RESIDENCY JUAN A. GAITAN (CAN/NL)
Juan A. Gaitan (1973, Canada/Netherlands) is Hordaland Art Centre's resident August 2010.
Gaitan will give a talk on August 31st at 19:00.
For the residency period Gaitan will develop further an essay tentatively entitled Acts and Figures.
Gaitan writes: "Deliberately reminiscent of the 1960s and 1970s transformation of Action (as in “Action Painting”) into Process, on the one hand, and into Performance on the other, the essay treats a theme that is relative to theatre and history: the Marxian motto, presented in his famous essay The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, that Revolution is a costume drama, “first as tragedy”, he wrote, “second as farce”. The essay will focus on the seeming impossibility of the contemporary world to transcend the revolutionary models set by Ghandi, or May ’68. But, as theories of revolutions are so far aesthetic, I want also to explore the possibilities of a non-aesthetic or “imageless” revolution: can there be such a thing in the contemporary world of Spectacle?"---------
Juan A. Gaitan is a writer and curator of contemporary art. Trained as an art historian and aesthetic theorist, his work has focused on two historical moments: anarchism and art in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, specifically France and Germany; and post-utopianism and the end of Humanism towards the 1960s and 1970s, in relation to North American art and culture. Currently he is working as curator at Witte de With, Centre for Contemporary Art in Rotterdam, The Netherlands, where he is developing the year-long project Morality. He has published several monographic essays on contemporary artists and has written on a range of topics, from Late Antiquity in the Levant, to the photographic representations of the Atomic Bomb. Currently he is also working on his dissertation, about the death of utopian optimism and the emergence of the idea of process during the 1960s. As part of this project, he is currently developing a lengthy essay on the idea of “process” in revolutions, and the Marxian concept of Revolution as a costume drama.