****NEW THURSDAY CLUB EVENT @ GOLDSMITHS with *Warren Neidich on * a
WEDNESDAY, November 5th, 7-9PM, Small Cinema, Richard Hoggart Building***


Please note revised time and venue. The Richard Hoggart Building is the
older building at Goldsmiths. How to find us, remembering that there is no
East London Line :

http://www.gold.ac.uk/find-us/

By train

From Central London
Trains run from Charing Cross, Waterloo East, Cannon Street and London
Bridge. Journey time is roughly 10-15 minutes. If a direct train isn't
listed, or you are travelling from Blackfriars Station, catch the first
available train and change at London Bridge for either New Cross or New
Cross Gate.


From New Cross Gate

Turn left out of the station and cross the road at the pedestrian lights.

For the Richard Hoggart Building

Once you have crossed the road, turn left and walk along New Cross Road,
past Laurie Grove on to Lewisham Way.
Walk past the glass-fronted Rutherford Building, and cross over Dixon Road
(on the right). Richard Hoggart Building is on the right immediately after
this.



Warren Neidich

Wednesday, November 5th, 2008

7-9pm

Small Cinema
Richard Hoggart Building

Goldsmiths

This event is supported by Goldsmiths Digital Studios and the Centre for
Cognition, Computation and Culture.


Political Art in the Sixties was about Delineation, Political Art Today is
about Differentiation

"The diagram is indeed a chaos and a catastrophe but it is also a germ of
order and rhythm…..As (Francis) Bacon says it unlocks areas of sensation".

Francis Bacon, The Logic of Sensation, Gilles Deleuze, pg. 102

"I am blind folded, a black silk scarf cloaks my eyes pressing my eye lids
tightly against my globes. I am spun around and around by my assistant. All
of sudden for no apparent reason my motion is stopped.  That is my sign to
walk forward, which I do with my arm extended in front of me until I feel
the wall.  It is at that moment that my blind-fold is removed! I find my
self confronted at close range by a series of words and colored lines. I am
reading Extensive Culture and slightly above Intensive culture which are
connected by a series of bidirectional arrows. I step back and realize, with
of course some help form my memory since I was the one that drew this
drawing in the first place, that I am situated in the midst of my Cultured
Brain Drawing which I first began in 1999 and now has mutated into an
organic amoeba like entity with multiple pseudo-pods with words like
architecture, design, painting, performance and so on labeling them.  All
around are free floating colored lines that stretch and bend around corners
or  joining points of the floor and wall, the wall and ceiling or the two
walls that form the north and east surfaces of my studio"
Warren Neidich, Bedeutung Magazine #2, October, 2008, pages 84-94


Thus begins Neidich's performative lecture entitled "Some cursory comments
on the nature of my wall drawing…….".  which was recently enacted in his
studio at Iaspis, Stockholm  where a large  wall drawing, an expanded
version of ones he had created over years of research,  was produced
during his residency.

This work was situated between two smaller drawings on paper that were
pinned to the wall on its' right and left. To the left, Political Art in the
Sixties was about Delineation, Political Art Today is about
Differentiation.  Political Art in the Sixties, like the work of for
instance Hans Hacke and the institutional critique, was about using art to
describe and make visible the silent relations of the political conditions
that surrounded art and were part of the larger world to which it was
connected. Political Art Today, on the other hand, must address the
homogenizing effect on culture of Neo-liberal Global Capitalism that through
the Creative Industries, Art Market, Branding and Neuromarketing have
created a crisis in the production of difference and variation. The
challenge for Art, in Neidich's opinion, is to resist this homogenizing
condition. To the right "If it looks like art it probably isn't". If we can
appreciate a work as a work of art and know it to be so then it is already
part and parcel of our shared perceptual habits. It is forms part of the
common knowledge of members of the same culture and becomes for them what
the definition of art is. Maybe the idea of beauty might be such a
definition especially in its relation to its role as commodity.  If it is a
work of art and can't be identified as such it might mean that the
perceptual habits required to perceive it have not yet been acquired. In
this definition art is at first beyond recognition as such and the ability
of it being understood must wait for a mutation to occur in the subject.
Perhaps the initial reception of Marcel Duchamp's Fountain,1917 and other
examples of avant-garde excess proclaims such a misrecognition. Perhaps
post-modernism misunderstanding of the role of this misrecognition in its
attempt to understand the work of art in the expanded cultural and social
field led to its demise as a condition of social change.  Thus for Neidich
art is a condition of the future and must await parallel and commensurate
changes in the political, social, psychological, spiritual, economic and
historical fabric before it can obtain full meaning.

Neidich's lecture will explore how Neuroaesthetics might answer some of the
above questions and unveil the  new conditions of what he calls Neuropower
that has the potential to create new dispositifs for the administration of
memory, attention through its action on neuroplasicity. While at the same
time creating opportunities for the production of new forms of creativity
and the imagination.

Warren Neidich is a Berlin and Los Angeles based artist, writer and
exhibition organizer.  His work explores the interfaces between culture,
general intellect, phenomenology, social mind and post -Fordist economic
structures. His conceptual based practice uses all media depending on the
connotation and context.  He is founding editor of www.artbrain.org and The
Journal of Neuroaesthetics and is the author of Blow-up: Photography, Cinema
and the Brain,DAP, 2003 .  His work has been exhibited at such institutions
as the Whitney Museum of American Art, PS1 Moma, Long Island City,   The
Ludwig Museum, Koln, Germany, The Los Angeles County Museum of Art,  The
Kunsthaus Zurich and the The Kunsthaus Graz. He was Arts Council/AHRC
Fellow, Department of Computing 2003-2004 and is currently research fellow
at the Centre for Cognition, Computation and Culture, Goldsmiths,
University of London, UK.