| Saturday 8 November
14.00–18.30
Sample Culture Now
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donAtella
LonDonAtella (still) 2002
Courtesy Mark Leckey
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Featuring five leading artists and theorists in the
field of contemporary sample culture, this symposium will mix talks,
discussions and performances to investigate the practice of sampling,
an emerging form of art practice where artists cannibalize fragments
of sound, image, music, dance and performance to create new spaces
of possibility. Participants will include sound-artist and cultural
collagist Vicki Bennett (aka People Like Us), German art and music
theorist Diedrich Diederichsen, cultural critic Kodwo Eshun, and
artists Mark Leckey and Christian Marclay.
Vicki Bennett (aka People
Like Us) is a musician, sound-artist, video-maker and satirist,
whose mixed-media manipulations deploy absurd moments to expose
a surreal world of bad connections and faulty communications. Her
dynamic cross-platform performances have taken place at the ICA
London, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and at festivals from
Brooklyn to Barcelona.
Diedrich Diederichsen was the editor
of German music magazines Sounds and Spex and is one of the most
important critical voices internationally on art, music and pop
culture. Professor at the Merz Academy in Stuttgart and at Art Center
College of Design in Los Angeles, he is a frequent contributor to
Artforum and Texte Zur Kunst. He has edited Yo!
Hermeneutics: Black Cultural Criticism/Pop/Media/Feminism
and Loving the Alien: Science Fiction, Diaspora, Multi-Culturalism.
Kodwo Eshun is a self-professed ‘concept
engineer’, and known for his ‘fast-forward’ theories
on electronic music and its interface with art, science fiction,
technology and machine culture. His debut book More Brilliant
than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction was published in
1998, and his writings appear frequently in The Wire, The Face,
i-D, Spin, Arena and The Guardian.
British artist, Mark Leckey, uses
sampled sound, found film footage, video, and live performance to
pit the innocence and irresponsibility of club culture against rich
art historical references in an attempt to break open the traditional
codes and modes of art practice. Leckey’s Big Box Statue
Action was recently the inaugural performance in the Tate
& Egg Live: free series, and his work has been featured
in exhibitions in London at the ICA, Tate Modern, Cabinet, and the
Barbican Centre and at Gavin Brown's Enterprise in New York and
Galerie Daniel Buchholz in Cologne.
Influential New York artist Christian Marclay
has produced one of the most important bodies of work about sound
and its role in contemporary culture. Legendary DJ, composer, collagist,
and sculptor, Marclay creates new narratives on the threshold between
the audible and the visible. His first retrospective was held at
the UCLA Hammer Museum in 2003, and he has exhibited in museums
and galleries internationally, including the Hirshhorn Museum and
Sculpture Garden, Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Kunsthaus Zurich,
White Cube and the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Since the advent of collage in the early twentieth
century artists have sought to reprocess cultural residue from the
past to create new systems of representation. Whereas much of the
discourse around sampling still relies on theories of appropriation
developed twenty years ago, sampling can be distinguished as a distinct
aesthetic strategy, and one more relevant to many cultural practices
today. Sampling both quotes and challenges notions of authorship,
originality, and intellectual property, while creating new narratives
and new ways of reactivating the archive of art, and representing
the everyday.
Tate Modern Starr Auditorium
£10 (£7 concessions)
Symposia & Seminars
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