SPRING 2012

• Occupy as Form: A Working Session


• ART/CITY

• Regents Lecturer: Sabine Breitwieser


• Making Time
  

• Cultural Geographies of 1960s Japan: Cinema, Music + Arts

Occupy as Form: A Working Session

Friday, February 10, 2012, 9:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.

The word "occupy" now has new resonance in our current moment as do several other terms with which it has been allied: occupation, assembly, event, site-specificity, neighborhood, DIY, sit-in, encampment, settlement, network, labor, profession, public health, public safety. On the one hand, the Occupy movement is so wide, varied, complex, and protean, it can be hard to create a space of reflection that won't be dated the next day. On the other hand, as cities throughout the U.S. and the world take down Occupy encampments, it is all the more important to activate reflection about the movement's significance, its techniques, and its future.

As a modest contribution to such reflection, the Arts Research Center will explore what might be called the "formal" questions of the concepts related to Occupation, a charge that we hope will focus thinking and begin to plot an expanded set of associations, histories, and analytic frames. On Friday, February 10, we will gather for Occupy as Form: A Working Session, a day of reflection, discussion, presentation, and more reflection.

In order to register for this event, please submit a short text (no more than 500 words, with the option to submit accompanying images or links) on a keyword associated with the Occupy movement, which will be posted on our ARC Muses blog (some posts are already available for viewing). This is not an abstract per se, but a discursive offering to galvanize our collective thinking. Posts should be sent to Sarah Gibbons at sgibbons@berkeley.edu by January 31, 2012. Information on the exact time, location, and meal arrangements will be sent on receipt of registration/post.

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ART/CITY

Friday, March 16, 2012
The Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life
2121 Allston Way, Berkeley
Admission is free; pre-registration requested (see instructions below)

Since 2008, faculty affiliated with the Arts Research Center at UC Berkeley have been researching the impact of arts districts--both formal and informal--on the vitalization of metropolitan areas. In ART/CITY, we continue this examination in a daylong symposium that focuses on the Downtown Berkeley Arts District and also offer perspectives from other contexts.

PROGRAM
(participants confirmed as of 2/13/12; subject to change)

Optional campus art events to attend before and after ART/CITY:

On view throughout the day at the Magnes: Dissolving Localities, multimedia project by visiting artist Emmanuel Witzhum.

Thursday, March 15: Break/ing Ground: Critical Dialogues in Sound and Motion, lecture-performance with Dr. Thomas DeFrantz and Fred Moten, Sutardja Dai Hall, Banatao Auditorium, 4:30 p.m.

Friday, March 16:

Linda Mary Montano, continuous performance, Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive, 5-8 p.m.

Valley of Shadows & Dreams, reception and book signing with Ken Light, Melanie Light, and Thomas Steinbeck, North Gate Hall Gallery, Graduate School of Journalism, 6-8 p.m.

To pre-register for ART/CITY, please:

• send an email to ucb_arts@berkeley.edu, including your name, contact information, and organization affiliation if applicable.

• We also invite you to submit a brief response (not more than 250 words) to the following prompt:

"In relation to the arts and civic life, the question I am wrestling with right now is..."

Responses will be posted on the ARC Muses blog as a way of jump-starting discussion between symposium participants prior to the event.

ART/CITY is made possible in part by support from the UC Institute for Research in the Arts, the Townsend Center for the Humanities, and the Magnes Collection.

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Regents Lecturer: Sabine Breitwieser

The Arts Research Center is honored to be hosting 2012 Regents Lecturer Sabine Breitwieser. Sabine Breitwieser is the Chief Curator of Media and Performance Art at The Museum of Modern Art in New York. From 1988 until 2007 she was the Founding Director and Chief Curator of the Generali Foundation in Vienna, for which she built a distinct program and a large collection of conceptual and media based art. She has curated retrospectives and solo exhibitions, and edited publications of artists such as Dan Graham, Hans Haacke, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Andrea Fraser, Mary Kelly, Edward Krasinski, Gordon Matta-Clark, Gustav Metzger, Adrian Piper, Martha Rosler, and Allan Sekula. Among her thematic projects are Utopia and Monument (2009-2010), Modernologies (2009-2010), Designs for the Real World (2002), double life (2001), RE-PLAY (2000), vivencias/life experience (2000), or White Cube/Black Box (1996). Since her arrival at MoMA in fall 2011 she has curated Harun Farocki: Images of War (at a Distance), 9 Scripts of A Nation at War by Andrea Geyer, Sharon Hayes, Ashley Hunt, Katya Sander, and David Thorne, and two multi-day performance projects, Grand Openings Return of the Blogs, and Combatant Status Review Tribunals, pp. 002954-00304: A Public Reading. Among her upcoming projects at MoMA is the Media Lounge designed by the artist Renée Green that will give access to the entire collection of video and audio-based works.

As Regents Lecturer, Breitwieser will take part in the following public programs on the UC Berkeley campus:

April 15: Gallery Conversation discussing the exhibit State of Mind: New California Art circa 1970 at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive with the exhibition curator Constance M. Lewallen, 3 p.m.

April 16: Lecture on Media Bichos and Other Interdisciplinary Displays at the Art Museum at the Art, Technology, and Culture Colloquium, 7:30 p.m.

April 19: Regents Lecture/Keynote Address on Performance Without Curators: Art and the Public Sphere at the Arts Research Center's symposium Making Time, 5 p.m.

April 20-21: Symposium Participant at Making Time.

During her visit, Breitwieser will also meet privately with graduate students and faculty in the Departments of Art Practice and History of Art.

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Making Time

April 19 to 21, 2012
Berkeley Art Museum Theater
2625 Durant Avenue, Berkeley
Free and open to the public

Exploring the paradoxes of the term "time-based art," the Arts Research Center presents Making Time, a cross-disciplinary arts symposium that extends the theme of last year's symposium, Curating People. Scholars, artists, presenters, and curators will come together to think about what it means to make, curate, and evaluate hybrid art practices. What does it mean to install a dance in a museum? What does it mean to place an installation in a theatre? How does the experience of duration in the gallery differ from that of the cinema? What does it mean to "curate" experience? What does it mean to "collect" performance? What skills are visual artists learning from performance? How are performers using the skills of visual art? What new skills do critics and curators need to support the expanded practices of artists?

The symposium will organize panels and roundtables that broadly examine the terms invoked or resisted in defining these art practices, the way such work challenges the divisions of labor within and between different types of institutions, and the traditional and new conventions of authorship, collecting, documentation, and evaluation that they require.

SYMPOSIUM SCHEDULE
(last updated 3/5/12)

Thursday, April 19

Friday, April 20

Saturday, April 21

Please continue to check back for program updates.

RELATED EVENTS OF INTEREST ON CAMPUS:

Exhibit: State of Mind: New California Art circa 1970, Berkeley Art Museum, February 29-June 17, 2012

Performance: Berkeley Dance Project 2012: Beneath the Flesh, Department of Theater, Dance & Performance Studies, Zellerbach Playhouse, April 20-29, Fridays and Saturdays at 8 p.m., Sundays at 2 p.m.

Artist's Talk: Jonah Bokaer, on Vanishing: New Mythologies for Choreography in the Museum, Art, Technology, and Culture Colloquium, Sutardja Dai Hall, April 23, 7 p.m.

Panels: Women, Work, Role-Playing and Contemporary Practices, Berkeley Art Museum, Sunday, April 29, 2 p.m.

Making Time is made possible in part by support from the UC Institute for Research in the Arts; the Townsend Center for the Humanities; the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage, through Dance Advance and the Philadelphia Exhibitions Initiative; the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive; the Berkeley Center for New Media; the Richard and Rhoda Goldman Chair in the Arts and Humanities; and the Departments of Art Practice, History of Art, and Rhetoric at UC Berkeley.

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Cultural Geographies of 1960s Japan: Cinema, Music + Arts

April 26-27, 2012
Center for Japanese Studies
2223 Fulton Street

The discipline of Cultural Geography (founded at UC Berkeley) claims that culture is as much an object for the discipline of geography as rock formations, climate, and other more traditional aspects of the field. The argument goes beyond the claim that culture is *conditioned* by space / landscape / climate to assert that culture (relations between people and the beliefs that support them) is co-determinant of "place" alongside the physical aspects of space (access, climate, natural resources etc). This symposium proposes to take the concerns of cultural geography as a model (or metaphor) for a way of thinking the "landscape" of art- and film-making in the 1960s Tokyo counterculture.

By mapping the circulation of different forms of cinema, music, media and performance arts, the location of the different institutions that housed them, and the network of relations between the people involved, the conference aims to enhance our understanding of "intermediality" in 1960s arts as a social and spatial, as well as textual, practice. 

The conference aims to show that in the 1960s "counter-culture" must be taken at its word: as a relational term (opposed to the commercial culture of "high economic growth" that also formed its condition of possibility) and as one based on concepts such as "proximity" and "encounter" that fill the artistic manifestos and roundtable discussions during the decade. Combining the hermeneutic analysis of texts and art works familiar in film studies and music art history with the recent emphasis on inter-medial connections and the analysis of spatial culture, the symposium aims to create a new perspective on the relation of avant-garde and mainstream culture, and to develop methods that can be used in other projects to map the cultural geography of Japan and elsewhere.

The Arts Research Center's Art + Asia research team is pleased to co-sponsor this event, which is being organized by ARC Affiliate Miryam Sas and the Center for Japanese Studies.

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In order to receive announcements from ARC, we encourage you to subscribe to our monthly e-newsletter, ARC News, by sending an email to: artsnews_ucb-join@lists.berkeley.edu

To view a curated list of other arts events taking place at UC Berkeley and around the Bay Area, see our ARC Picks calendar.

To see past events, click on the following:
Fall 2011

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Photos at top of page, from left to right: the work of ARC artists-in-residence Fred Wilson, Sean San Jose / Campo Santos, Marianne Weems / The Builders Association, Shannon Flattery / Touchable Stories.