[-empyre-] Judith Rodenbeck at the IDC-- The Open Work: Participatory Art Since Silence

[Christina McPhee]

dear -empyre-

Our guest Judith Rodenbeck is featured here on audio.



The Open Work: Participatory Art Since Silence

http://www.archive.org/details/idc_judith_rodenbeck_lecture_02072006


"...Yet this unwillingness to examine relational aesthetics with an  
eye on history is a defensive maneuver. As such it is one that needs  
to be taken on. This talk is an historical presentation addressed to  
some of the parameters under which the "interactive, user-friendly and  
relational" were actively explored-and critiqued--in key works of the  
1950s and early 1960s."


Tuesday, February 07

iDC Lecture by Dr. Judith Rodenbeck

(introduction by Trebor Scholz)

In the introduction to his 2002 book, Relational Aesthetics, the  
curator Nicolas Bourriaud writes that currently, "the liveliest factor  
that is played out on the chessboard of art has to do with  
interactive, user-friendly and relational concepts." Neither revival  
nor comeback, relational aesthetics, for Bourriaud, is the correct  
vanguardist response to a world saturated by mass communications. Part  
of the newness had to do, in Bourriaud's account, with asking what  
kind of art was possible after the doldrums of the 1980s, when the  
hegemony of "spectacle" seemed assured (via the alleged failures of  
May 1968), after institutional critique seemed to have run its course,  
and after any socially-engaged avant-garde had exhausted itself and  
the political patience of its adherents-and even, perhaps, the  
conditions of its possibility. "How are these apparently elusive works  
to be decoded, be they process-related or behavioral by ceasing to  
take shelter behind the sixties art history?" (Bourriaud, 7) Yet this  
unwillingness to examine relational aesthetics with an eye on history  
is a defensive maneuver. As such it is one that needs to be taken on.  
This talk is an historical presentation addressed to some of the  
parameters under which the "interactive, user-friendly and relational"  
were actively explored-and critiqued--in key works of the 1950s and  
early 1960s.

About Dr. Judith Rodenbeck:
BA, Yale University. BFA, Massachusetts College of Art. MA, MPhil,  
PhD, Columbia University. Special interests in art since 1945 and its  
compositional strategies; intersections between modernist literature,  
philosophy, and the visual arts. Co-author and co-curator with  
Benjamin Buchloh of Experiments in the Everyday: Allan Kaprow and  
Robert Watts--events, objects, documents; contributor to catalogues  
for Work Ethic and Inside the Visible; author of articles for Grey  
Room, The Art Book, Documents, and P-Form. Recipient of fellowships,  
including Henry Luce Foundation/ACLS Fellowship in American Art and  
Columbia University Mellon Fellowship for Art History.


This audio is part of the collection: Open Source Audio

Keywords: "Bourriaud"; "participation"; "art"; "eco"; "Cage";  
"relational"; "aesthetics"