ON ART & LANGUAGE.
RADICALLY UNCOMPLETED, RADICALLY INCONCLUSIVE.
Visiting lecture: Carles Guerra
Friday 8 November 2013 at 4 pm
Kiasma seminar room
Helsinki
About the talk:
Many individuals have been associated with the name and the complex practice of Art & Language. They include Terry Atkinson, David Bainbridge, Michael Baldwin, Ian Burn, Charles Harrison, Joseph Kosuth, Philip Pilkington, Mel Ramsden and Dave Rushton. Since 1977, the continuity of Art & Language has been in the hands of Michael Baldwin and Mel Ramsden, becoming self-observing or autopoietic and indeed essayistic and self-displacing. Whereas the publication Art-Language provided an access to the multitheoretical field in which Art & Language evolved through the sixties, seventies and early eighties, allowing their readers to become empowered, the recent positions adopted by Baldwin and Ramsden contaminate the perception of their own collective past. They make history and they make sense out of an unorthodox trajectory that stands out among the most complex and belligerent of the second half of the twentieth century. It would be as relevant to qualify Art & Language as a conversational practice aswell as to say that it is radically uncompleted and radically inconclusive. All in all Art & Language remains a contested space, with no privileged point of view to describe its achievements. Any account of their artistic life will be deemed partial and fragmentary, which is highly unfrequent for the usual business of art history.
The talk will touch upon issues of curating and the institution role in exhibiting a discursive practice like that of Art & Language. Articulated around a mayor Art & Language show Carles Guerra is curating for MACBA in Barcelona and Musee d' la Ville de Paris in 2014.
About Carles Guerra:
Carles Guerra is an artist, art critic and independent curator based in Barcelona. He has been Chief Curator at MACBA (2011-2013) and Director of La Virreina Centre de la Imatge (2009-2011). Some of the exhibitions he has curated for these two institutions include Military Series. Alexander Sokurov, Porfolio Office Baroque. Gordon Matta-Clark, Filming Beaubourg. Roberto Rossellini, Phantome Home. AhlamShibli, Antiphotojournalism, Feux divers. Bruno Serralongue and 1979. A Monument to Radical Instants.
Highlights of his professional career include other relevant exhibitions, such as Art &Language in Practice, Dis-exhibit. Perejaume, After the News. Postmedia Documentary Practices, Situation Cinema. Joaquim Jordà , B: Zone and This is not an exhibition.
He is member of the editorial board of Cultura/s, a culture magazine published by the newspaper La Vanguardia, since 2001; he is author of numerous essays N for Negri (2000), Allan Sekula speaks with Carles Guerra (2005) and Negatives of Europe. Video Essays and Collective Pedagogies (2008).
Besides his professional career as an art critic and curator, he has also worked extensively on the cultural policies under postfordist conditions.
Carles Guerra obtained a PhD degree by the Universitat de Barcelona in 2006 and, since then, he has been Associate Professor at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra. As visiting professor, he has taught at other institutions throughout Europe and the USA. In 2011 he was awarded with the Ciutat de Barcelona Prize for his contribution in the field of visual arts.
