ANNUAL SYMPOSIA
Recent
Pasts:
Art in Southern California from the 90s to Now
publication now available
In June 2004 SoCCAS conceived and realized an ambitious symposium titled Recent Pasts: Art in Southern California From the 90s to Now, which stands as the first detailed conference on the social and historical contexts of contemporary art in this region. The event was co-sponsored by the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), and took place at the 500-seat Silver Screen Theater at the Pacific Design Center, Los Angeles, on June 13, 2004.
The symposium featured a keynote address by noted historian and theorist Norman Klein on re-imagining Southern California through “mapping new forms of narrative palimpsests”; a paper by artist and writer Frances Stark tracing the first history of the contemporary art community in the Los Angeles Chinatown, one of the defining developments of the LA art scene in the last decade; a presentation by Oswaldo Sanchez, chief curator of the innovative multi-sited, transnational triennial, inSite, on new “alternative” arts organizations and collectives in the US and Mexico; a position paper by MOCA curator Connie Butler previewing her much-anticipated exhibition of feminist art; discussion by architectural/cultural historian Teddy Cruz and the activist artist ERRE (Marcos Ramirez) of the urban and artistic contexts of Tijuana and SD/TJ border zone; and a roundtable panel on the future of art in Southern California that convenes together a range of important literary, critical and student voices to debate new directions for the visual arts and media in the coming decade; a personal history of Three-Day Weekend by artist Dave Muller; and a “tour” of Los Angeles’ Center for Land Use Interpretation by Erik Knutzen. The symposium wrapped up with a vigorous and sometimes critical panel that included artists Meg Cranston and Daniel J. Martinez, critic and musician Malik Gaines, and Supersonic MFA committee chair Yanira Cartegena.
Institutional
Critique and After
publication forthcoming
in Fall 2006
In 2005 SoCCAS and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) presented the symposium Institutional Critique and After on Saturday, May 21st from 10:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. at LACMA’s Bing Theater.
Institutional Critique and After was an internationally focused program exploring the history and contemporary reassessment of the Institutional Critique (IC) movement launched in the late 1960s by artists including Michael Asher and Hans Haacke. A key aim of IC was the exposure and ironization of the structures and logic of museums and art galleries. IC was redeveloped in the 1980s and after by Andrea Fraser, Renée Green, Fred Wilson and others who engaged in more interactive and performative interventions; and has been vigorously reoriented in recent years to address issues such as globalization.
The program included three panel presentations featuring noted artists, scholars and museum professionals. Beginning with two revisionist scholars, Alex Alberro and Isabelle Graw (Allan Sekula, moderator) who commented on the geographies and cultural implications of the IC movement (session I), the event also debated the role of curators and exhibition practices--within the “institution” as well as independent (session II), with Christiane Paul, Lauri Firstenberg, and Jens Hoffmann (Lynn Zelevansky, moderator); and examined some of the larger social and political questions raised by the movement and its aftermath (session III), with Ricardo Dominguez and Andrea Fraser (Renée Green, moderator).
Discussion ranged across histories, theories, diverse locations and different kinds of institutional and alternative space. It touched on traditional forms of art, but also on installations, performance, new media practices, and cultural activism. Its central questions turned on the critical potential of art (and institutions) and whether—and if so how—they can stimulate social or political change.
The Aesthetics
of Risk
publication forthcoming,
view additional images from the symposium
The third SoCCAS symposium, The Aesthetics of Risk, took place at the Getty Center with the collaboration of the Getty Research Institute, on Saturday April 29, 2006. The event convened a lively and informed group of international scholars, artists and curators to discuss different aspects of the way visual cultural production in the modern and recent periods have engaged with notions of “risk” in several registers of practice and experience—bodily, social/political, aesthetic.
Participants included Jane Blocker, associate professor at the University of Minnesota; Douglas Crimp, professor at the University of Rochester; Rachel Greene, independent curator; Richard Shiff, professor at the University of Texas at Austin; Kristine Stiles, professor at Duke University; and Catherine Opie, Brock Enright, Paul McCarthy, and Steve Kurtz, artists.