Wednesday Night School
PLEASE JOIN US:
Feb 24, 7pm Audain Gallery presentation of our research during the last couple of months.
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The last forty years have seen the reconfiguration of the global economy towards the restoration of wealth, power and privilege. In Vancouver, real estate developer money fills the pockets of art institutions and political parties alike while independent art spaces are obliterated by imperatives of gentrification and high stratifying rents. Private space is unaffordable, scarce, and ultimately dominated by the tyranny of profit, while public space is increasingly controlled by the police.
As art museums progressively capitulate to the given situation, they become answerable to the requirements of capital accumulation. When we do uncover and foster space on our own terms, it is always under the precarious threat of erasure. We affirm, however, that an exception persists against the logic of this world.
The wholesale privatization of public institutions and the return to the enclosure of the commons is an endgame that we reject. The alternative is in fact an opening: a working with and within multiplicity. This language has two forms, split between the state of the situation and the decrees of the commune. Between these two is a dialectic of pure force, moving between sabotage and reading; revolt and pedagogy; sharing and conflagration, and all that remains to be uncovered in the founding of a new common sense.
Our participation will consist of a reading group that is open to the public. Every other Wednesday Coupe will host a platform from which to address the acute condition of art of our time, identify the current aesthetic mode corresponding to Vancouver's regime of monopoly-capitalist development, and attempt to articulate the aesthetic and political practice proper to undermine it.
Sunday, November 27
7pm, Audain Gallery
Wednesday Night School: Introduction
Rosalyn Deutsche: Evictions: Art and Spatial Politics Read: "Uneven Development: Public Art in New York City"
Boris Groys Art Power Read: "On the New"
Suggested Reading: Jacques Ranciere: The Nights of Labour: The Worker's Dream of the Nineteenth Century
Wednesday, December 7
7pm, Location TBA
Close Reading of Deutsche's Chapter "Uneven Development: Public Art in New York City and Boris Groys' "On the New"
Wednesday, December 14
7pm, Location: 339 E 13th Ave
Close Reading of Boris Groys' "On the New" from Art Power
Alain Badiou: Does the Notion of Activist Art Still Have Meaning?
Suggested Reading:
Alain Badiou Third Sketch of a Manifesto of Affirmationist Art
Alain Badiou The Century
Julian Stallabrass: Art Incorporated
Chin-Tao Wu: Embracing the Enterprising Culture: Art Institutions Since the 1980s
Sunday, December 18
7pm, Audain Gallery
CLASS RESTORATION (public discussion/presentation)
HOLIDAY BREAK DECEMBER 18 - JANUARY 4
Wednesday, January 4
7pm, Location TBA
Benjamin Buchloh: From Faktura to Factography
Suggested Readings:
Maria Gough: The Communist Lighthouse
Sergei Tret'iakov: Art in Revolution, Revolution in Art
Sergei Tret'iakov: Factography
Sergei Tret'iakov: Photo Observation
Sergei Tret'iakov: Biography of the Object
Sergei Tret'iakov: Old and New
Wednesday, January 18
7pm, Location TBA
Martha Rosler "Post-Documentary / Post-Photography" :Decoys and Disruptions: Selected Writings 1975 - 2001
Allan Sekula: Fish Story
Allan Sekula: Loaves and Fishes
Suggested Reading: Louis Althusser:Reading Capital
Sunday, January 22
7pm, Audain Gallery
MARXISM AND FACTOGRAPHY Screening of Allan Sekula's "Lottery of the Sea" (2005) | 5pm Audain Gallery | 149 W. Hastings
*NEXT MEETING: Friday 27 JAN 2012 -- 2847 Yale St. | 7:00pm -- Publication Discussion*
Wednesday, February 1
7pm, Location TBA
Art-Writing
Hito Steyerl Reader
Wednesday, February 15
7pm, Location TBA
Briony Fer: Studiowork
Friday, February 24
7pm, Audain Gallery
How to Trace the Destruction of the Old World on Your Hands (after El Lissitzky) (Presentation and discussion of final work)
**New Readings for the next three weeks**:
Benjamin Buchloh: Allegorical Procedures
Alain Badiou: Logics of Worlds: Being and Event 2
Rosalind Krauss: Voyage to the North Sea
Sergei Eisenstein: Collected Works: Part 1 + Part 2
Sergei Tret'iakov: Links Below
Briony Fer: Studiowork
Alain Badiou: Destruction Negation Subtraction
