Dear Friends,
Please join us Monday, April 21st at 5PM at the Cochran Woods
Art Center rm157 for a presentation by Jonathan Katz (bio
follows), discussion and refreshments will accompany the talk.

Art, Eros and  the Sixties, concerns the erasure of difference
in the art of the late fifties and sixties through recourse to
the body and its common capacity for pleasure. Premised on
recovering and re articulating a common theoretical and
political framework for art making–the idea of Eros– in at
least the US, UK, France, Germany, Austria, Brazil, Japan, and
Canada, the art of Eros was motivated by a vision of a
universal body networked to other bodies without regard to
differences in nationality, gender, class, sexuality or race.
Strikingly, this universalist vision immediately preceded, and
was swallowed up, by our common investment in specifying
identities and a politics of difference. Jonathan Katz will
further analyze why a universalizing discourse that sought to
precisely challenge the boundaries between self and other,
gave way–and in many instance fed-a reification and
naturalization of essentialized difference.

BIO
Jonathan D. Katz is the 2007-08 Clark-Oakley Fellow at the
Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute and a visiting
professor at Smith College. He was the 2006-2007 Senior Fellow
at the Archives of American Art/Smithsonian Museum of American
Art.  The first tenured faculty in gay and lesbian studies in
the US, Katz has made the academic and institutional
development of Queer Studies his life’s work, founding and
directing the Larry Kramer Initiative for Lesbian and Gay
Studies at Yale University and earlier founding and chairing
the first department of Lesbian and Gay Studies in the United
States at City College of San Francisco. Katz wrote the first
scholarly article exploring the dynamics of the Johns/
Rauschenberg creative and romantic partnership in 1993, and
since then has continued that exploration in 11 articles in 5
languages. Indeed, his newest book, called The Silent Camp:
Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and the Cold War and will
be published by the University of Chicago Press.   Katz has
curated exhibitions on Rauschenberg at both Yale University
and in San Francisco, is curating the first major museum queer
exhibition in US history at the Smithsonian’s National
Portrait Gallery in 2010 and another exhibition for the
Corcoran and Tacoma museums called AIDS, Art, America. He
co-edited the current issue of the journal GLQ on the work of
the theorist Monique Wittig, coauthored the book
Difference/Indifference with Moira Roth, and co-founded Queer
Nation, San Francisco, and the Chicago Gay and Lesbian Town
Meeting, which pushed through the Chicago Human Rights Ordinance.

http://chronicle.uchicago.edu/080221/rirkrit.shtml

Back from Colorado! CAW Presents:

IAN BOURLAND Diaspora and the Map of Art History.

You may not miss this talk! Please join us on Monday March
31st, at Cobb Hall 310, 6PM. Download the chapter from the CAW
site and read to be able to fully participate and offer
feedback. We have found fresh funds for Peroni and chips.

We are looking forward to seeing you.

download paper

Dear Friends,
Please join us on Monday Feb. 18th at CWAC 156, 5PM for a presentation by Harper Montgomery. Our UC colleague has completed her chapter called : “Avant - Garde Spectacles in Mexico City: Estridentistas and Treintatreintistas in Cafes and Carpas.”

In order to have a fruitful and constructive discussion please download and read a copy of her work, also acquaint yourself with the images as well.

We are looking forward to seeing you there. Refreshments provided.

Please join us for Guillaume Desanges’ lecture at CWAC 157. Enter through the North entrance of the building.

Douglas Crimp
University of Rochester
School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Tuesday, March 4, 2008 at 6:00pm
112 S. Michigan Avenue — Ballroom, 1st floor
further information
http://www.saic.edu/webspaces/arthi
or contact dgetsy@saic.edu

abstract
During the 1970s a new generation of New York
artists began using abandoned and transitional
spaces on the west side of downtown Manhattan to
make experimental artworks, notably Joan Jonas’s
outdoor performance piece Delay Delay (1972) and
Gordon Matta-Clark’s “destructed” warehouse
pier piece Day’s End (1975). At the same time, in
the exhilaration of early gay liberation, gay men
appropriated these same areas for cruising and
outdoor sex. Apart from Matta-Clark’s remark that,
while looking for a pier to work in, “the ones
that I originally found were all completely overrun
by the gays,” there has been little acknowledgment
of a connection between the two scenes. But the
connection was there in the experience of some of
the players in the city, which Crimp’s memoir of
the period seeks to portray.

bio
Douglas Crimp is Fanny Knapp Allen Professor of Art
History at the University of Rochester, and he has
also taught at the University of Manchester, UCLA,
Princeton, Rutgers, Sarah Lawrence College, and the
Cooper Union. He began writing art criticism for Art
News and Art International in the early 1970s and
has published widely in such magazines as Artforum
and Art in America as well as in scholarly journals.
Crimp has also worked as a curator, most recently
organizing film series for Dia: Beacon for the
summers of 2005 and ’2006. He is well known as a
theoretician of postmodernism in the visual arts
-for his editorship of the journal October from 1977
to 1990, for his exhibition Pictures, organized for
Artists Space in 1977, and for his writings on art
practices and institutions collected in his book On
the Museum’s Ruins published by the MIT Press in
1993). His art criticism has been recognized with
two Art Critics Fellowships from the National
Endowment for the Arts and with the Frank Jewett
Mather Award for Distinction on Art Criticism from
the College Art Association. In addition to his work
as an art critic, Crimp has made significant
contributions to cultural studies. His 1987 special
issue of October on AIDS, reissued as the book AIDS:
Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism, is considered
the seminal work on AIDS and cultural representation
and a founding text of queer theory. He continued
his work on AIDS, art, and activism with AIDS Demo
Graphics, which details the history of the AIDS
activist group ACT UP through its graphic
production, and in the essays and lectures collected
in his book Melancholia and Moralism: Essays on AIDS
and Queer Politics, published by MIT Press in 2002.
His work in queer theory also includes the co-edited
volume How Do I Look? Queer Film and Video. Crimp is
currently writing a book about Andy Warhol’s films
and a memoir of New York in the 1970s.

I look for the political in a quotidian experience. The quotidian is often rational and logical, it desires facts to feed itself. It is a product of a larger structure that attempts to contain everything, most often it does. I get to the subject of my work by being surprised by a seemingly random utterance by someone with whom I interact. I grab on it and its irrationality fascinates me. It has, ever since I was a child. I thought of ways to fit it within the structure as explained to me. My inability to assemble the the irrational utterance to the rest of the structure constructs a path to the political. The formal way in getting to it is to gather all the facts that are needed for the quotidian, as they relate to this utterance, and then by clustering those fact together, a process I choose to call faktoprilozhenie, an image emerges. This image is in my opinion the current endmost in the progressive line of the development of the image, from drawing through painting through factographia (Rodchenko: photography), and the montage of moving image through conceptual and performance work. This praxis, which produces this image I choose to call delodeistvie. The above statement does not mean that photography or drawing or the moving image are no longer, it simply means that they are part of something else, they are contained by faktoprilozhenie [which is an Application (in the sense of a “machine”) that contains Facts] they are support for the application. They are just the media. Therefore the rationale behind the choice of media (means) is determined by whatever the irrational utterance needs to create a structure of its own. The following process is employed in order to build this: [I will attempt to discuss and show this using examples during the actual presentation, will post here afterwards.] How does this generate meaning? In an extremely logical system facts are what may contend with the ssuperstructure. Contrary to popular belief facts don’t make non-fiction, only raw statistics do. Factual elements can build a narrative that is other than the main structure narrative. Faktoprilozhenie is able to create such narrative.

Some influences, in no particular order, which were crucial in developing my thoughts are Marcel Broodthaers’ work “Musée d’Art Moderne, Départment des Aigles”, Stan Brakhage’s concept of “moving visual thinking”, Ilya Kabakov’s early paintings and installations, Nedko Solakov’s work shortly after the fall of the Iron Curtain, Alan Greenspan’s recent book “The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World”, Slavoj Zizek’s way of asking the right questions, Alain Badiou’s “confindence in confidence” and Sergei Tretyakov’s writings for Novij Lef.

I hope to see you at the Contemporary Art Workshop where I will attempt to clarify this position.

Bulgarian feta, hummus and Tsingtao!

Manol Georgieff (DOVA)

FAKTOPRILOZHENIE

Please join us, this Monday, January 7th at the Contemporary Art Workshop. Manol Georgieff (Gueorguiev) will present his past, as well as his work in progress beginning at 6pm at Cobb Hall room 310. There will be refreshments.

***Also please include in your calendars upcoming presentations by Ian Bourland (AH), and performance artist Guillaume Desanges later this month. Brief artist statement will be posted Sunday here.

The last CAW session for the Fall will be held in conjunction with the New Media Workshop this Monday, normal time and place. Please see below for details and access to the paper for this week.CAW will resume on January 7 with Manol Georgieff (DOVA), and several guest speakers from Chicago and from afar.

***

The New Media Workshop and the Contemporary Art Workshop proudly announce:

KRISTINE NIELSEN, PH.D. CANDIDATE, ART HISTORY, UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO,

will present her paper “Do ut des: the Value of the Thaelmann Monument,” a chapter from her dissertation in progress, “Secular Iconoclasm: East Berlin’s Political Monuments from the Late SED Regime to Postunified Berlin.”

Date: Monday, November 12, 2007
Time: 6:00-8:00pm
Place: Cobb 310

If you plan to attend, please email Lisa Zaher (lmz@uchicago.edu) for a copy of the paper. Persons with disabilities who believe they may need assistance, please contact Lisa Zaher in advance.

“Emotionality, Art, and Investment”

A dissertation related discussion of fieldwork in progress. Erica typically presents to economic historians and social scientists, and is looking forward to a robust attendance from Art Historians and Practitioners. Her recent fieldwork in London explores the global art market and provides key insights for those invested in contemporary art.

The paper will be posted here.