BACA (Brixton Artists Collective Archives group) and 198 Contemporary Art and Learning inform us of the launch of their project Brixton Calling!, funded by Arts Council England and Heritage Lottery Funding. and organised in partnership with Lambeth Archives, Tate Archive, Women’s Art Library, and the IMCC at Westminster.

Brixton Calling! is a collaborative and participatory project as well as an exhibition that connects contemporary Brixton to its past. The intergenerational project will bring together Brixton artists and communities to explore some of the Gallery’s collaborative and artistic approaches to social/political issues and create new artworks that are relevant to Brixton today.

The first stage of the BACA Project will be: 50 Reasons to Celebrate, Brixton Art Gallery – 1983-86, Archiving Brixton Art Gallery & Artists Collective. The project’s main activity is a series of Community Archiving and Engagement projects that will be developed in Brixton between January and September 2011. The outcomes will form, alongside BACA archives, an exhibition that will be held October-December 2011 at 198 Contemporary Arts and Learning. The second stage will be a 2012-201 archiving and research project: BAG Archiving. At the end of the project, archives collected and produced during both stages will be transferred to Tate Archive, Women’s Art Library (Goldsmiths), Lambeth Archives and Carpenter Hall Archive (LSE).

Brixton Calling! Launch Party is scheduled for February 2011. Watch this space!

Wednesday 15 December 2010, 4-6pm
Room 350, University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street, London W1B 2UW

Paul Gladston (University of Nottingham)
‘Towards a Polylogue of Western and Chinese Contemporary Art Criticism’

Organised by our friends in the Contemporary China Centre.

Paul Gladston is Associate Professor of Critical Theory and Visual Culture in the Department of Culture, Film and Media at the University of Nottingham. He has written extensively on the subject of contemporary Chinese art and contemporary Chinese art criticism for numerous magazines and journals, and recent publications include the monograph Art History after Deconstruction (Magnolia, 2005) and an edited collection of essays China and Other Spaces (CCCP, 2009). He is currently preparing a monograph on the theory and practice of contemporary Chinese art for Reaktion and, in collaboration with Katie Hill, a guest edited edition of the journal Contemporary Art Practice with the theme ‘Contemporary Chinese Art and Criticality’.

For our Spanish friends: this coming Saturday 4^th December, IMCC Director Marq Smith will be one of those contributing to As the Academy Turns, a three-day symposium organised as part of Manifesta 8 at CENDEAC, Centro Parraga, Murcia.

As the Academy Turns is a multilayered project exploring the potentials and the tensions in the growth of artistic research and the current academization of art education. The ‘academicisation’ of art is increasingly marked by the strong expectation of research trajectories and how these will be shaped within the changing institutional framework of art education. In that context, the present possibilities of PhD research within visual art are particularly at the centre of attention and debate. What do those challenges mean for the art academy as such? Will novel forms of academic elitism pop up or will research induce a novel form of intellectual conscience in the art academy? How will research and artistic practice be intertwined? Will they produce redefinitions in both domains or is research rather doomed to be a fringe phenomenon at the art academy? And the ultimate question, how will research be conducted within art academies?

The programme is here.

Wednesday 10^th November, 1.15-2.30pm
Room 106, University of Westminster, 32-38 Wells Street, W1T 3UW

Joanne Murray (Birkbeck College, University of London)
“JG Ballard and New Brutalism”

Further details on the English Literature and Culture seminar series at Westminster here.

Excellent guest blog by our own Michael Nath at Exclusively Independent about Gabriel Josipovici’s Whatever Happened to Modernism?  and the media fuss that it’s generated:

“Professor Josipovici argues that the English novel has become caged in recent decades, and that its famous practitioners have been putting on a tame show, for all their swaggering. This has annoyed the literary reviewers and metropolitan columnists, who’re in the habit of making a fuss of certain big names, and don’t appreciate being told they’ve been cheering cows; but it happens to be true. The ranking writers and the prize-winners make it solely because the idea has caught on that ‘Modernism is dead’; the consequence of this is that contemporary writing can prowl about quite safely in its cage, or not prowl at all but just peep through its fingers.”

Read more here. And while you’re at it, check out David Cunningham’s review of Nicolas Bourriaud’s Altermodern exhibition in a recent issue of the Journal of Visual Culture. The defence of modernism begins here!

We are thrilled to announce that the IMCC’s Dr Alexa Wright has been awarded an AHRC Fellowship for 2010-11, and will be spending part of the forthcoming academic year as a Fellow at the prestigious Banff Centre in Canada.

Alexa’s AHRC project is entitled ‘A View From Inside’, and is a collaboration with Professor Graham Thornicroft at the Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College, London and Post-Doctoral Research Fellow, Dr Heidi Lempp. For the project, Alexa will create a series of eight large-scale digitally manipulated photographic portraits of people with short-term psychotic disorders or episodic conditions like schizophrenia. These images will challenge the viewer to readdress his or her ideas about ‘the type of people’ represented. Subjects will be depicted in such a way that does not make them appear different in any way, but the settings in which they are located will be altered digitally to coincide with the perceptual experiences described by each person.

The project will draw on the symbolism and techniques of eighteenth-century portrait painting as a means of representing the lived experiences of the subjects. Alexa will spend time working with individuals who experience psychotic disorders that lead to an intermittent loss of contact with reality in order to find a language comparable to the codes employed in eighteenth-century portraiture to represent both their outward appearance and their internal experience of what is ‘real’.

At Banff, Alexa will be taking part in the residency ‘The distance between our minds and thoughts equals the distance between our words and mouths’, led by Jan Verwoert, where she will produce her audio/video installation, ‘Heart to Heart’.

IMAGE=GESTURE
The 2011 Nomadikon Conference
Bergen, November 9-11, 2011

Confirmed keynote speakers:
Martin Jay (UC Berkeley)
Wendy Steiner (University of Pennsylvania)
Libby Saxton (University of London)
More TBA.

Images seduce. Images deceive. Images conceal. Images reveal. Images make icons. Images break icons. Images are agents of political struggle. Images are sacred. Images are secular. Images are powerful. Images are powerless. Images are banal objects. Images are aesthetic artefacts. Images embody cultural concepts materially. Images create concepts. Images are bodies without organs. Images are photographic. Images are cinematic. Images are digital. Images are real. Images are reality. Images are mimetic. Images are amimetic. Images are currency. Images are worthless. Images want something from us. Images witness. Images haunt us. Images are fundamentally unknowable. Images are entelechial. Images travel. Images are boundless. Images are transmutable. Images are ephemeral. Images are excessive. Images are inadequate. Images are mute. Images are language. Images are beyond language. Images disturb us. Images hurt us. Images are destructive. Images are redemptive. Images are transcendental. Images are transparent. Images are opaque. Images are worth more than a thousand words. Images are primitive. Images are historical. Images are poetic. Images are synechdochic. Images are rhetorical. Images shape the imaginary. Images are neural. Images are neutral. Images are ubiquitous. Images are haptic. Images are spiritual. Images are matter. Images matter. IMAGE=GESTURE.

Nomadikon now invites paper proposals that relate to the overall conference topic and to one or more of the streams below. Abstracts should not exceed 400 words. Please include a short bio. Deadline for submitting abstracts: November 10, 2010. Nomadikon also intends to publish one or more anthologies of articles based on material from the conference.

As a critical and heuristic trope, the gestural galvanizes many of the most pertinent areas of inquiry in contemporary debates and scholarship in visual culture and related disciplines:

a) Ethics: Images and their values and affects.
b) Ecology: Iconoclastic gestures and spaces of conflict.
c) Experience: The human as acts of mediation/product of the gaze.
d) Epistemology: Archive, document, memory.
e) Esthetics: From visual essentialism to transesthetics and synesthesia.

As both a cultural phenomenon and a philosophical concept, the notion of gesture straddles several disciplines, such as anthropology, linguistics, performance, theater, film and visual studies. At once a codified and natural expression, the gestural is peculiarly and somewhat ambiguously situated between the realm of the discursive and the realm of the instinctual, between the culture-specific and the universal, and between the corporeal and the visual. As a mode of mediation the gestural also traverses the distinct, albeit interrelated spheres of the political, the aesthetic and the everyday. A space of visual articulation in which rhetoric and semiotics intersect, the gestural produces movements and energies of eloquence capable of generating ideas, perceptions and affect.

Within the context of the present event, we would like to suggest that gesture could also rewardingly be re-deployed as a metaphorical and figurative concept. As among others Hans Belting has shown, there is a rather intimate connection between bodies and images, and if bodies can convey gestures, maybe images can too. Thus, we would like to ask: How may one speak not only of the gestures of the body but also of the gestures of the image? What constitutes gesturality in the image and, more broadly, what are the gestures of the aesthetic itself? In W.J.T. Mitchell’s already canonical postulation, pictures must be considered animated beings with drives, demands and desires of their own. They are, however, also in a sense mute beings incapable of speaking the hegemonic vernacular of logocentric discourses. But while pictures cannot speak in the literal sense, perhaps they have a gestural language of their own?

Job_Description_Programme_Coordinator

Fragments, Openness and Contradiction in Painting and Photography
Saturday November 27 2010, Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design

The restitution of the tableau form (to which the art of the 1960s and 1970s, it will be recalled, was largely opposed) has the primary aim of restoring the distance to the object-image necessary for the confrontational experience, but implies no nostalgia for painting and no specifically “reactionary” impulse. The frontality of the picture hung on or affixed to the wall and its autonomy as an object are not sufficient as finalities. It is not a matter of elevating the photographic image to the place and rank of painting. It is about using the tableau form to reactivate a thinking based on fragments, openness and contradiction, not the utopia of a comprehensive systematic order.
Jean-François Chevrier

In preparation for a two day international conference, Tableau/dispositif/apparatus, at Tate Modern in October 2011, our friends at Central Saint Martins are staging a symposium on Saturday November 27 in collaboration with the London Consortium to hear papers which address the nature of pictorial forms in contemporary practice; ‘fragmented, open and contradictory’ which Jean-Francois Chevrier opposes to the ‘utopia of a comprehensive systematic order’. This symposium is in preparation for the second day of the Tate conference which will be dedicated to the presentation of research papers.

500 word abstracts should be submitted by 1 October 2010 to Mick Finch: m.finch@csm.arts.ac.uk

The Whitechapel Salon: Matter Matters II: Performance Matters
Thursday 1^st July, 7pm
Study Studio, Whitechapel Gallery, London E1 7QX

Spanning art, architecture, performance and sustainability, this year’s series of four Salon discussions focus on the matter of ‘matter’ – its nature, substance and the productive forces that govern it. For July Gavin Butt (Goldsmiths College, London), Adrian Heathfield (Roehampton University), and Lois Keidan (Director, Live Art Development Agency) consider Performance Matters.

Co-organised by the IMCC and Whitechapel Gallery. Book now to avoid disappointment!

Tickets: £8/£6 (includes free glass of wine)

http://www.whitechapelgallery.org

Alexa Wright is currently showing a new configuration of the Alter Ego installation in Locate Me, an exhibition that examines the impact of new communication technologies on traditional concepts of space at Kunstraum Kreuzberg, Bethanien, Berlin, 22 May – 8 August, 2010. More details here.

As part of the re-launch of the Museum of London, Thomson and Craighead are making a new work for the entrance hall. The new displays open from May 28th, and they will be building the commission over the space of a week ending June 6th, so come along and see it there. Works by The Singh Twins and Keith Coventry will also be on display, and the exhibition runs until September 5th. More info here.

Thomson and Craighead are further showing two brand new works, ‘The End’ and ‘The Time Machine in alphabetical order’, in a solo exhibition at Highland institute of Contemporary Art, running from June 20th to July 25th. Finally, you can also hear the duo being interviewed on Resonance FM here.

Stefan’s report on the most excellent Scratch Orchestra event at the Culturgest, Porto, as part of their Cornelius Cardew: The Freedom of Listening exhibition, is now available here and also below the break.

Continue reading Scratch Orchestra Dealer Concert Report

Activating Brixton Art Gallery, 1983-86: Archives and Memories
Saturday 5^th June 2010, 11am-4pm
Westminster Forum, University of Westminster, 32 Wells street, London W1T 3UW

A collaboration between BACA (Brixton Artists Collective Archives) group, and the 198 Contemporary Arts and Learning, the project 50 Reasons to Celebrate, Brixton Art Gallery – 1983-86, Archiving Brixton Art Gallery & Artists Collective (2010-2012) will be officially launched in Autumn 2010.  BACA consists of five individual and original members of the Brixton Artists Collective: Teri Bullen, Guy Burch, Françoise Dupré, Rita Keegan, and the IMCC’s Stefan Szczelkun.  They were part of a significant group of artists, the Brixton Artists Collective, and were instrumental in the foundation, development and running of the Brixton Art Gallery.

The ‘Activating Brixton Art Gallery, 1983-86: Archives and Memories’ symposium at Westminster is the first of two university-based symposia that will contribute to the Project’s research and development in relation to content, context, process and dissemination.  An invited group will discuss the Brixton Art Gallery & Artists Collective’s socio-political and artistic concerns and contemporary relevance.

Speakers include: Paul Dash, Department of Educational Studies, Goldsmiths; Adrian Glew, Tate Archive; Althea Greenan, curator Women’s Art Library, Goldsmiths; Ajamu, artist; Sally Mould, Brixton Art Gallery exhibiting artist and Copyart.

The 50 Reasons to Celebrate, Brixton Art Gallery – 1983-86 project promotes and celebrates the achievement and legacy of the Brixton Art Gallery & Artists Collective and provides contexts and opportunities for the re-opening of existing archives and for future archiving of the Gallery and its Collective. The project incorporates public events and participation including a postcard project, an oral history project, a community archiving project, community-based workshops, gallery talks, symposia, a publication and a major archiving exhibition at the 198 Contemporary Arts and Learning (winter 2011). At the end of the Project, Brixton Art Gallery & Artists Collective’s old and new archives will be transferred and donated to Tate Archive for safekeeping and for broader public access (Spring 2012). Lambeth Archives, Tate Archive, Young People’s Programmes, Tate Britain and the Women’s Art Library, Goldsmiths, University of London have confirmed their support.  Artist Studio Company, Autograph ABP, Birmingham City University, London School of Economics, Hall Carpenter Archive and the University of Westminster are also confirmed partners.  

For further details about the syposium, please contact Stefan Szczelkun at: S.Szczelkun@westminster.ac.uk

For more information about the Brixton Art Gallery and its Collective and first 50 exhibitions please visit the website set up and developed by Brixton Art Gallery & Artists Collective co-founder Andrew Hurman: http://brixton50.co.uk

Old Media / New Work: Obsolete Technologies & Contemporary Art
Saturday 1st May 2010, 9am-6pm
Portland  Hall, University of Westminster, 4-16 Little Titchfield St, London W1W 7UW

Contemporary art shows renewed interest in ‘lost’, ‘obsolete’, and ‘archaic’ visual media forms and the illusion-producing processes of the past—for example: the camera obscura, the magic lantern, stereoscopy, Victorian stage illusion, shadowgraphy, optical toys, the panorama and stylised period representations such as the imagery of spiritualism, automatic writing and early photographic techniques. A platform for engagement with such ‘old media’ has been provided by the Magic Lantern Society’s popular public lecture series, Professor Pepper’s Ghost, at the University of Westminster this year. As a further development, the conference ‘Old Media / New Work’ will concentrate on art and artists working with or around such ‘lost’ practices, in order to show, discuss, and explore such work in context of contemporary relevance and future possibilities.

Speakers:
Madi Boyd (Independent): ‘Pepper’s Ghost for the 21^st Century’
Ignaz Cassar (Leeds / Nottingham Trent): ‘The Image of, or in, Sublation’
Mark Ferelli (Independent): ‘Michael Reeves Directs’
Mark Jackson (IMT Gallery): ‘Audiobooks of the Dead: William Burroughs & Konstantīns Raudive’
Ben Judd (Independent): ‘Magic, Belief, and Immersion’
Naomi Kashiwagi (Independent): ‘Reinventing the Reel: Reclaiming the Everyday’
Wiebke Leister (LCC): ‘Towards an Iconography of the White Face’
Olivia Plender (Independent): ‘A Stellar Key to the Summerland’
Peter Ride (Westminster): ‘When Everything Old is New Again’
Aura Satz (London Consortium): ‘Sound Seam: Gramophone Grooves & Primal Sound’
Dan Smith (Chelsea): ‘October Outmoded: Utopian Failure & Technological Possibility’
Simon Warner (Independent): ‘Isolating V5: Towards a Human Zoetrope’

Entrance is free but, as places are numbered, please contact the organisers, Sas Mays (IMCC) and Mervyn Heard (Magic Lantern Society), for a place: oldmedianewwork@live.com

Westminster English Colloquium #15
“No Hawkers: No Models”: The Vicissitudes of the Modernist Muse
Saturday 19th June 2010, The Pavilion, University of Westminster, 101 New Cavendish Street, London W1W

Keynote speaker: Jane Goldman (University of Glasgow)

In the spirit of Rhythm magazine’s (1911-1913) declared editorial remit – to cover the widest ‘manifestations of modernism in every province of art’ – this conference will seek to expand those categories structured round the hegemony of painting, sculpture, and literature, by looking especially at what might be considered gestural modernism, that is the experimental social aesthetics, or self-fashioning which vied with bourgeois norms. The impact of modern life on the founding processes of subjectivity was expressed in newly considered metropolitan modes of the material of identity – dress, interior décor, dance styles, cabaret/performance, photography, cinema, music, and sex. While modernist masquerades of virile masculinity were adopted by Augustus John and Wyndham Lewis, the swaggering style of the gipsy, or the apache, required emancipated women to support it. This conference aims to explore the especial difficulties and excitements of negotiation undergone by women in pre-WW1 London in their cultural positioning as artist, muse or model, or as was often the case, in these interchangeable roles.

Papers are invited on unnoticed or sidelined texts and the ways that they explore the artistic self, both structured and structuring, and that look at how modernist women produced their artistic identity or ‘enacted biography’. Possible subjects for papers: Vorticist artists sidelined by their male contemporaries: Helen Saunders, Jessica Dismorr, Kate Lechmere, and others; Jean Rhys, Katherine Mansfield and Mary Butts, who fictionalised their experiences as variously chorus girl, artist’s model, film extra, witch, dope addict and prostitute; the memoirs and anecdotes of ‘celebrity’ artists’ models, e.g. Dolores, Puma (Minnie Lucy Channing), Betty May, Viva (Booth) King, Euphemia Lamb, Lillian Shelley; the work of dancers such as Margaret Morris, Gertrude Hoffmann, Alice Mayes, Lydia Sokolova …

Proposals of around 300 words should be sent by no later than May 1st to Anne Witchard: a.witchard@westminster.ac.uk

The Whitechapel Salon: Matter Matters I: Popular Matters
Thursday 13^th May, 7pm
Study Studio, Whitechapel Gallery, London E1 7QX

The Whitechapel Salon is back! Spanning art, architecture, performance and sustainability, the forthcoming year-long series of four Salon discussions focus on the matter of ‘matter’ – its nature, substance and the productive forces that govern it. Chris Horrocks, Principal Lecturer, Kingston University and Julian Stallabrass, Reader, Courtauld Institute of Art consider Popular Matters including mass culture, vernacular photography, Web 2.0 and user-generated content.

Book now to avoid disappointment! Book your ticket here.

Tickets: £8/£6 (includes free glass of wine)

http://www.whitechapelgallery.org

Thomson & Craighead will be showing ‘A Short Film about War’ as an installation for the first time at the MyWar exhibition at the Foundation for Art & Creative Technology (FACT) in Liverpool, running from March 12 – May 30 2010. It will appear alongside works by Phil Collins, Renzo Martens, Milica Tomic, Knowbotic Research, Harun Farocki, Sarah Vanagt, Joseph Delappe, Oliver Laric, Dunne & Raby, Harrell Fletcher and SWAMP.

Animate Projects have also commissioned Lisa LeFeuvre to write a contextual essay about the piece, which is available on their website to read and download as a diffusion book alongside a streaming version of the work. Read Lisa’s essay here.

Old Media / New Work: Obsolete Technologies & Contemporary Art
Saturday 1st May 2010, University of Westminster, London

Contemporary art shows renewed interest in ‘lost’, ‘obsolete’, and ‘archaic’ visual media forms and the illusion-producing processes of the past—for example: the camera obscura, the magic lantern, stereoscopy, Victorian stage illusion, shadowgraphy, optical toys, the panorama and stylised period representations such as the imagery of spiritualism, automatic writing, audio-technologies and early photographic techniques.

Co-organised by the Magic Lantern Society and the IMCC—in the wake of 2009-10’s popular public lecture series, Professor Pepper’s Ghost, at the University of Westminster—Old Media / New Work will provide a forum at which artists working with or around such ‘lost’ concepts and technologies can come together to show, discuss, and explore their own work in context of these past techniques, their contemporary relevance, and their future possibilities. The conference will also be documented and continued by a new WordPress website that will allow participants to upload images, texts and comments.

Confirmed participants include: Jonathan Allen; Geoff Coupland; Mark Ferelli; Mark Jackson; Juliette Kristensen; Susan MacWilliam; Olivia Plender; Joseph Ramirez; Aura Satz; Dan Smith; Simon Warner; Isabel White

The organisers, Mervyn Heard and Sas Mays, welcome participation from established practitioners, as well as up-and-coming artists and researchers and specialists in the field. Interested parties should send a short (250-word) description of their topic and their CV, by 14^th March 2010, to: OldMediaNewWork@live.com

THE 2010 VISUAL CULTURE STUDIES CONFERENCE
To book email info@instituteformodern.co.uk or download the booking form here 

Thursday 27 May – Saturday 29 May, 2010
Venue: The Old Cinema, 309 Regent Street, University of Westminster, London
£50/25 concessions, booking essential 

Confirmed contributors: Glen Adamson (RCA/V&A); Lisa Cartwright (UC, San Diego); Sarah Chaplin (Greenwich); Will Cobbing (Wimbledon College of Art); David Cunningham (Westminster); Mark Dunhill (Central Saint Martins); Esther Gabara (Duke); Elizabeth Guffey (SUNY, Purchase); Raiford Guins (SUNY, Stony Brook); ); Gary Hall (Coventry); Michael Ann Holly (The Clark Institute); Guy Julier (Leeds Met); Esther Leslie (Birkbeck); Stephen Melville (Ohio State); Nicholas Mirzoeff (NYU); W.J.T. Mitchell (Chicago); Joanne Morra (Central Saint Martins); Keith Moxey (Columbia); Laura Mulvey (Birkbeck); Griselda Pollock (Leeds); Adrian Rifkin (Goldsmiths); Joy Sleeman (Slade); Marquard Smith (Westminster); Penny Spark (Kingston); Marita Sturken (NYU); Divya P. Tolia-Kelly (Durham); Victoria Walsh (Tate Britain); Joanna Zylinska (Goldsmiths)