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- Dr Lora Koycheva

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Seminar: 4 february 2009 (Chair: Dr Cüneyt Çakirlar, more ... )

Dr Gavin Butt, Department of Visual Cultures, Goldsmiths, University of London, more ...

Should We Take Performance Seriously?
[a seminar on the art-work of Oreet Ashery (More ...)]

This paper engages in an extended consideration of a recent piece of work by Israeli born, London-based artist Oreet Ashery, in order to rethink the routine critical denigration of so-called non-serious forms of cultural consumption.   Taking as its backdrop the ways in which performance has recently come to be taken seriously in the discourses and institutions of contemporary visual art, the paper takes instead a fresh look at performance’s pejorative histories and meanings. It asks how we might look again at the varied approaches which posit performance as a non- serious, or value-less form of activity. It asks how queer and performance studies might refresh its approach to such delegitimated forms of cultural production in order to newly appreciate the value of putatively non-serious activity and thought. This is not in order to simply revalorise the purportedly trivial or insignificant as latterly important (a familiar move of much revisionist and progressive scholarship), but rather to ask whether part of performance’s promise might reside in making vivid a perverse form of valuing hardly acknowledged within expressly serious discourse. Ultimately the paper asks whether we might speak, and act, on behalf of a queer gravity or profundity; a form of attention which improperly honours that which it prizes.

 

This page last modified 26 September, 2012 by UCL Mellon Admin