Academic Sessions: London 2008
The Politics of the Provisional
Sessions Convenors:
Jo Applin, University of York, UK ja520@york.ac.uk
Richard Taws, McGill University, Montreal, Canada richard.taws@mcgill.ca
Speakers:
Darlene Cousins (Université de Montréal) Mourning the Provisional Museum
Andrei Pop (Harvard University) The Dreamer and the Dreamed: Fuseli, Lady Hamilton, ‘The Nightmare’
Tom Gretton (University College London) Magazine Pictures Between Accumulation and Disposal: Bourgeois illustrated newspapers as a subversion of bourgeois values c. 1860– c.1890
Steven Gartside (MIRIAD, Manchester Metropolitan University) To Prefer Not
Steven Adams (University of Hertfordshire) Impressionist Painting in Occupied Paris
Mark Hobbs (University of Glasgow) ‘Condemned Forever to Becoming and Never Being’: Transience and Provisionality in 1920s Berlin
Sarah Hamill (University of California, Berkeley) Untamed Studio: Brancusi’s photography and the politics of display
Matilde Nardelli (University College London) ‘Matter Dissolves into Motion’: Cinema, provisionality and endurance
Anna Dezeuze (Manchester University) The Politics of Precariousness
Beth Anne Lauritis (University of California, Los Angeles) Exhibiting Contingency: Following the paper trail of ‘c. 7,500’
Nicholas Chare (University of Reading) Body Politics: Lisa Lyon’s provisional feminism
Ed Krcma (University College London) Resistant Remainders: Beuys, Broodthaers and Tacita Dean’s Darmstädter Werkblock (2007)
Session Absract:
Whilst in recent years a practical and theoretical interest in ‘provisionality’, often understood as suggesting certain forms of political critique, has become central to much contemporary art practice, the making and display of provisional images and objects has a long and complex history. This session seeks to investigate the condition of the provisional in relation to a wide range of images and objects, and theoretical and political positions. Provisionality can be the outcome of necessity, an incompletion brought about by lack of access to materials, perhaps within a volatile or revolutionary environment. The makeshift or ‘provisional’ can also be a self-conscious, or strategic, aesthetic reflection on those conditions. As such, it has the potential to speak to avant-garde or radical interests, although this has not necessarily been the case.
The session will explore notions of the provisional, the ephemeral, the impermanent and unstable, and ask what is, and what has been, at stake for both artists and viewers in the dissemination, reception and display of works which speak to conditions of transience or contingency. Topics include, but are in no way limited to: provisionality as resistance; utopianism and futurity; ‘preparatory’ processes and the ‘finished’ work; performativity and time-based media; monumentality and anti-monumentality; disposability; materiality and the impact of new technologies (whether contemporary or historical); strategies of authentication, conservation, display and archiving; hybridity and incorporation; processes of ‘working through’ and ‘acting-out’; provisionality as a destabilisation of spectatorship, participation and subjectivity; provisional spaces, temporary exhibitions and interventions. What are the psychic, social, political and aesthetic consequences of the provisional work of art?
Jo Applin, University of York, UK ja520@york.ac.uk
Richard Taws, McGill University, Montreal, Canada richard.taws@mcgill.ca
Speakers:
Darlene Cousins (Université de Montréal) Mourning the Provisional Museum
Andrei Pop (Harvard University) The Dreamer and the Dreamed: Fuseli, Lady Hamilton, ‘The Nightmare’
Tom Gretton (University College London) Magazine Pictures Between Accumulation and Disposal: Bourgeois illustrated newspapers as a subversion of bourgeois values c. 1860– c.1890
Steven Gartside (MIRIAD, Manchester Metropolitan University) To Prefer Not
Steven Adams (University of Hertfordshire) Impressionist Painting in Occupied Paris
Mark Hobbs (University of Glasgow) ‘Condemned Forever to Becoming and Never Being’: Transience and Provisionality in 1920s Berlin
Sarah Hamill (University of California, Berkeley) Untamed Studio: Brancusi’s photography and the politics of display
Matilde Nardelli (University College London) ‘Matter Dissolves into Motion’: Cinema, provisionality and endurance
Anna Dezeuze (Manchester University) The Politics of Precariousness
Beth Anne Lauritis (University of California, Los Angeles) Exhibiting Contingency: Following the paper trail of ‘c. 7,500’
Nicholas Chare (University of Reading) Body Politics: Lisa Lyon’s provisional feminism
Ed Krcma (University College London) Resistant Remainders: Beuys, Broodthaers and Tacita Dean’s Darmstädter Werkblock (2007)
Session Absract:
Whilst in recent years a practical and theoretical interest in ‘provisionality’, often understood as suggesting certain forms of political critique, has become central to much contemporary art practice, the making and display of provisional images and objects has a long and complex history. This session seeks to investigate the condition of the provisional in relation to a wide range of images and objects, and theoretical and political positions. Provisionality can be the outcome of necessity, an incompletion brought about by lack of access to materials, perhaps within a volatile or revolutionary environment. The makeshift or ‘provisional’ can also be a self-conscious, or strategic, aesthetic reflection on those conditions. As such, it has the potential to speak to avant-garde or radical interests, although this has not necessarily been the case.
The session will explore notions of the provisional, the ephemeral, the impermanent and unstable, and ask what is, and what has been, at stake for both artists and viewers in the dissemination, reception and display of works which speak to conditions of transience or contingency. Topics include, but are in no way limited to: provisionality as resistance; utopianism and futurity; ‘preparatory’ processes and the ‘finished’ work; performativity and time-based media; monumentality and anti-monumentality; disposability; materiality and the impact of new technologies (whether contemporary or historical); strategies of authentication, conservation, display and archiving; hybridity and incorporation; processes of ‘working through’ and ‘acting-out’; provisionality as a destabilisation of spectatorship, participation and subjectivity; provisional spaces, temporary exhibitions and interventions. What are the psychic, social, political and aesthetic consequences of the provisional work of art?