Friday 5 May 2006, 10.00–17.30

Appropriation is a common technique and is employed by many of the artists featured in Tate Triennial 2006. Although appropriation and the juxtaposition of images and facts is a recurring theme in recent art, the Triennial identifies a significant reinvigoration of the practice.

This symposium seeks to probe and debate the exhibition’s claims about the current state of appropriation by bringing together artists, academics and critics to address the themes of archive, re-enactment and memory. The speakers include Beatrix Ruf, Sturtevant, TJ Demos, Ken Russell, Amelia Jones, Jan Verwoert, Marc Camille Chaimowicz and Olivia Plender.

Tate Britain  Auditorium
£25 (£20 concessions), booking required

    

Programme:

9.00–10.00
Registration and coffee and biscuits

10.00–10.15
Beatrix Ruf

10.15–10.45
Jan Voerwort

10.45–11.15
Sturtevant

11.15–11.45
TJ Demos

11.45–12.15
Panel discussion. Chaired by Francesco Manacorda

12.15–13.15
Lunch

13.15–14.30
Amelia Jones in conversation with Marc Camille Chamowicz

14.30-15.35
Simon O'Sullivan and Katharine Stout with films by Cosey Fanni Tutti and Rirkrit Tiravanija

15.45–16.15
Tea and biscuits.

16.15–17.15
Olivia Plender in conversation with Ken Russell

17.15–17.30
Closing Remarks

 

Biographies:

Sturtevant is a renowned artist whose work can be said to influence many of the artists in this year’s Tate Triennial. Since the mid 1960s, Ohio-born artist Sturtevant has been concerned with one of the most important themes in Western art: originality. Now living and working in Paris, she reproduces existing paintings by artists such as Marcel Duchamp, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns and Frank Stella, to name just a few. Often indistinguishable from the originals, these works call attention to the crucial issues of origin and difference.

Jan Verwoert lives in Hamburg and works as a freelance writer. He is a member of the advisory board of the Kunstverein Munich and Guest Professor of Contemporary Art and Theory at the Academy of Umeå. He is contributing editor for frieze.

TJ Demos is lecturer in modern and contemporary art at University College, London. Current research areas include Migrations: Contemporary Art in the Age of Globalisation and forthcoming publications include The Exile of Marcel Duchamp (2007). He contributes regularly to October, Artforum and Grey Room.

Professor Amelia Jones studied at Harvard, Pennsylvania, and UCLA where she took her PhD. She specialises in many different aspects of modern and contemporary art including feminism and art; performance, body and video art; and Dada. She has curated many exhibitions and is the author of Postmodernism and the En-Gendering of Marcel Duchamp (1994), and Body Art/Performing the Subject (1998), as well as the primary survey essay in the Phaidon book The Artist's Body (2000). She has also edited several books: Feminism and Visual Culture (2003), Performing the Body/Performing the Text (with Andrew Stephenson, 1999), and Sexual Politics: Judy Chicago's 'Dinner Party' in Feminist Art History (1996).

Marc Camille Chaimowicz divides his time between London, Reading and Dijon in France. He is represented by Cabinet Gallery, London, where he has recently had a solo show. His work is included in many national collections and since the early 1970s, he has had shows in leading galleries around the world. During the last year Chaimowicz has completed commissions for market gates in Burgundy and a chapel ceiling in Cluny. A major work has recently been purchased by the Migros Museum in Zurich.

Olivia Plender is an artist and writer and currently co-editor of Untitled magazine. Her interest in magazine, comic strip and pulp fiction book cover formats is evident in her drawings exploring fictional narratives of bohemian lifestyles. Plender has undertaken residencies at the Visual Research Centre, Dundee Contemporary Arts; Grizedale Arts; and PS1, New York. Recent exhibitions include Romantic Detachment, New York; East End Academy Whitechapel Gallery, London; and a solo show at Dundee Contemporary Arts.

Ken Russell is a British filmmaker, best known in the United States as director of such feature films as Women in Love (1969), The Music Lovers (1970), Tommy (1975) and Altered States (1980). Although his television work is less well known outside the United Kingdom, it has had a major impact on the development of the television genre of fictional history. Described by historian C. Vann Woodward as the portrayal of 'real historical figures and events, but with the license of the novelist to imagine and invent', Russell's special province in the genre (a psycho-biographical form which he terms the 'biopic') has been music composers, dancers and poets. His imaginative interpretations of the lives of artists have, on occasion, outraged both critics and the general public.

Simon O’Sullivan is lecturer in art history and visual culture at the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths College, University of London. He has published widely on aesthetics and modern and contemporary art, with specific reference to Deleuze and Guattari, in journals such as Angelaki, Pli: The Warwick Journal of Philosophy, The Journal of the British Society of Phenomenology, Parallax and Afterall. He also writes catalogue essays, and is involved in collaborative art practice, with David Burrows, under the name Plastique Fantastique.

Beatrix Ruf was appointed Director/Curator of the Kunsthalle Zurich in 2001. Previously, she had been Director/Curator of the Kunsthaus Glarus, and curator at the Kunstmuseum of the Canton of Thurgau between 1994 and 1998. Since 1995 she has been Curator of the Ringier collection. She has organised exhibitions, written essays and published catalogues on artists such as Jenny Holzer, Liam Gillick, Angela Bulloch, Richard Prince, Keith Tyson, Rodney Graham, Doug Aitken, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Sean Landers and many others.

This event is related to the Tate Triennial 2006: New British Art exhibition