The symposium-crash course takes place at the Center for Curatorial Studies and other Bard College facilities between the April 10 – 14, 2014. Participants are Vanessa Anspaugh, Amelia Bande, Gregg Bordowitz, Andrew Kachel, Alhena Katsof, Clara López Menéndez, students and faculty at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College.
_Scene B
Some lives discuss forms of infectious responsibilities in rooms of preparation, for a professional existence in a neoliberal culture-life. They converge in a physical symposium between April 10 – April 14, 2013._
– Who? Who is talking about work?
– Look around you. Who is working right now? Who is not? If there are those who are not working, what exactly are they, or we, doing right now?
– Are you working?
– No… I don’t know.
– Should artists fight to get their activities defined as work to be able to justify a demand for economical security, a sense of community, pride and recognition, or should we define what we do as something else?
– Is it still possible to deal with NY on a level of “local culture”, or is NY’s self-image too dependent on its international ties?
– A central paradox of any transformative criticism: its dreams are founded on a history of suffering, precariousness and violence.
– What would be the points of refusal to agree on in order to achieve a post-capitalist reality?
– For those alive to the fragility of power, there are many opportunities to turn situations of domination to advantages.
– Art is not outside politics. Politics is its production, its distribution, and its reception. Queer labor is the affective necessary work of queer desire. A vision of the indeterminacy of value.
– How to use that?
– We are all using ourselves as material in collaboration.
– We must make the intelligible appear against its emptiness and deny its necessity; truly challenge the question: what can be played?[1]
∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞
[1] This dialogue consists of textual excerpts from the following sources: YES! Association/Föreningen JA! [Act 5: Die Zyklische Gesellschaftsreise], Guerrilla Art Action Group [Action 46], Heather Love [Feeling Backward], Hito Steyerl [Politics of Art: Contemporary Art and the Transition to Post-Democracy], Meg Wesling [Queer Value] and Michael Foucault [Friendship as a Way of Life].
Curated by Clara López Menéndez
