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Eda Cufer, image from a project by the collective NSK.
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October 24-25, 2008
PURCHASE TICKETS
Disruptions: the political in art now
Bringing together influential theorists, artists, curators, and educators, this symposium explores the intersections of politics and art in the first decade of the 21st century.
Keynote Lecture: The Contemporary Paradoxes of Political Art, by Jacques Rancière
Friday, October 24, 2008, 4 pm, the University of Chicago
1025 East 58th Street, Swift Hall, 3rd floor, The University of Chicago
This lecture is free and open to the public. No reservations necessary. Presented by Critical Inquiry in cooperation with the MCA and the Open Practice Committee/Department of Visual Arts, University of Chicago.
One of the most influential philosophers working today, Jacques Rancière has authored many books on topics ranging from democracy to film to aesthetics. In this keynote address, he examines the role of images in a democracy and how art and politics are intertwined. Rancière is the 2008 Critical Inquiry Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of Chicago.
For more information, call Critical Inquiry at 773.702.8477 or email jww4@uchicago.edu
Disruptions: the political in art now
Saturday, October 25, 2008, 11 am - 6 pm, MCA Theater
Saturday program: $15 / $10 MCA members
Organized by the MCA and the University of Chicago's Open Practice Committee/Department of Visual Arts
Exploring the many ways artists inspire political action and social change, or how art can be socially useful, this day of discussion asks pertinent questions about the intersection for art and politics. How does art function politically? What is activist art? What forms of dissent are possible today, and how do artists manifest political perspectives in their practice? Speakers include artist and educator Doug Ashford; writer and videomaker Gregg Bordowitz; artist Carolina Caycedo; performer, organizer and temporary Services Member Salem Collo-Julin; dramaturge, curator, and writer Eda Cufer; cultural critic Brian Holmes; artist Simon Leung; experimental geographer and artist Trevor Paglen; artist and member of Otabenga Jones & Associates Robert Pruitt; and artist and curator Mark Tribe.
Boxed lunches: A limited number of boxed lunches are available for $10 per lunch with advance ticket sales only (through October 21) and must be ordered at the time of purchase through the Box Office at 312.397.4010. Lunch tickets are issued by the MCA Box Office and distributed with symposium tickets.
For tickets or more information call 312.397.4010. 
Doug Ashford is an artist and a teacher. He is assistant professor at Cooper Union's School of Art. After receiving a BFA from Cooper Union in 1981, he became a member of the artists collective Group Material which was his principal art practice until 1997. Group Material produced over 40 exhibitions and public projects internationally, using museum and other public spaces as cultural arenas in which audiences were invited to imagine democratic forms. Prominent in this history are the exhibitions The Castle (documenta 8, Kassel, Germany, 1987), Democracy (Dia Art Foundation, New York, 1988) and AIDS Timeline (Berkeley Art Museum 1989, Wadsworth Atheneum, 1990, Whitney Museum of American Art, 1991). The collaborative group's essays and publications on the role of exhibition practices in design, public culture and display, and the value of democratic mobilization in the cultural arena continue to affect art practice both within the world of visual culture and in other disciplines. Since the disbanding of Group Material in 1997, Ashford has gone on to produce exhibitions and publish articles independently, although his primary creative practice has been teaching. He recently retired as the director of the Vermont College MFA in Visual Art Program, an experimental graduate program committed to situational pedagogy. At Cooper Union, Ashford organizes the Intra-disciplinary Seminar of the School of Art, a school-wide forum committed to the critical re-definition of visual practices.
Gregg Bordowitz is a writer, film and video maker. His films, including Fast Trip Long Drop (1993), A Cloud In Trousers (1995), The Suicide (1996), and Habit (2001) have been widely shown in festivals, museums, and movie theaters, and have been broadcast internationally. In spring 2002, Bordowitz had a solo museum show at the MCA. His book, titled The AIDS Crisis Is Ridiculous and Other Writings 1986-2003, was published by MIT Press in the fall of 2004. For this recent collection, Bordowitz received the 2006 Frank Jewitt Mather Award from the College Art Association. Bordowitz is a member of the faculty of the Film/Video/New Media Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and he is on the faculty of the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program.
Carolina Caycedo is an artist and member of the Colombian artists' group Colectivo Cambalache. Born in London and educated in Colombia, she helped create the ambulatory Museo de la calle (Museum of the Street) with Cambalache, which revolved around a streetcar as a site of exchange. She is currently editing the Marc Emery Almanach 2009 for Puerto Rico, as part of the second San Juan's Poli/graphic triennial. Contents refer to political, economical, and social aspects of the actual Puerto Rican trans-culturalization process, as seen by an alien resident. Her piece DAYTODAY, a personal barter network, was included in the 2006 Whitney Biennial. Her street actions, public marches, bartering, and itinerant projects respond to the effects of global capitalism as it impacts communities and the economies of the street. Caycedo lives and works in Isabela, Puerto Rico.
Salem Collo-Julin is a life-long Chicagoan, a writer, artist, and good neighbor who has been described as a "poster child" for working in groups. She frequently makes work with the group Temporary Services, a collaboration with Brett Bloom and Marc Fischer. Salem was co-founder of Mess Hall, the experimental cultural center in Chicago's Roger's Park neighborhood. Salem also writes and performs solo and collaborative work on non-stages and in anti-venues. She started and co-maintains The Free Store, a nomadic, ongoing venture that gives it all away. She is responsible for a list-serve called GoChgo, an internet forum for creatives, activists, teachers, performers, and other irregular people to share information about what they are up to in Chicago and beyond. She, along with her family and friends, plan to leave Chicago if the Olympics are brought here.
Eda Cufer is a dramaturg, curator, and writer. In 1983, she co-founded the theater group SNST (Scipion Nasice Sisters Theater) and a year later she co-founded the art-collective NSK (Neue Slowenische Kunst), based in Ljubljana, Slovenia. During the 1990s she worked extensively with NSK's visual art section, the IRWIN group, on a number of conceptual projects exploring the post-communist condition, and edited several books relating to those projects, including NSK Moscow Embassy: How the East Sees the East; Transnacionala: Highway Collisions Between East and West at the Crossroads of Art; and (together with Victor Misiano), Interpol: The Art Exhibition Which Divided East and West. She also collaborated with the international dance group En-Knap, based in Ljubljana; and the performance and visual artist Marko Peljhan and Project Atol. Between 2002 and 2004 she co-curated a series of exhibitions in Europe, including In Search of Balkania, Balkan Visions and Call me Istanbul. Her essays on theater, dance, visual art, culture, and politics have appeared in many journals and books, including: Impossible Histories (MIT Press), Primary Documents (MOMA), East Art Map (Afterall) and Participation (Whitechapel Gallery). With the suppport of an Andy Warhol/Creative Capital Foundation Fellowship, she is currently completing a book, Art as Mousetrap, which examines the interdependency between art practices and global economic and political structures. Since 2005 she has been living in the United States.
Brian Holmes is a cultural critic living in Paris and Chicago and working with artistic and political practice while moving restlessly around the world. He holds a doctorate in Romance Languages from the University of California at Berkeley; is the author of Hieroglyphs of the Future: Art and Politics in a Networked Era (Zagreb: WHW, 2002), Unleashing the Collective Phantoms: Essays in Reverse Imagineering (New York: Autonomedia, 2008) and most recently, Escape the Overcode: Creative Art in the Control Society (Forthcoming, 2008). Holmes is a member of the journal Multitudes and the mailing list Nettime, lectures widely, contributes to catalogues, edited volumes, self-publications, tracts etc. He is currently collaborating on the Continental Drift seminar with the 16 Beaver group and the WHW curatorial collective. Text archive can be accessed at http://brianholmes.wordpress.com.
Simon Leung was born in Hong Kong and lives in Los Angeles. His project-based work include a reposing of Duchamp's oeuvre as an discourse in ethics; a rethinking of the psychological, philosophical, and political dimensions of AIDS in the figure of the glory hole; a video essay on Edgar Allan Poe; an expanded opera project set in Los Angeles; and meditations on "the residual space of the Vietnam War," comprising of projects on the squatting body as counter-architecture, military desertion as askesis, and surfing. In 2006, he organized an extended project, "The Look of Law," addressing the literal and indirect representations of the state (war, the prison, the border, the police, etc.) as it relates to the psyche in contemporary times. He is the co-editor of Theory in Contemporary Art since 1985 (Blackwell 2004), and teaches in the Studio Art department at University of California, Irvine. His latest project "Squatting Project/Guangzhou," is currently on view at the 3rd Guangzhou Triennial in China until mid-November.
Trevor Paglen is an artist, writer, and experimental geographer working at the Department of Geography at the University of California, Berkeley. His work involves deliberately blurring the lines between social science, contemporary art, and a host of even more obscure disciplines to construct unfamiliar, yet meticulously researched ways to interpret the world around us. Paglen's visual work has been exhibited at Transmediale.08 Festival, Berlin; The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh; Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; Kunstraum Muenchen, Munich; and Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, North Adams; among other venues. He lectures frequently and his work has been featured in numerous publications, from the New York Times to Wired to the New York Review of Books to Modern Painters and Aperture. Paglen's first book, Torture Taxi: On the Trail of the CIA's Rendition Flights (co-authored with AC Thompson; Melville House, 2006) was the first book to systematically describe the CIA's "extraordinary rendition" program. His second book, I Could Tell You But Then You Would Have to be Destroyed by Me (Melville House, 2007) an examination of the visual culture of "black" military programs, was published in November 2007. His third book, entitled Blank Spots on a Map, is planned to be published by Dutton/NAL/Penguin in February 2009.
Robert A. Pruitt was born in 1975 in Houston Texas. He received his BFA from Texas Southern University and a Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Texas at Austin. He is a founding member of the Artist collective Otabenga Jones & Associates. Pruitt creates sculptures, drawings, video, and installations about the dichotomy of the black experience in America, and the impact of black cultural production on the global landscape. He has exhibited his work at The Museum of Fine arts Houston, The Dallas Museum of art, The Studio Museum of Harlem, and was a participating artist in the 2006 Whitney Biennial. Pruitt is a recipient of the Artadia artist award in 2004, and a Tiffany Foundation award in 2008. In 2007 he was a resident artist at Artpace In San Antonio. Pruitt now lives and works in Chicago IL, teaching at Northwestern University.
Mark Tribe is an artist and curator whose interests include art, technology, and politics. His art work has been exhibited at the ZKM Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe; Marat Guelman Gallery in Moscow; and Derek Eller Gallery in New York City. He has organized curatorial projects for the New Museum of Contemporary Art, MASS MoCA, and inSite_05. He is the co-author, with Reena Jana, of New Media Art (Taschen, 2006). He is assistant professor of Modern Culture and Media Studies at Brown University, where he teaches courses on digital art, curating, open-source culture, radical media, and surveillance. In 1996, he founded Rhizome.org, an online resource for new media artists. He received a MFA in Visual Art from the University of California, San Diego, in 1994 and a BA in Visual Art from Brown University in 1990. He splits his time between Providence and New York City.
Friday, October 24, 4 pm
Keynote: Jacques Rancière, The Contemporary Paradoxes of Political Art
1025 East 58th Street, Swift Hall, 3rd floor, The University of Chicago
Free and open to the public.
Presented by Critical Inquiry.
One of the most influential philosophers working today, Jacques Rancière has authored many books on topics ranging from democracy to film, to aesthetics. In this keynote address, he will examine the role of images in a democracy and how art and politics are intertwined. Rancière is the 2008 Critical Inquiry Distinguished Visiting Professor at The University of Chicago.
For more information, call 773.702.8477 or email jww4@uchicago.edu.
Saturday, October 25, 11 am - 6 pm
Symposium
Organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art and The University of Chicago's Open Practice Committee/Department of Visual Arts.
11 AM
Opening Remarks: Elizabeth Smith, James W. Alsdorf Chief Curator and Deputy Director for Programs at the MCA, and curator of Jenny Holzer: PROTECT PROTECT
Opening Lecture: Doug Ashford, After 1988: A reflection on the nature of critical practices since Group Material's Democracy project
Democracy was a year-long series of meetings, exhibitions and a publication organized and designed by Group Material as a critical response to the systemic failures of American democracy. Dialogically produced in the many gaps that existed between art institutions and cultural activism, Group Material's project positioned politics as an implicit part of the art industry. Twenty years later there is much that has changed: institutions initial rejection of art's social effect has evolved into the active incorporation of social practice into a new gilded age for collectors and museums. What epiphany can describe the beginning of new social mobilizations?
12 PM
Lunch break. The MCA invites you to see the exhibition Jenny Holzer: PROTECT PROTECT, which opens to the public that day.
* Symposium presenters and those with pre-purchased lunch tickets may pick up their box lunches in the Kanter Meeting Center.
1-2:50 PM
Panel: Everywhere and Nowhere
Panelists: Trevor Paglen, Simon Leung, Robert Pruitt, Eda Cufer
On the politics of locating, understanding, and contextualizing politically invested art, and the tactics artists are employing to activate and reveal new political landscapes.
3:10-3:50 PM
Interlude: Gregg Bordowitz, Belief and Volition
On the conflicting impulses and philosophical contradictions that inform Bordowitz's work and the role of belief regarding volition-the faculty of power to exert one's will.
4:15-6:00 PM
Panel: Absurdities and Public Interventions
Panelists: Mark Tribe, Carolina Caycedo, Brian Holmes, Salem Collo-Julin
On art and activism, expression and dissent, responsibility, and relations between protest, public space and the public sphere.
6:00 PM
Symposium concludes