Art of Assembly XIV

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Florian Malzacher's long-running and excellent series Art of Assembly came to NY in March. I was totally thrilled to be doing my first in-person public event in 2+ years, and in the company of (insane combination alert) Tania Bruguera and Ann Liv Young. I also discovered I was completely out of practice at navigating live Q&A. Here's the vid.

Are You Alive or Not? Rietveld Academie

I'm curating the last day of a four-day conference-festival-event for the Rietveld Academie, loosely based around my book Artificial Hells. I've invited Gavin Butt, Jesse Darling, Annie Dorsen and Alexandra Pirici to respond to the question of whether de-skilling opens up to inclusive new aesthetic possibilities (such as punk, karaoke, or the user)--or just heralds the end of virtuosity altogether. De Brakke Grond, Amsterdam, 11am-7pm, Sunday 22 March 2015.

Post-Discipline? Contemporary Artists and Research

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.

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

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.

Deskilling - The Aesthetics of Amateurism

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.

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

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.

Where the West Ends?

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.

Transnational Communities

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.

What is a curator?

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

The Social in Art

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

Rethinking Spectacle

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).

1968/1989

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

'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.