Art & politics & fiction & sex & death & aesthetics & reading & dialectics & philosophy & horror & sleeping & reading & music & intensity & jouissance &...

8 speakers negotiate diverse positions mapping the radical terrain of the ampersand.

17 November 2007, ICA, The Mall, London SW1Y 5AH

Symposium convened by John Russell & Alun Rowlands, University ofReading.

Art & … symposium understands that the contemporary discourses of art cannot be conceived of as an autonomous specialism - ‘Art’, but as a space of transversality and connectivity: ‘Art &….’ Art might be a name for this moving sideways, for the fostering of specifically transversal connections. This transversal movement (in line with Guattari’s definition of transversality) explicitly sets out to de-territorialise the disciplines, fields and institutions it works across. The co-ordinating conjunction of ‘&’ therefore is not an inclusion mechanism, a random stringing together, or a series of contextual filiations. It is a modality of the between that produces temporary alliances between practices and fields.

The symposium addresses the crucial problem as to how transversal practices might be engaged with critically, without fixing or limiting the potential of these transforming practices and connective discourses. Art &… therefore explores and evaluates the various forms and performances of transversal art and, in extension, the idea that critical engagement with these practices might itself be more productively staged as a form of transversality.

In response to these research problems and objectives Art &… addresses three interlinking questions: How might notions of art and criticism - the definitions, functions and staging of art - be diagrammed in relation to transversal ideas and performances? In which ways can transversal practice be  seen  to be a form of self-articulation -  through which type(s) of performance, action or fiction does this articulation occur? How can these ideas and practices of connectivity be critically evaluated, documented and disseminated within a form that performs these ideas and practices as a structure for critical engagement?

FELIX ENSSLIN is a philosopher, a stage director, dramaturge, & curator. Ensslin studied philosophy & drama at the New School of Social Research, New York; worked as executive staff in the German parliamentary group Bündnis 90/Die Grünen for two legislative periods; stage director & dramaturge at the Deutsche Nationaltheater Weimar, where he staged, among others, Friedrich Schillers »Die Räuber« & put on stage his own dramatic piece »Durch einen Spiegel ein dunkles Bild«. In 2005, he curated together with Ellen Blumenstein & Klaus Biesenbach the exhibition »Regarding Terror: The RAF-Exhibition«; in 2007 the exhibitions »Between two deaths« at ZKM Karlsruhe & »Berlin Noir« at Perry Rubenstein Gallery, New York, followed. He will talk on ‘And.Encore.Repetition.Jouissance and Art today’ with reference to the ‘Between Two Deaths’ exhibition.

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FABIENNE AUDEOUD Artist and musician. 
If not the sound track to images and the marker of social identities what is music doing in art?
If the audience has become the form in music: How do you perform it in art? 
If the audience - as size - buys itself: How is this gesture/exchange happening?
She will address questions around music in art and work live on the composition of a third version of "the hit".


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PETER OSBORNE Professor of Modern European Philosophy and director of the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy, Middlesex University, London (since 1994). He is also editor of the journal Radical Philosophy (since 1983). He is the author of – among other books – The Politics of Time: Modernity and Avant-Garde (Verso, 1995); Philosophy in Cultural Theory (Routledge, 2000); Conceptual Art (Phaidon, 2002); and Marx (Granta, 2005). Additionally, he is a contributor to Afterall, Art History, October, Oxford Art Journal, and various catalogues including Manifesta 5 (San Sebastian, 2004); Time Zones (Tate Modern, 2004); and Zones of Contact (Sydney Biennial, 2006). His paper examines Art & Non-Art: Dialectics of Non-Identity. Ampersand & distinction; typesetting as the home of pop conceptualism in reverse. 


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MARIA FUSCO IS PATRICIA MacCORMACK Maria Fusco is a Belfast-born writer. She is Director of Art Writing at
 Goldsmiths College, and the editor of The Happy Hypocrite, a new journal for and about experimental writing. Patricia MacCormack is Senior Lecturer, Department of English, Communication, Film and Media at Anglia Ruskin University. She has published on Continental Philosophy & the ethics of aesthetics. Talk: The ecosophy of art - a monstrous hybrid event. Art itself is an '&' traversal. Deleuze and Guattari and Serres claim art is produced through a mapping of chaos which is an ethical production (cf Spinoza) - an ecosophic territory. For Deleuze & Guattari philosophy describes the creation of concepts which are the result of problems, that is, the incommensurability of two ideas. Concepts and philosophy always require an '&', not an 'or' and the '&' is not causal or chrono-centric but immanent, neither element precedes or follows.

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JJ CHARLESWORTH is a critic and Reviews Editor, ArtReview. Nothing is Never Autonomous. If dialectics is not a play of opposites, but a way into the multiple realities that make up a thing or a phenomenon, how might art be understood as a meeting place for many possible contradictions, instead of just a few? What if autonomous art was art both at its least and most free?

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PAUL BUCK 
Description of Talk & : The condition of betweenness at play is spread wide to be licked between: sidewards. Paul Buck is a writer & (a state that he’s never been anything but).

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JOHN CUSSANS artist & writer, whose research explores para-psychological scenarios & multi-authoring processes. Eggheads in the Wallpaper: Writing, Psychobiography and the Problem of Historical Form takes its cue from a convergence of associational themes running between Cat's Cradle (Kurt Vonnegut, Jr) and The Yellow Wallpaper (Charlotte Perkins Gilman). It will address the textual inter-dependence of historical & subjective awareness, the relationship between science & art & their implications for inter-disciplinary art forms.


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NICHOLAS CHARE is Leverhulme Research Fellow at the Department of History of Art and Architecture, University of Reading. The focus of his research is on the acoustic dimensions of Francis Bacon’s art practice. He is a former editor of the international journal of critical theory, parallax. His work has appeared in a number of journals including Angelaki, Cultural Critique, parallax and West Coast Line. His paper Show and Tell: Francis Bacon’s Paint Incarnate will closely analyse Francis Bacon’s technique through the prism of Julia Kristeva’s writings on art and literature. The paper demonstrates that Bacon’s conscious and unconscious employment of chance in his artistic practice, particularly in his treatment of colour, causes his work to privilege what Kristeva calls the semiotic, the drive-invested dimension of language. The paper attends to the semiotic as a kind of disruptive noise. It will argue that the irruption of this noise within Bacon’s works causes them to unfold across a space somewhere between the acoustic and the visual fields. The paper considers how the artist’s interest in synaesthesia plays out in his paintings which frequently fashion connections between the senses.  

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Art & … proposes itself as a unique exploration of the potentialities of practice as art and as criticism. It is a timely response to the perceived contemporary disengagement of criticism from art practice, often referred to as a ‘Crisis in Criticism’. In a broader sense this can be seen to relate to the problematic historical separation of ‘conceptual’ and ‘non- conceptual’ art practice, or the division of theory and practice. Transversal practice develops in response to the infinite expansion of the field of art, which allows for an unlimited range of activities and objects to be constituted as art. This builds on the insight, developing from the 1960s onwards, that the work of art is constituted through social relations rather than spatial configuration of the object, gallery or elements of the cultural system. These intersecting relations allow for the realisation that the site of the work of art is the totality of cultural sites within which art is mediated and consumed. Also tied to this ‘conceptual legacy’ is the understanding that the support languages of the art world constitute and validate art as art. In the 1960/70s this proposed a radical and political conceptuality responding to the excesses of aesthetic formalism. Within a contemporary sense this legacy is played out as a form of managed (and managing) literalism. The mechanisms of criticism, mediation and documentation fulfil increasingly bureaucratic and institutional roles. As J.L Lyotard describes, there is ‘a new stratum: the managerial staff of the art institutions, the reading engineers, the maintenance crews for the big explanatory machines patented under the name of Ideology, Fantasy, Structure.’[1] Criticism is seen to perform a managerial role within the dramatic globalisation of the cultural field, in line with the cultural politics and national branding of biennales, art fairs and showpiece museums. This perpetuates pre-set theoretical positions, in line with the market-led institutional requirements for stability of art validation.

[1] Lyotard, ‘Philosophy and Painting in the Age of Their Experimentation, 1984.