Dialogical Practices and Representation

This program of lectures addressed various possibilities of conversational or dialogical activity in the museum and with regard to artistic practice in general. Among the concerns under discussion was the question of the beholder as reader and potential interlocutor, the connections and disconnections between the aesthetic and the everyday, and the critical relations between performance and authorship with respect to different cultural forms.

Programme

Friday, 14 May 1999, 7 p.m.
Abstraction and Intimacy, W.J.T. Mitchell

The lecture addressed the traditional high modernist paradigm of the work of abstract art in terms of "alienation" and "empathy" (W. Worringer), and suggested that an alternative aesthetic of conversational intimacy with and around the work can now be imagined.

Saturday, 15 May 1999
11 a.m.
Beyond Adorno: Art, Autonomy and Criticism, John Roberts

John Roberts dealt with the critical paradox of art’s autonomy. That is, it looked at the necessary illusion of art’s autonomy: art’s autonomy must be resisted if autonomy is to survive as the prosecution of art’s failure to realize its freedom from social dependency. Hence the importance of anti-art as the necessary moment of art’s determinate negation of artistic tradition. Anti-art and autonomy are locked into a dialectical embrace. He examined the implications of this argument in Adorno, defending the implications of his writing against both his postmodern critics and a recent Adornian aestheticism.

12:30 a.m.
Public Art and the Spectacle of Money: a Commentary on "Art Rebate/Arte Reembolso", John Welchman

The lecture attempted to think-through the logic and social extension of the Art Rebate project developed by Louis Hock, Liz Sisco and David Avalos in San Diego’s North County in 1993. It raises an intricate and important set of questions for public art in the 90s, a period of retrenchment, defunding and conservative attack which has left the National Endowment for the Arts, and numerous state and local initiatives, in crisis.

5 p.m.
About a Painting Painted by Actors, Charles Harrison

The picture in question is a work produced by the Jackson Pollock Bar in the course of their ’theory-installations’: "Art & Language Paints a Picture" in the Style of the Jackson Pollock Bar at the Fundació Antoni Tąpies on 17th April 1999. The lecture was concerned with the relationship between authorship and performance in the work of art.

Activities

• ’Art & Language Paints a Picture’ Installed in the Style of the Jackson Pollock Bar
• Dialogical Practices and Representation