Pamela Lee, Professor of Art and Art History at Stanford University
will present the keynote address for the 2009 AAH&VS Graduate Student Symposium.
Her lecture, "New Games," will take place on Friday, February 13 at 4:30 P.M.
in the Nancy A. Nasher and David J. Haemisegger Family Lecture Hall of the Nasher Museum of Art.
Below is the abstract for Professor Lee's talk:
(See also at bottom of this post the schedule for graduate student presentations earlier that day)
New Games
Pamela M. Lee
In Esthétique relationnelle, his influential polemic of 1998, French curator Nicolas Bourriuad described the work of Rirkrit Tiravanija, Felix Gonzales-Torres, Liam Gillick, Carsten Holler and others as a social staging ground of sorts, less object, we might say, than interface. “The liveliest factor that is played out on the chessboard of art,” Bourriaud wrote “has to do with interactive, user-friendly and relational concepts.” Departing from this example, my lectures asks: what are the historical implications of speaking about such work through the rhetoric of games? What extra-aesthetic models might complicate our understanding of such practices, troubling the utopian and democratizing premises underlying much participatory art? Far from treating this work as merely playful, or taking recourse to the long tradition of gaming associated with the historical avant-garde, I contend that such relational modes rest as much with a theory of conflict as they do with the ludic.
To that end, this paper traces a genealogy for interactivity in contemporary art in terms of the principles of game theory, the insidious branch of economics that emerged with American postwar military strategizing. Though game theory stems from decidedly Cold War phenomena, it continues to resonate within the social sciences and political philosophy today: it has been extensively debated relative to the social contract, interpersonal psychology, rational choice and public choice theory and hence, the fortunes of neo-liberalism. As case studies, I look at the work of the New Games Foundation, associated with the countercultural impresario Stewart Brand in the 1970s, and the variable works and “game paintings” of the Swedish artist Oyvind Fahlström in the 1960s.
An additional goal of this talk is methodological, implicitly challenging the historical amnesia of much writing on contemporary art. Bourriaud, for example, is adamant that relational work breaks radically from practices of sixties art Yet in acknowledging the importance of game theory as a peculiar model of interactivity, I revisit theories of postmodernism otherwise forgotten in recent art criticism. What I argue for game-theoretic discourse is the extent to which postmodernism confronts and internalizes its most basic tenets - namely those related to interactivity and the production and exchange of knowledge – while at the same time challenging its authority on the grounds of its rationalizing of conflict and cooperation; its claims to consensus and its calculative reason. In particular I look to Jean-Francois Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge and argue for its continued relevance to the discussion of contemporary art.
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AAH&VS Graduate students will present papers from 10:30-11:30 a.m. and 11:45 a.m.-12:45
p.m. that day in East Duke Building 204B. Speakers and titles are as follows:
10:30-11:30
Alexis Clark: Painting on the Walls: The Myth of Paul Gauguin in the Early Twentieth Century?
Kency Corejo: Eros lo que Lees: Habacuc's Exposition No. 1?
11:45-12:45
Fredo Rivera: Liberating the Havana Hilton, Revolutionizing Modern Form
Hilary Coe Smith and Sandra van Ginhoven: Accounting for Preferences for Paintings in Paris: 1764-1780?
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