School of Visual Arts (SVA) presents Critical Information, an interdisciplinary graduate student conference examining the contemporary dialogue between art, media, and society. Sponsored by the MFA Art Criticism and Writing Department at SVA, the Critical Information conference provides a critical forum for current scholarship exploring the juncture of media, theory, criticism, and the visual arts. Claire Bishop, Associate Professor in the PhD Program in Art History at CUNY Graduate Center, New York, will deliver the keynote address.
Bishop’s address will look at the recent proliferation of education-based art projects and contextualize them in the framework of ‘academic capitalism’. Spectatorship is a recurrent problem in these projects: are they targeted at an actual or ideal education, a universal audience or specific students? She will argue that the work of Tania Bruguera (Cuba, 1968) and Paul Chan (US, 1973) offer polarized approaches to the imbrication of art and education – and point to the importance of devising new criteria by which to examine these transdisciplinary practices.
Bishop has written extensively on art, critical theory and performance. Her publications include Installation Art: A Critical History (Tate/Routledge, 2005) and Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (Verso, 2012), and the edited anthology Participation (2006). Her curatorial projects include the performance exhibition Double Agent at the ICA, London (2008) and the PRELUDE.11 performance festival at CUNY Graduate Center (2011). She is a regular contributor to Artforum.
The conference’s international roster of participants, representing a wide cross-section of disciplines, will present papers and projects on the following six panels: Revolution 101 / 2012; Still, Mediated and Moving – The Image Today and its Effects on Time and Space; Animism Anew: New Media & the Speaking Object; Handmade in an Information Age; The Writing On The Wall: Street Art, Hacktivism and Subversive Inspiration; and Algorithmic Thought and Memory. More information on the panels and papers, as well as the full schedule of events can be found at http://criticalinformationsva.com/2012-schedule.
CRITICAL INFORMATION ORGANIZATION
Graduate Student Organizing Committee
Carina Badalamenti
Naomi Lev
Tara Stickley
Samuel Swasey
David Willis
Faculty Advisor
Russet Lederman
MFA Art Criticism & Writing Chair
David Levi Strauss
MFA Art Criticism & Writing Administrator
Annette Wehrhahn
