Who’s Afraid of the Public?

Symposium at ICA, London organised by the Research Platform for Curatorial and Cross-disciplinary Cultural Studies at the University of Reading and Postgraduate Programme in Curating, Zürich, Practice-Based Doctoral Programme.

4 May 2013
£12 / £10 concessions / £8 ICA Members / £5 Student Members

Despite all the yearning for new publics and the attempts to include ever wider and more diverse audiences, one has to suspect that these are mere gestures of inclusion driven by the desire to produce visitor numbers than constituting a public.

If participation is the new spectacle, as Diedrich Diedrichsen once provocatively stated, how are we then to go beyond the given proliferation of art communication, mediation and education? When participation has both become an apt strategy of governmentality falling in place with the discourse of the fear of the public and is constantly generated by communicating via social media and its constant flow of information and relations at a fast pace, what are then the potentials to open up a new discourse on what public and participation in its constitution means in the 21st century?

This symposium explores the social, cultural and political challenges surrounding public participation in relation to social media and examines the strategies and experiments that engage audiences within different rhythms and reflections in the public arena.

Speaker Schedule

11.30am – 12.15pm
Simon Sheik, Curator and Programme Director of the MFA Curating at Goldsmiths, University of London

12.15pm – 1pm
Marie Luise Angerer, Professor at the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne

1pm – 1.30pm
Lunch

1.30pm – 2.15pm
Sergio Edelsztein, Director of the Centre for Contemporary Art in Tel Aviv and Curator of the Israel Pavillion at the Venice Biennial 2013

2.15pm – 3pm
Aria Spinelli, critic/curator based in Milan

3pm – 3.45pm
Jeanne Van Heeswijk, artist, Netherlands

3.45pm – 4.15pm
Break

4.15pm – 5.30pm
Film Screening curated by John Canciani, Director of Winterthur Short Film Festival. Full details of the programme are available here. The Film Screening is included in the symposium, but if you’d like to attend the Screening only, tickets are available to purchase below.

Concept:

Elke Krasny (moderator)
Curator, Senior Lecturer at The Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, currently working on her PhD at the Research Platform for Curatorial and Cross-disciplinary Cultural Studies at the University of Reading.

Dorothee Richter
Curator and head of postgraduate programme in curating Zürich,; director with Susanne Clausen of the Research Platform for Curatorial and Cross-disciplinary Cultural Studies at the University of Reading and Postgraduate Programme in Curating, Zürich, Practice-Based Doctoral Programme.

Silvia Simoncelli
Lecturer at postgraduate programme in curating, Zürich.

‘Who’s Afraid of the Public?’ – Film Screening

This is Alaska (2009), courtesy Theo Tsappos, Svenska Filminstitutet

The film programme forms a part of ‘Who’s Afraid of the Public?’, a symposium exploring the social, cultural and political challenges surrounding public participation in relation to social media, examining the strategies and experiments that engage audiences within different rhythms and reflections in the public arena. The programme is curated by John Caviani (Artistic Director Internationale Kurzfilmtage Winterthur, Switzerland) comprising of seven short films that investigate aspects of the public and the public space.Developed in collaboration with University of Reading and in association with University of the Arts Zurich. The programme seeks to engage with these issues within the context of cinema exploring the relationship between audience, film and screen creating a unique collective audience experience.

4 May 2013
£5 / Free to ICA Members

Films include:

Play
Christoph Giradet , Matthias Müller, Germany 2003, 7 mins
Audiences in movies. In Play, the onscreen action can only be seen reflected in the facial expressions and gestures of the audience. In sequences of analogous reactions, individual behavior condenses into collective behavior. The event is transferred from the stage to the hall; audience members become the actors in an unpredictable drama.

Crni Film – Black Film
Želimir Žilnik, Jugoslavia 1971, 14 mins
One night, Žilnik picks up a group of homeless men from the streets of Novi Sad and takes them home. While they enjoy themselves in his home, the filmmaker tries to “solve the problem of the homeless”, bringing along a film camera as a witness. He speaks to social workers, ordinary people and policemen. They all close their eyes in the face of the problem.

This is Alaska
Mårten Nilsson, Gunilla Heilborn, Sweden 2009, 11 mins
A group of people have moved to Alaska, searching for a higher level of freedom.

Bradley Manning Had Secrets
Adam Butcher, United Kingdom, 6 mins
The story of Bradley Manning, not as a Wikileaks ‘hacktivist’, but as a young American soldier simultaneously going through a crisis-of-conscious and a crisis-of-identity. Animated in a rotoscoped pixel-art style and using dialogue from Bradley’s online conversations, the film explores issues of personal and political secrets, digital identity and alienation.

Dogs Are Said To See Things (Dizem que os caes veem coisas)
Guto Parente, Brasil 2012, 14 mins
An omen, a shred of time. Suddenly the huge-bellied man jumps into the pool, holding a glass of whisky.

Untitled (Zimbabwean Queen of Rave)
Dan Halter, Zimbabwe 2005, 4 mins
In 1991 Rozalla’s single Everybody’s Free (To Feel Good) was released. The film expresses a personal reality and the cultural gap between white and black that I was experiencing.

Be Loved (Geliebt)
Jan Soldat, Germany 2010, 16 mins
Life’s all about two things: firstly, being loved, and secondly not being alone. But what happens when people aren’t enough, or when they’re too much? Be Loved (Geliebt) is not a film about the pros and cons of emotional and sexual relationships with animals, but a film about the relationship between humans and animals, poised somewhere between love and dependence.

The full symposium programme can be seen here.

Support for local people to do a PhD

The University is offering bursaries to cover the cost of home/EU fees for local people who wish to begin their PhD at the University on either a part-time or full-time basis.  Candidates must normally live within 25 miles of the University, and must satisfy normal entry requirements.

The deadline for applications is Wednesday 1 May 2013.  Please click here for further details.

Contact Dr Rachel Garfield  r.s.garfield@reading.ac.uk if you would like to discuss your proposed research.

Between Curatorial and Urban Practice

Listen to Elke Kransy, Reading – Zurich PhD Curating Platform in discussion with Dr Clémentine Deliss, Maria Lind, Justin McGuirk

Recorded on 2 March 2013 in Sheikh Zayed Theatre, New Academic Building.

In recent years arts practice has shifted towards new modes of collaborative production while digital platforms continually offer new ways to distribute and engage with the arts. As performing and visual arts organisations are transforming relationships with audiences, more varied roles have emerged for curators beyond exhibition making and collections management. Curating has evolved to embrace audience-generated content. Many curators see their role more and more as a cultural producer.

The panel will examine an evolving definition of contemporary curation within their practices, and their relationships to the cities and people around them. Is an architect who arranges and designs spaces or the city a curator? Is a curator an architect of sorts producing spaces of exchange? What about the work a writer or researcher does in ‘curating’ arguments and ideas? Finally, how does the increasing importance of the everyday, of the street, and of shifting political geographies of art practice mark curation today?

Clémentine Deliss is director of Weltkulturen Museum, Frankfurt am Main since April 2010. She studied contemporary art in Vienna, and social anthropology in Vienna, London, and Paris. She holds a PhD (1988) from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London on 1920s French museum anthropology and dissident surrealism.

Elke Krasny is a cultural theorist, curator, urbanist and author, based in Vienna. She researches on the interrelations of architecture, urban space, issues of cultural identity and representation, engaged art practices, gender and world fairs, museums and exhibitions as cultural formations. She teaches Art and Public Space, Museum Pedagogy, Visual Didactics, Didactics of Architecture and Space and Cultural Education at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, “Garden as Community” at the Technical University of Vienna, Cultural Studies at the FH Joanneum Graz and is a visiting professor at the University of Bremen “Urban Transformation and its Narratives” 2006.

Maria Lind is a curator and critic. She is director of Tensta Konsthall, a centre for contemporary art in Stockholm, Sweden. Between 2001 and 2004 she was director of the Munich Kunstverein. Previous to that she was curator at Moderna Museet in Stockholm (from 1997-2001) and in 1998 was co-curator of Manifesta 2 Europe’s nomadic biennale of contemporary art.

Justin McGuirk is a writer, critic and curator. He is the director of Strelka Press, the publishing arm of the Strelka Institute in Moscow, and the design consultant to Domus. He has been the design columnist for The Guardian and the editor of Icon magazine. In 2012 he was awarded the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale of Architecture for an exhibition he curated with Urban Think Tank. He is currently working on a book about activist architecture and social housing in Latin America.

Theatrum Mundi / The Global Street is a new urban forum based in London at LSE Cities. It seeks to understand what brings life to a city, particularly in its public places and asks how these might be better designed. Theatrum Mundi, focused on urban culture, brings architects and town planners together with performing and visual artists to reimagine the public spaces of twenty-first century cities – streets, squares, parks, and places for culture. We begin with theoretical conversations and move towards real projects, celebrating those which embody new thinking about public space.

This event forms part of LSE’s 5th Space for Thought Literary Festival|, taking place from Tuesday 26 February – Saturday 2 March 2013, with the theme ‘Branching Out’.

How to Identify with Difference? Doing Art in the Public Realm

Symposion curated by Elke Krasny
January 30th 2013 4 pm – 9 pm
Kunstraum Niederoesterreich, Herrengasse 13, 1014 Vienna
Part of the programme of Public Art Lower Austria, http://www.publicart.at

The shadows cast by the past are growing longer. The identifications with the present time are shattered by numerous fault lines. In the context of globalized artistic and cultural production, history becomes both, a circulating resource and a challenge to specifically address the local. Temporay but equally long-term articulations in public space, ranging from performance to monuments, manifest how differences in remembering, politics, feminisms are questions of curating and of artistic production.

The symposion aims at discussing the articulation of difference, the ethics of curatorial and artistic production in addressing identification in the public realm when it comes to articulating the perspectives on the past in the now and seeks to develop an understanding what modes of contemporary sharing in public space are. Central issues addressed in the contributions on art in the public realm are politics of remembrance, feminist practices and curatorial and artistic production between art and activism.

Invited Speakers:

Ines Doujak, artist, Vienna,
Amelia Jones, art historian and curator, Montréal
Elke Krasny, curator, Vienna
Suzanne Lacy, artist, Los Angeles
Suzana Milevska, curator, Skopje
Mechtild Widrich, art historian, Zurich
Maayan Shaleff, curator, Tel Aviv

Art Postgraduate Symposium

PROGRAMME

Wednesday 27^th June 2012, G09 Old Whiteknights House, Reading University

10.00 – 10.20 Registration and Uploading Power Points

10.20 Welcome

First Panel   Chair: Barbara Berrington

10.30 – 10.50   Jane Williams: Boris Anrep’s Mosaic for Augustus John.

This early commission by the mosaicist Boris Anrep for the home of Augustus John portrays both the artist and his family. Anrep depicted them in a reverential manner which is more closely aligned in spirit to his religious works rather than his society portraits.

10.50 – 11.10   Alison Boyd: The Significance of the Location and Planning of Southampton Civic Centre.

This presentation will consider the choice of site and the comprehensive plans for the area surrounding Southampton Civic Centre (1929-39) as these highlight the hopes and aspirations of those responsible for the project and are an indication of a considerable investment in the future of the town.

11.10 – 11.30   Holly Barton: Illustrations of war in photographs and artist’s interpretations: an example of the transition between media in the British Illustrated Press from 1915.

This paper will explore how different media of illustration were used to support and consolidate one another, and how the limitations of photography were circumnavigated in the early years of the war. The transition will consider how photography, even when censored, suggested authenticity, while illustration continued the narrative, and filled the lacunae in scenes of battle that could not be caught on camera.

11.30 – 11.45   Questions

11.45 – 12.00   Tea/coffee break

Second Panel   Chair: Clair Drever

12.00 – 12.20   Donna Yamani: Skulpturenpark Berlin_Zentrum: History, Memory and Community Uniting in the Twenty First Century.

This paper will consider how Skulpturenpark Berlin_Zentrum has included installations which explore and challenge the historical aspect of the site and the development of the term ‘community art’ and what ‘community’ means to artists and residents of the city. The artists to be discussed here are Katerina Seda (Over and Over, 2008) and Matthias Einhoff (Celebration, 2009).

12.20 – 12.40   Kevin O’Connor: Betwixt Belief and Doubt.

Research focuses on firstly, how the artist and artwork although experiential, are believed to be rational in origin, and as such, are the subject of belief and doubt. Secondly, how the belief and doubt that surrounds artist and artwork centres on the nature of the subjectivity of their connection.

12.40 – 1.00   Kate Corder: Cultivation Field.

Kate’s recent research has centered around Cultivation Field as a curatorial project, the focus of which extended from the Cultivation Field Postgraduate Symposium that took place last September at the University of Reading.  This presentation will consider curation as practice or medium, the wider area of Cultivation Field as a discourse or field of interest in art and how this fits in with Kate’s own allotments research studies.

1.00 – 1.15   Questions

1.15 – 2.00   Lunch in the Art History Reading Room

Third Panel   Chair: Donna Yamani

2.00 – 2.20   Clair Drever: Underground Film in London, 1960’s and 1970’s.

Ideas of temporality, image and the materiality of film permeated the culture of The London Film-Makers Cooperative in the 1960’s and 70’s. They made significant innovations with multi-screen films and expanded cinema events, producing works whose essence was defined by their ephemerality. How are such expressions of immediacy remembered in the twenty first century?

2.20 – 2.40   Giulia Mezzi: Camillo Boito’s restoration of Donatello’s Altar in the Basilica del Santo in Padua.

Donatello’s Altar underwent several modifications since its original conception designed in the 1440’s. This presentation focuses on Boito’s reconstruction and restoration of the altar (1895), which has been documented by the same architect in an original volume published in 1897.

2.40 – 3.00   Glenis Kerr Elliot: Memory and Memorial: The Radcliffe Camera in Oxford.

This paper looks at the concept of encyclopaedia and memory and the classical basis of education in late seventeenth century Britain, and suggests that for patrons, trustees and architects the tombs of emperors were inspiration for this memorial to Dr John Radcliffe in his university city.

3.00 – 3.15   Questions

3.15 – 3.30   Tea/coffee break

Fourth Panel   Chair: Glenis Kerr Elliot

3.30 – 3.50   Barbara Berrington: Habits of Performance.

A Dominican Friar appears in almost every fresco of Fra Angelico’s decorative programme at San Marco Convent. His dress identifies and separates him out, proclaims his role and his social purpose. But what performance practices did the habit embody for strict observant Dominicans in the Florence of 1450 – and how is this portrayed?

3.50 – 4.10   Rebecca Gill: From Heretics to Saints: the church of San Barnaba, Milan.

This paper will address how the Barnabite Order, having been accused of heresy by the church of Rome, sought to redefine themselves through the architecture of their mother church, San Barnaba, designed by Galeazzo Alessi in 1561.

4.10 – 4.20   Questions and concluding comments

4.30 and onwards   A glass of wine in the Art History Reading Room

Cultivation Field

NEW Practice-based PhD programme in collaboration with Zurich University of the Arts

 The Department of Art at the University of Reading, in collaboration with the Postgraduate Programme in Curating at Zurich University, are excited to announce a new Curatorial and cross-disciplinary cultural studies, practice-based doctoral programme in Art starting in January 2012. 
http://www.reading.ac.uk/art/pg-research/art-postgraduate-rsearch-zurich-phd.aspx

Reading and Zurich are offering this doctoral program for research in and as curatorial and/or artistic practice. Whilst being enrolled in Reading, students will be part of a research group hosted by the Postgraduate Programme in Curating in Zurich, where they will also be offered opportunities for teaching and lecturing in Higher Education. The new PhD programme specializes in offering established curators, artists, art critics and designers from all disciplines the critical framework to focus on specific curatorial and cultural research topics through a combined theoretical and practical approach. The programme aims to provide a cooperative environment with a decidedly cross-disciplinary and international bent based. Participants will be able to engage with an ongoing international public programme in Zurich and with the independent OnCurating magazine.

For further information please contact: fineart@reading.ac.uk

Curating Research: Practice-based PhD

The Department of Art at the University of Reading in collaboration with the PostgraduateProgramme in Curating, Zurich is offering a new doctoral program for research in and as curatorial and/or artistic practice.Research students are enrolled at the University of Reading and the Postgraduate Programme in Curating is hosting a research group and offers opportunities for teaching and lecturing in Higher Education. The new PhD programme specializes in offering established curators, artists, art critics and designers from all disciplines the critical framework to focus on specific curatorial and cultural research topics in order to earn a Doctorate from the University of Reading through a combined theoretical and practical approach.

The Research Platform aims to provide a cooperative environment with a decidedly cross-disciplinary and international bent based on an association of two outstanding Programmes, the Department of Art at the University of Reading and the Postgraduate Program in Curating at the Zurich University for the Arts. The program responds to recent changes in the processes of the production of culture and a shift in the organisation of work processes throughout society. Within this shift, individual areas of action are coming together in new meta-levels, such as networks and knowledge transfer. The program aims to address and to question the significant changes affecting cultural production. It seeks to provide a productive environment for participants to discuss and develop their research, to critically reflect on the issues involved and to transform their own respective positions as producers, agents, designers, artists, archivists, and conveyors of those economies, and the politics, aesthetics and effects related to them. The program emphasises the reflection of curatorial and artistic methodologies and prospects of arts production, its practitioners, and its audiences.

The Practice-based PhD program is designed for a three year duration. Participants are enrolled at the Department of Art at the University of Reading and they should be prepared to take part in seminars and communal meetings in Zurich and Reading. Over the course of the three years participants will develop and realise their projects supported by the academic and artistic team of co-participants and faculty.

The participants have access to the facilities and resources of the Department of Art at Reading and at the Postgraduate Program in Curating and to the institutions and people that form the broader and expanding Research Platform. Participants will be supported to pursue and develop dissertation work resulting in a curatorial/artistic project and a written component displaying a strong emphasis on methodological reflexivity and documentation. Moreover, participants are expected to take an active part in organizing the program (coordinating workshops, guest lectures, conferences, exhibitions, screenings, etc.). After successful completion and submission of the PhD, a Doctorate will be awarded by the University of Reading.

Participants will be able to engage with the ongoing international public programmes connected to the Postgraduate Programme in Curating Zurich, and with the independent OnCurating magazine.

Entry requirements

Requirements for admission to the PhD in Practice program are a degree (MA, MFA or diploma) from a recognized University or Academy, and the submission of a portfolio and/or a written project proposal (to be written in English). Applicants who are already engaged in an artistic or academic career are encouraged to apply. Applications will be made directly to the University of Reading.

Please contact the Department of Art for further information: fineart@reading.ac.uk

The main practical areas for curatorial approaches are:

• Exhibitions and exhibition architecture
• Design
• Production of books and catalogues
• Installations
• Digital projects
• Transdisciplinary practices
• Art Mediation
• Art in public spaces
• Art education projects/ communication projects
• Sound-specific projects
• Film/Video/Performance

Areas of Research

Transfer: contemporary discourses of exhibition practice / undertaking a critique of ideology through the medium of exhibition making / everyday culture to high culture/ media in relation to curating

Display: the practices and power relations within modes of display; modes and discourses of audience address

Context: Sites/ discourses of space and body politics / review of political missions/ (post)colonial perspectives / Re-interpretations of collection politics

Contemporary Practices: artistic and curatorial projects / paradigm shifts concerning the production, distribution, and reception of exhibitions, curating as cultural practice, performative curating

Susanne Clausen is an artist and Head of the Department of Art at of the University of Reading; 
Dorothee Richter is Head of the Postgraduate Programme in Curating, ICS, DKV, ZhdK and supervisor for PhDs at the University of Reading.

Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2011

Hyewon Kwon,  PhD researcher has been selected for Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2011: In the Presence 23 Nov – 15 Jan 2012, ICA London.

Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2011 will be showing at S1 Artspace and Site Gallery in Sheffield between 23 September and 5 November 2011 before travelling to the ICA, London, 23 November 2011 until 15 January 2012.

Cultivation Field: Postgraduate Symposium

 

The premise for this Symposium is that cultivation is leading to new art practices deserving of critical inquiry and articulation. Whether in the garden or allotment, the soup kitchen or the road, on wasteland or the tower block, or wherever there are cracks in the system, cultivation provokes questions about human being’s relation to and encounter with the earth and its growth systems and operations. The purpose of this Symposium is to encourage discursive exchange and productive encounter between art practitioners and researchers whose work explores plant-based material, land use, growth, ecosystems, economy, taxonomy, environment, power and chaos in the field of cultivation.

Wednesday 28^th September 2011
Bulmershe Theatre, the Minghella Building

10.30am – 11.00am	Arrival and Registration.
11.00am – 11.10am	Welcome, Housekeeping and Outline of Event
11.10am – 11.40am	Gayle Chong Kwan – Invisible Twinning
11.40am – 12.10am	Rosalie Kim – Ruining a Ruin
12.10am – 12.40pm	brook & black -The Fermenting Room: return of the rhizome
12.40pm – 13.00pm	Fritz Haeg – Edible Estates – Lenape, New York (film, 23mins)
13.00pm – 14.00pm	Lunch – The Graduate School, Old Whiteknights House
14.00pm – 14.30pm	Pil & Galia Kollectiv – Asparagus: A Horticultural Ballet
14.30pm – 15.00pm	Kenna Hernly – FIELDCLUB - The Interactive Meaty Master
15.00pm – 15.30pm	Amy Cutler – Peter Larkin’s Leaves of Field and British Woodlands
15.30pm – 15.45pm	Tea and Coffee – The Green Room
15.45pm – 16.15pm	Carly Troncale – ANSR – Social Practice and Criticality/ Cooperation and Resistance
16.15pm – 16.45pm	Janette Porter – Field Based Works
16.45pm – 17.15pm	Rachael Champion -The Mechanical Nature
17.15pm – 17.40pm	Adi Gelbert – Vermin (film, 23mins)
17.40pm – 18.00pm	Conclusion

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

All papers/presentations are 20 minutes in duration followed by 10 minutes question times unless stated.
Chair is Kate Corder.

As part of The Cultivation Field Symposium, more film works will be shown in the Minghella Building Atrium on monitors Stih & Schnock – ORBIT (in the Green Room), Fritz Hage, Edible Estates, London and LA, and Pil & Galia Kollectiv – Asparagus: A Horticultural Ballet.

This Symposium is organised by Kate Corder doctoral student in Art.  

Postgraduate Research: Dexter Sinister

 

Afterall issue 27, Summer 2011, themed around notions of mapping and territory, and how they might be used as constructive methodologies.

The work of New York-based duo Dexter Sinister (Stuart Bailey, University of Reading) may not immediately be considered as territorial or even spatial. However, as demonstrated by their piece A Note on the Type included in the journal, the terrain of Dexter Sinister’s work is the field of criticality and (therefore) of the printed word itself. Writer Saul Anton places their approach within a historical spectrum of criticality and progression; while Anthony Elms provides a ten-point legend towards navigating the ‘space’ between reading and writing in the artists’ work.

Dieter Roelstraate considers the strategy of artist Jef Geys, whose practice attempts an institutional critique from a prosaic and hyper-local perspective. Chris Sharp attempts to deduct an objectifying logic within Geys’s work, explaining his remarkable methodological integrity.

Francis McKee and Jean Fisher look at Mexican artist Minerva Cuevas, whose work ranges from entomological observation to social and political emancipation in provocative arcs.

Andrea Zittel’s designs for living use a specific geographical location as a testing site for her living experiments. Steve Rowell discusses the particularities of inhabiting the Southern Californian landscape, and collaborators Lisa Anne Auerbach and Robby Herbst take a road trip, mapping the vernacular architecture of playgrounds as an homage to Zittel’s models for improved—or improvised—living.

Increasingly in the context of exhibitions, publications and collections, methodologies of mapping have emerged as a means of deducting logic from a spatial or ideological terrain. Stephanie Smith’s reassessment of Suzanne Lacy’s 1995 book Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art discusses an overlooked history of participatory practices, while Stephanie Jeanjean’s piece on 1970s French feminist video collectives describes how the spatiality of information exchange became crucial in disseminating new video art. Information exchange, and the validity thereof is unpicked in a historical sense by Michèle Faguet, who considers the fate of East German Marxist-Leninist educators within Phil Collins’s video project marxism today.

Issue 27 can be purchased in bookshops across the UK, Europe and America; find a stockist near you here. For more information on Afterall or to subscribe, visit our website: www.afterall.org.

Annual History of Art Postgraduate Symposium

Everyone is welcome to join in the Symposium  10.00 a.m. Humanities Building, Room 141

Wednesday 22nd June, 2011 Programme

10.20                    Welcome
10.30 – 10.50     Alison Boyd – The influence of Architectural Competition on the Design of Southampton Civic Centre.
10.50 – 11.10      Holly Barton – Images of War on the Western Front in the French and British Illustrated Press, 1914-1918
11.10 – 11.30       Barbara Berrington – Virtually Unrecordable: Filming Fra Angelico’s frescoes in the convent of San Marco
12.00 – 12.20     Nicola Capon – The Latonian Ideal: a consideration of a key sculpture by John Tweed.
12.20 – 12.40     YiFang Chen – Searching cultural identity in digital simulation – Mei Dean-e’s works and post-colonial aesthetics.
12.40 – 1.00       Suriyya Choudhary – Contemporary vs. Colonial gaze
2.00 – 2.20        Youjin Chung – The Unity of Art and Life: the Synthesis of Fluxus and Zen Buddhism.
2.20 – 2.40        Clair Drever  –  Hermann Nitsch: Viennese Aktionist, cult provocateur and the mysterium of existence.
2.40 – 3.00        Jessica Feather – Collecting Watercolours at the British Museum.
3.30 – 3.50        Rebecca Gill – Galeazzo Alessi and Church Reform: Santa Maria presso San Celso.
3.50 – 4.10        Glenis Kerr Elliott – In Camera: The Radcliffe Camera – Patron and Society.
4.10 – 4.30        Giulia Mezzi:  Camillo Boito and Heritage Protection in Post-Unification Italy.

                               

Stuart Bailey

            

(DEXTER SINISTER | DOT DOT DOT MAGAZINE)

 TO:  Department of Typography & Graphic Communication and the Department of Art
DATE: Wednesday 10 November
TIME: 2pm
VENUE: Nike Theatre in Agriculture  

Stuart Bailey completed a BA in Typography and Graphic Communication at Reading and went from there to the masters programme at the Werkplaats Typografie in Arnhem the Netherlands. He is now registered as a theory/practice postgraduate researcher in the Department of Fine Art at Reading. He was based for some years in Amsterdam and now lives and works in New York and Los Angeles USA.

Stuart is (with Peter Bilak) editor and designer of dot dot dot magazine and is also (with David Reinfurt) part of the group Dexter Sinister, who operate a ‘just-in-time workshop’ and ‘occasional bookstore’ in New York City. The work of Dexter Sinister has increasingly been featured in the context of contemporary art through events such as the Whitney Biennial in New York (2008), the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London (2009) and the Frieze Art Fair in London (2010). Their engagements with the idea of text-based art practice and with typography and the ‘space’ of publishing as a means of dissemination and dispersion follows on from Conceptual Art practices of the 1960s and 70s and a more recent Post-Conceptual territory which has seen the collapsing of traditional distinctions between art, design, writing editing, publishing and distribution. Dexter Sinister ‘publishes’ works that explore these intersections.

Stuart will be talking about some of his recent projects with Dexter Sinister.

Frieze Projects

Based on an architectural blue print from 1847, Shannon Ebner and Dexter Sinister will build a room from Aircrete breeze blocks. However, although the original 1847 structure was designed to keep the weather out, the work for Frieze Art Fair is designed to keep sound in.  The situation of the fair and its material resources are being used to commission an eight-part episodic text on the octopus. Twice daily at 12 and 4pm the room will be closed to the public and the text will be read and recorded.  As the fair closes, the episodes will be stuck together to form a whole, to be played to a dedicated audience on the 31st floor of the Chrysler Building in New York. The recording will then be transcribed and republished as a PDF on servinglibrary.org

Dexter Sinister is the co-operative name of Stuart Bailey (b. 1973) and David Reinfurt (b. 1971). Dexter Sinister constitutes a triangle of activities: (a) a publishing imprint, (b) a workshop & bookstore, and (c) a pseudonym making site/time-specific work in art venues. David graduated from the University of North Carolina in 1993, Yale University in 1999, and formed the design studio O-R-G in 2000. Stuart graduated from the University of Reading in 1994, the Werkplaats Typografie in 2000, and co-founded the journal Dot Dot Dot the same year.

Shannon Ebner (b.1971) is an American artist based in Los Angeles. Recent solo exhibitions include ‘Signal Hill’, Altman Siegel Gallery, San Francisco (2010); ‘Invisible Language Workshop’, Wallspace, New York (2009) and ‘Special Project: Shannon Ebner’, P.S.1/MoMA Center for Contemporary Art, New York (2007).  Selected group exhibitions include ‘6th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art’, Berlin (2010); ‘Les Recontres d’Arles 2010 / 41st Edition’, Arles, France (2010); ‘2008 Whitney Biennial’, The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2008); ‘Learn to Read’, Tate Modern, London (2007) and ‘Uncertain States of America: American Art in the 3rd Millennium’, The Serpentine Gallery, London (2006-2007).  Ebner’s work is held in public collections such as The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, LACMA in Los Angeles and The Gallery of New South Wales in Australia.  In 2009 Ebner’s artist’s book The Sun as Error was published by LACMA and co-ordinated by Dexter Sinister.

Other things to do

Curated by Philip Newcombe (MFA Fine Art 2001-3) ‘Other things to do’ includes a screening of James Gilham, current postgraduate research student at the Department of Art.

PhD Symposium in Art

PhD Symposium in Art
Graduate School in the Arts and Humanities
University of Reading

Wednesday 23 June 2010

A Symposium to discuss practice-led research in art across disciplines at the University of Reading, featuring presentations by PhD researchers in Fine Art, History of Art, and Philosophy, and interventions by Art & Language and Herman Rapaport, Reynolds Professor of English, Wake Forest University.

11.15-11.45 Neil Chapman, ‘The Winter Journey: Vitalism’s Rosetta Stone’
11.45-12.15 Roxana Tohanaeanu-Shields, ‘Conceptual Art and the Aesthetic’
12.15-13.00 Art & Language
14.00-14.30 Andy Hunt, ‘One Curator, Three Dealers: Serota, Fischer, D’Offay and Gagosian’
14.30-15.00 Claire Drever, ‘Art as the Negation of One’s Ego’
15.00-15.45 Herman Rapaport, ‘Let Freedom Ring! Cutting Loose with Albert Ayler and Carolee Schneemann’
16.00-16.30 Kate Corder, ‘Allotment Plot and its Growing History’
16.30-17.00 David Stent, ‘A Skinned Mule – Portraits of a Research Project’

For directions to the University: http://www.reading.ac.uk/about/find/about-findindex.aspx

A Productive Relationship

Integration of Practice and Theory in Post-graduate Research

These five seminars led by Dr Martine Rouleau, lecturer at Birkbeck College, take place in March, April and May 2010, providing a platform for the discussion of issues arising from the integration of theory and practice in post-graduate research . The outcome of the series will be a conference held at Birkbeck College in June 2010 where the participants to the seminars, other research students and scholars will be invited to discuss their approach.

In media, culture and creative practice, the choice of a research framework is often intertwined with the practice that you will engage with in order to conduct your research, be it media and film, arts management, music, creative writing, screenwriting, journalism, performance or cultural studies. More than an object of study, each comes to existence through a process that can contribute to the direction your questions, reflections and arguments might take. How can the integration of practice and theory provide means to encompass these dimensions in research?

Each seminar will take the form of a brief presentation introducing a reading and/or a particular research. The participants are then encouraged to engage in discussion on the basis of the introduction, the recommended readings and their own research.

Creating Friction

An Interdisciplinary Creative Practice Postgraduate Conference
22^nd April 2010 Newcastle University

With the expansion of creative possibilities for study within University settings, it is increasingly imperative that we question the borders between the creative and critical components of postgraduate study.  How do the different modes of creative practice intersect with the world of traditional academia?  How does a creative practitioner function as a PhD candidate?  What methods can be used for assessment?  What role does the accompanying critical thesis play in the context of the creative work produced?  How does creative practice differ from fieldwork?  What frictions are created by interdisciplinary work?

This one-day seminar aims to provide a space for creative practitioner PhD students to come together and discuss the relationship between their practice and research.

Keynote Speaker: Dr Sharon Kivland, Reader in Contemporary Art, Sheffield Hallam University, Visiting Fellow in the Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies, University of London, and a Research Associate of the Centre for Freudian Research and Analysis, London

 Presentations must discuss both the creative and the critical aspects of your PhD research and should last no longer than 20 minutes maximum.  We are keen to encourage diverse methods of presentation, and exhibition space will be available on the day. For installation based presentations, please e-mail us in the first instance to check we can meet your spatial and technical requirements.

 We invite 300 word abstracts (including up to 10 low res images or up to 2 minutes video where relevant) from those who consider themselves to be creative practitioner PhD students; this includes (but is not limited to) students working within the areas of creative writing, digital media, fine art, music, and the performing arts.

 Please email abstracts to: i.s.streffen@ncl.ac.uk  | Deadline: Friday 25^th February 2010, 10am

Radical Aesthetics-RadicalArt

Wednesday 17th February 2010 Loughborough University

Is art history? (re-visited)

Mihnea Mircan is an independent curator based in Bucharest, Romania. 2005-06 he was curator of Le Pavillon, Palais de Tokyo, Paris. At the National Museum of Contemporary Art (MNAC), Bucharest, Mircan curated exhibitions such as: Sean Snyder (with Florin Tudor), 2007; SUBLIME OBJECTS, 2007; Video Works. Jaan Toomik, 2006; and the Under Destruction series of site-specific interventions. Other curatorial projects include: Since we last spoke about monuments, Stroom Den Haag, 2008; Low-Budget Monuments, Romanian Pavilion, 52nd Venice Biennial, 2007; No Significant Incidents To Report, Galeria Noua, Bucharest, 2005. He contributes regularly to international publications of contemporary art and has recently written on the work of Deimantas Narkevicius, Mircea Cantor and Alon Levin. His forthcoming projects are exhibitions ‘History of Art, the’, David Roberts Art Foundation, London, ‘An Image instead of a Title’, Spinnerei Leipzig, and ‘Hans van Houwelingen: Until It Stops Resembling Itself’, Stroom Den Haag.

Robert Garnett

 

 
You Can’t be Serious: On the Pre-posterous Encounter With Art

2pm Weds 10 March, Fine Art Lecture Theatre
Garnett, theoretician and art critic, is co-editor of the recent Gest: Laboratory of Synthesis #1 (2008)

Initiated by a series of events and discussions during the exhibition ‘Gest’ — at the Stanley Picker Gallery, Kingston University, this book Gest: Laboratory of Synthesis, includes a range of essays and interviews bringing together philosophers, artists, theorists and critics to discuss new approaches to art writing. It operates in the widening gap between the mainstream art magazine and the academic journal in order to create new conjunctions and productive disjunctions between theory and practice out of which new voices and new modes of art writing emerge.

Contributors include: Jennifer Allen, Eric Alliez, Devrim Bayar, Dan Fox, Rainer Ganahl, Johnny Golding, Peter Osborne, Anne Pontégnie, Nina Power, Ralph Rugoff, John Russell and Dirk Snauwaert ISBN 978 1 870699 96 9

Art School

 
Art School (Propositions for the 21st Century)
Edited by Steven Henry Madoff

Table of Contents and Sample Chapters

The last explosive change in art education came nearly a century ago, when the German Bauhaus was formed. Today, dramatic changes in the art world—its increasing professionalization, the pervasive power of the art market, and fundamental shifts in art-making itself in our post-Duchampian era—combined with a revolution in information technology, raise fundamental questions about the education of today’s artists. Art School (Propositions for the 21st Century) brings together more than thirty leading international artists and art educators to reconsider the practices of art education in academic, practical, ethical, and philosophical terms.

The essays in the book range over continents, histories, traditions, experiments, and fantasies of education. Accompanying the essays are conversations with such prominent artist/educators as John Baldessari, Michael Craig-Martin, Hans Haacke, and Marina Abramović, as well as questionnaire responses from a dozen important artists—among them Mike Kelley, Ann Hamilton, Guillermo Kuitca, and Shirin Neshat—about their own experiences as students. A fascinating analysis of the architecture of major historical art schools throughout the world looks at the relationship of the principles of their designs to the principles of the pedagogy practiced within their halls. And throughout the volume, attention is paid to new initiatives and proposals about what an art school can and should be in the twenty-first century—and what it shouldn’t be. No other book on the subject covers more of the questions concerning art education today or offers more insight into the pressures, challenges, risks, and opportunities for artists and art educators in the years ahead.

Contributors: Marina Abramović, Dennis Adams, John Baldessari, Ute Meta Bauer, Daniel Birnbaum, Saskia Bos, Tania Bruguera, Luis Camnitzer, Michael Craig-Martin, Thierry de Duve, Clémentine Deliss, Charles Esche, Liam Gillick, Boris Groys, Hans Haacke, Ann Lauterbach, Ken Lum, Steven Henry Madoff, Brendan D. Moran, Ernesto Pujol, Raqs Media Collective, Charles Renfro, Jeffrey T. Schnapp, Michael Shanks, Robert Storr, Anton Vidokle

Rethinking the art school

Rethinking the Contemporary Art School  (The Artist, the PhD and the Academy) examines the reasons for the art school and its continued existence, its role in society and what should be taught and learned in the context of what is now a globalised art world. The book considers different art school models—innovative graduate programs, independent stand-alone schools and art schools which are departments or schools of major research universities and the problems they face operating in what James Elkins describes as “marginalized in university life.” Rethinking the Contemporary Art School sheds light on the debates surrounding the appropriate terminal degree for university-level teaching in the arts and concludes with essays on new media, examining whether the contemporary art school offers the right context for this discipline. The anthology includes contributions from Su Baker, Bruce Barber, Mikkel Bogh, Juli Carson and Bruce Yonemoto, Edward Colless, Jay Coogan, Luc Courchesne, Sara Diamond, Lauren Ewing, Gary Pearson, Bill Seaman, and Jeremy Welsh.

Research Resource 4

Irit Rogoff: Academy as potentiality
Many of the above insights have come to us through arts practices, instantiating what we are calling ‘practice driven theory’. This was a term we originally evolved to move on from a 1970s/1980s model of arts practice which was highly influenced by and illustrative of , the theoretical insights that blew away the cob webs of expressivity, interiority and rebellious transgression of previous generations. Instead we have more recently been looking for a practice to spur us on, not because it is self-consciously informed but because it is gives itself a different set of permissions… read more here.

 

Urgent Thought: Hegemony, Exhaustion, Bologna

Fragments of a radical pedagogy: The third session of Urgent Thought features contributions by Oliver Marchart, Jan Verwoert and Dieter Lesage. It was recorded at the third day of SUMMIT non-aligned initiatives in education culture.

 

 
Portrait of the Artist as Researcher 2.0 Exhibition
Artistic work can often be understood as research, even if its methodology is different from that of science. The exhibition A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A RESEARCHER 2.0 is a plea for the recognition of the specificity of artistic research, and for the art academy

as a place of free artistic research, beyond the limits of the market, beyond all academic norms – even after ‘Bologna’.

 

The exhibition A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A RESEARCHER 2.0 shows a selection of works that are the result of artistic research. These works show the artist at work as a researcher, investigating the history of an art institution (Sven Augustijnen), or of cultural practices (Sonia Boyce), collecting and selecting thoughts (Herman Asselberghs), or cultural products (Jacques André), experimenting with sound (Art Jones), or image (Ina Wudtke), representing the artist as a social scientist (Jill Magid), or the philosopher as an artist (Dieter Lesage). In this way, these works comment, circle around or criticise the discourse on ‘research’ that is characteristic of the Bologna Process and interrogate the limits of its applicability for the arts. A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A RESEARCHER 2.0 is an upgrade of an exhibition curated by Ina Wudtke and Dieter Lesage in the summer of 2007 in the MuseumsQuartier Vienna. It is an initiative of the Institute for Drama and Audiovisual Arts (IDeA) and the department Rits of the Erasmushogeschool Brussel.

Dieter Lesage & Kathrin Busch (eds.), A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A RESEARCHER. THE ACADEMY AND THE BOLOGNA PROCESS, (AS #179), Antwerp, MuHKA, 2007, 154 pp., ISSN 07735855. With contributions by Sabeth Buchmann, Diedrich Diederichsen, Eva Meyer, Eran Schaerf, Stephan Schmidt-Wulffen, Marion von Osten.

 The Academy is Back: On Education, the Bologna Process, and the Doctorate in the Arts
Dieter Lesage responds to Irit Rogoff and Tom Holert’s recent contributions to eflux-journal on the role of the art academy, addressing the Bologna Process and its influence on art eduction throughout Europe. (see full essay here)