7 June 2013
Kunsthof Zürich
Limmatstrasse 44
8005 Zürich
Tram 4/13/17, Haltestelle Museum für Gestaltung
Forum Kunsthof on 7 June 2013
Image: David Hammons, Bliz-aard Sale, 1983
Public disputatio or polemic discussion with the participation of: Christoph Brunner, Daniel Morgenthaler, Garrett Nelson, Aoife Rosenmeyer, Aria Spinelli, and Stefan Wagner, moderated by Dimitrina Sevova (in English)
Performances by Burçak Konukman, Garrett Nelson & Sarah Bernauer, and P.F.T. (Peter Emch, Franziska Koch, Tobias Oehmichen). And open-air screening by Hila Peleg.
Showing or Snowing Art in June?
on Art, Value, Price, Work and the Market
Art vs. Market / Market games and the play of commons / Art vs. Multitude
14.00 coffee, tea and cake
14.15 - 15.45 public disputatio or polemic discussion, Part One: Christoph Brunner, Daniel Morgenthaler, Garrett Nelson, Aoife Rosenmeyer, Aria Spinelli, Stefan Wagner, moderated by Dimitrina Sevova. (in English)
short break
16.00 – 17.00 public disputatio or polemic discussion, Part Two
17.30 – 18.30 Lecture by Aria Spinelli about the grassroots movements in Italy, creativity and commons: The cultural turn of the Occupy movement: understanding the commons as a means for emancipation
19.00 -19.40 Performative Lecture No.8: EAT HERE BLINK BLINK PART II with Sarah Bernauer and Garrett Nelson
20.00 – 20.40 Untimely live / video performance by Burçak Konukman
21:00 – 21: 40 P.F.T. experimental, melodic, noise. a play of free improvisation!
22: 30 – 23:30 Late cinema – Open Air: A Crime Against Art, video by Hila Peleg, 100 min, 2007 (in English)
[For further information on the performances and artists, please see short information below, or complete information on the project blog at outdoorplay.tumblr.com, or in printable layout in the PDF.]
As we go about discussing the value of art we must not lose sight of the fact that in the current economic relations, “in the art field speech is gold. […] Put differently, the high volume of communication required is directly related to the precarious character of the symbolic values that are being traded. Artworks are not intrinsically valuable.” [1] The discussion aims self-reflexively and in cooperation with its public to contribute to new forms of exchange, and animate awareness, solidarity, and engagement, in order to respond to how the value of art shifts within the creative leap and affective turn from where new market relations open up in an expanded economy of art beyond the gradually contracting art market in the knowledge economy and so-called creative industries.
These new relations consist of new forms of production and consumption, of use, measurement, dissemination and exchange of art, new forms of organization and market economic and social changes, and entail the transformation of the conditions of production and consumption of art. They raise the question of the value of art and creativity, how it relates to the system of measurement, valorization and capitalization in post-Fordist speculations, and how the crisis may be considered as ambiguous and open into new political and social opportunities for art practices. How do art practices relate to society as a whole, and create and imagine new systems and forms of exchange, new cultural and political realities?
Forum Kunsthof for this public polemic discussion takes as a point of departure an action by David Hammons from 1983, titled Bliz-aard Sale, in which the artist stood on a sidewalk in downtown Manhattan as a street seller offering to pedestrians snowballs arranged in order of and priced according to their size. This intervention was an art gesture not driven by a desire to gain, but rather by a desire to lose the measurement of economic scale and its relation to art, creating a speculative situation as a mockery of the market economy, introducing a new role of art in society.
[…]
Can we consider today that art is linked to business like it has never been before? To what extent has art been integrated in the economic labor system? Can we not conclude that we are all, whether artists or so-called cultural producers, active in the sphere of services in a liquid modernity in flux? Would art as services mark the end of artistic work, and lead to the work of art in the age of its disappearance into social (bio) productivity? If artistic work and its object are on the wane, so that perpetual ephemeral virtuosic performances emerge, does this liberate art practices, and create situations allowing to speak about art as non-alienated labor? Or does it rather, with the loss of its object, get integrated fully in the neoliberal conception that “culture should serve the economy” in which immaterial forms of labor virtuosity, creativity and communication are important economic sources?
Text: Dimitrina Sevova
[1] Isabelle Graw, “Talk ‘Til You Drop: The Art Conversation and the Communication Imperative,” Mousse Magazine, Issue #38, April 2013.
[Read the full text on the project blog at outdoorplay.tumblr.com, or in printable layout as PDF.]
Lecture by Aria Spinelli
The cultural turn of the Occupy movement: understanding the commons as a means for emancipation
“You can even think of flying.” MACAO, a skyscraper squatted between 5 and 15 May 2012 in the very center of Milano.
In the aftermath of the mediatic boom that covered almost daily the anti-capitalist social movements “Occupy” or “Indignados” we are still trying to grasp how much of our sense of space, citizenry, and economy has been affected. These series of protests in fact attempted to propose a new idea of what society could mean, trying to find the basis for a sustainable socio-economic exchange. Whilst the famous “99%” occasionally continue to rally in the United States, the Indignados movement occupy squares and public spaces in protest against austerity measures exacerbated by Rajoy’s political program. In this paper I wish to address the specificity of the Italian activist practices against austerity. Although the Italian “branch” of anti-capitalist activism has no name, it identifies itself in a national fight for culture as a common.
Italian squats, since the 1970s, have always been centres for free culture, activating programs of all sorts, from music to theatre or sports. Since 2011 squatting theatres has become a groundbreaking practice for redefining the sense of commons. Starting from the Teatro Valle Occupato in Rome, up until the MACAO in Milan, these newly born squats turn illegal practices into a form of experimental legality; they constitute novel institutions through “instituency”; ultimately they distinguish the notion of the “commons,” in opposition to the notion of “public.”
By working side by side with economists and jurists, their aim is to propose a reform of the Italian legislation, introducing the “commons” as a new legal form of preservation of basic needs. I wish to address these issues and try to map the socio-political and economic consequences of this ongoing practice of legalization, questioning whether this particular tendency of today’s anti-capitalist movements could be seen as an alternative.
Performative Lecture No.8: EAT HERE BLINK BLINK PART II
with Sarah Bernauer and Garrett Nelson
francis alÿs
alexander kluge
matthew barney
harrison birtwistle
bruce nauman
in three acts:
Act1. human | not human: the half & half
Act 2. zirkus, reform! dilettanten
Act 3. gutes tun. ohne etwas zu tun.
“EAT HERE BLINK BLINK I took place at the freitagsküche in Frankfurt . Four paper dinner placemats created by Sarah Bernauer and Garrett Nelson suggesting different possibilities of dialogue were used and signed during the evening by artist diners. In the second part of the performance at Kunsthof Zurich, these paper dinner placemats will be used again as material for a three act performance script as well as a potential sale of semi-anonymous works.”
This performance-lecture is part of the conceptual series Performative Lectures by the artists Sarah Bernauer and Garrett Nelson. The project is in the middle of its second year. For each lecture new sets of actions and action objects are created from an amalgam of impulses, influences and repetitions in search of new levels of consciousness. Each lecture takes new lists of sources and uses them freely and associatively to create a hyper system of knowledge within the lecture. Each reference is subverted to become either self-critical, self-destructive, hypocritical, dead-on or far flung, with a level of intended equality throughout. The artists seek to admonish their own opinions and systems of intellectual references through joint destruction, regurgitation, repetition, absurdities, well calculated games and the audience’s opinion. It is a catharsis that entangles. It is an optimistic thread seeking a clear mind like a vandalized neon sign, broken but not yet extinguished. They have had special guest lecturers including political party members, poets, soul singers, persistent ghosts and all kind of undeads. A new stage in the series is the compilation of a lexicon in a book and ebook format.
Performance by Burçak Konukman
Untimely live / video performance
I was actively working at the Istanbul 2010 European Capital of Culture Agency Visual Arts Directorate as an assistant when I was accepted to the Art Center Istanbul residency as an artist. After my graduation from university in fine arts I started to do an MA in Cultural Management in Bilgi University. I had to take responsibilities as an assistant and coordinator of projects of other artists before finding the opportunity to concentrate on my works, and experienced firsthand the production conditions of contemporary art in Istanbul. The relation between artist and institutions, the position of cultural managers, and the active players of the contemporary art world were the issues of untimely performance. I shot this performance at my studio in the art center as an artist. At the same time I had to go to work at the office at Kadirga Art Production Center as an assistant. Producing a performance based on my notes at university and my experiences, I preferred to talk to myself as a sort of reckoning. The audience who will listen to these monologues will be introduced to the features of the art world not just in Istanbul but more globally.
P.F.T.
Peter Emch – Guitar
Franziska Koch – Bass
Tobias Oehmichen – Guitar
experimental, melodic, noise
a play of free improvisation!
A Crime Against Art is a film based on the trial staged at an art fair in Madrid in February 2007 by Anton Vidokle and Tirdad Zolghadr. Inspired by the mock trials organized by André Breton in the 1920s and 30s, it playfully raises a number of polemical issues in the world of contemporary art: collusion with the “new bourgeoisie,” instrumentalization of art and its institutions, the future possibility of artistic agency, as well as other pertinent topics.
The trial begins with the assumption that a crime has been committed, yet its nature and evidence are allusive and no victims have come forward. The testimonies and cross-examinations become an attempt by the Judge (Jan Verwoert), the Prosecutors (Vasif Kortun and Chus Martinez), and the Defense Attorney (Charles Esche) to unravel the nature of the puzzling “crime against art.” Set as a television courtroom drama, the film serial presents a condensed 100 minutes version of the trial.
This is the second in a series of events this summer and autumn 2013 as part of
Opportunities for Outdoor Play? Playgrounds – New Spaces of Liberty (The Question of Form)
A transdisciplinary collective research and production project curated by Dimitrina Sevova at Kunsthof Zürich in cooperation with Prof. Elke Bippus, Franziska Koch and the Bachelor Medien & Kunst, Vertiefung Bildende Kunst of the Zurich University of the Arts.
[Read a short description of the overall project on the project blog at outdoorplay.tumblr.com, or in printable layout as PDF.]
Following event: Kunsthof Station on 6 July 2013
Psychogeography: From Urbanism to Everyday Places
How can art practices interact with everyday praxis, legislation, social norms and play, and the production of space?
On 6 July Kunsthof will serve as a station for urban interventions, traversing singular points of view and drifting as forms of research and performative actions in the District 5 of Zurich with excursions into the neighboring districts. The artists of the research and production group as urban ethnographers will collect data in order to reflect and map, through various transdisciplinary practices, the possibilities for outdoor activity and leisure, with talks and art guided walks through some of the playground places in the vicinity of Kunsthof. They will explore how time and space gets structured by their bodies and movements, but also reveal invisible layers of knowledge, which is itself spatially structured, and strato-analytically proceed to excavate the memory hidden behind the anonymizing tendencies imposed by the gentrification of the urban living environment. This aim is to psychogeographically redefine social space and place by observing and reflecting on certain processes of change and their predictability in the streets, offering a new place to the public, new forms of exchange, through the “disorientation of habitual reflexes.”
The research and production group consists of:
Amélie Brisson-Darveau, Mortimer Chen, Zoë Darling, Benjamin Egger, Max Heinrich, Petra Elena Köhle & Nicolas Vermot Petit-Outhenin, Sandra Lang, Konstantinos Manolakis, Flavio Merlo, Cat Tuong Nguyen, Kika Nicolela, Jacqueline Poloni, Romy Rüegger, Riikka Tauriainen, Navid Tschopp, and the curator of the project, Dimitrina Sevova
Kunsthof Zürich
Der Kunsthof Zürich ist ein Ausstellungs- und Veranstaltungsort
der Vertiefung Bildende Kunst im Bachelor Medien & Kunst
der Zürcher Hochschule der Künste.
Limmatstrasse 44
8005 Zürich
Tram 4/13/17, Haltestelle Museum für Gestaltung
www.kunsthof.ch
