Researchers from across London are invited to participate in a series of conversations to discuss their ideas and respond to some of the themes present in current and future exhibitions. Hayward Gallery
The Hayward Gallery is closed from February to May 2010 for essential repairs and renewal. It reopens on 19 June with the spectacular exhibition Ernesto Neto. In the mean time the Hayward Touring Exhibitions continue their journey around the country.
SPEAKERS: TARU ELFVING AND OLIVER HARRIS
Taru Elfving will discuss the act of witnessing and the address of the viewer in contemporary visual culture. Elfving with argue that when the viewer is addressed, or called to witness, the habitual positions and conventional modes of viewing are momentarily unsettled. Yet the viewer becomes simultaneously implicated through the act of witnessing, entangled with(in) the narratives and events witnessed, allowing for a rethinking of active spectatorship and the viewer’s sense of responsibility. Follow this link to access ‘The Viewer Interrupted’.
Oliver Harris will introduce his research on the myth of Actaeon as the starting point for an exploration of shame, guilt and voyeurism. Drawing on other myths of transgressive sight – Orpheus and Pentheus in particular – as well as contemporary debates regarding pornography and the law, Harris will also address the recent exhibition and closure of Richard Prince’s installation ‘Spiritual America’ (1983) at Tate Modern. Follow this link to access ‘The Trial Of Actaeon’.
Contextual material for further reading:
Haraway, Donna, Modest_Witness@Second_Millenium.Femaleman©_Meets_OncoMouse™, Routledge, New York and London, 1997
Vivian Sobchack, The Address of the Eye. A Phenomenology of Film Experience. Princeton, new Jersey, Princeton University Press, 1992
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Ovid, The Metamorphoses
Pierre Klossowski, Diana at her Bath/ The Women of Rome, Marsilio, 1998
Jacques Lacan, ‘The Signification of the Phallus’ in Écrits, Routledge, 1977
Benvenuto Bice, Concerning the Rites of Psychoanalysis, or The Villa of Mysteries, Routledge, 1994
SPEAKERS BIOS:
Taru Elfving is an independent curator and writer based in London (UK) and Turku (FIN). She has written extensively on the figure of the girl as well as on the encounter between art works and their viewers, and has just completed her PhD research on this with a focus on Eija-Liisa Ahtila’s video installations at Visual Cultures, Goldsmiths College. Her curatorial practice concentrates on artistic research and exchange as well as site-specific exhibitions internationally. She teaches in art academies in Scandinavia and the UK.
Oliver Harris gained a BA in English Literature and an MA in Shakespeare studies at UCL. In between, he studied creative writing at UEA. He writes for the TLS and Bad Idea magazine. His PhD concerns the place of psychoanalysis in relation to myth, philosophy and science.
#2 Examining the “experience of the visitor”
Last night in the Dan Graham Pavilion, Hayward Gallery
SPEAKERS: STEFANO COLLICELLI CAGOL & SEPH RODNEY
Stefano Collicelli Cagol introduced his research into the ‘New Wing’ of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, opened in 1954 under the directorship of William Sandberg. Intended to place the institution in constant dialogue with the city, this innovative exhibition space reflected Sanberg’s belief in contemporary art as an agent of change in everyday life. Cagol’s presentation focused on how the ‘New Wing’ put into question the assumptions implicit in traditional museum display strategies, and pointed to new ways of experiencing an art institution. Follow this link to access ’The New Wings at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam’.
Seph Rodney looked at the museum or gallery visit through the lens of migration. Positioning the visitor as a ‘migrant’, and drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of ‘habitas’, he compared and contrasted the experiences available in modern and contemporary art exhibition spaces. Follow this link to access ’Why the Tourist needs to become a Migrant’.
Contextual material for further reading:
Petersen, Ad and Brattinga, P., Sandberg: een documentaire = a documentary, Amsterdam: Kosmos, 2005
Petersen, Ad., Sandberg, designer and director of the Stedelijk, Ad Petersen: Rotterdam: 010, 2004.
Petersen, Ad., Sandberg graphiste et directeur du Stedelijk Museum,Paris: Editions Xavier Barral, 2007
O’Doherty, B., Inside the White Cube. The Ideology of the Gallery Space,London: University of California Press, 1999
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Bourdieu, P., (with Darbel, A. & Schnapper, D. / 1990). The love of art: European art museums and their public,
Beattie C. and N. Merriman (Trans.) Cambridge: Polity.
Heath, C. and vom Lehn, D. Configuring Reception: (Dis-)Regarding the ‘Spectator’ in Museums and Galleries. Theory, Culture & Society 21, 6 (2004), 43—65.
Foner, N. (2005). In a new land: a comparative view of immigration, New York: New York University Press.
SPEAKERS BIOS:
Stefano Collicelli Cagol is PhD student at the Curating Contemporary Art department of the Royal College of Art, London. His research project is related to the transformations of the conditions of display in Italy after the Second World War. Before moving to London from Italy, he was Research Curator at the Villa Manin - Centre for Contemporary Art, Passariano. From 2004 to 2006 he received a postgraduate fellowship from the Department of History of Arts at the University Ca’ Foscari, Venice (Italy) for research on the Venice Biennale of Visual Art. In 2008, he published the book Venezia e la vitalità del contemporaneo. Paolo Marinotti a Palazzo Grassi (1959-1967). He has written several articles on the Venice Biennale and he collaborates with the magazine Domus. Recently, he has been appointed Tutor of the Young Curators’ Residency programme organized by the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo and the Fondazione Garrone.
Seph Rodney emphasizes that he: “sincerely wishes that the moments of a genuine, electric contact were simply guaranteed by the work of art - but knows that, unfortunately, they are not.” Therefore he has chosen to engage with art and cultural criticism in a few ways: He is host and partner of the intermittent radio show The Thread, which broadcasts on Resonance FM. As such, he attempts to help to make a space for real inquiry into current culture, not for critique, but for comprehension. He also occasionally writes for an art journal or two. However, he spends the majority of his time working on his research PhD in the London Consortium program. His work concerns the visitor’s experience, perceived through the lens of migration, and using the case studies of two great museums of modern and contemporary art to contrast ways of obtaining symbolic capital. He intends to submit this thesis in September 2010. He comes originally from Jamaica and though filtered through New York, LA and London.
Comments:
“We’re in danger of falling into an equivocation here between physical exhaustion and exhausting the possibilities”
“Possible-worlds analysis of an event. Event = point at which possible-worlds diverge.”
thank you to all of those who were present and made it a great evening ; )
Sam McAuliffe and Sandra Plummer were in conversation on the concept of the ‘thought-event’ through Deleuze.
McAuliffe addressed the logic specific to the incommensurability between the being of the possible and the actual that the event gives to be thought. Follow this link to access ‘Deleuze and the Index of the Possible’.
Plummer considered thought via Deleuze’s account of maps and trajectories in his Essays Critical and Clinical and his concept of the phantasm in Logic of Sense. The discussion explored what these ideas convey in relation to the event of thought in the exhibition ‘Walking in My Mind’ currently showing at Hayward Gallery. Follow this link to access ‘Reading Walking in My Mind through Deleuze’s phantasm’.
Contextual material for further reading:
Gilles Deleuze, ‘The Exhausted’, in Essays Critical and Clinical, London and New York: Verso, 1998.
Gilles Deleuze,’Thirtieth Series of the Phantasm’, in The Logic of Sense, London: Continuum, 2004.
Gilles Deleuze, ‘Foucault’, ed. and trans. Sean Hand, London: Athlone Press, 1988.
SPEAKERS BIOS:
Sam McAuliffe is currently a PhD candidate and Visiting Tutor at Goldsmiths College within the Visual Cultures department, with a background in modern European philosophy and literature. He is also a Research Board Group member of the university’s Centre for Research in Continental Philosophy. His doctoral thesis, entitled ‘Thinking in Thought: Image, Concept, and Their Relation in Benjamin and Adorno, Blanchot and Deleuze,’ is a study of the tendencies informing the recasting of “the image” within twentieth-century philosophy as the condition for the exercise of thinking itself in its various forms (from ontology, logic, and linguistics, to ethics and aesthetics). Outside of his doctoral research he is currently working on a number of related studies: ‘“A Point of View on Health”: Sickness and Perspective in Nietzsche’; “Breaking-Off: On the fiction of Peter Handke”; “Derrida, Literature, and the Absolute Referent”; and “The Melancholy of Form,” a study of the problem of aesthetic autonomy.
Sandra Plummer is an artist and writer who has recently completed her PhD at the London Consortium, Birkbeck. Her PhD thesis Photography after Deleuze: Ontology, Reflexivity and Materiality addressed the ontology of the photograph via Deleuze’s concepts of simulacrum, surface and the time-image. In 2007 her article on Vik Muniz was published inTextile: The Journal of Cloth and Culture. During 2008-9 she was a Visiting Lecturer in Photography at Middlesex University and a Guest Lecturer at Sotheby’s Institute of Art. Her current research addresses contemporary self-referential photography and attempts to posit the photograph as an object.
