June 11, 4:00 pm
The postmodern theory of subculture generally associates youth society with consumption and recreation. The contemporary art movement was always critically disposed towards these categories, even though today it frequently characterises itself in similar terms. So is modern art just one part of the contemporary Scene, or can we point to differences between its creations and fan-art or rave fashion? If the latter, then what are they — what distinguishes modern art from popular music, flamboyant raves, popular serials and festivals? How can artists break down the phenomenon of the Scene, revealing its social and class-based contradictions? Boris Klyushnikov takes the examples of critical exhibitions and works by Jeremy Deller, Dan Graham, Thomas Hirschhorn and Kodwo Eshun and uses them to analyse the various means by which the artist interacts with popular culture, and which allow art to mediate between the daily experience of youth society and its visual culture and codes of communication. To do this he briefly traces the history of the dialectical approach to modern art in the wider field of culture, employing the methods of such theoreticians as Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Peter Osborne, Claire Bishop and Diedrich Diederichsen.
Boris Klyushnikov is a contemporary art theoretician, and lecturer and tutor at the Russian State University for the Humanities. He has written numerous articles on the philosophy of art and the methodology of art studies.
Admission is free of charge. The number of participants is limited. Please register in advance.
Curator: Gleb Napreenko, art critic, theorist and art historian, from January 2016 to March 2017 editor-in-chief of the online magazine Raznoglasie (Controversy).
What is art in today’s world? It is possible to answer this question with a paradox — art today is that which relates to non-art — that, which time and again redefines its own limits; which opposes the unequivocal regime of reading and acceptance of art and non-art; which casts doubt on guaranteed solutions and calls a halt to actions which seem obvious. Sounds too romantic? Or too reminiscent of the old modernistic concept of the avant-garde as that which transcends the barrier between life and art (the last notable outbreak of such ideas was the thinking in France in 1968)? In our lecture series On the Fringes of Art we will demonstrate that the boundaries of art are arranged so whimsically that to imagine the modern avant-garde purely as the practice of building life by means of art, with the breaking down of art’s barriers as a militaristic gesture of conquest, as some thinkers used to think, is now impossible. Art is located at the crossroads of many lines of force, and many contested territories, the disputes over which it is neither able nor willing to resolve. Our lecture series, while making no pretention at unachievable totality in this matter, will try to delineate a few such borderlands in order to show, among other things, the unobviousness of what we call art. And that very unobviousness is not peculiar to the modern world, but traces its roots way back into history: we can find it in a range of obsolete artistic and non-artistic practices, ways of life, political and economic programmes with whose vestiges and consequences we are still dealing today.
