Directed 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

All lectures are held on Fridays at 5:00pm in the SFAI Lecture Hall on the 800 Chestnut Street campus and are free and open to the public (unless otherwise noted).

Friday, October 9 — 5:00pm
Raúl Cárdenas Osuna
“White Noise”

Born in Mazatlán (Sinaloa, Mexico), Raúl Cárdenas Osuna is the founder of Torolab, a Tijuana-based collective workshop and laboratory of contextual studies that identifies situations or phenomena of interest for research. Established in 1995, Torolab creates projects that address the politics and poetics of various social phenomena, urban spaces, and artistic languages. Torolab’s work has been shown nationally and internationally at various venues: P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center (MoMA) in Long Island City (New York), Havana Biennial, 2004 Liverpool Biennial (UK), Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego, Museum of Craft and Folk Art in San Francisco, LAXART in Los Angeles, the First Architectural Biennial Beijing (2004), OMR gallery in Mexico City, Moderna Museet in Stockholm, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Working in conjunction with SFAI’s City Studio Program, Cárdenas Osuna and Torolab are participating in the 2009 Lyon Biennial. He currently lives in Tijuana, Mexico.

Friday, October 16 — 5:00pm
Charles Gaines
“Reflections on Metonymy”

Focusing on the postmodern sublime and the figure of metonymy, Charles Gaines draws on an array of sources as prods to the making of his art. In his work, he deploys arguments that resist conventional ideas about meaning in art and its relationship to aesthetic experience. He has had numerous exhibitions at such venues as the Whitney Biennial 1975 at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, Susanne Veilmetter Los Angeles Projects in Los Angeles, and the 2007 Venice Biennial. He has received a National Endowment for the Arts Award and a United States Artists Fellowship, and he was a finalist for the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award. Public collections include, in New York City, MoMA, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, as well as the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Gaines is, in addition, a widely published writer and is on the faculty of the Program in Art at the California Institute of the Arts.

Friday, October 23 — 5:00pm
Silvia Kolbowski
“After Hiroshima Mon Amour”

Based in New York City, Silvia Kolbowski is an artist the scope of whose address includes memory, sexuality, the unconscious, and the ethics of history. Her project After Hiroshima Mon Amour premiered in 2008 at LAXART in Los Angeles, was part of a solo exhibition at Galerie Leonard & Bina Ellen at Concordia University in Montreal, and was installed at Moderna Galerija in Ljubljana (Slovenia). In 2007, she exhibited a revised version of An Inadequate History of Conceptual Art (1998/99) at the Centre for Contemporary Art in Warsaw. Her 2004 project Proximity to Power, American Style, a slide/audio work about the relational aspects of masculine power, was published in book form, under the same title, in 2008. Additionally, she has exhibited at Secession in Vienna and the Whitney Biennial 2000 at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City. From 1993 to 2000, Kolbowski was a coeditor of the journal October and remains on its advisory board.

Friday, October 30 — 5:00pm
Lisa Le Feuvre
“Failure: Error, Perfection, Dissatisfaction, and Experiment”

A lecturer in the postgraduate Curating Program in the Department of Art at Goldsmiths, University of London, Lisa Le Feuvre is a curator and writer. Between 2005 and 2009 she directed the Contemporary Art Program at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich (UK), where she commissioned new work by Dan Holdsworth, Esther Shalev-Gerz, Lawrence Weiner, Simon Patterson, Renée Green, and Jeremy Millar. In 2009, she curated the exhibition Joachim Koester: Poison Protocols and Other Histories at Stills in Edinburgh as well as the exhibition Economies of Attention: Leisure, Resistance, Desire, and Labour at the Arts Council England, National Office in London. In 2010, she will curate, with Tom Morton, British Art Show 7, a quinquennial response to art made in the UK, which will be exhibited in four UK cities between 2010 and 2011. Le Feuvre is currently editing a book entitled Documents on Contemporary Art on Failure.

Friday, November 6 — 5:00pm
Marysia Lewandowska
“From Enthusiasts to Creative Commons: Generosity and the Future of Public Domain”

Marysia Lewandowska is a London-based artist who, up to 2008, frequently collaborated with Neil Cummings. Her past and current practice reflects on the ways in which institutions determine the exchange of values between art and its public. The project Enthusiasm was exhibited at Whitechapel Gallery in London, Kunst-Werke Berlin in Berlin, and Fundació Antoni Tàpies in Barcelona. The film Museum Futures: Distributed was commissioned by Moderna Museet in Stockholm in 2008, and Tender Museum, a sound and film installation, was recently completed for Muzeum Sztuki in Lodz (Poland). She is currently developing the Women’s Audio Archive, part of her residency at the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, and Our Radical Parents, a project produced by Mossutställningar in Stockholm. Upcoming projects Casting and Self-documentation will address the politics of broadcast and the public realm. Lewandowska is a professor in the Fine Arts department at Konstfack in Stockholm, where she has created Timeline: Artists’ Film and Video Archive. www.chanceprojects.com

Friday, November 13 — 5:00pm
Charles Atlas
“Video In and As Performance”

Since the mid-1970s, Charles Atlas has been working as a film and video artist in various mediums: multichannel video installations, feature-length documentaries, video artworks for television, live electronic performances, and pioneering media/dance works. He has collaborated with such choreographers/dancers as Michael Clark, Merce Cunningham, and Douglas Dunn, and with such performers as Marina Abramović, Leigh Bowery, and Diamanda Galás. In 2006, a selection of film and video works was screened in a retrospective at the Tate Modern in London. In 2009, he collaborated with Mika Tajima/New Humans and Judith Butler on Today Is Not a Rehearsal at SFMOMA. Venues at which his work has been exhibited include the Whitney Museum of American Art and MoMA in New York City; and the Musée National d’Art Moderne collection at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. Atlas has received three Bessie Awards and was the recipient of the Foundation for Contemporary Art’s biennial John Cage Award in 2006.

Friday, November 20 — 5:00pm
Yvonne Rainer
“One Day When I Was Growing Up in the 60s . . . ”

Distinguished Professor in the Claire Trevor School of the Arts at UC Irvine, Yvonne Rainer began her career in the arts, in the 50s, as a dancer and choreographer. In the early 70s, after nearly twenty years working in modern dance, she turned her attentions to filmmaking. Over the subsequent twenty-five years, she made seven experimental feature films, including Lives of Performers (1972), Privilege (1990) (see below), and MURDER and murder (1996). Encouraged by a commission from the Baryshnikov Dance Foundation, she returned to choreography in 2000 for the White Oak Dance Project. Recent work includes choreography on AG Indexical, with a little help from H.M. (a revision of Balanchine’s Agon), on RoS Indexical (a revision of Nijinsky’s Rite of Spring), and on Spiraling Down (a meditation on soccer, aging, and war), as well as a video installation for a traveling solo exhibition comprising dance and texts that touch on art and politics in fin-de-siècle Vienna. Rainer published a memoir, Feelings Are Facts: A Life, in 2006.

Saturday and Sunday, November 21 and 22 — 7:30pm
Film Screenings: Journeys from Berlin/1971 (Nov. 21) and Privilege (Nov. 22)
Yvonne Rainer (director), in person

Conveying with wit and inventiveness the personal implications of sociopolitical issues, the films of Yvonne Rainer (who will be present at both screenings) interweave narrative and non-narrative elements, blur the line between fact and fiction, deconstruct cinematic conventions, and expand upon the immediacy, corporeality, and emotional complexity of her dance and performance work. Journeys from Berlin/1971 (1980) is a groundbreaking exploration, both personal and political, of psychiatry, feminism, terrorism, and power. Privilege (1990) takes on the rarely explored subject of menopause and constructs a witty, complex critique of empowerment and class by delving into issues of age, sexuality, and race. Both films are presented in conjunction with San Francisco Cinematheque (www.sfcinematheque.org). Admission: general public—$10.00; San Francisco Cinematheque members—$5.00; SFAI students, faculty, and staff—free.

Friday, December 4 — 5:00pm
Edgar Arceneaux
“The Watts House Project and Systems Theory: Neighborhood Redevelopment as Collaborative Artwork”

Los Angeles–based artist Edgar Arceneaux received a BFA from the Art Center College of Design and an MFA from California Institute of the Arts. He was an artist-in-residence at Artpace in San Antonio (Texas, USA), Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Skowhegan (Maine, USA), Project Row Houses in Houston (Texas, USA), and the Fachhochschule in Aachen (Germany). Venues at which he has had solo exhibitions include the Kitchen in New York City, SFMOMA, Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects in Los Angeles, and the Studio Museum in Harlem in New York City. His work was included in the Whitney Biennial 2008 at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City and is retained in such public collections as the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis (Minnesota, USA) and the Hammer Museum at UCLA in Los Angeles. Since 1999, Arceneaux has been the director of the Watts House Project, an ongoing collaborative artwork in the shape of a neighborhood redevelopment that is centered on the historic Watts Towers. wattshouseproject.org

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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. The screenings of Yvonne Rainer’s films Journeys from Berlin/1971 and Privilege are presented in conjunction with San Francisco Cinematheque.