Planetary Futures Seminar: Postcapitalist Art Worlds

Adopting ‘postcapitalism’ as a broad intellectual horizon, this seminar examines the constellation of contemporary ‘art worlds’, i.e. economic, environmental, political and social systems sustaining artistic practices. As journalist Paul Mason (2015), feminist economists Gibson-Graham (2006) and others have argued, postcapitalist alternatives to the neoliberal undermining of social and environmental security are now a matter of urgency. In turn, systems arranging the production, dissemination and consumption of culture (artistic, architectural, political, literary, etc.) also have to be rearranged.

Practitioners and researchers engaged in inventing postcapitalist arts practices will discuss these conditions of production, exchange and expenditure in relation to contemporary art institutions – as well as micro-practices in individual and collective practices – through the following questions:

• What are postcapitalist Biennales, art markets and pedagogy?
• How are curators and practitioners reconfiguring the work/value of the institution, e.g. through critiques of ‘museums of the 1% (Occupy Museum, New York) and ‘the Museum 3.0’?
• How can micro-economics offer alternative modes of production?
• What sites and environments do activist and collective practices operate in?
• What is the impact on the arts under precarious economic conditions where labour, time and the materials are increasingly insecure in their value?
• How does digital/immaterial labour affect authorship and markets?

Programme

2.00        Introduction: Peg Rawes
2.15        Kuba Szreder: Art worlds beyond the gallery-exhibition nexus
3.00        Response: Andrew Barry
3.15        Suhail Malik: Postcapitalism or postneoliberalism?
4.00        Response: Peg Rawes
4.15        Break
4.30        Micro-practices panel: Chair Kuba Szreder
4.35        Mel Evans: Artwash - how oil companies instrumentalise art
4.45        Jane Rendell: Lost rocks: Silver
4.55        Neil Cummings: Feudal market enclaves in a vast educational commons
5.05        Kathrin Böhm: Trade as public realm
5.15        Discussion
6.00        Close and drinks

Biographies

Andrew Barry is Chair of Human Geography at UCL. Andrew was originally trained in the natural sciences and science and technology studies. He taught sociology at Brunel University and Goldsmiths College, where he founded the Centre for the Study of Invention and Social Process, and was subsequently Professor of Political Geography at Oxford University, before joining UCL in 2013. Andrew is the author of Political Machines: Governing a Technological Society and Material Politics: Disputes along the Pipeline, and co-editor of Foucault and Political Reason, The Technological Economy, and Interdisciplinarity: Reconfigurations of the Social and Natural Sciences.

Kathrin Böhm is a UK-based artist and founding member of the art and architecture collective Public Works, and the international artist initiative Myvillages. Kathrin has a long-standing interest in the collaborative making and extending of public spaces through methods of collective production, distribution and usage. Current and recent projects include Trade Show at Eastside Projects in Birmingham (co-curated with Gavin Wade, 2013); the International Village Show at the Museum for Contemporary Art in Leipzig (2015-16) and ‘Company Drinks’ a Barking and Dagenham based community drinks enterprise, since 2014. Kathrin contributes regularly to discussions and research about art and economy and the making of new public realms. She is organising monthly ‘Haystacks’ events that address connections between urban and rural practices and realities, and is involved in a number of self-organised initiatives such as the Eco Nomadic School and is co-founder of the artist led ‘Keep it Complex’ campaign. www.andmillionsandmillions.net   www.companydrinks.info

Neil Cummings was born in Wales and lives in London, he is professor at Chelsea College of Arts and on the editorial board of Documents of Contemporary Art. www.neilcummings.com

Mel Evans is an artist and campaigner with Platform and Liberate Tate. Her book Artwash: Big Oil and the Arts was published by Pluto Press in April 2015. Her play Oil City was produced by Platform and presented as part of the Two Degrees Festival in 2013. With Liberate Tate Mel has co-created numerous live art performance interventions to challenge BP sponsorship of Tate. Her writing has been published by Performance Research Journal, The Guardian, The Independent and Dissent! magazine.

Dr Suhail Malik is Co-Director of the MFA Fine Art, Goldsmiths, London, where he holds a Readership in Critical Studies, and was 2012-15 Visiting Faculty at CCS Bard, New York. Recent and forthcoming publications include, as author, On the Necessity of Art's Exit From Contemporary Art (2017) and 'The Ontology of Finance' in Collapse 8: Casino Real (2014), and, as co-editor, Realism Materialism Art (2015), Genealogies of Speculation (2016), The Time-Complex. Postcontemporary (2016), a Special Issue of the journal Finance and Society on 'Art and Finance' (2016), and The Flood of Rights (2017).

Peg Rawes trained in art history and philosophy. She is Professor of Architecture and Philosophy and Director of the MA Architectural History programme at the Bartlett School of Architecture UCL. Her recent publications include: ‘Housing Biopolitics and Care’ in Critical and Clinical Cartographies (forthcoming 2017); ‘Planetary Aesthetics’ in Landscape and Agency (forthcoming 2017); the film, Equal By Design, co-authored with Beth Lord, in collaboration with Lone Star Productions (2016, www.equalbydesign.co.uk); 'Humane and inhumane ratios' in The Architecture Lobby's Aysmmetric Labors (2016); Poetic Biopolitics: Practices of Relation in Architecture and the Arts (co-ed., 2016) and Relational Architectural Ecologies (ed., 2013).

Jane Rendell trained and practiced as an architectural designer, before studying architectural history. Her transdisciplinary research and writing, through which she has introduced ‘critical spatial practice’ and ‘site-writing’, crosses architecture, art, feminism, history and psychoanalysis. She is author of The Architecture of Psychoanalysis (2017), Site-Writing (2011), Art and Architecture (2007), and The Pursuit of Pleasure (2002); and co-edited collections include: Critical Architecture (2007), The Unknown City (2001) and Intersections (2000). New publications include, ‘Giving an Account of Oneself, Architecturally’, the Journal of Visual Culture (2017); 'Critical Spatial Practice as Parrhesia', MaHKUscript, Journal of Fine Art Research 1(2), p. 16; Silver (2017) for the fictionella Lost Rocks (2017–2021) A Published Event curated/edited by Justy Phillips and Margaret Woodward, Hobart, Tasmania; and with Dr Michal Murawski, she is co-editor of Reactivating the Social Condenser, a special issue of The Journal of Architecture (forthcoming 2017). Jane is Professor of Architecture and Art at the Bartlett, UCL, where she is Director of History and Theory and leads the Bartlett’s Ethics Commission. http://www.janerendell.co.uk/

Kuba Szreder is an independent curator and researcher, and Associate Professor at the Department of Art Theory at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. A graduate of sociology at Jagiellonian University (Krakow), he was awarded a practice-based PhD from Loughborough University School of the Arts in 2015. In his interdisciplinary projects he carries out artistic and organizational experiments, hybridizing art with other domains of life. In 2009 he initiated the Free/Slow University of Warsaw, with which he completed several inquiries into the political economy of contemporary artistic production. He is editor and author of several catalogues, readers, book chapters and articles. In his most recent book ABC of Projectariat, he scrutinises economic and governmental aspects of project-making and their impact on 'independent' curatorial practice.

Image credit: Noah Fischer/GULF