Keynote Speakers
Dr Glenn Adamson
Modern Craft: Directions and Displacements
After many years out in the cold, craft is a hot topic for art historians. Received narratives of nineteenth-century imperialist and industrial aesthetics are being displaced by studies that focus on the figure of the artisan. Fixtures in the Modernist firmament, from the Bauhaus to Minimalism, are being re-evaluated according to new ideas about production. Meanwhile, contemporary artists are embracing carpentry and ceramics, and a whole youth subculture is taking up knitting and other hobby techniques. In this talk, Glenn Adamson will provide a brief survey of recent scholarly work. By looking closely at three areas of contemporary practice - DIY protest art, ceramic sculpture, and so-called 'Design Art' - he will also suggest where modern craft is heading next.
Glenn Adamson is Head of Graduate Studies in the Research Department at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Dr Adamson's most recent book, Thinking Through Craft (Berg 2007) is a timely investigation into craft's centrality to arts practice and analyses craft's role in a variety of disciplines, including architecture, design and contemporary art. He is co-editor of The Journal of Modern Craft, the first peer-reviewed academic journal to cover craft in all its historical and contemporary manifestations.
Dr Adamson's research interests include 20th century craft and design, furniture and ceramics in England and America in the 17th and 18th centuries, and decorative arts theory. His other publications include Industrial Strength Design: How Brooks Stevens Shaped Your World (MIT Press 2003) and Gord Peteran: Furniture Meets Its Maker (Milwaukee: Milwaukee Art Museum/University of Wisconsin Press, 2006). Dr Adamson is also widely published in journals such as 'American Furniture', 'Ceramics in America', and 'American Craft', and in numerous exhibition catalogues.
Currently Dr Adamson is in the early stages of planning for an exhibition entitled 'Postmodernism', a major survey about design, architecture and art in the 1970s and 1980s. Of particular importance in the project are issues of production (not just symbolism and style) in Postmodern design; uses of history, often as quotation or pastiche; changing relations between bodies and technology; subcultural identities, particularly centring on music; and the proliferation of Postmodernism across the globe during a period of economic boom. The exhibition will be on view at the V&A in the autumn of 2011 and will travel thereafter.
Professor Pamela M. Lee
New Games
In Esthtique relationnelle, his influential polemic of 1998, French curator Nicolas Bourriuad described the work of Rirkrit Tiravanija, Felix Gonzales-Torres, Liam Gillick, Carsten Holler and others as a social staging ground of sorts, less object, we might say, than interface. 'The liveliest factor that is played out on the chessboard of art,' Bourriaud wrote 'has to do with interactive, user-friendly and relational concepts.' Departing from this example, my lecture asks: what are the historical implications of speaking about such work through the rhetoric of games? What extra-aesthetic models might complicate our understanding of such practices, troubling the utopian and democratizing premises underlying much participatory art? Far from treating this work as merely playful, or taking recourse to the long tradition of gaming associated with the historical avant-garde, I contend that such relational modes rest as much with a theory of conflict as they do with the ludic.
To that end, this paper traces a genealogy for interactivity in contemporary art in terms of the principles of game theory, the insidious branch of economics that emerged with American postwar military strategizing. Though game theory is a decidedly Cold War phenomena, it continues to resonate within the social sciences and political philosophy today: it has been extensively debated relative to the social contract, interpersonal psychology, rational choice and public choice theory and hence, the fortunes of neo-liberalism. As case studies, I look at the work of the New Games Foundation, associated with the countercultural impresario Stewart Brand in the 1970s, and the variable works and 'game paintings' of the Swedish artist Oyvind Fahlstrm in the 1960s.
An additional goal of this talk is methodological, implicitly challenging the historical amnesia of much writing on contemporary art. Bourriaud, for example, is adamant that relational work breaks radically from practices of sixties art. Yet in acknowledging the importance of game theory as a peculiar model of interactivity, I revisit theories of postmodernism otherwise forgotten in recent art criticism. What I argue for game-theoretic discourse is the extent to which postmodernism confronts and internalizes its most basic tenets namely those related to interactivity and the production and exchange of knowledge while at the same time challenging its authority on the grounds of its rationalizing of conflict and cooperation; its claims to consensus and its calculative reason. In particular I look to Jean-Francois Lyotards The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge and argue for its continued relevance to the discussion of contemporary art.
Pamela M. Lee is Professor of Art History in the Department of Art and Art History at Stanford University. Her research, scholarship and teaching focuses on the history, theory and criticism of art since 1945, with special interests in the 1960s and 1970s, media and technology, philosophical aesthetics and feminism. She is the author of two books published by the MIT Press, Object to Be Destroyed: The Work of Gordon Matta-Clark (2000) and Chronophobia: On Time in the Art of the 1960s (2004). French and Spanish-language editions of the respective works are in preparation. A contributor to Artforum, Texte zur Kunst, October and Grey Room, Professor Lee is currently completing two books. The first considers the relationship between globalization and contemporary art and is entitled Forgetting the Art World. The second book, to be published by Routledge Press, is called New Games: Postmodernism and the Prisoner's Dilemma. Here Lee revisits the literature on postmodernism and the visual arts relative to game theory and the Cold War, arguing for the continued relevance of the former as a challenge to the neo-liberal agendas much game-theoretic discourse effectively sponsors.