Kunstlicht Launch

On May 23, the latest issue of Kunstlicht—the journal affiliated with the VU’s Art and Culture department—will be launched at De Appel in Amsterdam. The issue is titled “The Public Market.”

The dust seems to have settled after the initial commotion following the culture cuts in the Netherlands. The reactions, however, have differed widely, ranging from passive bitterness to a newfound work ethic, and in some cases, perhaps, resulting in clandestine excitement about the increased independence from an unpredictable government. Whichever way you choose to look at it, the outcome has been a heightened dependence on individuals and non-public entities, advancing the “market mentality” adopted by the government in recent years. We can now speak of a “public market.”

On May 34, international scholars will analyse and discuss the contemporary and historical contexts of the current situation. The program includes lectures by, among others, Pascal Gielen and Olav Velthuis, and a performance by Chloé Dierckx.

Time and place: 8.30 P.M, De Appel. Free entrance. The presentation will take place in Dutch. RSVP before May 22, e-mail to redactie@tijdschriftkunstlicht.nl

At this launch, “The Public Market” will be for sale for the special price of €6 (instead of €12).

More information: www.tijdschriftkunstlicht.nl

Assembly (Imagining the Image)

On Wednesday, May 8, the seminar Imagining the Image will be followed by an “assembly” convened by Agency. Agency is the generic name of a Brussels-based agency that was established in 1992 by Kobe Matthys.

For Assembly (Imagining the Image), Agency calls forth Thing 001620 (Das Schweigen von Marcel Duchamp wird überbewertet, 1964), speculating on the question: how can temporaries become included within art practices?

Thing 001620 (Das Schweigen von Marcel Duchamp wird überbewertet, 1964) concerns a conflict between Eva Beuys and Museum Schloss Moyland concerning Manfred Tischer’s photographs of Joseph Beuys’ performance Das Schweigen von Marcel Duchamp wird überbewertet. During the following court case on 29 September 2010 at Düsseldorf Regional Court, the judge had to decide if the live action by Joseph Beuys constituted a work of art protected by author law and if the documenting photographs were copies of the performance.

On May 8th, Thing 001620 (Das Schweigen von Marcel Duchamp wird überbewertet, 1964) will convene an assembly in the framework of seminar Imagining the Image in order to bear witness.

The modern concept of intellectual property relies fundamentally upon the assumption of a division between the categories of “nature” and “culture”. If one however pays attention to multiple agencies, for many art practices such a division is difficult to make. Agency constitutes a growing list of things that resist this split. These things are mainly derived from juridical processes, lawsuits, cases, controversies, affairs and so forth, around intellectual property.

Agency invokes things from its list via varying assemblies inside exhibitions, performances, publications, etc… Every assembly poses a different speculative question. The series of questions explore in a topological way the operative consequences of the apparatus of intellectual property for an ecology of art practices.

http://www.bamart.be/persons/detail/en/252/

Image: Agency, Assembly (Animism), 2010, at MUHKA, Antwerp.

Alumni news

The April/May 2013 issue of the art magazine Metropolis M boasts an essay by VAMA alumnus Daniël van der Poel, “Digitale Discriminatie” (Digital Discrimination). In the Netherlands, so-called digital art is promoted by a small number of specialized institutions but embraced only hesitantly by museums of modern art. In his polemical text, Daniël argues that problem lies partly in the misnomer that is digital art. Using unsound technical criteria to divide art into digital and non-digital, it obscures the general influence of computer technology in contemporary society and art practices – digital and non-digital alike. Thus art that features obvious technical manifestations of this influence is stereotyped (or ignored), and meaningful connections that span the “digital divide” are lost.

As if to illustrate the digital divide, Daniël’s essay (which is in Dutch) is not available online, but a short English text on the subject from his VAMA days can be found here.

Tinguely Reloaded

On March 23 at the Museum Tinguely in Basel, former Metamatic Visiting Professor Emily Scott co-chaired the panel “Caught in the Circuits”  at the Metamatic Reloaded Symposium together with VAMA student Angela Bartholomew. Artists Soren Pors, Aparno Rao and Joao Simoes were the other participants. While at the VU as visiting professor last year, Emily taught the seminar “Art-Media Sites in the 1960s,” which Angela attended.

Tom Holert: Design and Shine

In the context of the current seminar Imagining the Image, which this year focuses on the image as object or thing endowed with agency, VAMA welcomes the art historian, critic and artist Tom Holert for a reading seminar and presentation on April 16. This event is organized in collaboration with (and at) Casco, office for art, design and theory in Utrecht. We will focus on two of Holert’s projects as theorist and video maker: the essay Distributed Agency, Design’s Potentiality (2011) and the video installation The Labours of Shine (2012). The essay will be discussed in a VAMA reading seminar during the afternoon, whereas the video installation will be presented and discussed by Holert during a public Casco “open seminar” in the evening.

The day begins with the closed VAMA reading seminar focusing on Distributed Agency, Design’s Potentiality. In this text, Holert acknowledges that the ubiquity of design in contemporary life “has long been bemoaned by cultural critics as the utmost symptom of the postmodernist loss of substance to surface,” but that this general presence of design marks a position of great potential. Analysing what he identifies as the “distributed agency” of design, Holert argues that “design can only be understood as an activity situated in an arena where ‘participation’, if at all, is happening under the condition of competition and conflict. Instead of glossing over social, cultural and economic inequalities, design, in its microprocessual capacity to engage with the local and the particular, is bent to acknowledge difference—not as distinction, but as struggle.”

Holert’s recent video installation The Labours of Shine, installed at Casco for the occasion,   answers the complains of the “loss of substance to surface” by investigating the substance of surface itself—more specifically the shine of various objects and the labour invested in its production. Holert zaps from everyday objects to high art and explores Hollywood’s representation and repression of political and racial struggles. In a surprising juxtaposition of the shoeshiner in classic movies with Brancusi’s polished metal sculptures, he examines how the labour of shine, of producing shining surfaces, generates its own contradictions and conflicts. The Labours of Shine will be screened and discussed by Holert with audience members.

Tom Holert (* 1962) is an art historian, critic, curator and artist. A former editor of Texte zur Kunst and Spex, he currently lives and works in Berlin. Holert is honorary professor of art theory and cultural studies at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna where he, from 2008 to 2011, held the chair of Epistemology and Methodology of Art Production and co-coordinated the Center for Art/Knowledge (CAK) and the PhD in Practice. He also (with Johanna Schaffer) headed the WWTF funded research project „Troubling Research. Performing Knowledge in the Arts“ (2010-2011). Alongside his writings on contemporary art, Holert has (co-)authored books on visual culture, politics, war, mobility, glamour, and the governmentality of the present. Currently his research focusses on questions of art and knowledge (developing ideas first elaborated in his 1997 Künstlerwissen. Studien zur Semantik künstlerischer Kompetenz im Frankreich des 18. und frühen 19. Jahrhunderts); he is also working on a book on the visual culture of experimental psychology (The Diagnostic Modern). As an artist Holert recently participated in the 8th Gwangju Biennale 2010, Forum Expanded 2011 (Berlin Film Festival), Transmediale (Berlin, 2012) and Animismus (House of World Cultures, Berlin, 2012).

Updated with photos of the event. (Yes, good food is an essential ingredient of VAMA activities.)

That Summer School Feeling

Now that spring is almost here (we hope), the Dutch national research schools are announcing their annual summer schools for Research MA and PhD students. VAMA students might consider enrolling in one of the following:

On June 17 and 18, the OSK (Dutch Postgraduate School for Art History) will present the Summer School Memory and the Museum.

“What role do museum practices play in encouraging societies to remember or, in some cases, to repress their past? In this two-day interdisciplinary Summer School we will examine museums not just as repositories of collective memory, but as spaces in which memory is made, contested, and re-interpreted. We will begin by examining theories about personal and collective memory and will consider how, if at all, memory differs from history. We will then consider various strategies by which artists and curators make private memories public, shape narratives of the past, and give voice to those whose stories have been omitted from familiar histories. We will examine critical discourses relating to the public presentation of difficult and disturbing knowledge and consider ethical dilemmas that arise in the visual representation of trauma. As a therapeutic engagement with the past or an antagonistic encounter with history, our relationship to museums is examined as a vital component of critical self-awareness. This Summer School is divided into four interactive workshops (with presentations by different guest lecturers) that debate the latest research into memory studies, curatorial practices, museum studies, and the making of contemporary history in painting and photography. We will also examine specific case studies and view collections in Amsterdam.”

From June 10 to June 13, RMeS (Research School for Media Studies) will hold its Summer School 2013 on Audiences and Users.

“The Summer School targets PhD students and Research Master students who are keen to dive into current perspectives, advanced methods, and cutting-edge research in the study of audiences and users. Special attention will be paid to the question how competing approaches and research traditions in the study of audiences, users, consumers, and fans can be fruitfully combined. Classes will focus on key developments in audience characteristics and practices and will cover a variety of media and cultural fields, including art, music, film, cultural heritage, television, print, and the Internet.”