Generalist Practice -Term 2

31 January – 3 April 2012

Following the success of last years Reading Group, Generalist Practice, in collaboration with Campbell Works, are pleased to present of the new season of the READING GROUP

READING GROUP – Being or becoming a Subject and the Subject’s ability to act.

Tuesday 31st January 2012 8.00 – 10.00pm 

Texts for discussion week 1:

• Isaiah Berlin – Two Concepts of Liberty

• Paulo Freire – Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970, 1993), chapter 2 (pp. 52-67)

• Hito Steyerl – The Subaltern’s Present (preface to the German translation of G. Ch. Spivak’s Can the Subaltern Speak? Postkolonialität und subalterne Artikulation, transl. by Alexander Joskowicz and Stefan Nowotny, Vienna: Turia + Kant 2007 (Es kommt darauf an, Vol. 6).) 

Texts for discussion week 2:

• Claire Bishop – The Social Turn: Collaboration and Its Discontents (Artforum, February 2006)

• Gavin Grindon – Surrealism, Dada, and the Refusal of Work: Autonomy, Activism, and Social Participation in the Radical Avant-Garde (Oxford Art Journal 34.1, 2011)

• Markus Miessen – The Nightmare of Participation (Crossbench Praxis as a Mode of Criticality), Chapters 11 and 12

Texts for discussion week 3:

Non-Western artists have often been encouraged, historically, to maintain their sense of ‘otherness’ and ‘seperateness‘ by a privileged, Western establishment and discouraged from experimenting with broader artistic discourse. Is a generalist an outsider? Or is someone from a very particular perspective an outsider? The texts include an essay and article published recently and an interview with a veteran of the South African art scene, who was treated very much as an outsider on his sojourns in London.

Reading material for Tuesday 6th:

• Fouad Asfour – David Koloane interview (Dead Revolutionaries e-zine)

• Paul O’Kane – Out of this World (Art Monthly, January 2012), 
talk show: http://www.artmonthly.co.uk/magazine/site/events/omar-kholeif-paul-okane-talk-show-february-2012

• Stefan Szczelkun – The Dark Arts (Mute, February 2012)
  http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/dark-arts

Texts for discussion week 4:

The material  this time describes different paradigms of modernity – one writer has been influential to our understanding of modernism, another is credited with coining the term ‘postmodernism’ and the third text is an effort to describe what came after that: 

• Walter Benjamin – On the Concept of History

• Nicolas Bourriaud – Altermodern ( catalogue essay – Altermodern: the Tate Triennial 2009)

• Fredric Jameson – Postmodernism or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Section I and VI from Chapter I)

Texts for discussion week 5:

• Benjamin Buchloh – Allegorical Procedures: Appropriation and Montage in Contemporary Art (Artforum, Sept 1982)

• Isabelle Graw – Dedication Replacing Appropriation: Fascination, Subversion, and Dispossession in Appropriation Art (in Louise Lawler and Others, Hatje Cantz Publishers, 2004), pp. 45-67

• Craig Owens – The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism, Part 2 (October, Vol. 12, Spring 1980), pp. 67-86