Office for Contemporary Art Norway
Nedre gate 7 / 0551, Oslo / Norway
http://www.oca.no / [email protected]
Wednesday, 21 October/ 19:00
Speaker: Peter Osborne
Subject: ‘Fragment and Project: From Schlegel’s Athenaeum Fragments to LeWitt’s Sentences on Conceptual Art’
Many of the ideas central to the understanding of contemporary art – genre, fragment, project, the new or, the concepts of art and criticism themselves – derive from early German Romanticism. This lecture revisits Friedrich Schlegel’s Athenaeum Fragments as the basis for a new interpretation of Sol LeWitt’s Sentences on Conceptual Art, one of the defining documents of this movement, focusing in particular on the art-status of criticism and its philosophical function of ‘completing’ works of art.
Peter Osborne is Professor of Modern European Philosophy, Director of the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy, Middlesex University, London and editor of the journal Radical Philosophy.
21 October to 19 December
Project: ‘Sol LeWitt’s Sentences on Conceptual Art: Manuscript and Draft Materials 1968–69′
Courtesy of Collection Daled, Belgium
In January 1969 Sol LeWitt’s Sentences on Conceptual Art were first published in the magazine 0-9 (New York, NY) edited by Vito Acconci and Bernadette Mayer, and later the same year in Art-Language (UK) declaring that ‘Ideas alone can be works of art; they are in a chain of development that may eventually find some form. All ideas need not to be made physical’. OCA will present the rarely exhibited handwritten notes by the artist and illustrate the evolution of the Sentences.
Wednesday, 28 October/ 19:00
Speaker: Ina Blom
Subject: ‘On Lynda Benglis’s Mumble (An Instance of Videosociality)’
What are the critical terms through which we approach the question of ‘sociality’ in art? In 1972 Lynda Benglis and Robert Morris started an artistic dialogue through a collaborative project that, using video as a medium, seemed to turn, self-reflexively, around their evolving relationship. The two resulting works, Benglis’s Mumble (1972) and Morris’s Exchange (1973) seem to suggest that this relationship is the unique result of the productive framework of televisual technologies, and open up fundamental questions about the social art practices of the 1960s and 70s.
Ina Blom is a Professor at the Institute of Philosophy, Classics, History of Art and Ideas at the University of Oslo.
28 October to 19 December
Project: ‘Lynda Benglis’s Mumble (1972) and Robert Morris’s Exchange (1973)’
In 1972 Lynda Benglis and Robert Morris agreed to exchange videos in order to develop a dialogue between each other’s work. The resulting artworks, key examples of early video, will be screened daily.
Wednesday, 4 November / 11:00–16:00
Organiser: Will Bradley
Participating speakers include: Trude Iversen and Parallel Action
Workshop: ‘The mind of this death is unrelentingly awake’: A Workshop on Art, Criticism and the Institution of Critique (Part 1)’
What is art criticism for? How does it function? How should it change? This workshop steered will investigate art criticism, its aesthetics, its ideologies and its institutional role to focus on questions such as: How does critique take form? How does a text operate? What is the relationship between writer and text, text and reader? How does a text reach an audience? How is the discourse around art constructed? What forces affect it? If the critique of the institution of art is also, itself, part of the institution, how can meaningful change take place? As part of the workshop, works by Andrea Fraser and Martha Rosler will be screened and an independent project, including works by Pablo Helguera, Simon Linke, and David Hall, will be installed.
Will Bradley is an art critic and curator based in Oslo.
Wednesday, 11 November / 11:00–16:00
Organiser: Anne Hilde Neset
Workshop: ‘Audio Interpretation: Writing on Sound’
For whom are we writing? Who and what are we serving? Musicians, other critics, oneself, potential advertisers, the general reader, the specialist reader, an academic institution? What is our agenda when writing? How does art writing differ from writing about sound and music? These questions are approached through an introduction to different categories of sound writing. The particular discussions will evolve around a series of introductions – to pop cultural music criticism with examples cited through the work of Lester Bangs, Greil Marcus, Alex Ross, Paul Morley, among others; to sound art/critical analysis through examples by Christoph Cox, Douglas Kahn, David Toop, Jacques Attali, among others; and to selected artists’ texts as cited through examples by John Cage, Edgard Varese, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Ornette Coleman, Dan Graham, Luigi Russolo among others. The workshop will also approach how music is described in fiction, in reviews, and in theory.
Anne Hilde Neset is deputy editor of The Wire magazine and the co-founder of Electra in London.
Wednesday, 2 and 9 December/ 11:00–16:00
Organiser: Stuart Bailey
Workshop: ‘On Library, Archive and ‘Service’ (Part 1 and Part 2)’
How do we guarantee preservation and access to published material? How do we construct libraries? What are the different modes of experience that a library can offer? Stuart Bailey, member of collaborative group and event space Dexter Sinister, will lead two public workshops on the nature of the library and its function as an archive, a social space and a pedagogical tool, taking at a starting point ‘The Serving Library’, a project currently in development by Dexter Sinister.
Stuart Bailey is a graphic designer, a member of Dexter Sinister and co-editor of Dot Dot Dot based in NYC.
All events open to the public and take place at OCA at Nedre Gate 7 in Oslo. Prior registration recommended for receipt of pre-requisite readings to Anne Charlotte Hauen, OCA’s Programme Assistant, at [email protected]
Press inquiries, please contact Marthe Tveitan at [email protected]
Full programme information: http://www.oca.no/semesterplan/autumn_2009.shtml