Programme:

Thursday 9 November 2017

Thierry de Duve:

LECTURE

10:00 - 12:00
Authorship according to Marcel Duchamp

“What is an author?” Michel Foucault famously asked long time ago. “What is authorship in matters of visual arts?” Marcel Duchamp might have added, tongue-in-cheek, giving a humorous and cryptic answer to his own question through his work. Indeed, one needs only “read” his oeuvre literally with this question in mind to discover that it contains a full and quite surprising answer to the question.

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LECTURE

Thierry de Duve:

13:30 - 15:30
Joseph Beuys and the German Past, Tentatively

The celebrated and controversial German artist, Joseph Beuys (1921-1986), is as well known for his claim that “every human being is an artist” as for his sculptural oeuvre made of such unusual materials as fat and felt. He will here be put in a historical context, going back to the German Romantics, that reveals what his awesome and disquieting artistic and political ambition has been.

Friday 10 November 2017

LECTURE
10:00 - 12:00

Lisa Blas:

Artist talk

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LECTURE

13:30 - 15:30

Thierry de Duve:

When is art political? — Suzanne McClelland’s Call with Information show

In February 2015, the New York painter Suzanne McClelland had a show at Team Gallery, the subject of which was domestic terrorism. There were large “expressionistic” paintings the artist calls portraits, “conceptual” posters with a lot of factual information, and wall installations of works on paper devoted to seven American domestic terrorists still at large. Nine months later, McClelland’s Call with Information show became tragically relevant to the question asked here, “When is art political?”

Thierry de Duve

Historian and philosopher of art Thierry de Duve is Evelyn Kranes Kossak Professor at Hunter College, City University of New York, and Emeritus from the Université de Lille 3. In 2014 he was Daniel J. Evans Visiting Professor at Evergreen State College, Olympia, WA, and in 2013, Kirk Varnedoe Visiting Professor at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. In 2012-2013, he was William C. Seitz Senior Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (CASVA) in Washington, D.C.; and in 2010, he was J.P. Getty Foundation Distinguished Visiting Professor, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. His English publications include Pictorial Nominalism (1991), Kant after Duchamp (1996), Clement Greenberg Between the Lines (1996, 2010), Look—100 Years of Contemporary Art (2001), and Sewn In the Sweatshops of Marx: Beuys, Warhol, Klein, Duchamp (2012). In 2013-2014, he published six essays in Artforum which he is now expanding and gathering into a book titled Duchamp’s Telegram. Two volumes of his Essais datés, published in French by Mamco in Geneva, have appeared recently: Volume 1, titled Duchampiana, in 2014, and Volume II, titled Adresses, in February 2016. Aesthetic at Large (Art, Ethics, Politics), a book of essays on aesthetics, is forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press in the fall of 2018.

Lisa Blas

Lisa Blas is a visual artist of Guamanian/ Italian-American descent working in painting, collage,
photography, and installation. Based in New York, she draws from art history, nature, and current
events to reflect on specific cultural and political legacies, past and present.

Her most recent work in collage (from 2013 – present) addresses the fragility of the environment
and civil unrest, across timelines and specific events. From this pairing, abstract images and
typographical fields are composed alluding to specimens of nature, disappearing geographical
spaces and news headlines. The collage material is constructed by painting sheets of watercolor
paper with layers of interference and flat color, cutting down the paper into fragments and
affixing it to vellum and Arches, in medium to large scale formats. Using the detritus from her
collages, she creates ephemeral still life arrangements with newspaper clippings and other
materials, to be photographed and produced as digital C-prints.

Blas produces a weekly blog post on Monday, of artworks from museum collections paired with
the front page of the newspaper. “Monday’s image” is located in the NEWS section of her
website, and the project was mounted in March 2017 as a video installation at the Emily Harvey
Foundation in New York. She has also produced an artist project for the Spring 2016 issue of
Public Art Dialogue: The Dilemma of Public Art’s Permanence, edited by Erika Doss.

Recent solo exhibitions are LISA BLAS / Monday’s Image, at Emily Harvey Foundation, New York, LISA BLAS / After lost space(s), 2016, at Kai Matsumiya Gallery, New York, LISA BLAS / Still Lifes, Sometimes Repeated, 2012-13, at Rossicontemporary, Brussels, LISA BLAS / As if pruning a tree, after Matisse, 2011, at Musée Matisse, Cateau-Cambrésis, France, LISA BLAS /
Meet Me at the Mason Dixon, 2011, at Gettysburg College, Pennsylvania. Recent group exhibitions are Social Photography V, at Carriage Trade, New York, Drawing Practice/Bellingham National 2017, at Whatcom Museum, Washington, Americanah, at Spring Break Art Show, New York, Emergency Eyewash, at Tanja Grunert Gallery, New York, Foundation Barbin Presents: Redeux (Sort of), 2016, at Kai Matsumiya Gallery, New York, Sensations That Announce The Future, 2015, at Evergreen College Gallery, Olympia, Washington, and A Particular Kind of Solitude: An exhibition inspired by the writings of Robert Walser, 2014, at the Elizabeth Street Garden, New York.

Concurrent with exhibiting her work both nationally and internationally, Blas has taught across
disciplines in Fine Art at the undergraduate and graduate level, with a special focus on the
museum and historical archives. She has taught at the Corcoran College of Art & Design, George
Washington University, Arlington Arts Center, Université de Lille 3, University of California at
Riverside, and Pomona College. She has been invited to speak on her work, participate in thesis
panels and/or do studio visits at Brooklyn Art Space (New York), Evergreen College (Olympia,
WA), The University of Virginia (Charlottesville, VA), American University (Washington, DC),
Otis College of Art and Design – Painting Department (Los Angeles, CA), The Slought
Foundation (Philadelphia, PA), Gettysburg College (Gettysburg, PA), ESA/école supérieure d’art
du Nord-Pas de Calais/Dunkerque-Tourcoing, (Tourcoing, France), La Cambre/école nationale
supérieure des arts visuels (Brussels), and School of Visual Arts (New York).

www.lisablas.com