Dear All
Dr Gavin Butt (Department of Visual Cultures, Goldsmiths, University of
London) will be giving a seminar at UCL on 4th February, 6pm. The seminar
will take place at Malet Place Engineering Building Room 1.02.
'Should we take Performance Seriously?'
Abstract:
This paper engages in an extended consideration of a recent piece of work
by Israeli born, London-based artist Oreet Ashery, in order to rethink the
routine critical denigration of so-called non-serious forms of cultural
consumption. Taking as its backdrop the ways in which performance has
recently come to be taken seriously in the discourses and institutions of
contemporary visual art, the paper takes instead a fresh look at
performance’s pejorative histories and meanings. It asks how we might look
again at the varied approaches which posit performance as a non- serious,
or value-less form of activity. It asks how queer and performance studies
might refresh its approach to such delegitimated forms of cultural
production in order to newly appreciate the value of putatively
non-serious activity and thought. This is not in order to simply
revalorise the purportedly trivial or insignificant as latterly important
(a familiar move of much revisionist and progressive scholarship), but
rather to ask whether part of performance’s promise might reside in making
vivid a perverse form of valuing hardly acknowledged within expressly
serious discourse. Ultimately the paper asks whether we might speak, and
act, on behalf of a queer gravity or profundity; a form of attention which
improperly honours that which it prizes.
For further details, please the UCL Mellon Programme's page:
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/mellon-program/seminars/2008-2009/index.shtml
All welcome!
With my very best wishes
Cuneyt
_______________
Dr Cuneyt Cakirlar
Post-doctoral Research Fellow
UCL Mellon Programme
University College London
Gower Street London WC1E 6BT
+44 (0) 20 7679 7458
E-mail: [log in to unmask]
Web: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/mellon-program/fellows/cuneyt/
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