Friday 16 September 2005, 14.30–18.30
Saturday 17 September 2005, 11.00–18.30
Sunday 18 September 2005, 11.00–17.30
Monday 19 September 2005, 10.30–15.00

This weekend of presentations and debates aims to explore the ideas and practices represented in the exhibition Open Systems: Rethinking Art c.1970, and to develop the ideas represented there into other cultural areas.

The conference on Friday and Saturday brings together leading artists from the period of Open Systems and critics, historians, theorists and curators who have made important contributions to how the experimental art of the 1960s and 70s is understood today.

The Graduate Symposium on Sunday and Monday has been convened by the University of Wales, Newport, College of Art, Media and Design. It features doctoral and post-doctoral researchers from leading universities in Europe and the US.

Tate Modern  Starr Auditorium
£40 (£25 concessions), booking recommended
Price includes refreshments and drinks reception
£10 day tickets for Sunday 18 and Monday 19 September are available on the door

    

Schedule subject to minor changes

OPEN SYSTEMS CONFERENCE
16 AND 17 SEPTEMBER

Friday 16 September 2005

14.30
Introduction
Dominic Willsdon, Curator of Public Events at Tate Modern and tutor in critical theory at the Royal College of Art and the London Consortium

14.40
Donna De Salvo, Anne Rorimer
Chaired by Alison Green

Donna De Salvo is the curator of Open Systems: Rethinking Art c.1970 and the Associate Director for Programs and Curator, Permanent Collection at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. As Senior Curator at Tate Modern (until 2004), she curated exhibitions of Giorgio Morandi, Andy Warhol and Anish Kapoor. She is an expert on Pop Art and the work of Andy Warhol and has curated the exhibitions Hand-Painted Pop: American Art in Transition 1955–52 (1993) and Success Is a Job in New York: The Early Art and Business of Andy Warhol (1989).

Anne Rorimer is based in Chicago and is an independent scholar and freelance curator. Formerly, she was a curator at The Art Institute of Chicago where she worked closely during the 1970s and 80s with artists from the Conceptual period. In 1995 she was the co-curator (with Ann Goldstein) of Reconsidering the Object of Art, 1965–1975, organised at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. She is the author of New Art in the 60s and 70s: Redefining Reality (Thames & Hudson, 2001) and has published widely in exhibition catalogues and journals.

Alison Green is an art historian, critic and curator. She is the author of ‘When Attitudes Become Form and the Contest over Conceptual Art's History’ in the recent Cambridge University Press book, Conceptual Art: Theory, Myth, and Practice (2004). She currently teaches history and theory at Central St Martins School of Art and Design in London and writes regularly for Art Monthly.

15.45
Braco Dimitrijevic

Braco Dimitrijevic became internationally known in the early 1970s with his Casual Passer-by works, in which he exhibited the gigantic photo portraits of unknown people on the public sites of city facades and billboards, places usually reserved for pictures of dignitaries or publicity messages. In the mid-1970s the artist turned his interest to the art of the past, and started making installations in museums. He has show at major venues internationally for more than thirty years; his work is included in Open Systems: Rethinking Art c.1970.

16.30
Tea and coffee

17.00
Peter Osborne and Alexander Alberro
Chaired by Michael Corris

Peter Osborne is Professor of Modern European Philosophy at Middlesex University, London and an editor of the journal Radical Philosophy. He has published widely on philosophical aspects of conceptual and post-conceptual art. His books include Conceptual Art (Phaidon Press, 2002), and forthcoming in 2006, Art Against Aesthetics: Philosophical Essays on Contemporary Art, Collected Essays 2001–5.

Alexander Alberro is an Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Florida, and the author of Conceptual Art and the Politics of Publicity (MIT Press, 2003). His essays have appeared in a wide array of journals and exhibition catalogues. He has also edited and co-edited a number volumes, including Two-Way Mirror Power: Dan Graham's Writings on Art (MIT Press, 1999), Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology (MIT Press, 2000) and Recording Conceptual Art (University of California Press, 2001).

Michael Corris is Professor at the Newport School of Art, Media and Design, University of Wales. As a member of the Conceptual art group, Art & Language, and as an individual artist, his work has been exhibited and collected by major international institutions. His art criticism has been published in Art Monthly, Artforum, Flash Art, Art History, art+text and Mute. His most recent publications include Conceptual Art: Theory, Myth and Practice (Cambridge, 2004).

18.30
Drinks reception

20.00
Alvin Lucier: Open Sound Systems
(Separate ticket required)

 

 

Saturday 17 September 2005

11.00
Margaret Iversen and Briony Fer
Chaired by Lucy Soutter

Margaret Iversen is Professor in History and Theory of Art at the University of Essex. Her books include Alois Riegl: Art History and Theory (MIT Press, 1993), and a monograph on the contemporary artist Mary Kelly (Phaidon Press, 1997). Her forthcoming book Art Beyond the Pleasure Principle, due to appear in 2005, is a series of case studies applying psychoanalysis to the interpretation of twentieth-century and contemporary art.

Briony Fer is Reader in the History of Art at University College London. Her publications include On Abstract Art (Yale, 1997), and The Infinite Line Re-Making Art After Modernism (Yale, 2004). The latter offers a radical reinterpretation of the innovative art of the late 1950s and 1960s, focusing on the tendency toward repetition and seriality that occurred at the moment of modernism's decline and continues to shape contemporary art.

12.45
Alvin Lucier with Seth Kim-Cohen

The legendary American composer Alvin Lucier was an early pioneer of sound works which use systems as a generative device. He has since produced innovations in many areas of musical composition and performance, including the notation of physical gestures, the use of brain waves in live performance, and the evocation of room acoustics for musical purposes.

Seth Kim-Cohen is a conceptual sonician, writer of creative texts, and the organiser of Friday night’s performance Alvin Lucier: Open Sound Systems.

13.30
Lunch

14.30
Sabeth Buchmann and Matthias Michalka
Chaired by Charlie Gere

Sabeth Buchmann is a professor of history of modern and post-modern art at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. She is working on a research project on film, avant-garde and biopolitics at the Jan-Van-Eyck-Academy, Maastricht (in cooperation with Helmut Draxler and Stephan Geene). For her PhD dissertation she wrote on the notion of production within Conceptual art in reference to new technologies. She regularly contributes to publications on art, art criticism, cultural/visual studies and media theory.

Matthias Michalka is an art historian and curator for new media art at the Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Vienna. Among the exhibitions he has curated are Mathias Poledna, Western Recording, Matthew Buckingham, A Man of the Crowd, X-Screen, Film Installations und Actions of the 1960s and 1970s, Dorit Margreiter. 10104 Angelo View Drive, and Katya Sander - The Most Complicated Machines Are Made of Words. He has been a lecturer at the Merz Akademie Stuttgart and the Institute for Art History at the University of Vienna among others.

Charlie Gere is Reader in New Media Research in the Institute for Cultural Research, Lancaster University, Chair of Computers and the History of Art (CHArt), and the Director of Computer Arts, Contexts, Histories, etc... (CACHe), an AHRB-funded research project looking at the history of early British computer art. He is the author of Digital Culture (Reaktion, 2002), and is currently writing a book on art and speed from the early nineteenth century up to the present day, to be published as Art, Time and Technology in 2006.

16.15
Tea and coffee

16.45
Morgan Fisher with Stuart Comer

California-based filmmaker Morgan Fisher began his career as an editor in the commercial film industry before exploring the avant-garde. The combined experience has led Fisher to examine and deconstruct the narrative of film and the industry itself with wry humour, creating an entirely unique and intimate view of cinema and its physical presentation.

Stuart Comer is Curator of Film and Events at Tate Modern, and has programmed for Tate Modern the retrospective of Fisher’s films, Standard Gauge, curated by Chrissie Iles for the Whitney Museum of American Art.

17.30–18.30
Plenary Discussion
Chaired by Mark Godfrey

Mark Godfrey teaches at the Slade School of Fine Art, University College, London. He is a Leverhulme Award holder and is researching a book on Abstraction and Holocaust memory for Yale. Recent projects include a catalogue essay on Open Systems for Tate Modern and on Eva Hesse for the Jewish Museum, New York.

20.00
Standard Gauge: The Films of Morgan Fisher Programme One
(Separate ticket required)

 

OPEN SYSTEMS GRADUATE SYMPOSIUM: 18 AND 19 SEPTEMBER

Organised in collaboration with the University of Wales, Newport, College of Art, Media and Design. Admission is included in conference ticket or £10 on the day. Day tickets are valid for both Sunday and Monday.

 

Sunday 18 September 2005

11:00
Introduction: Kathleen Madden

The convener of this graduate symposium, Kathleen Madden is Commissioning Editor for Contemporary Art at Phaidon Press, and a PhD candidate at the University of Wales, Newport where she is working on late-1960s Conceptual art history.

11:10
Luke Skrebowski (London Consortium)
All Systems Go: Recovering Jack Burnham’s Systems Aesthetics

Luke Skrebowski is pursuing research into the interaction of Art and Technology, 1966–71. He graduated from King’s College, Cambridge University, in 1999. He has worked professionally in New Media.

11:40
Jonathan Bass (Rutgers University)
Zembla is Elsewhere: Robert Smithson’s displacement of Nabokov’s Pale Fire

12:10
Irene Small (Yale University)
One Thing After Another: How We Spend Time in Hélio Oiticica’s Quasi-Cinemas

Irene Small is a PhD candidate in the History of Art, Yale University, and is writing her dissertation on the work of Hélio Oiticica. She previously acted as Curatorial and Research Assistant to Okwui Enwezor for the exhibition The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa 1945–1994.

12:40
Lunch

14:10
Maja and Reuben Fowkes (Zagreb University / University of Essex)
Croatian Spring: Art in the Social Sphere

Maja and Reuben Fowkes have curated numerous solo and group shows in Croatia, Hungary and the UK, and have a strong interest in socially and environmentally engaged art. Current projects include convening the conference on Art and Sustainability at Central European University, Budapest, and curating the exhibition Croatian Spring at SC Gallery, Zagreb. Reuben is a Research Fellow at MIRIAD, Manchester Metropolitan University, and Maja is curating for Galerija Balen, Slavonski Brod.

14:40
Isobel Whitelegg (University of Essex)

Isobel Whitelegg completed her PhD (Mira Schendel, A Radical Passivity: Toward Another History of Art, Thought and Action in the Brazilian Sixties) at the University of Essex in 2005. She acted as Senior Research Officer for the University of Essex Collection of Latin American Art’s AHRC funded UECLAA OnLine project and is currently Senior Research Officer for Wider UECLAA.

15:10
Sophie Richard (Norwich School of Art and Design)
Sculpture Inside-Out

Sophie Richard is currently researching the international network of conceptual. She has been awarded research grants from the Henry Moore Institute and the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). She has published extensively in periodicals and exhibition catalogues, notably for the Casino Luxembourg-Forum d’art contemporain and is a contributor to the Artistic Studies Seminar of the University of Luxembourg.

15:40
Tea and coffee

16:10
Seth Kim-Cohen (London Consortium)
Open Systems and the Question Concerning Competence

Seth Kim-Cohen’s doctoral research focuses on the failure of representational and semiotic codes to deliver on their signaled intentions. He is also a conceptual sonician, broadcaster, writer of creative texts, and organised the Open Sound Systems concert featuring Alvin Lucier and John White. His book, One Reason To Live, is due in December from Errant Bodies Press.

16:40
Anna Lovatt (Courtauld Institute of Art)
Closed Systems: Serial Art, Solipsism, Politics

Anna Lovatt recently submitted her PhD at the Courtauld Institute of Art. Her thesis is entitled Seriality and Systematic Thought in Drawing 1966–1976. In Autumn 2005 she will begin a post-doctoral research fellowship funded by the Henry Moore Foundation, which will also be held at the Courtauld Institute. Her upcoming research will focus on the role of drawing in New York-based sculptural practices of the late 1960s and early 70s.

17:10–17:40
Paula Feldman (Courtauld Institute of Art)
The Grapevine of the Yellow Pages: Uncovering the Conceptual Foundation of Minimal Art

Paula Feldman received her PhD on the reception and production of minimal art in the Netherlands at the Courtauld Institute of Art in 2005. She is the co-editor of Dan Flavin (Thames & Hudson, 2004) an anthology of writings on the artist and has written for the Burlington Magazine, Art Monthly, and Contemporary. She currently works at White Cube.

19.00
Standard Gauge: The Films of Morgan Fisher Programme Two
(Separate ticket required)

 

Monday 19 September 2005

10:30
Rachel Churner (Columbia University)
Hans Haacke from Group Zero Up

Rachel Churner is a doctoral candidate currently working on a dissertation about Kurt Schwitters.

11:00
Nicholas Cullinan (Courtauld Insitute of Art)
From ‘The Open Work’ to the System: Arte Povera in Italy

Nicholas Cullinan is currently a Leverhulme Scholar at the British School at Rome, where he is researching a PhD on Arte Povera at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London. A contributor to frieze, Contemporary, The Independent and Tema Celeste, he has also worked at the National Portrait Gallery, the Estorick Collection and the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice.

11:30
TBC

12.00
Lunch

13:30
Gloria Hwang Sutton (UCLA)
Tactical Networks: Rethinking VALIE EXPORT’s Tapp und Tastkino (1968–71)

Gloria Hwang Sutton specialises in Expanded Cinema practices of the 1960s. Her work on artist Stan Vanderbeek’s Movie-Drome (1965) is included in Future Cinema: The Cinematic Imaginary After Film (MIT, 2003) and she is currently a research associate for an exhibition of new media art organised by The Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles to open in October 2005.

14:00
William Kaizen (Columbia University)
Ecological Art and Media Ecology: On Dan Graham, Radical Software and Gregory Bateson

William Kaizen is currently finishing his PhD dissertation The Immediate: Video and American Art, from Warhol to Postminimalism. His writing has appeared in October, Grey Room and elsewhere.

14:30–15:00
Kathryn Chiong (Columbia University)
Fair Game: Strategic Art Systems c.1970

Kathryn Chiong is currently doing dissertation research on the work of Lawrence Weiner. Kathryn also works as a Museum Educator at the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, both in New York.

This event is related to the Open Systems: Rethinking Art c.1970 exhibition