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Spheres of Interest (Graduate Lecture Series)
Spheres of Interest (Graduate Lecture Series)
Related Information
Contact:
415.749.4563
Contact:
415.749.4563
Spring 2009 Graduate Lecture Series
Spheres of Interest: Experiments in Thinking & Action
Organized by Dean of Graduate Studies Renée Green, the Graduate Lecture Series provides an opportunity for students to engage with the thoughts and productions of an international array of guest participants from a variety of fields. A goal of the series is to provoke students to imagine unfamiliar forms of perceiving and creating through exposure to challenging ideas that concern the ways in which different forms of contemporary and historical creative production can be conceived in the present.
One stimulus for thinking about this series is provided by this sentence: “Only because art has left the sphere of interest to become merely interesting do we welcome it so warmly” (Giorgio Agamben, The Man without Content). It is easily possible to feel indifference toward the “merely interesting.” In response to what can appear as a perpetual state of “interesting” spectacles, the invited speakers address these paradoxes of living. Their presentations and seminars will serve as opportunities to grapple with productions, conditions, and perspectives that can stimulate other kinds of responses. The speakers will not invite smooth or easy receptions of the aural, visual, or spatial operations with which they are engaged, but will, in contrast, raise questions from the perspective of producers and analysts about present and past forms of being and production.
Past topics have included a project on film and biopolitics; a process to begin re-evaluating the avant-garde paradigm of transgression; a noise symposium; curatorial experiments introducing the notion of the anti-curator; “cram sessions”; an “undeliverable address”; trauma production and the global image economy in art and architecture; painting considered in relation to shifting contexts; artists working with sound in film, video, and installations; and sound work and “sound politics.”
All lectures (unless otherwise noted):
Lecture Hall
800 Chestnut Street Campus
Fridays at 5:00pm
Free and open to the public
Friday, January 23 — 12:00noon
Hiroshi Yoshioka
“Dialogue on Site: ‘Ogaki Biennale 2006’ and ‘Diatxt./Yamaguchi’”
Professor of Aesthetics and the Theory of Art in the Faculty of Letters at Kyoto University, Hiroshi Yoshioka concentrates his research on aesthetics, the cultural theory of media and technology, contemporary arts, and media arts. He was the editor-in-chief of the journal Diatxt. and the general director of both the 2003 Kyoto Biennial and the 2006 Ogaki Biennial. In collaboration with a voluntary group in the city of Yamaguchi, he edited Yorobon: Diatxt./Yamaguchi, a version of the journal Diatxt. He is also the editor of the Japanese Association of Semiotic Studies (JASS). The author of many books and articles on the contemporary theory of culture, art, and technology, he serves on the board of New Research Initiatives for Humanities and Social Sciences, a project organized by the Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS). Yoshioka’s website, Space in Cyberspace, includes electronic versions of some of his essays in English and Japanese. http://www.iamas.ac.jp/~yoshioka/SiCS/index.html
Friday, January 30 — 5:00pm
Nora Alter
“Hearing the Essay”
Professor of German and of Film and Media Studies at the University of Florida, Nora Alter focuses on twentieth-century cultural and visual studies from a comparative perspective. She is author of Vietnam Protest Theatre: The Television War on Stage (1996), Projecting History: German Nonfiction Cinema, 1967–2000 (2002), and Chris Marker (2006). Together with Lutz Koepnick, she is editor of Sound Matters: Essays on the Acoustics of Modern German Culture (2004). She has published numerous essays in German and European studies, film and media studies, cultural and visual studies, and contemporary art. She has been awarded year-long research fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Howard Foundation, and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. In 2005, she was awarded the DAAD Prize for Distinguished Scholarship in German and European Studies and the Florida Blue Key Distinguished Faculty Award. Alter is currently completing a new book on the international essay film.
Friday, February 20 — 5:00pm
Julio César Morales
“Cover Versions”
Julio César Morales is an artist, educator, and curator. Using photography, video, print, and digital media, he devises conceptual projects that address the productive friction occurring within transcultural territories like Tijuana and San Francisco as well as within inherently impure media like popular music and graphic design. Morales teaches and creates art in a variety of settings: juvenile halls and probation offices; museums; academia; and alternative nonprofit institutions. His work explores issues of labor, memory, surveillance technologies, and identity strategies and has been exhibited at such venues as the 2007 Istanbul Biennial, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the 2006 Singapore Biennial, Frankfurter Kunstverein in Frankfurt (Germany), Peres Projects in Los Angeles, the 2004 San Juan Triennial (Puerto Rico), Fototeca de Havana (Cuba), and the Hammer Museum at UCLA. Morales is adjunct curator at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco and teaches in SFAI’s New Genres department.
Friday, March 13 — 5:00pm
Lydia Yee
“The Originality of the Chinese Avant-Garde”
Lydia Yee is a curator at the Barbican Art Gallery in London, where, with Francesco Manacorda, she recently curated Martian Museum of Terrestrial Art (2008). She has also organized projects by Huang Yong Ping (2008) and Shirana Shahbazi (2007) for the Barbican’s Curve Gallery. Previously, she was senior curator at the Bronx Museum of the Arts in New York City where she organized such exhibitions as Collection Remixed (2005), Music/Video (2004), One Planet under a Groove: Hip Hop and Contemporary Art (2001), and Urban Mythologies: The Bronx Represented Since the 1960s (1999). Yee was the 2003 Cassullo Teaching Fellow at the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Program and the recipient of the 2004 Emily Hall Tremaine Exhibition Award for Street Art, Street Life (2008), which she curated for the Bronx Museum of the Arts.
Friday, March 27 — 5:00pm
Ann Goldstein
“Martin Kippenberger: The Problem Perspective”
Ann Goldstein is senior curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA). Since joining the museum in 1983, she has organized several large-scale survey exhibitions, including A Minimal Future? Art as Object, 1958–1968; 1965–1975: Reconsidering the Object of Art (with Anne Rorimer); and A Forest of Signs: Art in the Crisis of Representation (with Mary Jane Jacob). With Donna De Salvo, she curated Lawrence Weiner: As Far as the Eye Can See—jointly organized by MOCA and the Whitney Museum of American Art. She has also organized solo exhibitions by Barbara Kruger, Christopher Wool, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Cosima von Bonin, Jorge Pardo, Roni Horn, and Jennifer Bornstein. Goldstein recently put together Martin Kippenberger: The Problem Perspective, the first American retrospective of the artist’s work, on view at MOCA through 5 January 2009 and at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York from 1 March to 11 May 2009.
Friday, April 3 — 5:00pm
Tony Conrad and Activating the Medium
“Fantastic Glissando”
Composer and filmmaker Tony Conrad has been a pioneering force in the development of minimalist composition and in the proliferation of underground film. As a way to explore harmonic intricacies of the drone, he introduced, in the 60s, the idea of eternal music by utilizing long-duration performance, intense amplification, and precise pitch. Together with La Monte Young, John Cale, and Marian Zazeela, he formed the short-lived-yet-seminal improvisational unit of pure minimalism the Dream Syndicate. He has collaborated with scores of musicians including Faust, Jim O’Rourke, Rhys Chatham, and David Grubbs. He has also produced a large body of avant-garde film and video, including The Flicker, which has long been hailed as a key work of the structural film movement. In addition to his lecture, Conrad will be performing at SFAI for the 12th Activating the Medium Festival (see below), sponsored by San Francisco Cinematheque and 23five Incorporated.
Saturday, April 4 — 8:00pm
12th Activating the Medium Festival
Annually since 1998, the nonprofit sound-arts organization 23five Incorporated has produced the Activating the Medium Festival, an internationally recognized showcase for the most innovative and visionary practitioners of sound art. Since 2006, SFAI has hosted the festival with 23five Incorporated. The 2009 festival, the twelfth, is a retrospective of the work of Tony Conrad (see above), presented in conjunction with San Francisco Cinematheque. In the Lecture Hall of SFAI’s 800 Chestnut Street campus, Conrad will present one of his legendary solo performances: violin, film projection, and shadow. The festival will also feature a new collaboration between minimalist composer Brendan Murray and experimental filmmaker Paul Clipson. Entrance fee: $10. Free for SFAI students, faculty, and staff. www.23five.org
Friday, April 24 — 5:00pm
James Meyer
“From Nomadism to Cosmopolitanism”
James Meyer is Winship Distinguished Associate Professor of Art History at Emory University in Atlanta, where he has been teaching since 1994. He is a noted specialist and lecturer in minimalism, in American art of the 1960s, and in contemporary forms of institutional critique. Meyer has written extensively on minimalist artists. Publications include Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the 1960s (2001) and essays in Mel Bochner: Thought Made Visible, 1966–1973 (1995); Ellsworth Kelly: Sculpture for a Large Wall, 1957 (1998); Eva Hesse: A Retrospective (2002); Conceptual Art: Theory, Myth, Practice (2004); and A Minimal Future (2004). He is the editor of Carl André’s Cuts = Texts, 1999–2004 (2005), and has contributed to such journals as Artforum, Art Magazine, Flash Art, and Parkett.
Friday, May 1 — 5:00pm
Alexander Alberro
“New Forms of Spectatorship in Contemporary Art”
Virginia Bloedel Wright Associate Professor of Art History at Barnard College in New York City, Alexander Alberro teaches courses in modern and contemporary art, the history of photography, and the history of art film and video art. He is the author of Conceptual Art and the Politics of Publicity (2003). With essays published in a wide array of journals and exhibition catalogues, he has also edited or co-edited a number of volumes, including Two-Way Mirror Power: Selected Writings by Dan Graham on His Art (1999); Museum Highlights: The Writings of Andrea Fraser (2005); Art After Conceptual Art (2006); and Institutional Critique: An Anthology of Artists’ Writings (forthcoming).
Supported by the Artur Walther Foundation, SFAI’s Graduate Lecture Series—Spheres of Interest: Experiments in Thinking & Action—is organized through SFAI’s Division of Graduate Studies in cooperation with SFAI’s Centers for Interdisciplinary Study.
Spheres of Interest: Experiments in Thinking & Action
Organized by Dean of Graduate Studies Renée Green, the Graduate Lecture Series provides an opportunity for students to engage with the thoughts and productions of an international array of guest participants from a variety of fields. A goal of the series is to provoke students to imagine unfamiliar forms of perceiving and creating through exposure to challenging ideas that concern the ways in which different forms of contemporary and historical creative production can be conceived in the present.
One stimulus for thinking about this series is provided by this sentence: “Only because art has left the sphere of interest to become merely interesting do we welcome it so warmly” (Giorgio Agamben, The Man without Content). It is easily possible to feel indifference toward the “merely interesting.” In response to what can appear as a perpetual state of “interesting” spectacles, the invited speakers address these paradoxes of living. Their presentations and seminars will serve as opportunities to grapple with productions, conditions, and perspectives that can stimulate other kinds of responses. The speakers will not invite smooth or easy receptions of the aural, visual, or spatial operations with which they are engaged, but will, in contrast, raise questions from the perspective of producers and analysts about present and past forms of being and production.
Past topics have included a project on film and biopolitics; a process to begin re-evaluating the avant-garde paradigm of transgression; a noise symposium; curatorial experiments introducing the notion of the anti-curator; “cram sessions”; an “undeliverable address”; trauma production and the global image economy in art and architecture; painting considered in relation to shifting contexts; artists working with sound in film, video, and installations; and sound work and “sound politics.”
All lectures (unless otherwise noted):
Lecture Hall
800 Chestnut Street Campus
Fridays at 5:00pm
Free and open to the public
Friday, January 23 — 12:00noon
Hiroshi Yoshioka
“Dialogue on Site: ‘Ogaki Biennale 2006’ and ‘Diatxt./Yamaguchi’”
Professor of Aesthetics and the Theory of Art in the Faculty of Letters at Kyoto University, Hiroshi Yoshioka concentrates his research on aesthetics, the cultural theory of media and technology, contemporary arts, and media arts. He was the editor-in-chief of the journal Diatxt. and the general director of both the 2003 Kyoto Biennial and the 2006 Ogaki Biennial. In collaboration with a voluntary group in the city of Yamaguchi, he edited Yorobon: Diatxt./Yamaguchi, a version of the journal Diatxt. He is also the editor of the Japanese Association of Semiotic Studies (JASS). The author of many books and articles on the contemporary theory of culture, art, and technology, he serves on the board of New Research Initiatives for Humanities and Social Sciences, a project organized by the Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS). Yoshioka’s website, Space in Cyberspace, includes electronic versions of some of his essays in English and Japanese. http://www.iamas.ac.jp/~yoshioka/SiCS/index.html
Friday, January 30 — 5:00pm
Nora Alter
“Hearing the Essay”
Professor of German and of Film and Media Studies at the University of Florida, Nora Alter focuses on twentieth-century cultural and visual studies from a comparative perspective. She is author of Vietnam Protest Theatre: The Television War on Stage (1996), Projecting History: German Nonfiction Cinema, 1967–2000 (2002), and Chris Marker (2006). Together with Lutz Koepnick, she is editor of Sound Matters: Essays on the Acoustics of Modern German Culture (2004). She has published numerous essays in German and European studies, film and media studies, cultural and visual studies, and contemporary art. She has been awarded year-long research fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Howard Foundation, and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. In 2005, she was awarded the DAAD Prize for Distinguished Scholarship in German and European Studies and the Florida Blue Key Distinguished Faculty Award. Alter is currently completing a new book on the international essay film.
Friday, February 20 — 5:00pm
Julio César Morales
“Cover Versions”
Julio César Morales is an artist, educator, and curator. Using photography, video, print, and digital media, he devises conceptual projects that address the productive friction occurring within transcultural territories like Tijuana and San Francisco as well as within inherently impure media like popular music and graphic design. Morales teaches and creates art in a variety of settings: juvenile halls and probation offices; museums; academia; and alternative nonprofit institutions. His work explores issues of labor, memory, surveillance technologies, and identity strategies and has been exhibited at such venues as the 2007 Istanbul Biennial, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the 2006 Singapore Biennial, Frankfurter Kunstverein in Frankfurt (Germany), Peres Projects in Los Angeles, the 2004 San Juan Triennial (Puerto Rico), Fototeca de Havana (Cuba), and the Hammer Museum at UCLA. Morales is adjunct curator at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco and teaches in SFAI’s New Genres department.
Friday, March 13 — 5:00pm
Lydia Yee
“The Originality of the Chinese Avant-Garde”
Lydia Yee is a curator at the Barbican Art Gallery in London, where, with Francesco Manacorda, she recently curated Martian Museum of Terrestrial Art (2008). She has also organized projects by Huang Yong Ping (2008) and Shirana Shahbazi (2007) for the Barbican’s Curve Gallery. Previously, she was senior curator at the Bronx Museum of the Arts in New York City where she organized such exhibitions as Collection Remixed (2005), Music/Video (2004), One Planet under a Groove: Hip Hop and Contemporary Art (2001), and Urban Mythologies: The Bronx Represented Since the 1960s (1999). Yee was the 2003 Cassullo Teaching Fellow at the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Program and the recipient of the 2004 Emily Hall Tremaine Exhibition Award for Street Art, Street Life (2008), which she curated for the Bronx Museum of the Arts.
Friday, March 27 — 5:00pm
Ann Goldstein
“Martin Kippenberger: The Problem Perspective”
Ann Goldstein is senior curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA). Since joining the museum in 1983, she has organized several large-scale survey exhibitions, including A Minimal Future? Art as Object, 1958–1968; 1965–1975: Reconsidering the Object of Art (with Anne Rorimer); and A Forest of Signs: Art in the Crisis of Representation (with Mary Jane Jacob). With Donna De Salvo, she curated Lawrence Weiner: As Far as the Eye Can See—jointly organized by MOCA and the Whitney Museum of American Art. She has also organized solo exhibitions by Barbara Kruger, Christopher Wool, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Cosima von Bonin, Jorge Pardo, Roni Horn, and Jennifer Bornstein. Goldstein recently put together Martin Kippenberger: The Problem Perspective, the first American retrospective of the artist’s work, on view at MOCA through 5 January 2009 and at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York from 1 March to 11 May 2009.
Friday, April 3 — 5:00pm
Tony Conrad and Activating the Medium
“Fantastic Glissando”
Composer and filmmaker Tony Conrad has been a pioneering force in the development of minimalist composition and in the proliferation of underground film. As a way to explore harmonic intricacies of the drone, he introduced, in the 60s, the idea of eternal music by utilizing long-duration performance, intense amplification, and precise pitch. Together with La Monte Young, John Cale, and Marian Zazeela, he formed the short-lived-yet-seminal improvisational unit of pure minimalism the Dream Syndicate. He has collaborated with scores of musicians including Faust, Jim O’Rourke, Rhys Chatham, and David Grubbs. He has also produced a large body of avant-garde film and video, including The Flicker, which has long been hailed as a key work of the structural film movement. In addition to his lecture, Conrad will be performing at SFAI for the 12th Activating the Medium Festival (see below), sponsored by San Francisco Cinematheque and 23five Incorporated.
Saturday, April 4 — 8:00pm
12th Activating the Medium Festival
Annually since 1998, the nonprofit sound-arts organization 23five Incorporated has produced the Activating the Medium Festival, an internationally recognized showcase for the most innovative and visionary practitioners of sound art. Since 2006, SFAI has hosted the festival with 23five Incorporated. The 2009 festival, the twelfth, is a retrospective of the work of Tony Conrad (see above), presented in conjunction with San Francisco Cinematheque. In the Lecture Hall of SFAI’s 800 Chestnut Street campus, Conrad will present one of his legendary solo performances: violin, film projection, and shadow. The festival will also feature a new collaboration between minimalist composer Brendan Murray and experimental filmmaker Paul Clipson. Entrance fee: $10. Free for SFAI students, faculty, and staff. www.23five.org
Friday, April 24 — 5:00pm
James Meyer
“From Nomadism to Cosmopolitanism”
James Meyer is Winship Distinguished Associate Professor of Art History at Emory University in Atlanta, where he has been teaching since 1994. He is a noted specialist and lecturer in minimalism, in American art of the 1960s, and in contemporary forms of institutional critique. Meyer has written extensively on minimalist artists. Publications include Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the 1960s (2001) and essays in Mel Bochner: Thought Made Visible, 1966–1973 (1995); Ellsworth Kelly: Sculpture for a Large Wall, 1957 (1998); Eva Hesse: A Retrospective (2002); Conceptual Art: Theory, Myth, Practice (2004); and A Minimal Future (2004). He is the editor of Carl André’s Cuts = Texts, 1999–2004 (2005), and has contributed to such journals as Artforum, Art Magazine, Flash Art, and Parkett.
Friday, May 1 — 5:00pm
Alexander Alberro
“New Forms of Spectatorship in Contemporary Art”
Virginia Bloedel Wright Associate Professor of Art History at Barnard College in New York City, Alexander Alberro teaches courses in modern and contemporary art, the history of photography, and the history of art film and video art. He is the author of Conceptual Art and the Politics of Publicity (2003). With essays published in a wide array of journals and exhibition catalogues, he has also edited or co-edited a number of volumes, including Two-Way Mirror Power: Selected Writings by Dan Graham on His Art (1999); Museum Highlights: The Writings of Andrea Fraser (2005); Art After Conceptual Art (2006); and Institutional Critique: An Anthology of Artists’ Writings (forthcoming).
Supported by the Artur Walther Foundation, SFAI’s Graduate Lecture Series—Spheres of Interest: Experiments in Thinking & Action—is organized through SFAI’s Division of Graduate Studies in cooperation with SFAI’s Centers for Interdisciplinary Study.
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