words show up in strange places

My thoughts on my recent Istanbul accommodations are quoted at Serendipity Suite, a GERMAN-LANGUAGE BLOG ABOUT HOTELS.

Croatian interview published

The Croatian translation of Tom Sparrow’s interview of me, which appeared in Pli in 2008, has now been published in Croatian:

“O užasima realizma”, translated by Goran Vujasinović, Quorum, vol. 5-6, 2010, pg. 274-291.

Arsenale

Discussion this morning on Corban Walker’s sculpture in Ireland’s off-site pavilion, and we’re now at the Arsenale. Still having fun with the Irish, and about to meet my Croatian friends if they’re still here.

Also, I didn’t lose the Calvino book randomly on the streets of Venice. I left it in the Irish pavilion last night while we were having drinks along the canal, to which the back patio of the building leads.

this morning’s activity

I already posted this on May 26, but here’s a re-post.

Things are a it more fluid for later in the day. There are still a few people I’ve loosely been trying to find but we keep missing connections. I purposely don’t bring my cell phone on trips anymore, so arranging meetings is something I have to do the old-fashioned way.

Seeing Through Objects: a group discussion in the context of Corban Walker’s exhibition at the 2011 Venice Biennale.

Organised by MA Art in the Contemporary World, National College of Art and Design, Dublin, Ireland and MA: Art and Process, Crawford College of Art & Design, Cork. Lead by Francis Halsall, Lucy Dawe Lane and Declan Long

Irish Pavilion, Venice Biennale, Sat. June, 4th, 2011, 11am-12.15pm

What kind of object is Corban Walker’s Please Adjust?

For the Irish Pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale, Corban Walker has created a large-scale sculpture composed of 160 inter-connected open-framed stainless-steel cubes. As the exhibition statement describes, it is an art object in which many elements ‘combine to form a fragile structure that supports itself, though one alteration could destroy the existing configuration and create a new one’. Whilst appearing fixed, Please Adjust is also precarious, and though physically transparent it is, also, quite deliberately, not ‘clear’.

Using Please Adjust as a context, this discussion will explore multiple theoretical and historical approaches to definitions of, and encounters with, objects. What is at stake here is identifying the focus of aesthetic attention — in other words, how do theories of objects impact on the theories, practices and experiences of art?

The multiple, transient, performative and dematerialized forms that art objects have taken after modernism and since the late 1960’s demonstrate how the problems in defining what an object is are exemplified in the context of art. This historical moment is still with us. At the very least it is now taken for granted that an art object is not definable as a discrete, material thing that is independent from its situational and historical context(s).

However, relatively recent discussions of what Graham Harman has called both Object Orientated Philosophy and Speculative Realism offer the promise of ‘adjusting’ how objects are considered within contemporary art discourse. As Harman has claimed, “the dithering agnosticism of recent philosophy, its obsession with tedious questions of human access to the world, can be replaced by a high rolling metaphysics of objects. The spirit of the archive can be replaced by that of the casino”. (from Towards Speculative Realism, Zero Books, 2010). This means not only to address how art as a practice of object making constructs complex, relational objects but also how such objects might engender and demonstrate certain forms of thinking about the world.

This discussion will build on the recent series of presentations on the subject of ‘What is an object?’ lead by the MA Art in the Contemporary World in response to Richard Tuttle’s exhibition Triumphs at the Hugh Lane Gallery in Spring 2011. It also follows from a previous MA ACW session at the Irish Pavilion at Venice in 2009.

All are welcome to attend this discussion. Please get in touch if you would like to participate.

Contact: Francis Halsall (halsallf@ncad.ie); Lucy Dawe Lane (lucy.dawe-lane@cit.ie); Declan Long (longd@ncad.ie; twitter: @declanlong).

We would like to gratefully acknowledge the support and assistance of Corban Walker, Eamon Maxwell, and Jennifer Marshall in the staging of this event.
The Irish Pavilion at Venice is located at the Istituto Santa Maria della Pietà, 3703 Calle della Pietà, Castello. Calle della Pietà is mid-way between Piazza San Marco and the Arsenale, off Via Riva degli Schiavoni.
http://www.acw.ie ; http://media.cit.ie/maap/; http://www.irelandvenice.ie/

the Venice effect

Two strange but opposite things always seem to happen in Venice. First, you have completely bizarre coincidental meetings with people you know. Second, when you try to arrange to meet people you know, it often seems to fail. Things come up for one or both of you, and the scheduled meetings never take place.

For obvious reasons, it’s also the easiest city in which to get terribly lost. You can easily be heading in the opposite direction from what you think, and even the ubiquitous yellow signs and arrows for the train station, Rialto, and San Marco, while somewhat useful, can sometimes fail you at key moments. Plenty of time must be allowed for going anywhere in particular.

OOO at Carnegie-Mellon

If memory serves, Melissa Ragona and Mike Witmore team-taught something in a similar vein at CMU when Mike was still there, maybe in 2006 or so.

***

“How is Art More than a Thing?: Performativities of Objects, Technologies, and Temperaments — MFA Academic Seminar 2011″

In this seminar, we read a selection of both historical and contemporary theoretical texts with an eye to the network of texts and practices covering discourses of (1) the possible “freedom” of the work of art (material relations in the art market, new political discourses addressed by contemporary artists, radical form vs. subversive content) (2) the new discourse on the performativity of objects in painting, sculpture, video, and new media; (3) the future of the image in relation to apocalyptic discourses/the accident of art/ theories of new technologies. We explored these motifs across the work of Paul Chan, Martin Heidegger, Graham Harman, Friedrich Kittler, Marshall McLuhan, Sigmund Freud, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Lacan, Georges Bataille, Judith Butler, and Paul Virilio (just to name a few).

Special focus was given to (1) so called, “revolutions” in public practice (i.e. what comes after “Relational Aaestheics”), (2) theories of affect, (3) contemporary forms of performance and performativity (and historical precedents), and (4) emerging aesthetic forms inspired by the use of new technologies in contemporary practice. Most importantly, we attempted to figure out how and why these texts and works were meaningful to our own art and critical practice.

All the papers “sampled” below should be considered, “works in progress.” These presentations are intended to be preliminary “snap shots” of the contextual section of the MFA written thesis (an academic project that parallels the MFA exhibition in a Graduate’s third year). The theses tested out here will morph and expand over the next few years, culminating in a substantial thesis paper that grounds each student’s work in the historical and theoretical discourses that inform and frame their MFA exhibition project.

– Melissa Ragona, Associate Professor of Art & Critical Theory, MFA Academic Seminar faculty