How can the lecture be relevant to artists beyond its usual function as a form for representing and discussing art? Can the lecture itself be a form of art – as one of art’s ‘new media’? These are some of the questions that guest experts will address via a range of disciplines – philosophy, performance-art, curating and art-criticism.
15 Aug 2013
The Art-Lectures… are not what you think
Sallis Benny Theatre, Grand Parade
All events: 4 – 5.30pm
The Art-Lectures resonates with current key debates in art, e.g. the question regarding the role of writing in an artist’s practice, and the increasing interest in ‘post-autonomous’ art which often involves artists collaborating with non-artists, non-art methods, and working in a range of social spaces. An instance of these preoccupations can be seen in Mark Leckey’s Turner Prize display, comprising a substantial work that uses the lecture as art-content.
Come to The Art-Lectures and a lecture may never be the same again.
Monday 12th January
Dr Matthew Rowe
‘My Philosophy or Anyone’s Artwork?’
Matthew Rowe will present a philosophical essay with the declared content of the question of its own status – is this art or philosophy or both? The developing discussion will be approached, among other things, through avowedly superficial discussions of Borges, Danto, Nietzsche, Frege and Appropriationism. To punctuate the presentation and the arguments, at certain points throughout, the audience will be asked to contribute their own written answers to specific questions that may appear to have been addressed by the presentation itself. These will be collected and collated with the aim of moving towards truth or consensus about an answer to at least some of these questions.
Matthew Rowe is a philosopher
Monday 26th January
Dr Simon Bayly
Babel of Tower: A Report to the Academy
Babel of Tower is a performance-lecture that functions as an alternative project report for an AHRC (Arts and Humanities Research Council) Fellowship in the Creative and Performing Arts, undertaken during 2003-2006. A comedic autocritque about failure, stupidity and free association, it takes the form of a staged dialogue with computer projection. Charting the illogic of a personal obsession with concrete and tower blocks, it maps both personal and cultural experiences of collapse as they converge in the psychic realities of a time of 'terror'. Recent performances include invitations to research events at the London School of Economics, University of Cambridge and Birkbeck College.
Simon Bayly is director of the London-based live arts company PUR and Principal Lecturer in Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies at Roehampton University. Currently co-developing a new MA in Performance and Creative Research, his interests include research and activism, the aesthetics and politics of participation in contemporary performance and the arts of organisation. Recent performance projects include Dear All, an event for formal conference rooms, non-actors and archives of all-user email lists from large institutions.
Monday 9th February
Fedja Klikovac
‘Was ist Kunst Brighton?’
Fedja Klikovac of Handel Street Projects, London, will be subverting the traditional lecture format by recreating the iconic 1976 performance by Serbian artist Rasa Todosijevic, ‘Was ist Kunst?’ in which the artist continually repeats this question, parodying the repressive police interrogation. Instead of Todosijevic’s female accomplice, Klikovac will be addressing the audience at the Sallis Benny Theatre. The roles here have been subverted: the audience takes the place of Todosijevic’s passive ‘model’ (or muse) as a possible site of power, and the lecturer becomes the unknowing, interrogative subject of lack.
In the background, there will be a slide projection of the various curatorial projects that Klikovac has undertaken and images of artists’ work that he has been involved with. Among the exhibitions shown will be projects at medievalmodern gallery, London, in which some of the works may not have been regarded as ‘art’.
Rasa Todosijevic’s political, expressive performance ‘Was ist Kunst’, grotesquely showed the repressive relation between the investigator (the artist) and the investigated person (participant). In Fedja Klikovac’s ‘lecture’ this becomes a metaphor for oppressive and hierarchical education system.
www.handelstreetprojects.com
Monday 23rd February
Sally O’Reilly
‘Remote learning with Brown Mountain College’
Brown Mountain College is dedicated to the exchange of information and skills from multiple eras, disciplines and genres. Through its new Remote Learning programme you can access over a century of interdisciplinary pedagogical endeavour. The programme comprises mini-lectures, reading lists, instructional films and participatory projects devised by some of the college’s luminaries, past and present, on a series of hour-long DVDs that can be used in group seminars or at home alone. Insights and instructions from artists, political theorists, social anthropologists, literary critics, scientists and philosophers break open and reapply to the arts broad ideas such as cliché, cynicism and power, making the Brown Mountain Remote Learning package the most expansive intellectual toolbox you can receive in the post.
Sally O’Reilly is a writer and art critic.
Devised and chaired by Dr Mary Anne Francis, Senior Lecturer, Critical Fine Art Practice, School of Arts and Communication
Enquiries to: maryannefrancis@hotmail.com
