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art and (re)production #2: tests and rehearsals in contemporary art - workshop with Sabeth Buchmann (Berlin/Vienna)
Tuesday, 30 June 2015, 2-7 pm
History of Art Department, UCL
Seminar room 3
Organized by Jenny Nachtigall and Dorothea Walzer
This one-day workshop is part of the "art and (re)production" project, which is dedicated to examining the shifting configurations of technological, social and economic (re)production in modern and contemporary art and culture (andreproduction.tumblr.com)
Departing from Sabeth Buchmann's recent work on the function of tests and rehearsals in contemporary art (initiated together with artist Constanze Ruhm), the workshop wants to discuss the multiple configurations of these notions in (contemporary) art and theory. Taking into account the double character of tests and rehearsals as media of both (neo-liberal) subjectivation as much as of aesthetic production and its indeterminacy, the workshop will focus on possibilities and limitations of tests and rehearsals today.
In what ways do techniques and practices of testing and rehearsing (re)produce subjectivities in film, photography, performance or painting? How do they relate to political and economic techniques of (re)producing subjectivities and their crisis-ridden figurations? How can we rethink the relation between disciplinary and aesthetic practices, between autonomy and heteronomy today? And in what sense do (artistic) practices of testing or rehearsing urge us to interrogate categories of authorship and the artwork and the divisions of labour underlying them?
The workshop will consist of a presentation by Sabeth Buchmann, screenings and discussions; the latter will focus on two radically different approaches to the aesthetic and/or political function of testing by confronting a historical account of the essay as form (Adorno) with a contemporary feminist reading of the "body-essay" (Preciado):
Theodor W. Adorno, "The Essay as Form" (1958).
Paul B. Preciado, Testo Junkie. Sex Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era (2013) (excerpts).
Sabeth Buchmann is an art historian and critic who lives and works in Berlin and Vienna. She is Professor of Modern and Postmodern Art at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and a co-editor of polypen, a series on art criticism and political theory, published by b_books, Berlin. Recent publications include Hélio Oiticica, Neville D'Almeida and others: Block-Experiments in Cosmococa, London, 2013 (with Max Jorge Hinderer Cruz); Denken gegen das Denken. Produktion - Technologie - Subjektivität bei Sol LeWitt, Yvonne Rainer und Hélio Oiticica, Berlin, 2007 and Art After Conceptual Art, MIT Press / Generali Foundation Collection Series, 2006 (co-edited with Alexander Alberro).
