FORUM B-OPEN LESESIRKEL: ANTHEA BUYS
B-opens første lesesirkel i 2012 holdes av Anthea Buys, gjest ved Hordaland kunstsenter i januar. Buys har plukket ut to tekster og en oppskrift for lesesirkelen: The Man of The Crowd av Edgar Allan Poe, et utdrag fra Three Banquets for a Queen av Charlotte Birnbaum og en oppskrift på Great great Aunt Bessie´s biscuits. I lesesirkelen vil Buys diskutere fremveksten av ulike former for "profesjonelle amatører" i samtidig kunstneriske og kuratoriske praksiser. Hun ser nærmer på hvordan kunnskapen innenfor tradisjonelt ikke-kunstneriske felt overføres til de kunstspesifikke praksisene, som tar disse feltene som utgangspunkt. Tekstene og diskusjonen vil denne gangen være på engelsk.
Buys skriver:
“An exhibition-maker is… an administrator, amateur, author of introductions, librarian, manager and accountant, animator, conservator, financier, and diplomat.” (Harald Szeemann)
Since Marcel Duchamp, in the early Twentieth Century, coined the term “readymade” to describe artworks made by the appropriation of everyday objects, the material and disciplinary scope of contemporary art has continued to expand exponentially. In the context of post-minimalist American sculpture, American art theorist Rosalind Krauss calls this widening of the substance and content of art “the expanded field”. The notion of an “expanded field” has been installed in the common language of art discourse in such a way that curators, writers, artists and other inhabitants of the art world use the term to speak of, and justify, a seemingly limitless scope of actions, objects, disciplines and expertise available for appropriation in the name of art.
In this light, are artists and curators today serial “amateur professionals”, moving from one conventionally “non-art” specialist skill-set to the next as projects come and go? While to me, at least, artists seem to show more constancy in their fields of appropriation, many contemporary curators seem to “check in” and “check out” of specialist fields like flâneurs moving from one part of a city to the next.
In some cases this itinerant amateur specialisation is born of circumstantial necessity (such as financial or institutional limitations); in other cases it is conceptually appropriate to a project, and in others still it occurs just because there is no reason it shouldn’t.
I would like to propose two short readings prior to our discussion both of which relate to this topic literarily and anecdotally, rather than theoretically. The first is Edgar Allen Poe’s short story “The Man of the Crowd” (1840), which is the literary origin of the figure of the flâneur. Walter Benjamin discusses this story extensively in his theorizing of the flâneur in The Arcades Project. The second is a short extract from Charlotte Birnbaum’s On the Table: Three Banquets for a Queen, which is a sumptuous read. There is a bonus “reading” as well, which is a recipe passed down to me from my great grandmother. I use it a lot in professional contexts, mostly to thank people for favours. If you would like, you are welcome to try the recipe out, and bring your batch of baked goods with you to the study circle.
Påmelding hos B-open: toril.johannessen [at] gmail.com
Tekstene blir tilsendt ved påmelding.
Gratis og åpent for alle!
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Anthea Buys er kurator og skribent fra Cape Town, Sør-Afrika. Hun jobber som kurator for samtidskunst ved South African National Gallery, og har hele tiden prosjekter på gang utenforinstitusjonen.