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SESSION 26:
sharing as making as thinking

SATURDAY, 29 april 2023

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Intro to Inclusion & Community Wellbeing director + Community agreement
ALL

16:30 - 20:00 UTC

SUNDAY, 30 april 2023

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13:45 - 14:45 UTC

Carceral Landscapes
with Film of and as Radical Landscape research cluster

TALKS & Workshops

A TAlk FOR ALL

IMPOSSIBLE EMBRACE, A DIALOGUE CONDUCTED BY LYNN BOOK AND JAY BUCHANAN

SATURDAY, APRIL 29, 15:00 - 15:45 UTC

Transmedia artist, Lynn Book and Art Historian-in-the-making, Jay Buchanan have been thinking together for some years about the implications of bodies experiencing, re-collecting, co-making, and re-making inventive structures of time and action. An exquisite conversation qua language-event will soon appear in the peer-reviewed Johns Hopkins University journal, ASAP/J (Association for the Study of Arts of the Present). This live inter-change event for Transart Institute, will feature Book and Buchanan in dialogue on the (practical, theoretical, chimerical) making of the Lynn Book Projects Archive, full of the outer limits of performance, experimental media and practice ephemera. Part interview, part poetics and proposal, the two unapologetic interlopers hope to spark urgent and complicated understandings that will provoke fresh speculative action for those attending. Book and Buchanan’s approach is imagined as an embracive encounter to further an emerging collaborative book project slated for 2024.

Lynn Book is a transmedia artist whose adventurous work interrogates and theorizes Bodies. She deploys extended voice, material practices and technologies to make performance, video, text, new music, exhibition and collaborative culture projects that take shape in galleries, clubs, fields, streets, online and in concert halls. Her work has been performed, heard and/or seen in New York City, Chicago, Vienna, Berlin, Naples, Marseilles, Budapest, Hong Kong, Bali, London, Manila, Brisbane and elsewhere. She has received support from the National Endowment for the Arts, Franklin Furnace Fund and a MacDowell Colony Fellowship among others.

Book taught at the intersection of the Arts and Humanities at Wake Forest University from 2005 until her retirement in 2022. She is a founding Faculty Associate with Transart Institute since its inception in 2004 and continues to teach workshops and advise, as well as serve on the advisory board, Transart Institute for Creative Research. In 2022, the “Lynn Book Projects Archive” was launched online, representing a corpus spanning 45+ years with the support of Mellon Foundation funding through the Humanities Institute, Wake Forest, the Z. Smith Reynolds Library with many other contributions. She recently produced, “Instructions for Deranging”, a major exhibition of multimedia works for the international festival of contemporary art, Art Stays, in Slovenia and is currently completing a culminating video project from that body of work, “Derangements – The Epispheres”.

lynnbook.com
vimeo.com/lynnbook
lynnbook.archive.wfu.edu

Jay Buchanan is an historian of sensation and encounter. A writer and arts orchestrator, Jay is a doctoral student in art history at Washington University in St. Louis, where he completed the MA in Theater and Performance Studies in 2021. Jay's published scholarship appears in Chiricú, Theatre History Studies, Miranda, annd ASAP/J. Poetry and creative writing appear in About Place from the Black Earth Institute, Tesserae, Deathcap, Otoliths, Rava Vavàra, and elsewhere. As an independent curator, Jay co-organized Ambivalent Pleasures: Advertiser Content in American Art for the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum (St. Louis) and curated The Grid in Millennial Vision: Selections from the John P. Anderson Collection for START/Wake Forest Art Galleries. He served as founding Digital Director for the Lynn Book Projects Archive and Managing Director for the episodic sonic artwork Idiosynchrony .

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mfa WORKSHOP
What was an exhibition? What is an exhibition?
With James Schofield

In relation to both research and practice in the art system, the exhibition is still (largely) held as a concretisation of labour in a final output. This default expectation of the exhibitionary moment has historically worked to stifle creative processes, limiting the scope for increasingly meaningful – and ongoing – research to develop.

Through understanding the implications of exhibition-making as a methodology of communicating research, students will be encouraged to challenge the formal structures of exhibition-making they have experienced to date, and begin to think of how they could incorporate new approaches or re-define their existing research, practice and projects in light of this to find new methods of best-practice for disseminating their own ideas.

bio
SYLLABUS

PHD WORKSHOP
Making Writing: experiments for voice and language with lynn book

This short workshop proposes writing as an act of making.  Different approaches to voice and vocalizing will offer a medium through which fresh approaches to language might occur.  By activating voice in the production of meaning, new modes of signification can challenge and enliven dominant forms of language production including public discourse, twitter feed, academic-speak.

For many of us, voice has precious little life outside of ever-rationalizing, often rhetorical speech acts.  The burden of ‘making sense’ in writing and speaking can limit imagination.  When the voicing body is engaged, a new exploratory plays surface and depth to overturn familiar rules and roles for words and meaning, and to liberate psychosomatic openings to new-sensical forms of thought and action. This proposition in turn, animates writing as an agent of desire’s body, and enables productive derangement of mind-bound abstractions and language-centric conditions.

The primary aim of this workshop intensive is to unfold polarities between inquiry and action, text and body, voice and its compact with inhibiting power structures.  The means will be direct: physical experimentation with voicing and writing during the workshop informed by selected readings and references that will lend credence and currency to these happenings, and to future writing and voicing experiments.

SYLLABUS
BIO

Carceral Landscapes
with Film of and as Radical Landscape research cluster

FILM OF AND AS RADICAL LANDSCAPE asserts that as long as landscapes are defined by fences and borders, demarcations wherein some may cross and others not, that they are inherently political. Our research cluster has been primarily based on the screening of short films. Each session has focused on a distinct ecological space and an area of ethical or political concern related to it. For example, the sea as a means to discuss refugee migration, desert as a performative border, and mountain as a discussion of memory and nostalgia. This proposed session will be on carceral landscapes, instigated by Achille Mbembe’s writing on, “The idea of a borderless world”, images from the Louisiana State Library that document the Louisiana State Penitentiary, a former plantation turned inmate labored working farm, archival footage of the indigenous Occupation of Alcatraz, and a guest lecture by interdisciplinary artist Maria Gaspar, whose community site-interventions at Chicago’s Cook County Jail are an instigation for discussion on the implications of incarceration for people of color. Her work, much like the work of the research cluster members, goes beyond film, into performance, installation, sculpture, and sound. The intent is to move beyond viewership and discussion of practice, and push for participants to create practice work, based on the theory and approach to landscape we have been cultivating through our shared time, on a significant landscape, in the medium each participant is most comfortable with, which will be shared with the group in a later session.

Guest:

Maria Gaspar is an interdisciplinary artist negotiating the politics of location through installation, sculpture, sound, and performance. Gaspar’s work addresses issues of spatial justice in order to amplify, mobilize, or divert structures of power through individual and collective gestures. Her work spans formats and durations, including sound performances at a military site in New Haven (Sounds for Liberation); long-term public art interventions at the largest jail in the country (96 Acres Project, Chicago); appropriations of museum archives (Brown Brilliance Darkness Matter); and audio-video works, documenting a jail located in her childhood neighborhood (On the Border of What is Formless and Monstrous). 

Gaspar has received the Guggenheim Award for Creative Arts, Latinx Artist Fellowship, United States Artists Fellowship, the Frieze Impact Prize, the Sor Juana Women of Achievement Award in Art and Activism from the National Museum of Mexican Art, and the Chamberlain Award for Social Practice from the Headlands Center for the Arts. Maria’s projects have been supported by the Art for Justice Fund, the Robert Rauschenberg Artist as Activist Fellowship, the Creative Capital Award, the Joan Mitchell Emerging Artist Grant, and the Art Matters Foundation. Gaspar has lectured and exhibited extensively at venues including MoMA PS1, New York, NY; the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, TX; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL; the African American Museum, Philadelphia, PA; and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. She is Associate Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, holds an MFA in Studio Arts from the University of Illinois at Chicago, and a BFA from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY.

Schedule:

17:30 UTC - 50 minute introduction to the topic of carceral landscapes by Erin Wilkerson

18:20 UTC – break

18:30 UTC – Mara Gaspar will join and share her approach and practice on carceral landscapes

19:30 UTC –  Q&A + introduction of creative practice challenge to bring to next research cluster meeting