Online only: EUR presents Claire Bishop – Keynote
The department of Arts and Culture studies of Erasmus University Rotterdam (EUR) and WORM present a keynote lecture by internationally acclaimed art critic and art historian Claire Bishop (Graduate Center, City University of New York). The lecture is called Interventions: The Art of Political Timing.
Claire Bishop’s lecture begins at 17:00 CET and can be watched here.
https://vimeo.com/event/780006
Immediately after the lecture there will be a response from dr. Erik Hagoort and a Q&A.
The lecture rounds off a mini-symposium to celebrate the completion of the research projects conducted by a group of Honors students of the academic year 2020-21.
About the keynote lecture – Interventions: The Art of Political Timing – By Professor Claire Bishop
This lecture offers a historical and theoretical analysis of the term "intervention" as a way to describe a way of making art that triangulates public gesture, political timing, and media circulation. The first uses of the term “intervention” are found in Latin America during the 1970s, when a weakening of the dictatorships made it possible for artists to exploit and mobilize public space and the media at a moment of political uncertainty. Although the term undergoes a dilution of meaning in the 1990s (devolving into site-specific projects commissioned for biennials and museums), the intervention’s qualities of self-initiated transgression persist in the digital realm of tactical media. Since 2010 there has been a resurgence of interventions in tandem with new forms of political activism and dissent (Russia, Cuba, United States). I connect political timing to the idea of conjunctural analysis (Gramsci/ Hall), but ultimately raise questions about (1) the ability of this method to work with (rather than against) the attention span of social media, and (2) the inherent value of disruption and transgression now that it has been co-opted by the alt-right.
About Claire Bishop
Claire Bishop is a critic and professor in the PhD Program in Art History at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Her books include Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (Verso, 2012), and Radical Museology, or, What’s Contemporary in Museums of Contemporary Art? (Walther König, 2013). She is a Contributing Editor of Artforum, and her essays and books have been translated into twenty languages. She is currently working on a short publication about Merce Cunningham’s Events, and a collection of essays about contemporary art and attention. Her most recent book records eight years of conversations with Cuban artist Tania Bruguera (Cisneros, 2020).
About Erik Hagoort
Moulding the experience of thinking together is at the core of Erik Hagoort’s practice. He invites others to explore with him other than usual ways of thinking, speaking, writing, and interacting together. His work contains improvisations, conversations, writing, curating, teaching and coaching artistic research. Hagoort received a Ph D in the Arts in 2017 from Antwerp University & Antwerp Royal Academy of Fine Arts. Since 2006 Hagoort is tutor artistic research at the Master Institute of Visual Cultures (Academy of Art & Design St. Joost).
Hagoort is the author of Good Intentions. Judging the Art of Encounter (Mondriaan Foundation, 2005), I don’t know what you are going to say (Jap Sam Books, 2018), On encountering and improvising (Erik Hagoort, 2020).