Readings for Art Users #2
How to live in post-artistic times?
Ilustracja: Krzysztof Pyda
The second Art User Readers will focus on games and play - abilities that are necessary in order to live in post-artistic times.
The seminar will start with a talk about the game instinct as a fundamental element of an aesthetic nation (Schiller). It will serve as a starting point for a discussion on the post-artistic age (Ludwiński), in which art sweeps reality like a rolling snow ball, slowly becoming the world. Ludwiński's hand-drawn diagrams and examples from the “Making Use” exhibition will be used as a springboard from which we will dive into the current of post-artistic life and a conversation on art that has ceased to be art.
Readings #2 will include excerpts from Friedrich Schiller's “Letters upon the Aesthetic Education of Man” and Jerzy Ludwiński's “Art in the Post-artistic Age”.
The texts will be sent to those interested in taking part in the seminar a week before the meeting. Please e-mail zapisy@artmuseum.pl with “Art User Readers #2” in the title. They will also be available in the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw's front desk at Pańska 3. The meeting will take place in the Room with the Mosaic on the 1st floor.
The team of the Free/Slow University of Warsaw invites to a new series of seminars accompanying the exhibition "Making Use: Life in Postartistic Times"about Readings for Art Users. With reference to the legacy of flying universities, F/SUW organizes a series of self-educational meetings for users of art. Readings' participants will assemble a theoretical toolkit, which will enable them to operate freely within a vocabulary and concepts crucial for understanding the role and position of art in the contemporary world.
Seminars will refer directly to the exhibitions organized simultaneously at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw ("Making Use. Life in the Post-Artistic Era", "Why We Have Wars. The Art of Modern-Day Outsiders", "Bread and Roses. The Strategies of Class Identification"), grounding theoretical reflection in the most recent curatorial and artistic developments.
The cycle will serve as a discursive platform, taking on such questions as:
- What is the use value of art?
- Is art purposeless?
- What does making use mean in such a context?
- Are we living in postartistic times?
- Does an avantgardistic dream of fusing art with life remain an unreachable horizon?
- Can art facilitate radical changes in society and everyday life?
- What is artistic competence?
- How does this extend to other domains of life?
- What kind of plausible art worlds are there?
- What is the value of institutions sustaining artistic autonomy?
- Is the art world capable, and under which conditions, to empower disenfranchised communities?
- What brings together DIY enthusiasts with hackers?
- What kind of work is being conducted by users of social media?
One of the main texts to resurface over the course of several seminars will be "Towards a Lexicon of Usership" by Canadian philosopher Stephen Wright. This work is to be juxtaposed with canonical texts (Immanuel Kant, Karl Marx, Friedrich Schiller) and contemporary positions (Howard Becker, Hakim Bey, Claire Bishop, Yann Moulier Boutang, Peter Bürger, Guy Debord, Hal Foster, Miwon Kwon, Lucy Lippard, Jerzy Ludwiński, Jacques Rancière, McKenzie Wark).
