Monthly Archive for September, 2010

Announcing–2011 Arts Conference, Berlin

Published on September 30, 2010 in Headline and Newsletter. 0 Comments

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We are pleased to be holding the Sixth International Conference on the Arts in Society at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities, Berlin, Germany from 9-11 May 2011.

Updates and announcements on plenary speakers, the conference dinner and tours, and the program will all be shared with the Arts in Society Community. Join our online conversation by subscribing to our monthly email newsletter and subscribing to our Facebook, RSS, or Twitter feeds at http://artsinsociety.com.

We look forward to receiving your proposal for the Call for papers, and hope you will be able to join us in May 2011 in Berlin!

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Sixth International Conference on the Arts in Society

Published on September 30, 2010 in Conference and Newsletter. 1 Comment

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www.Arts-Conference.com

Arts Conference
9-11 May 2011
Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities
Berlin, Germany

Plenary Speakers

Suzanne Anker, Visual Artist and Theorist; Chair, Fine Arts Department, School of Visual Arts, New York City, USA
Nina Czegledy, Media Artist, Curator and Writer; Senior Fellow, KMDI, University of Toronto; Associate Adjunct Professor, Concordia University, Montreal; Senior Research Fellow, Hungarian University of Fine Arts, Budapest
Erika Fischer-Lichte, Institute for Theatre Studies, Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany
Victoria Vesna, Media Artist, Researcher, Collaborator, University of California, Los Angeles; New School for Design, New York City, USA
Gunter M. Ziegler, Matheon Professor, Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany

Call for Papers

If you intend to present a paper at the conference, your participation begins by submitting a paper proposal. More information on proposals, presentation types, and other options available here. If your proposal is accepted, you will then need to register for the conference.

Registration

Those who submit paper proposals should register following the acceptance of the proposal. Conference delegates who do not intend to present may register at any time. 2011 Arts Conference registration options.

Themes

The artist was here

Published on September 24, 2010 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

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From The Economist…

“I HATE studio. For me, studio is a trap to overproduce and repeat yourself. It is a habit that leads to art pollution,” says Marina Abramovic, America’s most famous performance artist. She is in her kitchen, which occupies one prong of a star-shaped house with walls that are full of windows but free of art. “Nothing new happens. You don’t surprise yourself. You don’t put yourself in situations to risk,” she adds in a rapid, whispering monotone with a Serbian accent. The artist was born in Belgrade and lived all over the world before settling in Manhattan and then Maldon Bridge, New York.

Ms Abramovic’s milestone performance, “The Artist is Present”, had her sitting silently all day, every day from mid-March to the end of May in the atrium of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. To preserve her energy for the marathon of one-on-one encounters with members of the public, she rarely spoke to anyone after hours other than museum staff. Now that the speechless blockbuster is over, Ms Abramovic seems to find particular joy in talking, with no diminution of her powerful presence. More…

Ingestion/Table Manner

Published on September 20, 2010 in News. 0 Comments

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From Anthony Grafton at Cabinet…

On 18 July 1573, the Venetian Inquisition summoned Paolo Veronese to answer questions about the Last Supper that he had painted for the Convent of SS. Giovanni e Paolo. In Veronese’s magnificent image, Palladian architecture frames the central scene, while Hogarthian servants and soldiers talk and scuffle in the foreground. The extras who give the painting its life and color provoked dry, precise queries: “What signifies the figure of him whose nose is bleeding?” “What signify those armed men dressed in the fashion of Germany, with halberds in their hands?” “And the one who is dressed as a jester with a parrot on his wrist, why did you put him into the picture?” Veronese did his best to satisfy the inquisitors. The figure with the bleeding nose, he explained, “is a servant who has a nose-bleed from some accident.” The jester with the parrot “is there as an ornament, as it is usual to insert such figures.” As to the halberdiers, he offered a more theoretical explanation:

It is necessary here that I should say a score of words. … We painters use the same license as poets and madmen, and I represented those halberdiers, the one drinking, the other eating at the foot of the stairs, but both ready to do their duty, because it seemed to me suitable and possible that the master of the house, who as I have been told was rich and magnificent, would have such servants.

This appeal to artistic license did not satisfy the Inquisitors: “Does it seem suitable to you, in the Last Supper of our Lord, to represent buffoons, drunken Germans, dwarfs, and other such absurdities?” They ordered Veronese to erase the halberdiers and replace the dog who looked up at Jesus with Mary Magdalene. Veronese complied, in his own way. He left the painting as it was but retitled it Feast in the House of Levi—a scene less freighted with theological significance. More…

Japanese manga controversy hits Versailles

Published on September 17, 2010 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

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From The Age…

From a big-bosomed French maid to a Pepsi-guzzling monster, Japanese artist Takashi Murakami’s outlandish manga visions overwhelm the Chateau of Versailles, and not everyone is happy.

Unbelievably, his metal, fibreglass and acrylic sculptures manage to dominate the vast chambers of Versailles, with their marbled walls, gold leaf capitals and celestial ceiling frescoes.

But while French monarchists have denounced as “illegal” the exhibition in the rococo splendour of Louis XIV’s monument to absolute power, the artist himself says that he is quite used to what he calls “Murakami-bashing.”

“This criticism was also in Japan, especially on social networking sites, there were 3000 critics,” the 48-year-old told journalists at the show’s opening. “All of this is because of a misunderstanding, in my opinion.”

“When someone scores a goal, someone is going to be unhappy,” he says enigmatically, adding that while he respects others’ points of view, he will never change anything in his exhibitions as a result. More…

The medium and the tedium

Published on September 16, 2010 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

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By Mel Bochner at triplecanopy…

For translucence, against transparency: an account of conceptual art and its mediums. Presented during Triple Canopy’s panel discussion The Medium Was Tedium, held at the New Museum on February 19, 2010, and hosted by Rhizome.

As an artist, I have never had an allegiance to any specific medium. In the 1960s, so-called medium-specific art prescribed the limits of what was permissible to express. This was the “repressive face of modernism.” My desire was to find a way to expand the range of philosophical, psychological, political, and visual ideas that my work could engage. New ideas evolved into new mediums. But these new mediums did not arise as mere acts of will. First, they were always contextual, based in actual situations and immediate needs. Second, they were oppositional, intended as an attack on the dominant aesthetic and critical hierarchy.

For me, the medium was never transparent, never something to be seen through, never a neutral delivery system. No matter how reduced the means, they always remained something material, something to be taken apart and put back together, something to be confronted. Any genuine critique can arise only out of the process of using the medium against itself. Far from being the “tedium” of this evening’s theme, this is how I see my job as an artist: to grapple with the means of expression until an idea finds its own form. More…

Never Trust a Laura Newman Vertical

Published on September 13, 2010 in News. 0 Comments

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By Amy Sillman artcritical…

Never trust a Laura Newman vertical.  It might be the edge of a house, the tilt of a glass plane, or a door handle; it might indicate a painting within a painting, or a skeletal tree trunk that grew in from somewhere, and, oh, by the way, it also doubles as the cord of a wrecking ball and a stray power line.  Newman’s verticals and orthogonals function like unreliable narrators:  they fool the eye and throw basic spatial frameworks into question.  In her work, closeness looks far away, flat planes might be cut-outs, transparent windows open out to nothingness, clouds act as people, wisps of breeze arise from nowhere, and whole pictures are tilted off-kilter by triangular shims lurking in eccentric corners.

Technically speaking, the parallax view is the apparent displacement or difference in the position of an object when it is viewed along the two different lines of sight.   Newman pictures the world as a correspondingly parallax place.  Newman never settles for a monocular kind of vision or a singular kind of meaning.  If you scan your eye down any of her sightlines, you will find recurrent jump cuts and double entendres all along the way.  Her images are everyday ones, portrayed in a manner of seeming benevolence or almost cartoonish serenity – houses, walls, fences, windows, horizons – but they are rendered with intentional spatial implausibility and absurdity.  This is a world seen from the mind’s eyes, and I say the mind’s “eyes,” plural, on purpose, to propose the metaphoric parallax of Newman’s paintings, with their purposefully displaced or different way of being. More…

Hands up for Hirst

Published on September 9, 2010 in News. 0 Comments

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From The Economist…

How the bad boy of Brit-Art grew rich at the expense of his investors

In 2008 just over $270m-worth of art by Damien Hirst was sold at auction, a world record for a living artist. By 2009 Mr Hirst’s annual auction sales had shrunk by 93%—to $19m—and the 2010 total is likely to be even lower. The collapse in the Hirst market can partly be ascribed to the recession. But more important are the lingering effects of a two-day auction of new work by Mr Hirst that Sotheby’s launched in London on September 15th 2008.

The sale was memorable for many reasons, not least its name, “Beautiful Inside My Head Forever”. The first session took place the very evening that Lehman Brothers went bankrupt. No one on Wall Street or in the City of London knew who might be next. Yet within the New Bond Street saleroom, collectors went on bidding, oblivious to the bloodletting without. More…

A quiet revolution

Published on September 8, 2010 in News. 0 Comments

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From Helen Taylor at Times Higher Education…

The glorious Glastonbury Festival has come and gone again, and the West Country says goodbye to its pilgrim backpackers. But while the big music jamborees make headlines, a quieter revolution has occurred around literature festivals.

There is no doubt that such festivals, mushrooming and drawing in large enthusiastic audiences everywhere, have become the cosmopolitan and internationalist debating societies, political hustings, Open University-style summer schools and adult education classes of our age. Despite the virtual worlds in which we are all said to be living, many people – admittedly mainly white, middle class and middle-aged or older – yearn for live intellectual stimulation and want to celebrate and interrogate new as well as celebrity writers.

Established festivals such as Edinburgh, Cheltenham and Oxford are being jostled by lively new ones in small towns and villages across the UK. The larger ones now have offshoots in other countries, while the major TED international thinkers’ forum, for two decades held in Long Beach, California, ran a smaller version last month in Oxford. More…

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Art on its own account

Published on September 7, 2010 in News. 0 Comments

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From John Haldane at Times Higher Education…

Before I was a philosopher I was an artist, or at least before I studied philosophy I studied art for five years, and taught it for three more; and I have never lost that original interest. Sometimes I think of returning to the business of art-making, and occasionally I sketch out ideas for projects that I may one day pursue; but in the meantime I continue to follow art and write about it in the form of interviews with artists, and reviews of art books and exhibitions.

As a student I was lucky to join the company of a number of highly creative artists, two of whom (Tony Cragg and Richard Long) went on to be Turner Prize winners (in 1988 and 1989), while others, such as Bill Woodrow, were Turner finalists. The presiding spirit of the group was Roger Ackling, and like those named, and others including Hamish Fulton, several of his works are in the Tate collection. These bright spirits were inspiring figures, and people I continue to admire.

Art is no stranger to philosophy. They meet at one point in the subject of aesthetics, and at another in the more pretentious forms of conceptualism. My interest in art, however, is not that of a practitioner of philosophical aesthetics. Meanwhile, even at the age of 18 when I began fine-art studies, 10 years of Jesuit schooling had provided me with enough knowledge to see that the idea-artists’ efforts at philosophy were generally inflated and uncomprehending; and that remains true of later generations even to the present day. More…

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