SUMMER SCHOOL CURATING IN CONTEXT

  LECTURE by  Dominic Johnson, Head of Drama department at Queen Mary, University of London ///  Idiot Bliss: Charles Ray’s Plank Piece I-II (1973) ///                 Abstract: Charles Ray’s Plank Piece I-II (1973) stages a critical encounter between sculpture, performance art, and photography. The work is exhibited widely, but the precise means by which Plank Piece I-II makes – or forecloses – meaning has never been adequately accounted for. For Ray in the 1970s, the works ‘ha[d] no meaning — or rather their meaning is dynamic,’ and that when he made such claims, “my friends laughed at me and said, “You idiot, it looks like the aftermath of a car wreck or a Goya print”.’ In an experiment in art writing, I pursue Ray’s ‘idiotic’ invocations, reading Plank Piece I-II in relation to car crashes, images of torture, the then-recent American War in Vietnam, and other contingent phenomena; I attempt to do so towards a possible refashioning of meaning and history in performance art and

LECTURE & SEMINAR ///   Suzana Milevska Ph.D. in Visual Cultures from Goldsmiths College London, curator and theorist of visual culture ///   Curating Participatory Art as Means for Social Change ///               Abstract: Some of the main questions to be addressed in this lecture and seminar will be what kind of socio-political conditions and juridical structures call for, allow and/or prevent the participatory art to fulfill the given promises for social and cultural change. The conundrums of participatory art are many. Curating Participatory Art as Means for Social Change is imagined as a curated participatory and self-reflexive back and forth conversation that will eventually result with a collaboratively composed cross-disciplinary questionnaire. I’ve already discussed some of the crucial contradictions and frustrations of the participatory art practices in the context of neoliberalism-driven cultural movements. For example in the text “Infelicitous Participatory Acts on

  About the International Summer School “Curating in Context” 2021 The Lokomotiva team is pleased to announce the start of the second edition of the Summer School “Curating in Context” that offers critical reflection on diverse socio-political and economic contexts, as well as the possibility to develop curatorial methods to rethink the practices of contemporary (performing) arts in relation to activism, self-organization, and critical thinking. Thematically, “Curating in Context” is related to the question of the curatorial and its extended understanding, which goes beyond black or white box presentation and representation politics. The school analyzes the environment in which art is produced and disseminated, and it focuses on the creation of knowledge and opportunities for practitioners who want to pursue their career as curators in the field of performing arts and interdisciplinary approaches. Curating in Context critically re

Abstracts on different sessions of the summer school programme, reading titles related to seminar topics, lectures, workshops and other presentations.    LECTURE: Idiot Bliss: Charles Ray’s Plank Piece I-II (1973)/  by Dominic Johnson , Head of the Drama Department at Queen Mary, University of London Abstract: Charles Ray’s Plank Piece I-II (1973) stages a critical encounter between sculpture, performance art, and photography. The work is exhibited widely, but the precise means by which Plank Piece I-II makes – or forecloses – meaning has never been adequately accounted for. For Ray in the 1970s, the works ‘ha[d] no meaning — or rather their meaning is dynamic,’ and when he made such claims, “my friends laughed at me and said, “You idiot, it looks like the aftermath of a car wreck or a Goya print”.’ In an experiment in art writing, I pursue Ray’s ‘idiotic’ invocations, reading Plank Piece I-II in relation to car crashes, images of torture, the then-recent American War in Vietnam, and