Seminar 39 // 25, 26, 27 April 2013 // London

Thursday, 25 April 2013, 11 am - 4.30 pm

Location: Prokofiev Room, Library (Rutherford Building)

(for those without Goldsmiths Student Cards: we will be there at 10.45 to help you get into the building)

11 am - 2 pm: Presentation by C/K participant Fereshte Moosavi

CURATORIAL ACTIVITY AS an artistic MEDIUM

My research examines a reciprocal relationship between the curatorial activity and art by reassessing the creative mode through which the functionality of art is becoming operational via its conditioned structure. In this respect, the territory that my research explores is involved with the process by which the production of art occurs. Through studying three key elements – of curatorship, art, and audience – and the level of their respective reciprocal engagements, my research will address the what, which and how of the process of the production of art. Furthermore, this research seeks a theoretical realization of curatorial activity and the conception of its functionality in relation to art. Accordingly, this study tracks a theorization of the curatorial act as a situation contra and through the logic of the event as modelled by philosophers such as Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari.

2 - 3pm: Lunch break

3 - 4.30 pm:

Continuation of the presentation by Fereshte Moosavi. In this second part, Fereshte will also take us through a reading of an excerpt from Deleuze/Guattari’s ‘What Is Philosophy?’, thus introducing and discussing some key concepts that guide her research  

Readings:

– Michel Foucault, ‘Other Spaces’

– Gilles Deleuze / Félix Guattari, Excerpt from ‘What Is Philosophy?’

In the evening, there are two options:

1)

Thursday, 25 April, 5 pm

Location: Ian Gulland Lecture Theatre, Whitehead Building

Visual Cultures public programme

Manuela Rossini

Critical Posthumanism: For Life's Sake!

(Public Lecture)

For a number of decades now, scholars, artists, writers and even scientists have contributed to the rise and flourishing of posthumanism. As a critical reflection on ‘what it means to be human’, posthumanism is to be distinguished from transhumanism and other futurologies that celebrate the advent of the postbiological era. Such technophilic scenarios remain deeply embedded within a humanist and anthropocentric matrix and thus reinforce definitions of ‘human nature’ that have caused severe damage not only to nonhuman life but also to bodies not fully or no longer qualifying as ‘human’ according to prevailing norms, laws and values. One of the central aims of a critical posthumanism is precisely to counter these so-called ‘popular’ or ‘cybernetic’ versions of posthumanism by revisiting humanisms and humanistic approaches for their potential use as resources for political agency, justice and an ethics of sustainability on which the well-being of ‘the living in general’ and the survival of the planet as a whole depends.

Manuela Rossini works for the Swiss Academies of Arts and Sciences and, since May 2009, as the coordinator of the Graduate School at the Institute of Advanced Study in the Humanities and the Social Sciences, University of Bern. Her research interests are mainly in the area of inter- and transdisciplinarity, posthumanism, animal studies as well as feminism.

2)

Thursday, 25 April, 6.30 pm

Location: Lisson Gallery, 52-54 Bell Street (near tube station Edgware Road)

Rana Hamadeh

The Big Board, or... ‘And before it falls, it is only reasonable to enjoy life a little’ (2013)

(Lecture-performance)

The Big Board, or... ‘And before it falls, it is only reasonable to enjoy life a little’ (2013) is a newly-commissioned lecture-performance by Rana Hamadeh, and part of her ongoing umbrella project Alien Encounters, which she initiated in 2011. Inspired by Sun Ra’s 1974 film Space is the Place, Oskar Schlemmer’s 1926 Diagram for Gesture Dance and Paulus Fürst’s 1656 engraving of Doctor Schnabel of Rome, the performance is an exhaustive deliberation on the notion and gesture of ‘falling’. Thinking through the conjunction of the legal and the spatial, the work evokes a set of provocative associations, playing out an intensive scrutiny of the shared lexicons of criminology, epidemiology and theatre.

Rana Hamadeh (very well known to us as an auditor in C/K) is a performance and visual artist from Beirut based in the Netherlands. Interested in a curatorial approach within her artistic practice, she works on long term research-based projects that involve different levels of collaborations are presented in the form of lecture-performances, audio/text based installations, mind maps, and public/documented conversations.

Friday, 26 April, 11 am – 6 pm

Location: Prokofiev Room, Library (Rutherford Building)

(for those without Goldsmiths Student Cards: we will be there at 10.45 to help you get into the building)

11 am - 2pm:

Lecture and discussion with Gavin Butt

Performance Goes Pop, or, Towards a Post-Punk Commons

This lecture will explore the challenges that performance presents to scholars and curators by cutting across disciplinary boundaries, and reaching out to audiences across the divides of ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture. It will consider a cultural history project I am currently engaged in which addresses the milieu of Leeds artschools in the 1970s and 1980s and the post-punk music scene. The lecture will explore how scholarly study might recognize the full ‘Pop’ promise of this post-punk moment by focusing upon experimental work as it sought to address less insular audiences than those habitual to the art and theatre worlds. I will put forward the idea of a post-punk ‘laboratory’ in which the links between performance art, theatre, radical theory, conceptual art and playing in a band were actively explored by many artists such as John Hyatt, Rose English, Kevin Atherton and Steve Shil, as well as music acts including Sheeny and the Goys, Fad Gadget, Another Colour, Scritti Politti, The Three Johns, and more.

Gavin Butt is Reader in the Department of Visual Cultures, Goldsmiths. He is author of Between You and Me: Queer Disclosures in the New York Art World 1948-1963 (Duke University Press) and currently co-director, with Adrian Heathfield and Lois Keidan, of Performance Matters, a three-year creative research project on the cultural value of performance www.thisisperformancematters.co.uk. He is also co-director, with Ben Walters, of This is Not a Dream, a feature length documentary film about artist’s DIY use of film and video.

2-3 pm: Lunch break

3-6 pm:

Continuation of the discussion around Gavin Butt’s lecture

Readings:

– Michael Hardt, ‘The Common in Communism’

– Lewis Hyde, Excerpt from ‘Common as Air: Revolution, Art, and Ownership’

Friday evening

Group dinner – place and exact time will be fixed in the seminar

Saturday, 27 April, 12 am – 5 pm

Location: INIVA, 1 Rivington Place, Shoreditch

(see www.iniva.org/about_us/visiting_information)

Group discussion about C/K’s Interview Archive project

(postponed from last time)

One important part of the future activities in Curatorial/Knowledge consists in the building up of an archive of filmed interviews about ‘exhibition lives’ or exhibitions that had an impact on the lives of the interlocutors. We will discuss this project at length on Saturday, especially with a view to setting up a questionnaire to be used for the interviews, but also with a view to further generating ideas about possible interlocutors, exhibitions and the framing of this project. As agreed upon in March, we will use chapters 1 & 7 from Peggy Phelan’s book ‘Unmarked. The Politics of Performance’ as an entry point to that discussion.

Readings:

Peggy Phelan, ‘Unmarked’, chapters 1 & 7