Bojana Kunst / PROGNOSIS ON COLLABORATION

PROGNOSIS ON COLLABORATION

Bojana Kunst

“The absolutely desperate current state of affairs fills me with hope«

(Karl Marx)

On the time left to live

I.

In 2007, Carnegie Mellon University organised a series of lectures entitled Last lecture, for which several professors were asked to talk about what was really on their minds. If they had had to deliver the last lecture of their lives, what would that have been like and on what subject? The invitation from the university with the rhetorical implications of determinacy was clearly intended to challenge the lecturers and prompt their imagination to yield some additional value. The challenge got a totally different twist to it in September 2007, however, in the lecture given by Randy Pausch, Carnegie Mellon University professor of computer science, entitled Achieving Your Childhood Dreams.  After stating that he had been diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer and only had half a year left to live, he began to talk in an optimistic and humorous way about his childhood dreams, giving insights into computer science and also giving advice on creating multi-disciplinary collaborations, group work and interaction with other people. All that was accompanied by enchanting life lessons and even push-ups on stage. His lecture immediately received media attention. The lecture video became an online hit at social networking sites such as YouTube, Google Video, etc., and within a few days, the promise of him publishing a book with his lecture was worth 6 to 7 million dollars.[1]

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Published on 13/05/2010 00:25.
Filed under: Public Editing

Ana Vujanović / WHAT DO WE ACTUALLY DO WHEN WE … MAKE ART?

WHAT DO WE ACTUALLY DO WHEN WE … MAKE ART?

Ana Vujanović

If the death of art is its inability to attain the concrete dimension of the work, the crisis of art

in our time is, in reality, a crisis of poetry, of ποίησις. Ποίηις [… is] the very name of man‘s doing,

of that productive action of which artistic doing is only a privileged example, and which appears, today,

to be unfolding its power on a planetary scale in the operation of technology and industrial production.

(Giorgio Agamben, The Man Without Content)

This essay is conceived as a critical overview of the concepts supporting the principles and procedures of work in art, and their numerous and non-linear transformations throughout the history of Western culture. It is, accordingly, established as a kind of introductory assessment of the ways of work and cooperation in contemporary performing arts, without dwelling on their particularities and elaboration of the resulting collaborative modes. Indeed, my intention is not to come up with a universal ‘glossary’, but to critically focus on the concepts much too often taken for granted in the contemporary performing arts world. The central problem is, consequently, outlined from a macro-social perspective: I start from the economic/political contexts, since the 18th century’s Industrial Revolution to the current frameworks of post-Fordism and cognitive capitalism. Against this backdrop I am looking at a number of artistic paradigms which have considerably contributed to the changes in perception of artistic work throughout the 20th century: Benjamin’s concept of art in the age of mechanical reproduction (photography and film); Duchamp’s ready-made; Warhol’s pop art; digital art and (Bourriaud’s) post-production. The anticipated result from thus conceived piece of writing is sharpening of concepts frequently employed within the contemporary art scene – like immaterial work, creativity, practice, cooperation, process, reproduction, intervention etc. – in reference to their origins in Western philosophy, political theory and, particularly, material social circumstances.

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Published on 13/05/2010 00:13.
Filed under: Public Editing Tags: , , , , ,

Ana Vujanović / CONTEXTUAL APPROACH TO/IN ART

RE-HALLUCINATING CONTEXTS #2:

notes by Ana Vujanović

CONTEXTUAL APPROACH TO/IN ART

Modern western art paradigm (from 18th century on):

  • art as praxis (not poiesis as it has been since ancient Greece: see Aristotle’s Poetics). But the notion praxis doesn’t mean a voluntary public act dedicated to the regulation and transformation of the social field and relations, but as an act of expression of an individual’s creative will.
  • Reference: Agamben, Giorgio. The Man Without Content, Stanford Ca: Stanford University Press, 1999.

According to Agamben:

  • “The metaphysics of will has penetrated our conception of art to such an extent that even the most radical critiques of aesthetics have not questioned its founding principle, that is, the idea that art is the expression of the artist’s creative will.”

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Published on 18/03/2010 22:49.
Filed under: Re-hallucinating Contexts

Bojana Cvejić / INTRODUCTORY THESES ABOUT THE CONTEXTUAL APPROACH TO THE PERFORMING ARTS SCENES IN PARIS AND BELGRADE

RE-HALLUCINATING CONTEXTS #2:

notes by Bojana Cvejić

INTRODUCTORY THESES ABOUT THE CONTEXTUAL APPROACH TO THE PERFORMING ARTS SCENES IN PARIS AND BELGRADE

  • What, which context? (Context is structured by power relations)
  • Whose context? (Who is the subject of the context? In whose name do I speak? What is my relation of belonging to the context? In which grammatical person do I speak? When do I say “I” and when do I say “we”?)
  • What is to be done? (from critique to construction)

Context:

  • scene (performance), site (inscription), environment (atmosphere)
  • scene: magazines, festival and venue networks, conferences, dynamic of trends and fashions
  • site: leaving traces, possibility of structural changes, writing history
  • environment: general opinion or doxa (Roland Barthes), dominant fiction (Kaja Silverman)
  • constraints as limiting factors or as enabling conditions?
  • contingency (matter of circumstances, what’s given) and choice of position (the choice of taking a position)
  • familiar (native, or learnt, accommodated) and unfamiliar (new, to be explored)

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Published on 18/03/2010 22:40.
Filed under: Re-hallucinating Contexts

About: ILLEGAL_CINEMA

About: ILLEGAL_CINEMA

Paris edition of illegal_cinema is based on the project with the same title that Walking Theory platform (TkH) runs in Belgrade from 2007, and which was outsourced to Istanbul cultural center Depo in 2009.

illegal_cinema is conceived as an open (self-) educational project of exchange and contextualization of the auteur, documentary, activist, queer, anarchist, censored and other marginalized and in the local context hardly accessible films. The project is open to everyone interested to propose films, with obligation to speak about them, to open up discussion, or to invite guests. With this procedure we try to erase the boundaries between the editor (curator) and audience, to perform a long-term process of self-education and to create a critical cultural community. So, in this project, “illegal” means inciting another knowledge production and discourse among non-film specialists around more experimental, critical and minoritarian film production.

illegal_cinema program in Les Laboratoires means developments and transformations of existing illegal_cinema procedures and contents in the context of Paris alternative scene. As we consider continuity and regularity crucial for sustaining an influence on the context, the project will be realized every Monday at the same time (7:30 p.m.) at the Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers (41 Rue Lecuyer, Aubervilliers). It is organized by TkH platform from Belgrade (www.tkh-generator.net) and Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers (www.leslaboratoires.org). Concept of the project: Marta Popivoda, cultural worker, and film/video maker.

Published on 10/03/2010 01:03.
Filed under: illegal_cinema

About: LABorious PUBLIC EDITING

About: LABorious PUBLIC EDITING

TkH: Journal for Performing Arts Theory is an independent publication that deals with contemporary performing arts and their critical theories. Each issue is organized around a main focus – a theoretical concept or an artistic-theoretical problem.

The next issue of the TkH journal will be on the immaterial labour and conditions of work in contemporary performing arts. It would be prepared in new circumstances, and is planned as a joint issue of TkH and Le Journal des Laboratoires. The aim of the issue is not only to thematise the topic of work, but also to propose, examine, and discuss its own working procedures. Accordingly, the entire work process of editing will be transformed into the collective laboratory work of mobile teams in Belgrade and Paris. The laboratory work of editing will be done in public, opening a process of presentations and discussions about the written contributions before they enter the issue. The issue will be edited in May and June in Paris, and will be printed in August 2010, as a bilingual (Serbian/French) publication.

More details and most of the issues are available online:

www.tkh-generator.net/en/casopis

Published on 10/03/2010 01:01.
Filed under: Public Editing