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Place: Overgaden - Institute for Contemporary Art,
Copenhagen
Time: Saturday the 12th of May 2007 at 15.00
The talk will beheld in English and will be open and
free to all
"Many key assumptions held by an earlier generation of politically
engaged artists and activists about what oppositional culture is and
what it is not, are being challenged today by a new wave of
interventionist practitioners who are less concerned with demystifying
ideology than with 'creatively disrupting' it. Unlike most of the
critical art practices of the 1970s and1980s in which dominant
representational forms were systematically analyzed through a variety
of methods ranging from Semiotics to Marxism to Psychoanalysis, the new
approach plows directly, some would say even gleefully, into what Guy
Debord described as the Society of the Spectacle. Groups such as
RTmark, The Yes Men, Yomango, and the Critical Art Ensemble take full
advantage of increasingly widespread and affordable digital
technologies in order to practice what they call Tactical Media, a
concept inspired as much by the Zapatista rebellion as it is by the
Situationists. What is unique to these more recent, antagonistic
practices is the way they mobilize flexible organizational structures,
communicative networks, and economies of giving in order to produce a
critical disruption of everyday life. At the same time, the new
interventionist art reveals some definite similarities to the
entrepreneurial spirit of the neo-liberal economy, including a highly
plastic sense of collective identity, and a romantic distrust of
comprehensive administrative structures. In the late 1970s Adorno
cautioned that culture was becoming increasingly similar to the realm
of administration. Ironically, in the 1990s it was the world of
administration that moved closer to that of culture as private business
interests extolled the non-linear thinking and flexible working habits
of creative laborers. The aim of this presentation is to trace the
effects of neo-liberalization upon politically committed artists in the
United States by focusing on the shift from a post-war culture of
administration to that of a post cold-war culture entrepreneurship. It
concludes by asking what type of critical, artistic response is
possible under the conditions of the new, homeland security state
apparatus that emerged in the aftermath of September 11 2001?"
Gregory Sholette is a New York-based artist, writer, and
founding member of the artists’ collectives Political Art
Documentation/Distribution and REPOhistory, as well as co-editor of The
Interventionists: A Users Manual for the Creative Disruption of
Everyday Life (MassMoCA/MIT Press, 2004, 2006) with Nato Thompson, and
of Collectivism After Modernism: The Art of Social Imagination after
1945 with Blake Stimson, (University of Minnesota, 2007).
Organized by publik/
Katarina Stenbeck & Nis Rømer
Supported by:
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