Luis Jacob (CA): 'Commerce by Artists', book presentation

Julia Bryan-Wilson (US), 'Precarious Futures', lecture

Luis Jacob: 'Commerce by Artists'

Artist, writer and curator Luis Jacob (previously at Extra City as artist within the 'Animism' project) will speak about 'Commerce by Artists', a book he edited for Art Metropole in Toronto. 'Commerce by Artists' documents a range of artists’ projects produced since the 1950s by international artists who have sought to engage, rather than merely represent, the commercial world of which they are a part. This anthology is a comprehensive document of artworks that take the form of transactions and exchanges of value. It encompasses canonical works such as Yves Klein’s 'Zones of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility' (1958), Seth Siegelaub’s 'Artist’s Contract' (1971), and Lee Lozano’s 'Strike Piece' (1969), as well as innovative and rarely-documented works like Keith Obadike’s 'Blackness for Sale' (2001), Kelly Mark’s 'In & Out' (1997, ongoing until 2032), and Ben Kinmont’s 'Sometimes a Nicer Sculpture Is to Be Able to Provide a Living for Your Family' (1998, ongoing).

Jacob's presentation will include the network aesthetics of artist's collectives Image Bank and General Idea. Also, referring to the work of Robert Morris, Chris Burden and Cornelia Parker he will ask the following questions: Can artworks bring hidden realities to light? Do artworks also bring things to darkness, and thereby raise the issue of value (between dark and light)? What do artworks tell us about the relationship between material 'things' and immaterial 'values' (or 'meanings')?

Luis Jacob's work has been exhibited at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Städtisches Museum Abteiberg (Mönchengladbach), the Hamburger Kunstverein, documenta12, and at the 'Animism' exhibition that toured the Generali Foundation (Vienna), Kunsthalle Bern and Extra City Kunsthal Antwerpen. He currently has a solo exhibition 'A finger in the pie, A foot in the door, A leg in quicksand' at the Kunsthalle Lingen.

Julia Bryan-Wilson: 'Precarious Futures'

In her most recent book, 'Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam War Era' (2009), Bryan-Wilson explores the politicisation of artistic labour in the US in the late 1960s and early 1970s within the Art Workers’ Coalition and the New York Art Strike. In it she refers to Carole Pateman’s definition of work, by which “we do not just mean the activity that provides for most people the major determinant of their status in the world, or the occupation that the individual follows full time and that provides him with his livelihood, but (...) refer also to activities that are carried on in co-operation with others, that are ‘public’ and intimately related to the wider society and its (economic) needs; thus we refer to activities that, potentially, involve the individual in decisions about collective affairs, the affairs of the enterprise and of the community, in a way that leisure-time activities usually do not.”

For 'Reading Room' Julia Bryan-Wilson will speak about ideas of precarity, temporality, and the problem of imagining alternatives to work within late capitalism. Her presentation will invite discussion on how art, as an object and a system of signification, circulates as both commodity and sign from a feminist perspective and pose the question: what kind of mode of production does art making involve?

Julia Bryan-Wilson is an author, scholar, and educator whose research includes feminist and queer theory, craft histories, performance, video art, artistic activism, and coalitional politics. She has received fellowships from the Henry Moore Institute, the Smithsonian Institute, the Getty Research Institute, and a joint award from Creative Capital and the Andy Warhol Foundation. Bryan-Wilson taught at the Rhode Island School of Design and the University of California, Irvine, before joining the University of California, Berkeley in Autumn 2011.

'Into Eternity': film screening

After Jacob's and Bryan-Wilson's presentations, Michael Madsen's 'Into Eternity' will be screened. In this 2009 documentary, the Danish director investigates the Finnish nuclear waste facility ONKALO. Madsen: “The ONKALO project of creating the world's first final nuclear waste facility capable of lasting at least 100 000 years, transgresses both in construction and on a philosophical level all previous human endeavours. It represents something new. And as such I suspect it is emblematic of our time - and, in a strange way, out of time.”

As 'The Residence' probes relationships between the present and its afterlives, the screening of 'Into Eternity' complements this discussion of the future with an 'extreme' argument: imagining an interlocutor, terrestrial or not, literate - in the current sense of the word - or not, and addressing to this interlocutor a warning formulated today: the interdiction to dig. The ONKALO project revolves primarily around meaning - a meaning supposed to last, and to elude slippage, for the next 100 000 years. https://streamingmoviesright.com/us/movie/into-ete...

'Into Eternity' will be shown in Reading room #2 connecting with a lecture Julia Bryan-Wilson presents on Monday 20 February at VU University, Amsterdam. There, she will address ideas for markers to caution future inhabitants of the earth for our subterranean dumps of nuclear waste.

Free entrance / Presentations will be in English / Your registration through [email protected] is appreciated

Language English