Thursday Oct 26, 19:30
Park McArthur
Nick Dupree + Zoe Wool - https://somatosphere.com/2014/life-support.html/
Projects 195 - https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/5016
Geelia Ronkina text on Projects 195 (download)
Kunsthalle_Guests - https://kunsthalle-bern.ch/-ausstellungen/2020/park-mcarthur/
Thursday Nov 2, 19:30
Jan Verwoert
Art against Aesthetics
Jan Verwoert
Art against Aesthetics
Art inspires modes of cosmic orientation. People practice art daily when they feel out where they are between earth and sky. Cosmetics for example offers ways of orienting the cosmos towards you (hence the name) by modulating planetary forces of attraction through the application of color and contour. Art gets made all the time.
Modern aesthetics, on the other hand, were designed to train the bourgeoisie in methods of systematic recognition: The training emboldened the bourgeoisie to look at culture and nature as objects of observation, ready to be read and ruled. So the human sciences researched global cultures in preparation for their imperial conquest.
As Edward Said showed, the imperial bourgeoisie tried to prove the superiority of modern scientific readers over supposedly 'ancient' cosmic makers of art by amassing spoils of conquest in national museums, for urban readers to inspect aesthetically, and assure themselves of the power of methodic study. When rulers are readers and readers rulers, makers of art (‘naively’ submitting artefacts for ‘sophisticated' decoding) routinely get cast as a 'lower folk' to be ruled over (in the imperial mind this means children, users of cosmetics, rural populations, and people of colonised cultures). Ironically, the price the ruling class paid for their rule was the loss of art making from their ranks.
Today much art discourse still seems stuck in this modern mindset when success is measured in terms of how fast art renders itself readable (instagrammable), how fluently artists can interpret their work in public (in terms of scientific research), or (on the flip-side) how boldly you can shock ’n’ charm the bourgeois by playing the true-folk-rebel. Can we please exit this imperial charade. How?
Thursday Nov 9, 19:30
Ryan Holmberg
Tsuge Yoshiharu, Manga and the Avant-Garde, circa 1968
Thursday Nov 23, 19:30
Michael Sanchez
The Movement of Artists and the Transformation of Artistic Practices in Europe c. 1970
Thursday Nov 30, 19:30
Audio Archiv Kunst
Gespräch
