ tour), co-curated with Mark Sladen, 2008. Publication 2009. weblink
A group exhibition that took its lead from recent changes in performance art, in which artists are no longer the central performer in their work, but hire, persuade or collaborate with other people. The final show contained works in a variety of media, including video, photography, ceramics, installation and live performance. The artists shown were Pawel Althamer, Phil Collins, Dora García, Christoph Schlingensief, Barbara Visser, Donelle Woolford and Artur Zmijewski.

1968/1989

2008-12-04T08:42:00.001-08:00

1968/1989, Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw, June 2008, co-organised with Joanna Mytkowska. Publication forthcoming (Summer 2009). weblink
This conference aimed to investigate the relationship between political change and artistic innovation in Eastern Europe during two transformative moments of political upheaval. How did local political contexts give rise to specific artistic innovations? How does the overlap between political form and artistic form make itself visible? Is it true to assume that 1968 was more important for Western Europe, and 1989 for Eastern Europe, or can we nuance this claim?

Directed Reality

2008-12-04T08:40:00.000-08:00

'Directed Reality: From Live Installation to Constructed Situations', Warsaw Museum of Modern Art, November 2007. (webcast) This is an early version of the Double Agent catalogue essay.

Jerome Bel

2008-12-04T08:34:00.000-08:00

Review of Jêrome Bel retrospective at Sadler's Wells, London, in Artforum, December 2008, pp.264-5. Full text click here.

Participation

2008-12-04T08:28:00.000-08:00

Participation (London: Whitechapel and MIT Press, 2006), an edited anthology of key texts on the idea of social participation in art from the late 1950s to the present day. The book presents a range of theoretical, artistic and curatorial positions by which to address the collective production and reception of contemporary art.

The book was launched with a discussion at the Whitechapel Art Gallery as part of their series Big Ideas. My discussion with Jeremy Till (Professor of Architecture, University of Sheffield) and Nick Ridout (Lecturer in Theatre and Performance, QMU), September 2006, is podcast here.