Event overview
As part of the Visual Cultures Guest Lecture Series, Stephen Wright, an art writer, independent researcher and curator, will be delivering a lecture titled, 'Art after Spectatorship'.
To an even greater extent than objecthood or authorship, spectatorship continues to enjoy almost self-evident status in conventional discourse as a necessary component of any plausible artworld. The critical sermons of contemporary art are rife with celebration about free and active viewer participation. Yet is there not something almost pathetic about such claims at a time when ever more practitioners are deliberately impairing the coefficient of artistic visibility of their activity, challenging the very regime of visibility designated by the collective noun “spectatorship”? When art appears outside of the authorized performative framework, there is no reason that it should occur to those engaging with it to constitute themselves as spectators. Such practices seem to break with spectatorship altogether, to which they prefer the more extensive and inclusive notion of usership. Is the current mainstream focus on spectatorship – as a number of recent theoretical publications suggest – not merely a last-ditch effort to stave off a paradigm shift already underway in art? Why and when in the history of ideas did spectatorship – let alone disinterested spectatorship to use Emmanuel Kant’s paradoxical term – emerge as the linchpin institution of visual art? And above all, what alternative forms of usership of art are today being put forward to displace and replace it?
STEPHEN WRIGHT
Art writer, independent researcher and curator. Former research fellow in the "Art and Globalisation" programme at the Institut national d'histoire de l'art (Paris) and programme director at the Collège international de Philosophie (Paris), Dr. Wright has taught a post-graduate seminar at the Ecole nationale supérieure des Beaux Arts (Paris) and has lectured extensively in Europe and internationally. He has organised conferences at Tate Modern (London), Columbia University (New York), Palais de Tokyo (Paris), INHA (Paris), Musée d'art contemporain (Montreal), Aksanat (Istanbul), Videobrasil (Sao Paulo)... Member of the International Art Critics Association, former European Editor of the Montreal-based contemporary art journal Parachute (1997-2005), and editorial board member of the London-based journal Third Text, Dr. Wright has written widely on emergent art and art-related practice as forms of knowledge production in a context of globalisation. As a curator, Dr. Wright has produced a series of exhibitions and publications dealing with art practices with low coefficients of artistic visibility, including The Future of the Reciprocal Readymade (New York, 2004),Dataesthetics (Zagreb, 2007), Rumour as Media (Istanbul, 2006), Palestinian Products (Cairo, 2005), Recomposing Desire (Beirut, 2008) and Diggers All! (Montreal, forthcoming 2010). Laureat t of the European Art Essay competition (2008), he is currently working on the book-length essay Arbitrating Attention, and is putting together a collection of essays, Specific Visibility.
Dates & times
Date | Time | Add to calendar |
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28 Jan 2010 | 5:00pm - 7:00pm |
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