Opening Week: A Platform for Art/Theory/Design. Jan van Eyck Alumni Association e.V.

Posted in Motto Berlin event, Theory on July 9th, 2013
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17.07.2013. 19:00. Motto Berlin.

Opening Week: A Platform for Art/Theory/Design. Jan van Eyck Alumni Association e.V.

In times when norms of commerce and technology seem to pervade all activities, the example of the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht stands out. Until its recent entrepreneurial recasting under austerity programmes, the Academie had been a site of encounters which had surpassed the sterile confines of academia and the consensual norms of market-oriented work, as it welcomed examinations and radical critiques of the spaces of artistic creation, theoretical inquiry and design, while also questioning the relations and boundaries between these fields. Building upon this experience, while at the same time surpassing its institutional limitations, it is our intention to construct a platform for collaboration between theorists, designers and artists, by suspending the borders between their respective disciplines, by affirming the need for collective and experimental work, by engaging in projects which do not shy away from questioning the very possibilities of different domains, whether aesthetic, scientific or political. Within the framework of a three-day inaugural meeting, we will present and discuss works in design, art and theory by those formerly related to or supporting the Academie as well as others who are joining us. A series of lectures and performances, seminars and screenings, as well as displays of works and book presentations will serve us, in this sense, not only as materials for a broader discussion, but also as a nucleus for future collaborative work.

Organized by the Jan van Eyck Alumni Association e.V. in cooperation with the ICI Berlin Kulturlabor, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Motto Berlin and the Silberkuppe Gallery.

Full Programme:
http://www.ici-berlin.org/events-news/

Notes towards a Critique of Money. Georgios Papadopoulos. Jan van Eyck Academie

Posted in politics, writing on December 14th, 2012
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Notes towards a Critique of Money

The analysis in Notes towards a Critique of Money highlights the functions of money both in the organization of the capitalist symbolic order and in the constitution of subjectivity in the market.

Combining Lacanian psychoanalysis and Baudrillardian structuralism, the book creates a universe where price and sign are entangled, giving rise to the dominant organizing form of capitalism. The fantasmatic management of desire enforces this structural principle on the subjective level and encourages the libidinal investment in the dominant representations of social reality as they are produced by the combined principles of signification and economic valuation. Here, money signifies the particular content that hegemonizes the universal ideological construction of capitalism providing a particular and accessible meaning to economic value, which colours the very universality of the system of prices and accounts for its efficiency.

Being conscious of the limitations of the theoretical analysis, the book employs along with rational arguments a series of artworks that are used both to illustrate the argument and to challenge the unconscious links between the market and the subject, as it is mediated by money and ideology. Notes towards a Critique of Money does not only aspire to raise a theoretical challenge against capital and to open up possibilities of emancipation, but to point towards a new aesthetic of political analysis.

2011
English
142 pages
Paperback
Edition: 600

15€
Buy It

Painting – The Implicit Horizon. Avigail Moss. Kerstin Stakemeier. JVE

Posted in painting, writing on November 20th, 2012
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Painting — The Implicit Horizon documents a symposium which took place at the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht, the Netherlands. The book presents essays and transcripts of discussions between European and American artists, art historians, and critics who have looked at some of the ways painting has been conceived of in the eras after Conceptual Art. Addressing ideas of production and consumption, critiques of the end of art, issues of age, accomplishment, and the myth of the painter, the book posits that painting, as a working practice as well as a historical referent, serves as an implicit horizon or limit condition for other media.
“Jimson lives in a ramshackle houseboat on the Thames river, where he reminisces about the days when the state collected his paintings, hides from the police (who pursue him for his minor infractions and debts) and schemes about how to extract money from various wealthy patrons. That is, his struggles are conceptual, material and financial and always involve a race against time and an acknowledgement of his own limitations even in light of his successes. After a series of roguish scrapes, he finally receives a retrospective at Tate Britain: a triumph that does little to alleviate his destitution. But the film’s dénouement comes when Jimson paints a “monument to England”: a giant mural representing “The last Judgment” on the side of a bombed-out church aided by a cadre of voluntary art student assistants who he keeps remunerated in cups of coffee. The film ends when Jimson — threatened by council developers looking to capitalize on the land — voluntarily bulldozes his mural in advance of the city bureaucrats and sails off down the Thames in search of a new horizon: perhaps another, larger wall (or a further expansion of painting as such).”

Contributors:
Carol Armstrong, Warren Carter, Helmut Draxler, Kerstin Stakemeier, Elisabeth Lebovici, Esther Leslie, Avigail Moss, Ulrike Müller, Dierk Schmidt, and Amy Sillman.

Published by Jan van Eyck Academie

D 10€

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Lying Freely, Ruth Buchanan

Posted in magazines, music on August 15th, 2010
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Lying Freely, Ruth Buchanan

In her itinerant project ‘Lying Freely’, that has evolved in various locations since June 2009, Ruth Buchanan probes questions around the tension between private and public spheres by practicing a method that might be named after the project title, Lying Freely. This has involved Buchanan weaving stories by and about the public personas of three female writers Janet Frame, Virginia Woolf and Agatha Christie into her own speculative writings. The writing becomes scripts for manoeuvring through spaces of systemization and behavioural codification, such as an archive (The Hocken Collection), a hotel (Old Swan Hotel), a library (The British Library). These spaces, each associated with one of the authors, were reconfigured in a haptic choreography performed for and within different locations that hosted the project—a monumental house, a theatre, a gallery.

Co-published by Jan Van Eyck Academie Maastricht and Casco Office for Art, Design and Theory, Utrecht.

D 18€
Buy : orders@mottodistribution.com