University IUAV of Venice
Faculty of Arts and Design / Graduate Program in Visual and Performing Arts
In collaboration with EARN – European Artistic Research Network
International Symposium
ART AS A THINKING PROCESS
Visual Forms of Knowledge Production
Sunday 5 June & Monday 6 June 2011
Aula Magna, IUAV, Venue Tolentini
Santa Croce 191 / 30135 Venice
How to reach Aula Magna? click here
ABSTRACTS
ANGELA VETTESE
What an Art School Should Be
The increasing role of the schools in the visual arts is evident. More and more Academies and
Universities are changing their teaching structure and are developing a so cold third level, i.e. a
doctoral program after the graduate and undergraduate level. Many of these schools decided to
have a kunsthalle, a place dedicated to exhibitions of the students and sometimes of the
professors. More and more curators are looking for jobs as professors or as director and curator of
the school exhibition spaces. Some of them, from Portikus in Frankfurt to the Wattis in the States,
have reached and outstanding position in the art world. It is probably true what many observer are
noticing: working inside an art school means a way out from the even too evident connection
between the commodification of the art work and the critical curatorial practices.
Furthermore, the increasing number of books, essays and meetings around the topic of teaching
art demonstrates as this field is also considered to be crucial in the definition of art and its
practices. How to teach means also to go deeply in search for methods and for the nature itself of
the artistic act. Is a fact that many artists have started their own school, giving them a particular
structure that goes from the enlargement of the traditional “bottega” to a free form of college
dedicated to a certain discipline. On the one hand, the art school system is becoming more
important and more structured; on the other hand, this process is accompanied by the increasing
will on the side of the artists to give their own very personal contribution to the topic.
From an historical point of view, the aim of the artwork has often been a battleground, considering
decorative and merely practical side versus its nature of cognitive act. The recent and reach
debate around the art schools and their methods demonstrates, as it is progressively been
accepted, the second way to contemplates art, which, centuries after Leonardo Da Vinci’s claim for
the art as “think thing", considers it as a thought process.
The story of the Visual Arts at the IUAV University of Venice is one which tells how difficult it can
be, though, up to now, let it be completely accepted and therefore included in the structure of a
University: this has been the first experiment in Italy, where the main system is based on a more
traditional chain of Art Academies. The difficulties, the success, the failure to make it completely
accepted by the university itself, all that we met in the first 10 years of existence of the school, give
us the possibility to rethink its formula, a new possible formula to be transferred also out of our
Venetian experience.
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SARAT MAHARAJ
Cogitans: "What the Thunder Said"
My contribution looks at modes of thinking — celestial, terrestrial, subterranean, submarine and the
like.
The aim is to explore non-cognitive domains and processes of thinking — patches between the
"neo-cortical apron" and "slimy embodied" thinking — towards a rough mapping of their relation to
"creativity cholera" of the post-industrial world.
HITO STEYERL
Art as Occupation
Is art work or an occupation? What is the difference and what are the consequences and how does
art as knowledge production have to do with it?
HENK SLAGER
The Institutional Conscience of Art
Art education must be aware anew of its responsibility in the cultural field of force. Specifically in
our day where the art academy seems to lose its main function due to the rise of neo-liberalism
and the homogenizing rhetorics of the creative industries, it seems all the more urgent to focus on
the reformulation and actualization of the academy's original task. In other words, our current art
academies should again provide a space for temporary autonomous research enabling novel and
different forms of artistic thinking and critical consciousness.
MARY JANE JACOB
Experience as Thinking
“Thinking is preeminently an art; knowledge and propositions which are the products of thinking,
are works of art,” said American philosopher John Dewey. This paper will look at the dialectic
process of knowledge-building located between making and reflective thinking. It will consider the
continuous nature of this process, the benefits of collective exchange over solo practice, and the
potential for a range of results. It will also address how this mode of inquiry requires clear aims and
sustained attention through necessary periods of uncertainty in order to undertake the process well
and achieve the greatest outcomes. In addition to offering insights gleaned from the writings on
experience of Dewey, useful comparisons will be made to the knowledge-creation model in the
arena of corporate management, and to the co-creation model of the Venetian collective Artway of
Thinking.
By way of example, this thesis will be illustrated by the “Learning Modern” program that took place
in Chicago from 2007-11. This program’s art-as-thinking process led to multiple projects and parts
that emerged from — actively fed off of — each other as those individuals engaged investigated
why modernism remains alive in the thought and action of artists, architects, and designers; how
are they recalibrating modernism today; and how the dynamic impulse of modernism is embraced
by faculty, students, and the public. These questions made “Learning Modern” a grand exercise in
learning-by-doing, thinking-in-making. The organizational approach of this research valued the art
process as a mode of inquiry, not only recognizing that it is a means by which we gain knowledge,
but also enacting Dewey’s maxim: “The process is art and its product, no matter at what stage it be
taken, is a work of art.”
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Finally, the case will be made for why the art school — as a collective culture of makers — is the
right place for open-ended research processes and can produce outcomes. Moreover, it will look at
how a curatorial process directed toward cultivating open, creative-thinking space can be a model
for knowledge production in academia.
LEV KREFT
Teaching Contemporary Art (and Aesthetics)
I teach aesthetics to philosophers, to designers and to art historians. They all have different
interests in art and aesthetics; some even don't. But what they, on average, have in common, is
that they do not want “the history of” approach, starting with 25 hundred years ago, to arrive (or,
usually not) to contemporaneity at the final stage, at the end of course. They want to start with
contemporaneity not because they like it most, but because they were too much exposed to this
specific historical educational approach already, an approach invented by Jacques Bénigne
Bossuet ad usum delphini – for the successor of the crown in 17th century, as a proof of
humanity's progress and of God's providence. And they want to start with contemporaneity (or
contemporarity, as it is called in some other circles) because they do not believe neither in
humanity's progress nor in God's providence. And, still to add another negation, they do not want
to become successors to the crown, i.e. to become young generation which will make dreams of
their forefathers true. So, as they want to start with now, that is what they get. But there are
obstacles.
UTE META BAUER
Re_ACT: Research Based Artistic Practice at MIT’s Program in Art,
Culture and Technology
The MIT Program in Art, Culture and Technology (ACT) operates as a critical studies and
production based laboratory, connecting the arts with an advanced technological community. ACT
emphasized art as both knowledge production and dissemination.
What does it mean today to be embedded in such a high tech scientific context like Massachusetts
Institute of Technology (MIT)? And what does research-based artistic practice and production
mean?
Artistic practice has gone through significant changes in the last century. Today, the arts articulate
themselves less through mastering skills and more as an intervention in existing conditions and as
a critical voice in our society. György Kepes, founding director of MIT’s Center for Advanced Visual
Studies at MIT, was an advocate for art on a civic scale. Kepes - who taught alongside László
Moholy-Nagy at the New Bauhaus in Chicago, was an early proponent of addressing the
environment through artistic practice. Where are we now - more than forty years later?
CAROL BECKER
Microutopias and a Pedagogy for the 21 st Century
In this short essay I attempt to talk about the underlying concepts that energize the pedagogy of art
schools in America. Framing the piece around the collaboration between Columbia University
School of the Arts and the World Economic Forum Fellows Program, I discuss why Business
Schools and Schools of Economics, and those working with “future leaders”, have taken a serious
interest in the way in which art schools educate.
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HANS ULRICH OBRIST
Is Curating in the 21st Century
Lately, the word "curate" seems to be used in an greater variety of contexts than ever before, in
reference to everything from exhibitions of prints by Old Masters to the contents of a concept store.
The risk, of course, is that the definition may expand beyond functional usability. But I believe
"curate" finds ever-wider application because of a feature of modern life that is impossible to
ignore: the incredible proliferation of ideas, information, images, disciplinary knowledge, and
material products that we all witnessing today. Such proliferation makes the activities of filtering,
enabling, synthesizing, framing, and remembering more and more important as basic navigational
tools for 21st century life. These are the tasks of the curator, who is no longer understood as
simply the person who fills a space with objects but as the person who brings different cultural
spheres into contact, invents new display features, and makes junctions that allow unexpected
encounters and results.
Michel Foucault once wrote that he hoped his writings would be used by others as a theoretical
toolbox, a source of concepts and models for understanding the world. For me, the author, poet,
and theoretician Édouard Glissant has become this kind of toolbox. Very early he noted that in our
phase of globalization — which is not the first one — there is a danger of a homogenization, but at
the same time there is a counter movement to globalization, the retreat into one's own culture. And
against both dangers he proposes the idea of mondialité — a global dialogue that augments
difference. This inspired me to handle exhibitions in a new way. There is a lot of pressure on
curators to do shows not only in one place, but to send them around the world by simply packing
them into boxes in one city and unpacking them in the next‚ this is a homogenizing sort of
globalization. Using Glissant's idea as a tool means to develop exhibitions that always build a
relation to their place, that change permanently with their different local conditions, that create a
changing dynamic, complex system with feedback loops.
To curate, in this sense, is to refuse static arrangements and permanent alignments and instead to
enable conversations and relations. Generating these kinds of links is an essential part of what it
means to curate, as is disseminating new knowledge, new thinking, and new artworks in a way that
can seed future cross-disciplinary inspirations. But there is another case for curating as a vanguard
activity for the 21st century.
As the artist Tino Sehgal has pointed out, modern human societies find themselves today in an
unprecedented situation: the problem of lack, or scarcity, which has been the primary factor
motivating scientific and technological innovation, is now being joined and even superseded by the
problem of the global effects of overproduction and resource use. Thus moving beyond the object
as the locus of meaning has a further relevance. Selection, presentation, and conversation are
ways for human beings to create and exchange real value, without dependence on older,
unsustainable processes. Curating can take the lead in pointing us towards this crucial importance
of choosing.
MARCO DE MICHELIS
"To Open Eyes"
(not received)
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PAOLO LEGRENZI
Art as a Creative Process
The Production of Visual Form is a Deterministic Procedure?
A creative process has as an outcome something that is novel, i.e. not constructed by rote or by a
simple deterministic procedure. Try to imagine Pablo Picasso as he is painting a particular picture.
At any moment, there are several alternative brush strokes that he could have made. All these
strokes could yield a perfectly recognizable Picasso picture.
Whatever is the stereotype or the cognitive schema that defines the notion of a Picasso picture,
these schemas do not rule out all the possible brush strokes except the ones that Picasso did after
the beginning of an opera. If they were able to rule out, there would be as many Picasso works as
there are beginnings: everything would follow in a deterministic way after the first brush stroke. I
will argue that, even if you could specify the content of the mind of Picasso and every detail of the
environment, the creative process is not deterministic.
It will argue that the Gestalt principles for the interpretation of visual forms (Rudolf Arnheim) or the
understanding of the ways in which mirror neurons work in creating empathy, these are not useful
tools for analyzing the essence of an artistic opera. The reason is simple: the laws of perception or
the mirror neurons work in the same way when we have not to do with the creation or interpretation
of a visual opera.
PAOLO GARBOLINO
What the Scientist’s Eye Tells the Artist’s Brain
In the second half of the twentieth century, when art has increasingly become a thinking process, a
deep change has occurred in the understanding of science and scientific knowledge. Against the
"linguistic turn" of the first half of the century, the "practice" turn has denied that all scientific
knowledge is propositional in content, and that all forms of knowing-how are to be transformed in
forms of knowing-that. Scientific knowledge is now understood as the result of complex networks of
theories, instruments, practical skills and “tacit knowledge”, from which experimental results and
stable patterns of scientific practice emerge. This view of science and scientific knowledge can tell
something interesting about art practices and art as a form of knowledge.
There are no simple responses to the question "What is a scientific theory?" or "What is a scientific
experiment?" exactly as no straightforward answers can be given to questions like "What is art?" or
"What is an artistic experiment?". But there exists a common ground of instruments, experimental
practices, shared skills, that provide stability and continuity to science, even when theoretical
“revolutions” and changes of “paradigms” occur.
Experiments are not always performed to provide evidence for a theory, they “have a life of their
own” creating artificial phenomena and they can produce manipulative knowledge independently
from theoretical knowledge.
Current scientific practices make use of representations that are non-linguistic entities, neither
pictures nor diagrams, but fictional objects that can be manipulated in order to obtain knowledge.
What kind of knowledge can be obtained in this way? What kind of objects are they and what do
they represent? Do they share some properties with artworks? What kind of interventions can be
done on these fictional objects? Can these interventions be compared to some extent to artistic
interventions?
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HONGJHON LIN
The Site of Artistic Research
The "artist research” has widely replaced the term “art work” in academia and numerous biennials.
The contribution discusses where artistic research can be defined and formulated. Are there any
necessary requirements and formats have to made to meet its criterions as a research? What
knowledge can art contribute? Mostly when in a biennial, artists chose to realize “site-specific”
work in a cross cultural framework, the act of crossing-boundaries carries out a quasianthropological approach and apparently to be fulfilled the definition of “field work” generating
ethnographical interests. In fact most artists are doing broader sense of “adaptation works,” which,
although new commissioned projects are made, are in continuation in their previous projects,
certain styles and approaches are employed. Examining through several artist research projects, I
hope I differentiate types and categories of artist's researches, even to the geopolitical interest
which beget form outset of exhibition in order to understand the discursive space these projects
generate, and as to mark different methods and interpretations the content of work can express. A
specific form of art production as knowledge production, that is, the political meanings of “art as
knowledge”, can be distinguished, and brings forth what is relevant to epistemological shift today in
what art can do within or without when contemporary art has become the standardized “vehicle
language” for aesthetic experience.
SIMON NJAMI
Fictional Faculties
Faculty is an abstraction. Knowledge is an intangible reality. How could we imagine to reconcile
those two concepts in their practical meanings? The role of faculty, from its beginning, is to train
young women by giving them tools that should help them to understand the mechanisms of life
through reflection. But the problem is that we don’t still understand the mechanisms of life, and
anyone who would claim the contrary would be a pretender. So what are we left with, if not a
constructed story that we want to define as reality? Nothing indeed, if not our ability in building
fictions.
If we would agree that any knowledge dispensed at school which is in faculties, is nothing but a
constructed reality, access to knowledge would become something completely different: playful, interactive, where there would no room for the master and slave paradox to be performed. Students
could become teachers and teachers students. The mastery of academic tools should not signify a
trap of which we cannot escape, but a proposition that we can reinvent everyday. In human sciences, at least, reality should never have any determining role.
Academia is and should be a performative space where fictions are created endlessly.
CORNELIA LAUF
Locus Hocus Pocus
A very brief survey of the legacy of Fluxus/Conceptual art, institutional critique, relational
practice, and the role of place, power, and patronage.
Context-based curatorial practice will be scrutinized for its relevance today. Models for twenty-first
century exhibitions, from a Venetian and Roman perspective, will be proposed.
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SUZANA MILEVSKA
Feminist Research in Visual Arts
In this paper I want to address the methods and methodologies applied by various feminist
researchers in the field of visual arts and to focus on their eventual implications on artistic research
in general. While it is widely accepted that there aren’t specific feminist research methods in any
discipline, feminist methodology and feminist research practice can be distinguished by the
common questions feminists ask, the positioning of the researcher within the process of research
and within theorizing, and the intended purpose of the produced knowledge.
The political concerns of feminist artists are of course not unique to feminist art: they are
concerned with understanding why inequality between women and men exists and with
investigating the main reasons for the male domination. As any other feminists, feminist artists also
deal with the questions how to change this and how to achieve liberation for women that is
common to all feminists. However, in my presentation I want to argue that it is urgent to look at the
feminist methodology and epistemology specific to the recent feminist art practice because
although feminist art has been around quite a while, around half a decade, there has been no
substantial reflection on the specificity of the feminist research methodology in art. This is even
more relevant because ever since the first feminist art projects in the 1960s the research based art
became prevalent among feminist artists and comprises of many diverse and unique examples of
research projects that in different ways explored the relation between personal and political.
Therefore I find it productive to explore and appraise the specific research processes that have
been instigated through feminist art and I hold that they make a relevant basis for unique artistic
thinking.
I will additionally exemplify the cultural context as a relevant source for some culturally specific
feminist art projects. Because feminism is not one unified project I will ultimately propose to look at
several feminist research projects by the feminist artists from the Balkans in order to challenge the
assumption of universality of feminist methodology and any unified theory of knowledge production
in feminist art.
GERTRUD SANDQVIST
Thinking Through
Immanuel Kant stated: “For beautiful art… imagination, intellect, spirit and taste are required”.
Artists think through their work. Very often we call this way of thinking non-linear. What does that
mean? Is it only a question of another kind of resistance when you think through for instance iron
or clay than through words? How important is the shape to a thought? When Malmö Art Academy
started its PhD program in visual art some 10 years ago, one of the purposes was to understand
how artists way of thinking (if there is such a uniform thing) would be explored through a research
program.
For this reason, we didn’t establish a specific research method, since each PhD-project develops
its own methods. The only thing we borrowed from research programs being put up in other
academic fields was the tutoring, the seminars, and the public assessment. However, this means
already quite a lot.
To start with, we are talking about projects – something which has a beginning and an end. The
tutoring and the seminars’ exchange of thought mean transparence and criticality in the very
process of thinking trough art. And the public assessment means comparability of the artist’s way
of thinking with thinking and research taking place in other fields. In other words we believe that
there is a very specific form of knowledge production that is going on through art. A research
program in visual art brings this to its head.
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JAN KAILA
Artistic Research Formalized into Doctoral Programs
My presentation will be a pragmatic one on the process of formalizing artistic research into
doctoral programs for artists within the university context. After producing my own
doctorate in fine arts in 2002 and after being in charge of a practice-based artistic
research doctorate program now for eight years, I want to speak about the things that I
have learnt.
I consider the doctorate for artists to be the most interesting and demanding issue facing
artistic research today.
The most important questions I discuss in my paper address the quality (assurance) of
doctoral programs in artistic research. For example: How can we select the best possible
students for a practice-based doctorate program in the arts? What kind of a curriculum
would best support research done by artists? Who are the people (supervisors, evaluators
etc) who can guarantee the quality of doctoral studies and their outcome? And — the most
essential question — what kind of knowledge might be achieved in artistic doctoral
programs?
My presentation will also include visual material based Doctorates in Fine Arts (DFA)
completed at the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts.
MICK WILSON
Reputational Economies and Knowledge Conflicts
“Knowledge conflict” refers to sustained and wide-ranging disputes over: what it is to know; what is
knowable; what is worth knowing; how it is possible to know; who is entitled to know, etc.
Knowledge conflict thus points to contests over first principles and/or basic frameworks rather than
simply referring to localized differences of opinion or disagreements on contested points of fact or
interpretation.
This paper will propose that responding to the question of visual culture in general, and
contemporary art in particular, as forms of knowledge practice requires careful consideration of the
rhetorical dynamics of “knowledge conflict”. Part of this analysis proposes that reputational
economy is central to the way in which the status of competing claims to know are given a hearing
in knowledge conflicts. “Reputational economy” refers to forms of work organisation where the
opportunities to work, the decisions effecting the work-chances of others and the rewards for
working, are fundamentally regulated by reputational standing. The knowledge conflict currently
enacted over the status of contemporary art as a modality of knowledge production may also be
read as a contest between different forms of reputational economy. Importantly, the claim will be
made that while the analytics of “knowledge conflict” and “reputational economy” provide a useful –
perhaps essential – means of mapping the contest over art as a knowledge practice, these are but
one moment – albeit a key moment – in the larger process of working through these issues.
JOHN AIKEN
Undermining Orthodoxies
Undermining orthodoxies can be read (interpreted) in several ways. Creative endeavour and
purpose can and has served to undermine prevalent orthodoxies and generate new energies and
substantial changes throughout history. Of course the opposite is also true when prevalent
orthodoxies function to undermine creative energy in order to maintain the status quo and
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perpetuate existing power bases. This paradox is deeply embedded in all aspects of society and
culture, simultaneously enabling and repressing new ideas and initiatives.
In terms of art, when substantial or meaningful new ideas emerge, changes that occur, whether
initiated by artists, curators, theoreticians, curators or academics are the result of framing art as a
thinking process.
How this process of development has been absorbed, embraced, questioned and challenged
within the paradoxical academy can be traced by looking at how the art schools in Britain have
positioned themselves in the uneasy space between the complexity of the contemporary art world
and the increasing demands of harmonisation of academic structures and procedures.
Undermining Orthodoxies will investigate the changes that occurred due to the introduction of
degree status into well resourced, specialist art schools in the 1960’s and the subsequent
absorption of many of these previously autonomous institutions into the newly formed polytechnic
system that subsequently became the New Universities. As inflation in academic requirements and
qualifications occurred and student numbers increased, the art schools have endured a parallel
decrease in the amount of resources available to facilitate the development of the subject of fine
art. As a consequence it is even more vital to confirm art as a thinking process linked to network
rather than a linear process tied to procedure.
FRANCO BERARDI
The Autonomy of Knowledge as a Political and Epistemological Question
The crisis investing the European Union demands a new social imagination. The Neoliberal and
monetarist politics went bankrupt, but the European ruling class seems incapable of seeing a way
out of the crisis and seems only able to reaffirm and enforce the combined to bring about the
current situation of recession and crisis.
European society is afflicted by a palsy of social imagination. After the Greek crisis of the spring of
2010, democracy has been abrogated, and a directorate has been formed by Merkel-SarkozyTrichet in order to impose an ultra-monetarist agenda. This is going to bring about impoverishment,
unemployment, devastation in education and decay of infrastructures.
The Left has vanished as an alternative force… Imagination of the future disappeared.
Movements have resurfaced in various forms, but so far they have been unable to unite at the
European level, and unable of imagining a common project. The southern side of the
Mediterranean Sea is shaken by insurrections that are changing geopolitics and provoking new
flows of migration.
In a marginal and rocky place, close to the Adriatic Sea and surrounded by a barbaric country, in
the San Marino Republic, we are going to create SCEPSI, Centre of Social Research and Political
Education, that will be dedicated to the imagination of a new horizon for European future.
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SPECIAL EVENTS & STUDENTS PROJECTS
FDAEXPOSED
FDAEXPOSED is a website realized during the laboratory held by Lewis Baltz, with the
collaboration of Giuliana Racco, in the Faculty of Design and Art at the IUAV University.
It aspires to be an objective look at the activities of the Faculty of Design and Art over the
past decade.
This website does not take and should not be interpreted as an official view of the history
of the Faculty of Design and Art.
It is an anti-official view of the faculty composed of works by the following students:
Valentina Apicerni, Maria Ida Bernabei, Letizia Calori, Enrico Casagrande, Samuele
Cherubini, Francesca De Gonda, Chiara Gaspardo, Roberto Fassone, Nina Fiocco,
Natalia Franchi, Clio Kraskovic, Violette Maillard, Silvia Pigozzo, Enrico Poli, Matteo
Primiterra, Nicola Turrini, Giovanna Virga.
Within the website, different sections are constituted by heterogenous points of view.
Special thanks to Chiara Vecchiarelli for her generous contribution to the project and to
Angela Vettese and Mara Ambrožič for the opportunity to participate in the symposium.
We are extremely grateful for the generous assistance of Claudia Rossini.
Agonistic Academies, Sint-Lukas Books, Brussels 2011
Editors: Jan Cools and Henk Slager
Graphic Design: Jo De Baerdemaeker
Contributors: Ute Meta Bauer, Daniel Birnbaum, Clementine Deliss, Charles Esche, Renée Green,
Dieter Lesage, Irit Rogoff, Simon Sheikh, Bart Verschaffel, Jan Verwoert, Mick Wilson and Hans de
Wolf.
The concept of artistic research has raised many questions during the past decade accompanied
by intense and heated debates. What form of research could the domain of visual art produce? Do
the rhetorics of the concept of research include novel practices or does research rather exclude
and/or marginalize certain practices?
Could the dual pair of art versus not-art be substituted by the opposition research-based art versus
non-research-based creating a novel mechanism of exclusion? Or does a research discourse and
its vocabulary point to an already existing practice that could be accommodated in an academic
architecture focused on knowledge production through a process of translation? And last but not
least, what does the concept of artistic research mean for setting up a Graduate School for Fine
Art?
Especially the issue of the role and signification of the academization of visual art served as a
starting point for the collaborative project. A Certain Ma-Ness started up by Sint-Lukas Brussels
University College of Art and Design and maHKU (Utrecht Graduate School of Visual Art and
Design) in 2008 and that ultimately resulted in three projects. Besides A Certain Ma-Ness, the
projects Becoming Bologna and The Academy Strikes Back came into being as follow-ups in a
series of collaborations. At the core of these projects were the following three questions:
1. What does the current academization and thinking in terms of research competencies mean for
the student in art education? Could these competencies be charted in a clear and distinct way?
During the A Certain Ma-Ness conference and exhibition (VCH De Brakke Grond, Amsterdam,
April 2008) the so-called Dublin Descriptors - be able to cope in a research environment, problem
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solving attitude, well-considered in dealing with complexities, communicative skills, and
independent learning - established for dealing with such questions were critically evaluated.
2. What does the Bologna process mean for the didactic role of the lecturer? That was the leading
question in the follow-up project Becoming Bologna, a collateral event of the Venice Biennale 2009
consisting of a series of research interventions (Tolentini Building) and a symposium (Faculty of
Arts and Design, IUAV University of Venice). Central questions during Becoming Bologna were,
“What is the specificity of the didactic strategies developed because of the academization of art
education?”, “How is a research-based curriculum designed”, and "How could the research
competencies be judged adequately?"
3. What do the novel forms of didactic interaction mean for the art academy in itself? During the
concluding conference, The Academy Strikes Back (Sint-Lukas Brussels, June 2010), that
question was tackled from the perspective of the Graduate School as research environment and
sanctuary for artistic (knowledge) production.
The various responses from these three symposiums emphasize various challenging educative
elements such as a clear connection between artistic production and critical studies, a curriculum
with chiefly dialogic situations, a focus on public space, and a laboratory-type curriculum
experimenting with both novel forms of presentation — for example contextual studies and
curatorial studies — and various forms of communication as “agonistic forms of address”.
Beyond Death: Viral Discontent and Contemporary Notions about AIDS
At the 54th International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia
February – June 2011
OCA – Office for Contemporary Art Norway
The Office for Contemporary Art Norway (OCA), as commissioner of Norway's representation at
the 54th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, would like to announce the
completion of Beyond Death: Viral Discontents and Contemporary Notions about AIDS, a
Postgraduate program led by Bjarne Melgaard at the Faculty of Arts and Design, IUAV University
of Venezia. Running from 14 February to 13 May, Beyond Death has consisted of a series of
lectures and workshops, organised and taught by Melgaard as Visiting Professor, looking at the
history and present of the AIDS crisis, and its reflection within contemporary art and discourse.
The course examined how AIDS has become a key lens through which to investigate some of the
key transformations affecting the world today, especially in relation to identity formation, the use of
violence and the possibility of collective action. This was done through the close study of the work
and ideas of a series of thinkers, writers and artists – including Leo Bersani, the Black Panthers,
Douglas Crimp, Guillaume Dustan, Hervé Guibert, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Guy Hocquenghem,
Chris Kraus, Tiqqun and David Wojnarowicz. The course also included the participation of Leo
Bersani as Guest Lecturer.
The programme was followed by Paola Angelini, Michelangelo Corsaro, Cecilia Divizia, Elisa
Fantin, Marco Fellini, Corinne Mazzoli, Nicole Moserle, Beatrice Piva, Valeria Romagnini Solfato,
Valentina Roselli, Alessio Sacchetto and Davide Spillari.
As part of the course, each of the students developed a project and produced a written contribution
about specific topics. These projects are included in Baton Sinister, an exhibition that Bjarne
Melgaard, in collaboration with the students, is organising at Palazzo Contarini Corfù, Dorsoduro
1057, Venice. The exhibition will include a series of artworks, events and displays, all of which
have emerged from the lectures, workshops and seminars that have taken place during the last
four months.
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Technical Reproduction
Soprano: Sara Ricci
Pianist: Alvise Zambon
2011
The performance starts from the reading of the philosophic work of Theodor Adorno in relation to
his position about Avant-garde music and the concept of new in music. Such theoretic work is significant and problematic also nowadays, after the overcoming of Avant-garde movements and can
be used as a re-interpretation of our way to catch a deeper point of view in what we perceive as
music.
The result is a listening experiment starting from two classical Arias, by W. A. Mozart and G. B.
Pergolesi. Working on the level of interpretation, the performance means to put into question what
we search in a piece of music, how we could find a sense in a classic harmony sequence splitted
in its linearity and the relation between words and musical formularies, as well as the burst of pain
in a context of happiness.
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