[-empyre-] introducing Robert Summers and Marc Leger

[Christina McPhee]

hi all


First up please welcome Robert Summers and Marc Leger.

  Robert sent out a note recently about his continuing interest in  
queer theory relative to performance art traditions--; he is  
investigating different articulations of art-historical understandings  
of subject/object relations, theory, and visuality as those terms  
themselves have been transformed through an intersection with  
“queer.”  He is a lecturer in art history and visual culture at Otis  
College of Art.  He is a board member of Telic Arts Exchange and The  
Public School.  He has published papers in art and academic magazines  
and journals, and has published essays in anthologies, such as  
"Vaginal Davis _Does_ Art History" in _Jonathan Harris's Dead History,  
Live Art_ (University of Chicago Press).  He has also presented papers  
and has chaired panels both nationally and internationally -- the  
latest panel being "Intersectional Queer Visualities" at the annual  
Association of Art Historians (AAH) conference in the UK.

I came upon Marc's writings while doing a search online about Claire  
Bishop's critique of 'relational aesthetics.' Marc is an artist,  
writer and educator living in Montreal, Canada.  He has published  
essays on critical cultural practices in Afterimage, Parachute, Art  
Journal, C Magazine, Etc, Journal of Aesthetics and Protest and the  
Canadian Journal of Film Studies.  An essay on the cultural theories  
of Henri Lefebvre was published in Andrew Hemingway, ed. Marxism and  
the History of Art (Pluto Press, 2006).  He is editor of Bruce  
Barber's collected essays and interviews, Performance, [Performance]  
and Performers, published in 2007 by YYZBOOKS, as well as the  
forthcoming Spleen: Institutions of Contemporary Art Practice, a  
collection of essays on political dissidence in the context of the  
neoliberalization of cultural institutions.


I found Marc's comment moving in an interesting direction and look  
forward to hearing more from him and Robert too..


>
> "More recently, Bishop defined the emphasis on collaboration and  
> participation in contemporary art as "the social turn." (4) She  
> argues here that socially collaborative art constitutes "what avant- 
> garde we have today: artists using social situations to produce  
> dematerialized, antimarket, politically engaged projects that carry  
> on the modernist call to blur art and life." (5) She contends that  
> because the "politics of inclusion" operate in tandem with state and  
> corporate interests, works need to be discussed as art and not only  
> in the context of their stated ethical intentions."




-cm