Of All Possible Things

Jeremiah Day, Krakersmonument (Squatter’s Memorial), 2009

On November 9th & 10th, If I Can’t Dance, in collaboration with the Stedelijk Museum, presents two evenings/performances with Jeremiah Day, entitled Off All Possible Things. A structured improvisation incorporating movement, speech, slide-show and accompanied by the musician Bart de Kroon, each evening will have a different trajectory. Dealing with the problems of transmissibility and the conflicts of public life, this site-specific work will take place in the new commercial office area of Amsterdam Zuidas, in a site yet to be determined.

In an earlier work, the Squatter’s Memorial, Day touched upon a number of questions:
- If this space for such talking – reflection, debate, discussion – does not exist, can we build it?
- Why, or why not? What are the concrete reasons?
- And since it seems clear that we have not built it – have not built this space for reflection – what indeed have we built? If we don’t have such a place for discussion, what do we have?

In outline, these questions frame a backdrop for the ongoing new work by Day, commissioned by If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution. Previous elements of this commission include a performance last June in the Gdansk shipyards; and a presentation of work as part of the exhibition Work at Essays and Observations in Berlin. Ongoing efforts include the negotiation with Lidl Corporation over a former checkpoint in East Berlin, and in early Spring 2012, If I Can’t Dance, in collaboration with Site Gallery, presents a solo exhibition of Jeremiah Day at Site Gallery in Sheffield; a publication is forthcoming. Jeremiah Day is one of five artists commissioned by If I Can’t Dance to make a new work as part of Edition IV – Affect (2010-2012). If I Can’t Dance’s programme is financially supported by the Mondriaan Foundation, the Culture Programme of the European Union, the Amsterdam Fund for the Arts, and the Netherlands Foundation for Visual Arts, Design and Architecture. With thanks to Arcade Fine Arts and Ellen de Bruijne Projects.

Coordinates
November 9-10th, 20:00
Zuidas, Amsterdam (location tbc)
tickets: € 7,50 (pay upon arrival)
reservations: bookings@ificantdance.org

More Information
http://ificantdance.org

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Discussions on Architectural History

During the month of November, two events pick up on recent discussions regarding the discipline of architectural history:

On Monday November 7th, architectural historian Andrew Leach (Griffith University, Australia) will give a public lecture about two book projects: his recent publication What is Architectural History? (Cambridge, 2010) and one that is still in the making.

Andrew Leach is a Senior Lecturer in Architecture at Griffith University, where he also holds an Australian Postdoctoral Fellowship. He studied history of art and history of architecture at Victoria University of Wellington, earning his doctorate from Ghent University in 2006. He has held academic positions and fellowships in New Zealand, Belgium, Italy and Australia, where he has been based since completing his work at Ghent. Among his books are Manfredo Tafuri: Choosing History (Ghent 2007) and What is Architectural History? (Cambridge 2010), as well as the edited volumes Architecture, Disciplinarity, and the Arts (Ghent 2009) and Shifting Views: Selected Essays on the Architectural History of Australia and New Zealand (St Lucia, Qld 2008). From 2006-2009 he was co-editor of Fabrications: The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand. His current writing concerns the uses made of the baroque subject in twentieth-century Italian debates on the tools and tasks of history and the role of the historian in architectural culture. His spare time is spent trying to understand the Australian city of Gold Coast, on which he has also started to write.

Coordinates
November 7th, 16:00
VU University
The lecture is open to the public, but please register by sending an email to n.j.vanderkolk@student.vu.nl.
You will receive a confirmation of the room number in due time.

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Andrew Leach will also be giving the keynote address at the Architectural History as [Applied] Science Symposium, taking place in Leuven (Belgium) on November 9th & 10th. Other speakers and respondents include our very own Freek Schmidt, as well as one of VU’s former lecturers in Architectural History: Petra Brouwer (now Assistent Professor of Architectural History at UvA) and many international guests. The symposium is organized on the occasion of Prof. Luc Verpoest’s retirement from the KULeuven.

After graduating as an architect-engineer in 1969 and the completion of a PhD in 1984 at the KULeuven, Luc Verpoest took up a professorship in architectural history, 19th-20th centuries, and history and theory of conservation at the same university. He taught several generations of students and developed research on the history of architectural education, the Belgian catholic Gothic Revival, the history, theory and practice of conservation in Belgium. Furthermore, he is active in the Raymond Lemaire International Centre for Conservation, is chairman of Monumentenwacht Vlaanderen and co-founder of DOCOMOMO Belgium. His alumni, colleagues and friends took the initiative to organize a symposium on architectural history as [applied] science following Luc Verpoest’s retirement on 1 October 2010.

Coordinates
November 9-10th
Provinciehuis Vlaams-Brabant (Provincieplein 1, 3010 Leuven, Belgium)

Programme & Registration
http://kadoc.kuleuven.be/nl/acti/stu/architectural_history_applied_science.php

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Kunstschrift: Abraham Bloemaert. Een Geliefde Meester

The October/November issue of Kunstschrift is dedicated to Abraham Bloemaert, a Dutch painter most commonly known as one of the ‘Haarlem Mannerists’. This issue appears on the occasion of the exhibition Het Bloemaert-effect: Kleur & Compositie in de Gouden Eeuw (Centraal Museum, Utrecht) and includes articles by Paul van den Akker and Ruud Priem. As usual, you can download the introduction from this site.

Coordinates
Het Bloemaert-effect: Kleur & Compositie in de Gouden Eeuw
November 11th, 2011 – Februari 5th, 2012
Centraal Museum, Utrecht

Kunstschrift
Abraham Bloemaert. Een Geliefde Meester (pdf)
nr. 5, 2011
(website)

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Open: Emergency Issue

There is no way you haven’t heard it: the cultural sector in the Netherlands is looking at major cutbacks. The Dutch government’s new cultural plan and the retrenchments have intruded on our comfort zone and roughly awoken us from our reflective and theorising positions as critical observers. This ‘emergency issue’ of Open. Cahier on Art and the Public Domain is a special edition that accompanied De Groene Amsterdammer on September 23, 2011. It not only addresses the austerity measures, but also pays special attention to the overarching ideology and the right-populist government policy from which these arise.

Similarly, the publication does not merely defend the position of the arts, but is a record of public opposition to what many believe is a malicious policy that is adversely affecting or excluding growing numbers of groups (the sickly, immigrants, refugees, children, the elderly, artists, ‘ordinary’ people) and issues (relating to culture, knowledge, the environment, education, health care, multiculturalism). Contributors include Sven Lütticken and Jeremiah Day (both VU University), as well as many others.

You can download the issue (in Dutch) for free via the website of SKOR (Foundation for Art and Public Domain):
http://www.skor.nl/eng/activities/item/open-emergency-issue-the-new-politics-of-culture?single=1

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Métamatic Artists’ Lectures Series

In 2009 the Métamatic Research Initiative set out to investigate Jean Tinguely’s exploration of the relationship between the artist, the art work and the viewer as expressed in his Métamatic sculptures. Last winter eight artists have been commissioned to undertake artistic research. The artists are now halfway through their projects and will speak in Amsterdam about their art and their commission during the autumn of 2011 and the spring of 2012.

The Métamatic Research Initiative and the Faculty of Arts, VU University Amsterdam kindly invite you to the first lecture in the Métamatic Artists’ Lecture Series.

Ranjit Bhatnagar
4 October, 20:00h (doors open 19:30)
Felix Meritis, Keizersgracht 324, Amsterdam

Each lecture is free to the public and will be presented in English.
Please RSVP at paul@allartinitiatives.org

The academic context for the events is facilitated by the Faculty of Arts, VU University, Amsterdam.
More information regarding the lecture series and the Métamatic Research Initiative is available at www.metamaticresearch.info and www.let.vu.nl.

More upcoming lectures:
6 December 2011 Brigitte Zieger (France)
7 February 2012 Aleksandra Hirszfeld (Poland)
6 March 2012 Olaf Breuning (USA)
3 April 2012 João Simões (Portugal)
1 May 2012 Pors & Rao (India)
5 June 2012 John Bock (Germany)
19 June 2012 Jon Kessler (USA)

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Symposium: Remix in Retrospect

The annual Re-Mix symposium is organised within the framework of the English-language interdisciplinary minor program ‘Re-Mix: Creativity, Participation and Ownership in a Digital Age’, which is hosted by the Department of Arts and Culture at VU University Amsterdam. This year, the symposium is more specifically connected to the course ‘From Commonplace to Copy-Paste: Readers Using Texts’, focusing on a diachronic point of view.

How may knowledge of historical developments in manuscript and print culture feed the current debate on authorship, reading, copy-right, and creativity in the digital age? And how may a contemporary point of view help us understand and evaluate past practices?

Six internationally renowned speakers will discuss the changing roles of authors and readers in different stages of media history (from manuscript to print and digital textuality) and the implications of these changes for the creation of texts and the status of authorship.

A round table discussion involving all speakers as well as the audience will conclude the afternoon.

Date: 21 October 2011
Time: 1 PM-6 PM
Location: VU University Amsterdam

For more information, please visit http://remix-in-retrospect.blogspot.com

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