Talk by Gregory Sholette

"Interventionist Art in the Age of Enterprise Culture"
Talk by Gregory Sholette (New York)

Place: Overgaden - Institut for Samtidskunst, Copenhagen
Time: Saturday the 12 of May at 15.00
The talk wil be in English it is free and open to all

"Many key assumptions held by an earlier generation of politically engaged artists and activists about what oppositional culture is and what it is not, are being challenged today by a new wave of interventionist practitioners who are less concerned with demystifying ideology than with 'creatively disrupting' it. Unlike most of the critical art practices of the 1970s and1980s in which dominant representational forms were systematically analyzed through a variety of methods ranging from Semiotics to Marxism to Psychoanalysis, the new approach plows directly, some would say even gleefully, into what Guy Debord described as the Society of the Spectacle. Groups such as RTmark, The Yes Men, Yomango, and the Critical Art Ensemble take full advantage of increasingly widespread and affordable digital technologies in order to practice what they call Tactical Media, a concept inspired as much by the Zapatista rebellion as it is by the Situationists. What is unique to these more recent, antagonistic practices is the way they mobilize flexible organizational structures, communicative networks, and economies of giving in order to produce a critical disruption of everyday life. At the same time, the new interventionist art reveals some definite similarities to the entrepreneurial spirit of the neo-liberal economy, including a highly plastic sense of collective identity, and a romantic distrust of comprehensive administrative structures. In the late 1970s Adorno cautioned that culture was becoming increasingly similar to the realm of administration. Ironically, in the 1990s it was the world of administration that moved closer to that of culture as private business interests extolled the non-linear thinking and flexible working habits of creative laborers. The aim of this presentation is to trace the effects of neo-liberalization upon politically committed artists in the United States by focusing on the shift from a post-war culture of administration to that of a post cold-war culture entrepreneurship. It concludes by asking what type of critical, artistic response is possible under the conditions of the new, homeland security state apparatus that emerged in the aftermath of September 11 2001?"

Gregory Sholette er en New York baseret kunstner og teoretiker. Sammen med Nato Thompson har han redigeret bogen The Interventionists: A User’s Manual for the Creative Disruption of Everyday Life (MIT Press 2004). Hans seneste publikation, Collectivism After Modernism, er redigeret i samarbejde med Blake Stimson. Sholette bidrager desuden jævnligt til tidsskrifter som Third Text, CAA Art Journal, Afterimage, MUTE, CIRCA, samt The Oxford Art Journal. Han underviser i øjeblikket på New York University’s Visual Culture Program.

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