JVE Theory Lives On

http://www.konstnarsnamnden.se/default.aspx?id=15843

Theory Week at Iaspis – On the Question of Theory and Practice

Date: 18-20 April 2013

Place: Iaspis project room, Konstnärsnämnden, Maria skolgata 83, Stockholm

Limited seating, please RSVP by April 12, 2013 

It is with great pleasure that we announce Theory Week at Iaspis, a programme with theoretical seminars, book presentations, film screenings, an artist performance, and a secret exhibition – all devoted to the question of theory and practice. 

The question of theory and practice in contemporary visual art might seem as constitutive as ever-present: in press releases and catalogue texts, in discursive practices and artistic references to theoretical work, in artist writing and in the context of curatorial statements and art criticism. Theory Week at Iaspis will address the question of theory and practice in the contemporary visual art context by way of analogy: by looking at the thematization of theory and practice in other fields, such as psychoanalysis, political theory, philosophy, and film. 

The event takes its name from ”Theory Week” – the one week every month when researchers of the now defunct Theory Department at the Jan van Eyck Academie for art, design and theory reconvened in Maastricht, to give and attend seminars, lectures, and conferences. The unique character of this was perhaps not the steady flow of international guest lecturers and visiting scholars, or the intense and very productive setting, but rather the fact that it was a non-academic theory production: a both scholarly and at times experimental theory production outside the university system and its formal restraints of examination. Following the severe cuts in Dutch public arts funding announced in 2011, the Jan van Eyck Academie (along with The Rijksakademie and de Ateliers) was restructured and the Theory Department along with the Design Department was cancelled by the end of 2012, leaving the formerly interdisciplinary post-academic research institute with a thoroughly reshaped Art Department. 

Theory Week at Iaspis – a miniature version of only three days – is thus an attempt to temporarily host this unique and internationally renowned research structure, to offer it to a Swedish audience, and to see what future it might have outside its own, but now former academy.

In this regard, Theory Week at Iaspis inevitably plays a role of historical representation, or of staging a certain history of the present. But that is not the purpose of the event, nor its main idea. The idea is to discuss the relation between theory and practice, and to set this relation in motion in such a way that many different formats and viewpoints can meet. For this, we have included the core structure of the Van Eyck Theory Week, the seminars of the three so-called advising researchers: Katja Diefenbach's After 1968. On the notion of the political in postmarxist theory, Mladen Dolar's Hegel Seminar, and Dominiek Hoens' Circle for Lacanian Ideology Critique (CliC). Also, two former researchers have been invited:

Oxana Timofeeva from the theory department will present her book History of Animals, and Dubravka Sekulić will introduce the Yugoslav Black Wave Cinema and her work with the book Surfing the Black.

On the second day, Friday 19 April, there will be an off-site exhibition entitled Secret Show, for which the location will be announced the same day.

On the third day, Saturday 20 April, artist Johannes Paul Raether will do his performance Volksbegierden Total Reconstruction, and the whole event will be concluded with an open discussion, moderated by artist Emily Roysdon and writer/critic Fredrik Svensk.

The seminar room will be staged by designer Johan Hjerpe.


Hegel Seminar by Mladen Dolar: ”Interpreting and changing the world”Departing from Marx's thesis eleven from ”Theses On Feuerbach” and some reflections on interpreting vs. changing, we will turn to a Hegelian view of not theory vs. practice, but rather theory as practice. Here, attention will be paid to what is usually taken as the most damaging pronouncement by Hegel, that on the owl of Minerva (at the end of the ”Introduction” to the Philosophy of Right). Through Hegel's portraits and a poem by Heinrich Heine, comments will be made on key passages, to give just a little taste of the work of close reading.

Assigned reading: Hegel, G. W. F., Preface to Phenomenology of Spirit, paragraphs 20-27

CLIC Seminar by Dominiek Hoens: ”Duras' Dark Room”
A screening of Marguerite Duras' film Le Camion (1977) will be followed by a discussion of it. Attention will be devoted to the use of the past conditional mode, i.e. the future anterior situated in the past. This paradoxical time (the future of the past) may allow us to understand how one passes from thought to action. Once this 'pass' has been made, thought no longer precedes action, but becomes an inherent part of it.

Assigned reading: Preferably the text of Le Camion (Paris, Minuit, 1977; no English translation available).

After 1968 Seminar by Katja Diefenbach: ”Unemployed positivity, or: The practice of doing nothing”

Modern power mechanisms have been examined by Foucault by distinguishing two strategies of an individualising and totalising type that mutually superimpose and shift in their effects: on one hand the production of docile bodies, on the other hand the reproduction of the population centred around the administration of valorisation and circulation processes. Is there a way to deactivate the modes of capacitating subjectivisation emerging from this field, i.e. these homines oeconomici?

This question has been raised by post-Marxist authors developing existentialist and ontological figures of poverty, indeterminate existence and whatever being to reconceptualise political agency and thus revert Foucault’s perspective of examining the subject as first effect of power. By turning to the divergent ideas of non-economic activity in Agamben and Deleuze, I would like to discuss three questions:

1) Can one think politics in existentialist or ontological terms of poverty?
2) How to conceive of the radically different ways, in which Agamben and Deleuze do so in conceptualising the idea of an activity without work, end or return?
3) What do we learn from their mutual criticisms?

Assigned reading: Giorgio Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory. For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government, (§ 8 »The Archealogy of Glory«), Stanford: Stanford Univ Press, 2011, in particular pp. 239-259, 8.22–8.26. 

Giorgio Agamben, »Absolute Immanence«, in Potentialities, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999, pp. 220–239. 

Both texts and more detailed abstract available at: http://after1968.org/index.php/seminars/view/79

"Comrades, even now I am not embarrassed of my communist past - an introduction to the Yugoslav Black Wave Cinema"

Title of this presentation is the last sentence said in the last film of Yugoslav Black Wave, WR Mysteries of Organism by Dušan Makavejev. Starting maybe at the end, during my presentation I will try to chart the exciting world of Yugoslav Black Wave. The Yugoslavian Black Wave can be considered a unique movement in the history of cinema, interesting both due to its political implication as a critical voice toward bureaucratic Yugoslavian state socialism of the 60s and its aesthetic form with a visual freedom that is nowhere to be found even in the context of European experimental cinema of that decade. Although it is nowadays almost forgotten in the western part of Europe and the United States, from that “new cinema” something completely different emerged that challenged not only the ideological and aesthetic apparatus of the then Yugoslav state but that it is still preserving a challenging stance to our contemporary approach to ways of viewing. The urgency of these films now lies not only in the fact that their topics such as unemployment, homelessness, the impediments of class immobility are, at least, as current now as they were in the 1960s, but also in the fact that they were produced as a highly critical content within the system of controlled funding. This also makes them relevant beyond the limited (post-)Yugoslav context, and the studies of 1960s and 1970s. 

Book Presentation by Oxana Timofeeva: ”Revolution with a non-human face”
The focus of this presentation is a desire for communism in perspective of it's animality. In contrast to the «Socialism with a human face» (a famous slogan for Soviet dissidents) we propose to take into consideration the idea of a (communist) revolution with a non-human face and to make a detour into searching for animal roots of communism – precisely through literary and artistic practice. Timofeeva will draw on her book History of Animals, Jan van Eyck Academie, 2012. 

Artist performance by Johannes Paul Raether: “Volksbegierden Total Reconstruction”
“Volksbegierden Total Reconstruction” is formulated as a fictitious citizens’ initiative that aims to reconstruct national socialist architect Albert Speer’s chancellery as one of the most important architectonic landmarks in German history. At the present moment the Prussian Berlin city castle is being rebuilt on the very same spot.  Protagonists of the Berlin architecture and city planning debate are cited on their positions on reconstruction, their attempt to rehabilitate fascist architecture and their obsession with “rationalist” tradition and “Stone Architecture”.

Participants: 

Katja Diefenbach, theoretician, Berlin. Her research interests are 20th century French philosophy and epistemology, in particular the relationship between post-structuralism, Marxism and deconstruction. Recently, she has co-edited (with G. Kirn, S. Farris, P. Thomas) Encountering Althusser. Politics and Materialism in Contemporary Radical Thought (Continuum 2013). She is currently lecturer at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste, Hamburg, and taught at the Jan van Eyck Academy, Maastricht, the Humboldt University and the University of Arts, Berlin. She is in the editorial board of the publishing house collective b_books and co-directs the book series Materialism and Politics.

Mladen Dolar is Professor at the Department of philosophy, Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana, and a former advising researcher at the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht. His main topics of interest and reasearch are the German Idealism, particularly Hegel, contemporary French philosophy and psychoanalysis, as well as some broader issues in cultural studies and critical theory. He is the author of ten books in Slovene, the publications in English most notably include A voice and nothing more (MIT Press 2006, translated in six languages), some 100 papers in scholarly journals and book chapters etc. He has widely lectured internationally (particularly in the US). Two new books are forthcoming in English next year.

Johan Hjerpe is a designer based in Stockholm, Sweden. For the past decade he has been designing graphics, spaces and strategic frameworks for an array of contexts and industries. The visual side of his design practise resides mainly within the field of arts, and has over the years gained focus on how design helps or interfere with social interaction. The design of frameworks focuses on integrating decision making, policy setting and daily activities within systems where mutual value-in-context emerge. His design has been published in journals like Libération and Artforum as well as Chinese and Japanese books on design.

Dominiek Hoens is a philosopher and ex-advising researcher of the Jan van Eyck Academie, where he was responsible for the Circle for Lacanian Ideology Critique (CLiC) and its activities (seminars, reading groups, invited lectures and conferences). He is also co-editor of S: Journal of the Jan van Eyck Circle for Lacanian Ideology Critique (see www.lineofbeauty.org). Besides this he published on Lacan, Badiou and Duras, on logical time, love and catastrophe. He currently teaches Philosophy and Psychology of Art at different University Colleges in Belgium.

Karl Lydén is a writer, critic, and member of the editorial board of Site Magazine. He is the Swedish translator of Michel Foucault's Il faut défendre la société (2008) and Le gouvernement de soi et des autres (2013/upcoming), and his writings on art has appeared in Mousse Magazine, OEI, and kunstkritikk.se. He completed the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program in 2009 and was a researcher at the theory department of the Jan van Eyck Academie 2011-2012.

Johannes Paul Raether is an artist, author and activist based in Berlin. Raether’s work arise in connection with his performative and collective practice. He investigates models of production of knowledge and the possibilities of emancipatory self-organization. He is co-founder of the artists’ collective Basso in Berlin. In numerous projects, Raether has investigated the concept of nation and the creation of national myths.

Emily Roysdon is a New York and Stockholm based artist and writer. Her working  method is interdisciplinary and recent projects take the form of performance, photographic  installations, print making, text, video, curating and collaborating. Roysdon developed  the concept "ecstatic resistance"and is a founding editor of LTTR. Recent solo projects include new commissions from Performance Room, Tate Modern (London), Visual Art Center (Austin), Art in General (NY), The Kitchen (NY), Konsthall C (Stockholm) and a Matrix commission from the Berkeley Art Museum. Roysdon completed the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program in 2001 and an Interdisciplinary MFA at UCLA in 2006. In 2012 she was a finalist for the Future Generation Art Prize.

Dubravka Sekulić is an architect researching transformation of contemporary cities with specific focus on privatization of public sphere and transformation of legal frameworks that precede the production of space. She is the author of the book Glotzt Nicht so Romantisch! On Extra-legal Space in Belgrade. Not limiting her research just to questions of built environment, she co-edited (with Z.Testen and G. Kirn) the book Surfing the Black on  Yugoslav Black Wave Cinema and its transgressive moments. Both books were published by Jan van Eyck Academie, where Sekulić was a researcher at the design department 2009-2011. 

Fredrik Svensk is Editor-in-chief of Paletten Art Journal & and holds Lecturer position in Art- and Culture Theory at Valand Academy, University of Gothenburg. He writes art criticism for Kunstkritikk, Aftonbladet Kultur and Göteborgs-Posten Kultur and essays for journals like Glänta, SITE, Paletten, Sarai, Neue Review, Anarchitecture, Art Monitor, Paris, Res Publica et cetera. 2006-2008 he was a curator at Röda Sten Konsthall. He is a member of OTCOP and in 2012 his research has been published in books from Iaspis/Sternberg Press (Stockholm) and Tropedo Press (Oslo), Archive Books (Berlin).

Rebecka Thor is a writer and critic, based in Stockholm. She is currently writing her PhD in Aesthetics at Södertörn University. For the year 2012-2013 she is serving as a guest teacher at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm. She was a researcher at the theory department of the Jan van Eyck Academie 2010-2011.

Oxana Timofeeva is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Philosophy of Russian Academy of Science and currently a Humboldtian Fellow at Humboldt University in Berlin. She is a member of Russian collective "Chto Delat?" ("What is to be Done"?), and the author of books "Introduction to the Erotic Philosophy of Georges Bataille (2009, Moscow, in Russian) and "History of Animals: An Essay on Negativity, Immanence and Freedom" (2012, Maastricht).