Friday, 27 January 2006, 10:30–18:00
Verksted Seminar
@The Goethe Institut
50 Prince's Gate, London
The artists Michael Elmgreen (b. 1961, Denmark) and Ingar Dragset (b. 1969, Norway) have collaborated since 1995 on the production of powerless structures — sculptural installations that perform institutional critique in relation to sexual and other political identities. The Welfare Show, originally produced at Bergen Kunsthall in Norway in 2005, addresses aspects of welfare society, as implemented in the Scandinavian model of a democratic society. This model, engineered and marketed in the 1950s, has steadily deteriorated since the 1970s in response to a globalized economy. The Art of Welfare is a one-day conference, in tandem with the opening of The Welfare Show at the Serpentine Gallery in London, that will explore artistic and political aspects of The Welfare Show.
Topics include: politics as content and the politics of artistic form; the Scandinavian model of welfare as a socio-spatial form of experience; the current viability of the welfare state and its possible future forms; and institutional critique and relational aesthetics.
Marta Kuzma (Director, Office for Contemporary Art Norway, Oslo)
Solveig Øvstebø (Director, Bergen Kunsthall, Bergen, Norway)
The Politics of Content and Politics as Form
Peter Osborne (Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy, London, UK)
Peter Osborne situates Elmgreen and Dragset's The Welfare Show in the context of an ongoing search for a "modernism with social content". The talk explores the relationship between the politics of "content" and the politics of "form" and asks how this relationship is transformed in post-conceptual works. Peter Osborne is Professor of Modern European Philosophy at Middlesex University, London and editor of the journal Radical Philosophy. His books include The Politics of Time: Modernity and Avant-Garde (1995), Philosophy in Cultural Theory (2000) and Conceptual Art (Phaidon, 2002). He has contributed widely on questions about the philosophical status and character of contemporary art, with a special emphasis on Concept and Construction in Contemporary Art.
Modernity and Order: Architecture and the Welfare State
Jeremy Till (Professor of Architecture at the University of Sheffield and Director of Sarah) Wigglesworth Architects.
Publications include Architecture and Participation and Architecture and the Everyday. He was recently (2006) appointed curator of the British Pavilion in the 2006 Venice Architecture Biennale. A discussion of the elision of the ordering tendencies of modernity and architecture as manifest in the spatial provision for welfare, using the iconic 1960s building of Park Hill, Sheffield as a case study.
Outsourcing the Welfare State
Thomas Hylland Eriksen (Professor, Department of Cultural Complexity, University of Oslo)
Eriksen has worked with the politics of identity, ethnicity, nationalism and globalisation from a comparative perspective. He has published widely on the cultural complexity of Norway, either with a focus on Norwegians or the multi-ethnic character of contemporary Norway.
Participation and Social Conscience
Claire Bishop (Leverhulme Research Fellow in Curating Contemporary Art department at the Royal College of Art, London)
Claire Bishop is the author of Installation Art: A Critical History (Tate, 2005) and Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics (October no.110, 2004), and writes for a number of magazines including Artforum and Tate Etc. Her current research addresses the politics of spectatorship in relational and socially-engaged art practices.
Crumbling from Within? The Microfoundations of Welfare States
Victor D. Norman (Professor of International Economics at the Norwegian School of Economics and Business Administration, Oslo, Norway)
Norman is an economist, politician, and journalist who served as Minister of Labour from October 2001 to March 2004 in Norway. His book with Avinash K. Dixit, Theory of International Trade: A Dual, General Equilibrium Approach, is considered a major contribution to the understanding of international trade.
The speakers will be joined by the artists Elmgreen and Dragset for a general discussion.
The Art of Welfare is supported by the Office for Contemporary Art Norway and organized by OCA in cooperation with The Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy, Middlesex University, London and the Serpentine Gallery, London. Additional support has been provided by the Serpentine Gallery, The Royal Norwegian Embassy in London, the Goethe Institut, and the British Council.