Transmedia

SITE BRUSSELS: SUBJECT MATTER / OBJECT MATTER
Workshop by Jeremiah Day

This intensive workshop will be structured around an engagement with Brussels as a site – going to specific places, research into particular urbanistic and historical questions. And, at the same time, we will discuss the question of “content,” ways such research develops into artworks and different strategies for art’s engagement in worldly affairs. These two lines of thought should then be explored in a proposal for a site-specific work to be presented in the exhibition in June.

SUBJECT MATTER / OBJECT MATTER
The painter Barnett Newman stated that even though his work was abstract, and so had no “content,” it definitely had a subject. We will consider Newman as an example of artistic engagement that is not at all explicit. On the other had we will consider artists like Allan Sekula and Renee Green who work with explicit subject matter, and the Begian painter Luc Tuymans who falls somewhere in the middle.

SITE BRUSSELS
Brussels is now the evolving capitol of the EU – a site with geo-political significance. It is also the site of the school and so the local daily background of artistic practice. We will make a series of journeys into the city, engaging with sites and using them as examples with which to ask broader questions.

WORKSHOP GUIDELINES
All participants are asked to select one site to visit in advance of the workshop. The idea is to consider the way that ideas and realities come together in places, and then use the places as object for discussion.

Examples:
How has the European Union affected the neighborhoods of the city? We could visit different European Union sites, or residential areas.
How does the arrival of the international artworld impact on the local situation (for example, what was in 12 rue de Gran Cerf before the arrivial of Barbara Gladstone’s gallery?)
Brusselization is a widely used term to describe “anarchic commercial property development in a historic city” (wikipedia) – how does this urbanistic concept affect our daily experience of the city?

In addition, workshop participants should in advance of the workshop read and be prepared to discuss the attached interview with Barnett Newman, and take a look at pictures of his work in the library. If there is time please also look at Allan Sekula’s book Fish Story and Renee Green’s project Partially Buried as documented in her Ongoing Becomings – Retrospective 1989-2009, and Luc Tuymans Mwana Kitoko. The purpose behind looking at these historical examples is to then have more basis to consider how we might ourselves work with/from our experiments with site.

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WHEN
TUESDAY 11th MAY 2010 – 11am till …
11AM – introductory meeting and presentation, discussion of Newman, Sekula, Green, Tuymans.
Afternoon – site visits.

WEDNESDAY 12th MAY 2010 – 10am till …
10AM presentation on Robert Smithson’s Site / Nonsite
Afternoon and evening– site visits

THURSDAY 13th MAY 2010 EVENT – 11am till …
=> UPDATE => NO workshop, school will be closed!?

11AM final site visit and lunch – wrap up of workshop and brief individual meetings.
NOTE: some sites might be best explored after business hours or at night – please set aside Wednesday night for possible workshop activities.

THE ACADEMY STRIKES BACK

Clodagh Emoe, GradCAM Research Scholar

This workshop responds to aims of the Transmedia Programme at Sint-Lucas and aims to elicit methods that engage with and explore ways in which encounters beyond the utilitarian world of representation can be initiated. This workshop operates within the context of contemporary art practice using the ancient Greek term kairos as a point of departure. The ancient Greeks had two words for time, chronos and kairos. While the former refers to chronological or sequential time, the latter signifies a time in between, a moment of undetermined period of time in which something special happens. To explain kairos, the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, looks at the unpredictable and exceptional situation in time and space. This moment in time unique in its’ potential, is “not another time, but a contracted and abridged chronos” (Agamben, 2005, p.69).

The Transmedia Programme focus on research is instrumentalised within the workshop and students are required to engage in both practical and theoretical research to explore strategies that enable a consideration of this term. Through a critical and practical investigation, the implications surrounding this term and the issues it raises are examined. This workshop explores ways in which a specific term can be, in a sense, made manifest.

The workshop will culminate in a live public event that the students collaboratively realise. This workshop aims to enable students to develop their research skills, expand their own individual practice and experience working collaboratively on a large-scale project. The workshop has been constructed to allow enough latitude that the project is rooted within the students’ concerns while ensuring that students have the opportunity to engage with a range of experimentation practices.

The date of this outcome is scheduled to take place midday Thursday 6th May, allowing sufficient time for preliminary research. This event will be documented by the students and following the workshop, students are required to carry out post-production of the documentation in preparation for the exhibition.

There are a number of possibilities for this workshops outcome within the final exhibition scheduled to take place in June. The first option uses the documentation from the event organized during the workshop in May, another alternative is a live event, developed from the original event that takes place during the exhibition such as a reenactment or a mixture of both documentation and live event. This will be worked out on the final day of the workshop.

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WHEN
TUESDAY 4th MAY 2010 – 10am till 5pm
WEDNESDAY 5th MAY 2010 – 10am till 5pm
THURSDAY 6th MAY EVENT 2010 – 10am till 5pm

http://er.uqam.ca/nobel/k26161/dossier/paullandon.htm

WHEN
Tuesday 23/03/2010 till Friday 26/03/2010 from 10h00 till 17h00