 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
Spheres of Interest Graduate Lecture Series
Spheres of Interest Graduate Lecture Series
Related Information
Contact:
415.749.4563
Contact:
415.749.4563
Fall 2008 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.”
Fall 2008 Graduate Lecture Series
Spheres of Interest: Experiments in Thinking & Action
Lecture Hall
800 Chestnut Street Campus
All lectures on Fridays at 5:00pm (unless otherwise noted)
Free and open to the public
Friday, September 12, 5:00pm
Ben Kinmont
“Prospectus”
Ben Kinmont is an artist, publisher, and antiquarian bookseller living in Sebastopol, California. His work is concerned with the value structures surrounding an art practice and what happens when that practice is displaced into a nonart space. Since 1988, his work has been project-based, attentive to archiving and blurring the boundaries of artistic production, publishing, and curatorial practices. He has recently taught courses in the Social Practices Program at the California College of Arts and organized various workshops with students from the École nationale des Beaux-Arts in France (Angers, Valence, and Bourges). Exhibitions include those at Air de Paris, ICA in London, CNEAI in Chatou (Paris), the 25th International Biennial of Graphic Arts in Ljubljana (Slovenia), the Frac Languedoc-Roussillon in Montpellier (France), Documenta 11 in Kassel (Germany), and Les Abattoirs in Toulouse (France). He is also the founder of the Antinomian Press, a publishing enterprise which supports project Art and Ephemera. www.benkinmont.com
Friday, September 19, 5:00pm
Steve Kurtz
“Art and Discipline”
Associate professor of Visual Studies at SUNY Buffalo, Steve Kurtz is a founding member of the art and theater group Critical Art Ensemble (CAE). Founded in 1987 by Kurtz and Steven Barnes, CAE is an award-winning collective of artists of various specializations: computer graphics and web design, wetware, film and video, photography, text art, book art, and performance. The collective is dedicated to exploring the intersections between art, technology, political activism, and critical theory. For two decades, CAE has produced and exhibited art that examines information, communications, and biotechnologies. It has performed and produced a wide variety of projects for international audiences at diverse venues—from the street to the museum to the Internet. CAE has been invited to exhibit and perform in many of the world’s leading cultural institutions: the Whitney Museum of American Art and the New Museum in NYC; the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington DC; the ICA in London; the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago; Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt (Germany); Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; the Natural History Museum in London; Matadero Madrid; Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma in Helsinki; the Moscow Performing Arts Center; ZKM in Karlsruhe (Germany); and many more. The ensemble has collectively written six books, some of which have been translated into a number of languages. In 2000, TDR (The Drama Review) dedicated a special section to CAE. Work by the ensemble is included in the permanent collections of numerous museums, including MoMA in NYC; the Neue Gallerie in Graz (Austria); the Tate Gallery in London; the SFMOMA library; the Banff Centre for the Arts (Alberta, Canada); and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. CAE received the 2007 Andy Warhol Foundation Wynn Kramarsky Freedom of Artistic Expression Award, the 2004 John Lansdown Award for Multimedia, and the 2004 Leonardo New Horizons Award for Innovation.
October 17
Mary Kelly
“On Fidelity”
Through her large-scale narrative installations and theoretical writings, Mary Kelly has contributed extensively to the discourse on feminism and postmodernism. Her recent exhibitions include Documenta 12 in Kassel (Germany), WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution at MOCA in Los Angeles, the 2004 Whitney Biennial in NYC, and the Biennale of Sydney 2008. She is the author of Post-Partum Document (1983), which was reissued by the Generali Foundation in Vienna and UC Press (1999), and Imaging Desire (1997). A survey of her work entitled Mary Kelly was published in 1997. She is professor in the department of art at UCLA.
October 24
Juliane Rebentisch
“Aesthetic Autonomy Today”
Juliane Rebentisch teaches philosophy at the University of Potsdam and is a member of the Berlin-based Collaborative Research Center 626, Aesthetic Experience and the Dissolution of Artistic Limits. In the fall of 2008 she will be Theodor Heuss Lecturer at the New School for Social Research in NYC. Her main fields of interest are political philosophy and aesthetics. She has published a number of articles on contemporary art and is a member of the advisory board of Texte zur Kunst. Rebentisch is the author of Ästhetik der Installation (2003) and a coeditor with Christoph Menke of Kunst, Forschritt, Geschichte (2006).
October 31
Société Réaliste
“Glyphs and Strata”
Société Réaliste is a Paris-based cooperative created, in June 2004, by Ferenc Gróf and Jean-Baptiste Naudy. The cooperative manages the development of research and production structures in fields such as territorial ergonomy, experimental economy, political design, and counterstrategy. Société Réaliste’s practice is resolutely polytechnic, developed through exhibitions, collaborative research projects, cultural events, lectures, critical writings, and educational interventions. Since January 2008, Société Réaliste is, in tandem, researcher in design at Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht (the Netherlands). Société Réaliste’s recent projects include solo exhibitions at Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven (the Netherlands), Centre d’Art Contemporain La Synagogue de Delme (France), Galerie Martine Aboucaya in Paris, Galeria Zé dos Bois in Lisbon, Kunstpavillon in Innsbruck, and Trafo Gallery in Budapest. The cooperative has recently participated in group exhibitions or lectured in Moscow, Zagreb, Budapest, Paris, Vienna, Tel Aviv, Rome, Berlin, Prague, Hamburg, NYC, Copenhagen, Amsterdam, Kassel, Bucharest, and Kiev. Société Réaliste has published articles in Journal of Visual Culture, The HTV, Multitudes-Icônes, and Exindex. www.societerealiste.net
November 7
Kyong Park
“New Silk Roads”
Kyong Park is an acting associate professor of Public Culture in the department of Visual Arts at UC San Diego. As a member of the Lost Highway Expedition (a temporary self-organized society that exchanges knowledge and resources and that navigates the new and dynamic territories of the Western Balkans), he is the founding director of Centrala Foundation for Future Cities in Rotterdam (the Netherlands). The editor of Urban Ecology: Detroit and Beyond (2004), Park is the founding director of the International Center for Urban Ecology in Detroit and the founder and former director of Storefront for Art and Architecture in NYC. He co-curated Shrinking Cities at Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin (2004) and curated part of the Gwangju Biennial in South Korea (1997). His current project is New Silk Roads, an exploration into the transformation of urban landscapes between Istanbul and Tokyo, which will be presented, in 2009, as a solo exhibition at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León in León (Spain), and will be published in an upcoming issue of Atlántica magazine and as a book project in 2009.
November 14
Gloria Sutton
“Media to Medium: Apparatus to Interface”
Focusing her research on the history of media art, Gloria Sutton is a PhD candidate in Contemporary Art History at UCLA. She has been a fellow at the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Program and the Getty Research Institute. Sutton has contributed to Future Cinema: The Cinematic Imaginary after Film (2003) and Mainframe Experimentalism: Early Digital Computing and the Experimental Arts (forthcoming). Her criticism appears in the exhibition catalogues Ecstasy: In and About Altered States (2006), Laura Owens (catalogue raisonné, 2007), Vitamin Ph: New Perspectives in Photography (2006) and Ice Cream: Contemporary Art in Culture (2007). As the Ahmanson Curatorial Fellow at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, she co-curated in 2006 MOCA Focus: Karl Haendel. She is co-curator of an exhibition on public space and media at the MAK Center for Art and Architecture (to open in 2009). Sutton is working on a book on American expanded cinema practices of the 1960s.
November 21
Bruce Yonemoto
“Reenaction”
Bruce Yonemoto has developed a body of work which positions itself within the overlapping intersections of art and commerce, of the gallery world and the cinema screen. His recent work deals with the discovery of the real and poetic convergence of two phenomena specific, as he sees it, to Argentina: it’s the site both of one of the few growing glaciers in the world and of the last growing Lacanian psychoanalytic practice. Yonemoto has been honored with awards and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the American Film Institute, the Rockefeller Foundation, and, for experimental film and video, the Maya Deren Award. His installations, photographs, and sculptures have recently been featured in solo shows at the InterCommunication Center in Tokyo, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, and the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City. He has had solo exhibitions at Alexander Gray Associates in NYC, Blum & Poe in Los Angeles, and Tomio Koyama Gallery in Tokyo. Yonemoto’s work was featured in the exhibition Los Angeles 1955-85: The Birth of an Art Capital at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. He has also exhibited at the Generali Foundation in Vienna and the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. Yonemoto’s work will be featured at the 2008 Gwangju Biennial in South Korea. He is a professor in and the chair of the department of Studio Art at UC Irvine.
Supported by the Artur Walther Foundation, Spheres of Interest is organized through SFAI’s Division of Graduate Studies in cooperation with SFAI’s Centers for Interdisciplinary Study. The Steve Kurtz lecture is presented in association with the Berkeley Center for New Media (BCNM) at UC Berkeley.
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.”
Fall 2008 Graduate Lecture Series
Spheres of Interest: Experiments in Thinking & Action
Lecture Hall
800 Chestnut Street Campus
All lectures on Fridays at 5:00pm (unless otherwise noted)
Free and open to the public
Friday, September 12, 5:00pm
Ben Kinmont
“Prospectus”
Ben Kinmont is an artist, publisher, and antiquarian bookseller living in Sebastopol, California. His work is concerned with the value structures surrounding an art practice and what happens when that practice is displaced into a nonart space. Since 1988, his work has been project-based, attentive to archiving and blurring the boundaries of artistic production, publishing, and curatorial practices. He has recently taught courses in the Social Practices Program at the California College of Arts and organized various workshops with students from the École nationale des Beaux-Arts in France (Angers, Valence, and Bourges). Exhibitions include those at Air de Paris, ICA in London, CNEAI in Chatou (Paris), the 25th International Biennial of Graphic Arts in Ljubljana (Slovenia), the Frac Languedoc-Roussillon in Montpellier (France), Documenta 11 in Kassel (Germany), and Les Abattoirs in Toulouse (France). He is also the founder of the Antinomian Press, a publishing enterprise which supports project Art and Ephemera. www.benkinmont.com
Friday, September 19, 5:00pm
Steve Kurtz
“Art and Discipline”
Associate professor of Visual Studies at SUNY Buffalo, Steve Kurtz is a founding member of the art and theater group Critical Art Ensemble (CAE). Founded in 1987 by Kurtz and Steven Barnes, CAE is an award-winning collective of artists of various specializations: computer graphics and web design, wetware, film and video, photography, text art, book art, and performance. The collective is dedicated to exploring the intersections between art, technology, political activism, and critical theory. For two decades, CAE has produced and exhibited art that examines information, communications, and biotechnologies. It has performed and produced a wide variety of projects for international audiences at diverse venues—from the street to the museum to the Internet. CAE has been invited to exhibit and perform in many of the world’s leading cultural institutions: the Whitney Museum of American Art and the New Museum in NYC; the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington DC; the ICA in London; the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago; Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt (Germany); Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; the Natural History Museum in London; Matadero Madrid; Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma in Helsinki; the Moscow Performing Arts Center; ZKM in Karlsruhe (Germany); and many more. The ensemble has collectively written six books, some of which have been translated into a number of languages. In 2000, TDR (The Drama Review) dedicated a special section to CAE. Work by the ensemble is included in the permanent collections of numerous museums, including MoMA in NYC; the Neue Gallerie in Graz (Austria); the Tate Gallery in London; the SFMOMA library; the Banff Centre for the Arts (Alberta, Canada); and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. CAE received the 2007 Andy Warhol Foundation Wynn Kramarsky Freedom of Artistic Expression Award, the 2004 John Lansdown Award for Multimedia, and the 2004 Leonardo New Horizons Award for Innovation.
October 17
Mary Kelly
“On Fidelity”
Through her large-scale narrative installations and theoretical writings, Mary Kelly has contributed extensively to the discourse on feminism and postmodernism. Her recent exhibitions include Documenta 12 in Kassel (Germany), WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution at MOCA in Los Angeles, the 2004 Whitney Biennial in NYC, and the Biennale of Sydney 2008. She is the author of Post-Partum Document (1983), which was reissued by the Generali Foundation in Vienna and UC Press (1999), and Imaging Desire (1997). A survey of her work entitled Mary Kelly was published in 1997. She is professor in the department of art at UCLA.
October 24
Juliane Rebentisch
“Aesthetic Autonomy Today”
Juliane Rebentisch teaches philosophy at the University of Potsdam and is a member of the Berlin-based Collaborative Research Center 626, Aesthetic Experience and the Dissolution of Artistic Limits. In the fall of 2008 she will be Theodor Heuss Lecturer at the New School for Social Research in NYC. Her main fields of interest are political philosophy and aesthetics. She has published a number of articles on contemporary art and is a member of the advisory board of Texte zur Kunst. Rebentisch is the author of Ästhetik der Installation (2003) and a coeditor with Christoph Menke of Kunst, Forschritt, Geschichte (2006).
October 31
Société Réaliste
“Glyphs and Strata”
Société Réaliste is a Paris-based cooperative created, in June 2004, by Ferenc Gróf and Jean-Baptiste Naudy. The cooperative manages the development of research and production structures in fields such as territorial ergonomy, experimental economy, political design, and counterstrategy. Société Réaliste’s practice is resolutely polytechnic, developed through exhibitions, collaborative research projects, cultural events, lectures, critical writings, and educational interventions. Since January 2008, Société Réaliste is, in tandem, researcher in design at Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht (the Netherlands). Société Réaliste’s recent projects include solo exhibitions at Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven (the Netherlands), Centre d’Art Contemporain La Synagogue de Delme (France), Galerie Martine Aboucaya in Paris, Galeria Zé dos Bois in Lisbon, Kunstpavillon in Innsbruck, and Trafo Gallery in Budapest. The cooperative has recently participated in group exhibitions or lectured in Moscow, Zagreb, Budapest, Paris, Vienna, Tel Aviv, Rome, Berlin, Prague, Hamburg, NYC, Copenhagen, Amsterdam, Kassel, Bucharest, and Kiev. Société Réaliste has published articles in Journal of Visual Culture, The HTV, Multitudes-Icônes, and Exindex. www.societerealiste.net
November 7
Kyong Park
“New Silk Roads”
Kyong Park is an acting associate professor of Public Culture in the department of Visual Arts at UC San Diego. As a member of the Lost Highway Expedition (a temporary self-organized society that exchanges knowledge and resources and that navigates the new and dynamic territories of the Western Balkans), he is the founding director of Centrala Foundation for Future Cities in Rotterdam (the Netherlands). The editor of Urban Ecology: Detroit and Beyond (2004), Park is the founding director of the International Center for Urban Ecology in Detroit and the founder and former director of Storefront for Art and Architecture in NYC. He co-curated Shrinking Cities at Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin (2004) and curated part of the Gwangju Biennial in South Korea (1997). His current project is New Silk Roads, an exploration into the transformation of urban landscapes between Istanbul and Tokyo, which will be presented, in 2009, as a solo exhibition at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León in León (Spain), and will be published in an upcoming issue of Atlántica magazine and as a book project in 2009.
November 14
Gloria Sutton
“Media to Medium: Apparatus to Interface”
Focusing her research on the history of media art, Gloria Sutton is a PhD candidate in Contemporary Art History at UCLA. She has been a fellow at the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Program and the Getty Research Institute. Sutton has contributed to Future Cinema: The Cinematic Imaginary after Film (2003) and Mainframe Experimentalism: Early Digital Computing and the Experimental Arts (forthcoming). Her criticism appears in the exhibition catalogues Ecstasy: In and About Altered States (2006), Laura Owens (catalogue raisonné, 2007), Vitamin Ph: New Perspectives in Photography (2006) and Ice Cream: Contemporary Art in Culture (2007). As the Ahmanson Curatorial Fellow at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, she co-curated in 2006 MOCA Focus: Karl Haendel. She is co-curator of an exhibition on public space and media at the MAK Center for Art and Architecture (to open in 2009). Sutton is working on a book on American expanded cinema practices of the 1960s.
November 21
Bruce Yonemoto
“Reenaction”
Bruce Yonemoto has developed a body of work which positions itself within the overlapping intersections of art and commerce, of the gallery world and the cinema screen. His recent work deals with the discovery of the real and poetic convergence of two phenomena specific, as he sees it, to Argentina: it’s the site both of one of the few growing glaciers in the world and of the last growing Lacanian psychoanalytic practice. Yonemoto has been honored with awards and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the American Film Institute, the Rockefeller Foundation, and, for experimental film and video, the Maya Deren Award. His installations, photographs, and sculptures have recently been featured in solo shows at the InterCommunication Center in Tokyo, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, and the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City. He has had solo exhibitions at Alexander Gray Associates in NYC, Blum & Poe in Los Angeles, and Tomio Koyama Gallery in Tokyo. Yonemoto’s work was featured in the exhibition Los Angeles 1955-85: The Birth of an Art Capital at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. He has also exhibited at the Generali Foundation in Vienna and the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. Yonemoto’s work will be featured at the 2008 Gwangju Biennial in South Korea. He is a professor in and the chair of the department of Studio Art at UC Irvine.
Supported by the Artur Walther Foundation, Spheres of Interest is organized through SFAI’s Division of Graduate Studies in cooperation with SFAI’s Centers for Interdisciplinary Study. The Steve Kurtz lecture is presented in association with the Berkeley Center for New Media (BCNM) at UC Berkeley.
© 2007 San Francisco Art Institute/general switchboard: 415.771.7020