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Spheres of Interest Graduate Lecture Series
Spheres of Interest (Graduate Lecture Series)
Spring 2008 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.”
Spring 2008 Graduate Lecture Series
Lecture Hall
800 Chestnut Street Campus
All lectures on Fridays at 5:00pm (unless otherwise noted)
Free and open to the public
Friday, February 1
John Miller
“Socially Approved Love”
John Miller is an artist and writer based in New York and Berlin. In 2000, JRP Editions and the Consortium copublished a collection of his essays, The Price Club: Selected Writings, 1977–1996. In 2007, his work was featured at the Sculpture Center in Long Island City (New York), the Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie in Karlsruhe (Germany), and the Kitakyushu Biennial in Moji (Japan). Miller is an associate professor in the Art History department at Barnard College.
Friday, February 8
Christian Philipp Müller
“Acquired Taste”
Christian Philipp Müller has exhibited and taught internationally since 1986. He was a participant in such major exhibitions as Documenta X in Kassel (Germany) and in the 1993 Venice Biennial. In early 2007, Kunstmuseum Basel/Museum für Gegenwartskunst put on a twenty-year retrospective. He has had solo shows at Kunstverein München (Munich), Kunstverein in Hamburg, and the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels. He has worked with Belgian television as the main performer for the Skulptur Projekte Münster documentary and with Austrian and Swiss radio for public audio projects. Permanent work can be found, among other sites, on the campuses of Bard College and Queens College and in the cloister garden in Melk (Austria). He has also published many artists books since 1986. He is part of the artist- and art-historian-run Orchard in New York. www.christianphilippmueller.net
Friday, February 15
Tony Cokes
“Sound Against Image: Recent Works”
Tony Cokes is a postconceptualist whose practice foregrounds social critique. His video, installation, and sound works recontextualize appropriated materials to critically reflect upon our production as subjects under capitalism. Cokes’s video and multimedia installation works (which sometimes embrace collaborative working methods) have been exhibited at MoMA in New York, MACBA in Barcelona, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, and the Centre Pompidou in Paris, among other venues. His numerous media festival screenings include the San Francisco International Film Festival, the Oberhausen International Short Film Festival, the Seoul Film and Net Festival, and Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin/Madrid. Cokes currently teaches in the department of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University.
Friday, February 22
Phill Niblock
Phill Niblock is a New York–based minimalist composer, multimedia musician, and director of Experimental Intermedia. Niblock is known for constructing twenty-four-track digitally processed monolithic microtonal drones. The result is sound without melody or rhythm, the tonal variations being almost imperceptible. His vocal pieces are reminiscent of the choral works of György Ligeti. In his Hurdy Hurry and AYU (As Yet Untitled), the role of the producer/composer is emphasized as much as that of the performer. Since 1968, he has put on over 1,000 concerts in his loft space, including Ryoji Ikeda, Zbigniew Karkowski, and Jim O’Rourke. www.phillniblock.com
Niblock will be performing live at Recombinant Media Labs in the 11th Annual Activating the Medium Festival on February 23, 2008. For details, go to www.23five.org.
Friday, February 29
Florian Zeyfang
“1, 2, 3 . . . Avant-gardes and Other Concepts around Experimental Film”
Berlin-based artist Florian Zeyfang is a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Umeå (Sweden). His work has been exhibited at such spaces as the Center for Contemporary Art in Kiev (Russia), the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, Artists Space in New York, and Kunst-Werke in Berlin. He (co)curated shows for the 8th Havana Biennial, the Fotofest in Houston, the Museum für angewandte Kunst (MAK) in Vienna, the MAK Center in Los Angeles, and the Swiss Institute in New York. Publications include I Said I Love. That Is the Promise: The TVideopolitics of Jean-Luc Godard; Florian Zeyfang: Fokussy; and 1, 2, 3 . . . Avant-Gardes. Forthcoming are 4D—Pabellón de Cuba and Poor Man’s Expression.
Friday, April 4
Laura Harris
“Underground Document, Popular Experiment: Some Proposals on Some Proposals by C. L. R. James and Hélio Oiticica”
Laura Harris is a filmmaker, curator, community organizer, and scholar. She is a PhD candidate in the program in American Studies at New York University and a fellow in the department of English at Duke University. She has been writing about unfinished and only recently published proposals that were generated, at least in part, by writer C. L. R. James and artist Hélio Oiticica while each lived undocumented and underground in the US. Harris is interested in the unusual forms and social “lives” of such documents (or “undocuments”), the ways in which they open up new understandings of work, the work, authorship, citizenship, the way these all relate to one another, Afro-diasporic invention, and the possibility of new political dispositions. She has articles forthcoming in Discourse and Callaloo.
Friday, April 18
Sowon Kwon
“1963 gasoline” search
Sowon Kwon is a Korean-born artist based in New York. She works in a range of media, including sculptural and video installations, digital animation, drawing, and printmaking. She has had solo exhibitions at the Kitchen in New York, the Berkeley Art Museum, and the Whitney Museum of American Art at Altria (formerly at Philip Morris) in New York. Her group exhibitions include Artists Space in New York, the Drawing Center in New York, the ICA in Boston, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the third Gwangju Biennial in South Korea, and the Yokohama Triennial in Japan. She received the 2005 Media Arts Residency Award at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus (Ohio, USA) and is currently visiting professor in the MFA in Visual Art Program at Vermont College in Montpelier (Vermont, USA).
Saturday, April 19 from 10:00am to 3:00pm
Symposium – The Question is Known: (W)here is Latin American/Latino Art?
In conjunction with Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts, SFAI’s Graduate Division is sponsoring a one-day symposium on issues occasioned by the exhibition The Question is Known: (W)here is Latin American/Latino Art? Curated by Anthony Torres, the exhibition opens at Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts on Friday, April 18 and is on view through Saturday, May 24.
Together with the exhibition itself, the symposium aims to problematize the concept of Latino art—in particular, the tendency to essentialize it as a unified and clear-cut subject. An instance of the general Eurocentric fascination with ethnic alterity, this essentializing tendency is often reinscribed unawares in certain strains of postmodern discourse and art. When ideas of pluralism or multiculturalism are tacitly conflated with ethnic and geographic difference, the yield—if unwitting, ideologically dictated nevertheless—is a conception (or fabrication) of Latino art as discrete, exotic, and wholly other.
Symposium participants will posit a countervailing vision of the category: Latino art as a historically contingent, ideological construction. Neither natural nor given, Latino cultural creations are instead hybrid and fluid; they are established by contact, conflict, and experience and are inherently sympathetic to issue identification. Though often phantasmatically generated, such cultural creations are readable as living sources of inspiration that first become articulated through personal associations, iconography, and, ultimately, formal vocabularies. When recalibrated through theory-governed interventions, Latino art becomes a multivalent area of inquiry out of which innovative questions and issues can be posed about curatorial and institutional perspectives, practices, and politics—a new platform for facilitating greater crosscultural communication and a more inclusive, expanded, even global conception of “American” art. www.missionculturalcenter.org
Friday, April 25
Karim Aïnouz
Brazilian-born filmmaker Karim Aïnouz has directed several shorts and documentaries including Seams (1993) and Paixão Nacional (1994). His first feature film, Madame Satã, was selected in 2002 for the Cannes Film Festival “Un Certain Regard” list. Love for Sale: Suely in the Sky, his second feature film, was selected under “Horizons” in the 63rd Venice International Film Festival, took first prize at the 2006 Havana Film Festival, and won a number of awards, including Best Film, at the Rio de Janeiro International Film Festival (Aïnouz will screen Love for Sale: Suely in the Sky before his talk). Recently, he was in residence in Berlin as a guest artist of the Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst (DAAD) and is currently working on a TV series for HBO Latin America.
May 2
Sharon Hayes
“Performance, Politics, and Desire”
Sharon Hayes utilizes video, performance, and installation in an ongoing investigation of the interrelation of history, politics, and speech. She employs conceptual and methodological approaches borrowed from practices such as performance, theater, dance, anthropology, and journalism. Spaces at which her work has been shown include P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, Art in General, Artists Space, and the New Museum (all in New York). She has also shown at the Tate Modern in London and, in Vienna, at Museum Moderner Kunst (MUMOK) and the Generali Foundation. Her collaborative piece 9 Scripts from a Nation at War was exhibited in Documenta 12 in Kassel (Germany) in 2007. Hayes is faculty co-chair at Vermont College of the Fine Arts of Union Institute and University and is a visiting instructor at Cooper Union for the Advancement of Art and Science. She lives and works in New York. www.shaze.info
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.”
Spring 2008 Graduate Lecture Series
Lecture Hall
800 Chestnut Street Campus
All lectures on Fridays at 5:00pm (unless otherwise noted)
Free and open to the public
Friday, February 1
John Miller
“Socially Approved Love”
John Miller is an artist and writer based in New York and Berlin. In 2000, JRP Editions and the Consortium copublished a collection of his essays, The Price Club: Selected Writings, 1977–1996. In 2007, his work was featured at the Sculpture Center in Long Island City (New York), the Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie in Karlsruhe (Germany), and the Kitakyushu Biennial in Moji (Japan). Miller is an associate professor in the Art History department at Barnard College.
Friday, February 8
Christian Philipp Müller
“Acquired Taste”
Christian Philipp Müller has exhibited and taught internationally since 1986. He was a participant in such major exhibitions as Documenta X in Kassel (Germany) and in the 1993 Venice Biennial. In early 2007, Kunstmuseum Basel/Museum für Gegenwartskunst put on a twenty-year retrospective. He has had solo shows at Kunstverein München (Munich), Kunstverein in Hamburg, and the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels. He has worked with Belgian television as the main performer for the Skulptur Projekte Münster documentary and with Austrian and Swiss radio for public audio projects. Permanent work can be found, among other sites, on the campuses of Bard College and Queens College and in the cloister garden in Melk (Austria). He has also published many artists books since 1986. He is part of the artist- and art-historian-run Orchard in New York. www.christianphilippmueller.net
Friday, February 15
Tony Cokes
“Sound Against Image: Recent Works”
Tony Cokes is a postconceptualist whose practice foregrounds social critique. His video, installation, and sound works recontextualize appropriated materials to critically reflect upon our production as subjects under capitalism. Cokes’s video and multimedia installation works (which sometimes embrace collaborative working methods) have been exhibited at MoMA in New York, MACBA in Barcelona, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, and the Centre Pompidou in Paris, among other venues. His numerous media festival screenings include the San Francisco International Film Festival, the Oberhausen International Short Film Festival, the Seoul Film and Net Festival, and Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin/Madrid. Cokes currently teaches in the department of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University.
Friday, February 22
Phill Niblock
Phill Niblock is a New York–based minimalist composer, multimedia musician, and director of Experimental Intermedia. Niblock is known for constructing twenty-four-track digitally processed monolithic microtonal drones. The result is sound without melody or rhythm, the tonal variations being almost imperceptible. His vocal pieces are reminiscent of the choral works of György Ligeti. In his Hurdy Hurry and AYU (As Yet Untitled), the role of the producer/composer is emphasized as much as that of the performer. Since 1968, he has put on over 1,000 concerts in his loft space, including Ryoji Ikeda, Zbigniew Karkowski, and Jim O’Rourke. www.phillniblock.com
Niblock will be performing live at Recombinant Media Labs in the 11th Annual Activating the Medium Festival on February 23, 2008. For details, go to www.23five.org.
Friday, February 29
Florian Zeyfang
“1, 2, 3 . . . Avant-gardes and Other Concepts around Experimental Film”
Berlin-based artist Florian Zeyfang is a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Umeå (Sweden). His work has been exhibited at such spaces as the Center for Contemporary Art in Kiev (Russia), the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, Artists Space in New York, and Kunst-Werke in Berlin. He (co)curated shows for the 8th Havana Biennial, the Fotofest in Houston, the Museum für angewandte Kunst (MAK) in Vienna, the MAK Center in Los Angeles, and the Swiss Institute in New York. Publications include I Said I Love. That Is the Promise: The TVideopolitics of Jean-Luc Godard; Florian Zeyfang: Fokussy; and 1, 2, 3 . . . Avant-Gardes. Forthcoming are 4D—Pabellón de Cuba and Poor Man’s Expression.
Friday, April 4
Laura Harris
“Underground Document, Popular Experiment: Some Proposals on Some Proposals by C. L. R. James and Hélio Oiticica”
Laura Harris is a filmmaker, curator, community organizer, and scholar. She is a PhD candidate in the program in American Studies at New York University and a fellow in the department of English at Duke University. She has been writing about unfinished and only recently published proposals that were generated, at least in part, by writer C. L. R. James and artist Hélio Oiticica while each lived undocumented and underground in the US. Harris is interested in the unusual forms and social “lives” of such documents (or “undocuments”), the ways in which they open up new understandings of work, the work, authorship, citizenship, the way these all relate to one another, Afro-diasporic invention, and the possibility of new political dispositions. She has articles forthcoming in Discourse and Callaloo.
Friday, April 18
Sowon Kwon
“1963 gasoline” search
Sowon Kwon is a Korean-born artist based in New York. She works in a range of media, including sculptural and video installations, digital animation, drawing, and printmaking. She has had solo exhibitions at the Kitchen in New York, the Berkeley Art Museum, and the Whitney Museum of American Art at Altria (formerly at Philip Morris) in New York. Her group exhibitions include Artists Space in New York, the Drawing Center in New York, the ICA in Boston, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the third Gwangju Biennial in South Korea, and the Yokohama Triennial in Japan. She received the 2005 Media Arts Residency Award at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus (Ohio, USA) and is currently visiting professor in the MFA in Visual Art Program at Vermont College in Montpelier (Vermont, USA).
Saturday, April 19 from 10:00am to 3:00pm
Symposium – The Question is Known: (W)here is Latin American/Latino Art?
In conjunction with Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts, SFAI’s Graduate Division is sponsoring a one-day symposium on issues occasioned by the exhibition The Question is Known: (W)here is Latin American/Latino Art? Curated by Anthony Torres, the exhibition opens at Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts on Friday, April 18 and is on view through Saturday, May 24.
Together with the exhibition itself, the symposium aims to problematize the concept of Latino art—in particular, the tendency to essentialize it as a unified and clear-cut subject. An instance of the general Eurocentric fascination with ethnic alterity, this essentializing tendency is often reinscribed unawares in certain strains of postmodern discourse and art. When ideas of pluralism or multiculturalism are tacitly conflated with ethnic and geographic difference, the yield—if unwitting, ideologically dictated nevertheless—is a conception (or fabrication) of Latino art as discrete, exotic, and wholly other.
Symposium participants will posit a countervailing vision of the category: Latino art as a historically contingent, ideological construction. Neither natural nor given, Latino cultural creations are instead hybrid and fluid; they are established by contact, conflict, and experience and are inherently sympathetic to issue identification. Though often phantasmatically generated, such cultural creations are readable as living sources of inspiration that first become articulated through personal associations, iconography, and, ultimately, formal vocabularies. When recalibrated through theory-governed interventions, Latino art becomes a multivalent area of inquiry out of which innovative questions and issues can be posed about curatorial and institutional perspectives, practices, and politics—a new platform for facilitating greater crosscultural communication and a more inclusive, expanded, even global conception of “American” art. www.missionculturalcenter.org
Friday, April 25
Karim Aïnouz
Brazilian-born filmmaker Karim Aïnouz has directed several shorts and documentaries including Seams (1993) and Paixão Nacional (1994). His first feature film, Madame Satã, was selected in 2002 for the Cannes Film Festival “Un Certain Regard” list. Love for Sale: Suely in the Sky, his second feature film, was selected under “Horizons” in the 63rd Venice International Film Festival, took first prize at the 2006 Havana Film Festival, and won a number of awards, including Best Film, at the Rio de Janeiro International Film Festival (Aïnouz will screen Love for Sale: Suely in the Sky before his talk). Recently, he was in residence in Berlin as a guest artist of the Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst (DAAD) and is currently working on a TV series for HBO Latin America.
May 2
Sharon Hayes
“Performance, Politics, and Desire”
Sharon Hayes utilizes video, performance, and installation in an ongoing investigation of the interrelation of history, politics, and speech. She employs conceptual and methodological approaches borrowed from practices such as performance, theater, dance, anthropology, and journalism. Spaces at which her work has been shown include P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, Art in General, Artists Space, and the New Museum (all in New York). She has also shown at the Tate Modern in London and, in Vienna, at Museum Moderner Kunst (MUMOK) and the Generali Foundation. Her collaborative piece 9 Scripts from a Nation at War was exhibited in Documenta 12 in Kassel (Germany) in 2007. Hayes is faculty co-chair at Vermont College of the Fine Arts of Union Institute and University and is a visiting instructor at Cooper Union for the Advancement of Art and Science. She lives and works in New York. www.shaze.info
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