Art it: what is a lecture-performance?

Over the past decades we could observe the ubiquity of artistic phenomena, based on the production of discourse and spoken language. Galleries and museums often organize performances, oral presentations, discussions, symposia, educational platforms and lectures by artists, which seem to have blurred the clear boundaries between artists, critics, curators and other members of the art world. From parochial and marginal phenomenon that was limited to a few institutions and communities, discursiveness has become a common and efficiently determining condition of existence of modern art.

Despite several concepts, which have tried to conceptualize these trends (the"educational turn" the "new institutionalism", "knowledge production" or "discursive exhibition"), none of them analyzed the very ontology, genre, and artistic and critical context and historical genealogy of lecture-performance as a new genre of art. Instead, all these terms described the speech as communication, addressing infrastructure, institutional, educational and curatorial aspect of these practices, or else regarded them as the result of the change in the method of production — the transition from Fordism to post-Fordism and the new economy based on knowledge and information.

Some precedents of the early twentieth century (in particular the shares of the futurists, Dadaist and Soviet avant-garde) resemble the modern lecture-performances, however, the allocation and the awareness of them as a separate genre historically became possible only after the emergence of conceptualism in the 1960-ies, but also of performance art, where the main tool was the very body of the artist. It was then created by the legendary lectures, performances avant la letter: Robert Morris submitted his "23.1" (1964) repeating lips recorded by him a lecture Erwin Panofsky periodically Stripping out of sync. At the same time, Henry Flynt, inventor of the term "concept-art", read their "anti-lecture", denying the art itself. In the 90 years we can also remember the "discursive intervention" Andrea Fraser. However, the massive decline of the lectures is made possible by a special infrastructure, which combines the features of a white cube and a lecture hall such as Performa, TEDx, Former West or the many (meta)conference like Characters, Figures and Signs (2009) (Tate Modern), Art Speech—A Symposium on Symposia (2011) (MOMA), Lecture Performance – Between Art and Academia (2013) (Beergarden), or exhibitions ("Lecture Performance", Cologne and Belgrade, 2009).

In my opinion, the most successful description of the phenomenon of lecture performance can be the concept of "art speech" in the Symposium Art Speech—A Symposium on Symposia, though the participants meant by him all kinds of speech, including communication, Interpellation and other auxiliary statements. The concept of "artistic speech", which is also found in the Russian formalist, perfect for the description of performative lectures, as it underlines the nature of the speech act or producing utterances consisting of a sensory, acoustic, bodily aspects (voice), as well as the substantive, logical, conceptual component (word). Speech in modern art cannot be reduced to merely conceptual practice (where the voice would be a "vanishing mediator"), as in the lecture-performances as an important contextualization of the statements, underline samotnosci the speech act of the dramatization of the body and to some extent, the physicality of the artist. It is no coincidence that the exploration and deconstruction of the speech of Jacques Derrida devoted some of his books, describing it as a modality of existence, competing for access to consciousness, meaning, presence.published

 

P. S. And remember, just changing your mind — together we change the world! ©

Source: theoryandpractice.ru