'The Grammar of Forms' is a series public events, workshops and presentations that will take place throughout autumn 2009 and winter 2010 at the Office for Contemporary Art Norway, with the aim to look at language, writing, criticism and publishing in relation to contemporary art, exploring its diverse modes of operation and possibilities within historical and contemporary practices. 'The Grammar of Forms' consists of a series of public events with a pedagogical remit, in which writers, artists, critics, publishers and theorists will investigate different experiences of and approaches to writing and language, specifically in relation to art. Starting in October, the programme will continue through spring 2010, making of OCA a public forum for learning, practice and exchange of knowledge and information, and further developing our commitment to rethinking the relationship that a contemporary art institution can have to its audience. As a complement to this programme of events, OCA will host a series of projects, including presentation of artworks and libraries of publications made available to the public for consultation and reading, further transforming OCA's public space into a place for production and exchange of discourse.
Wednesday, 21 October/ 19:00
Speaker: Peter Osborne
Subject: 'Fragment and Project: From Schlegel's Athenaeum Fragments to LeWitt's 'Sentences on Conceptual Art''
Many of the ideas central to the understanding of contemporary art – genre, fragment, project, the new or, the concepts of art and criticism themselves – derive from early German Romanticism. This lecture revisits Friedrch Schlegel's Athenaeum Fragments, one of the defining documents of the early German Romanticism, as the basis for a new interpretation of Sol LeWit's Sentences on Conceptual Art, focusing in particular on the issues of the art-status of criticism and its philosophical function of 'completing' works of art.
21 October to 19 December
Project: 'Sol LeWitt's 'Sentences on Conceptual Art': Manuscript and Draft Materials 1968–69'
Courtesy of Collection Daled, Belgium
In January 1969 Sol LeWitt's Sentences on Conceptual Art were first published in the magazine 0-9 (New York, NY) edited by Vito Acconci and Bernadette Mayer, and later the same year in Art-Language (UK) declaring that 'Ideas alone can be works of art; they are in a chain of development that may eventually find some form. All ideas need not to be made physical'. OCA will present the rarely exhibited handwritten notes by the artist and illustrate the evolution of the Sentences, which are an example of draftsmanship in their own right.
Wednesday, 28 October/ 19:00
Speaker: Ina Blom
Subject: 'On Lynda Benglis's Mumble (An Instance of Videosociality)'
What are the critical terms through which we approach the question of 'sociality' in art? In 1972 Lynda Benglis and Robert Morris started an artistic dialogue through a collaborative project that, using video as a medium, seemed to turn, self-reflexively, around their evolving relationship. The two resulting works, Benglis's Mumble (1972) and Morris's Exchange (1973) suggest that this relationship is the unique result of the productive framework of televisual technologies, and has no self-evident correlate in any reality beyond this framework. Ultimately, this collaborative work opens up certain fundamental questions concerning the social art practices of the 1960s and 70s, and calls out for redefinitions of the very models of sociality that tend to underpin our discussion of such work.
28 October to 19 December
Project: 'Lynda Benglis's Mumble (1972) and Robert Morris's Exchange (1973)'
In 1972, Robert Morris and Lynda Benglis agreed to exchange videos in order to develop a dialogue between each other's work. Mumble brings together repeated scenes and gestures, featuring Morris and Benglis's brother Jim, and a narrative of irrelevant, confusing and often purposefully untrue statements. As Benglis's narration degenerates into a meaningless, repetitive pulse, Mumble disrupts the convenient fiction that the image presented on screen is complete on itself. Morris's tape, Exchange, is a response to Benglis's Mumble. At the beginning of the tape, Morris comments on the nature of the collaboration, their interaction, and what they represent to each other. An asymmetry of elements forms as the tape moves from the professional towards the personal – a shift that gives the work humanity and, in relation to the development of early Conceptual video, its unique historical importance.
Wednesday, 4 November / 11:00–16:00
Organiser: Will Bradley
Workshop: 'The mind of this death is unrelentingly awake: A Workshop on Art, Criticism and the Institution of Critique (Part 1)'
What is art criticism for? How does it function? How should it change? This workshop will investigate art criticism, its aesthetics, its ideologies and its institutional role with an emphasis on the Norwegian context. The workshop will focus on questions such as: How does critique take form? How does a text operate? What is the relationship between writer and text, text and reader? How does a text reach an audience? How is the discourse around art constructed? What forces affect it? If the critique of the institution of art is also, itself, part of the institution, how can meaningful change take place? The workshop will begin with a one-day public event of talks by Bradley and additional speakers and screenings, and will continue with several sessions culminating in a day of public talks by the participants in 2010. For more information please click here.
Wednesday, 11 November / 11:00–16:00
Organiser: Anne Hilde Neset
Workshop: 'Audio Interpretation: Writing on Sound'
How do you translate sound into words? How do you pin down music, ethereal and without body, onto the page? In this workshop, The Wire's deputy editor Anne Hilde Neset will explore various approaches to writing about sound: journalistic, fictional, personal, historical and theoretical. The workshop will sample music and sound clips and discuss how sonic experience can be put into words, and will include reading various examples of writing on sound and debating their different approaches and effects. Participation is open to the public with prior registration. For more information please click here.
Wednesday, 2 and 9 December/ 11:00–16:00
Organiser: Stuart Bailey
Workshop: 'On Library, Archive and 'Service' (Part 1 and Part 2)'
How do we guarantee preservation and access to published material? How do we construct libraries? What are the different modes of experience that a library can offer? Stuart Bailey, member of collaborative group and event space Dexter Sinister, will lead two public workshops on the nature of the library and its function as an archive, a social space and a pedagogical tool, taking at a starting point 'The Serving Library', a project currently being developed by Dexter Sinister. The idea of 'The Serving Library', a place where both books and alcohol are available, functions as a roundabout way to reflect on the way in which printed and unprinted material can be articulated and preserved within a public place that is both educational and recreational. Participation is open to the public with prior registration. For more information please click here.
Wednesday, 27 January / 19:00
Speaker: AA Bronson
Subject: 'AA Bronson: My Life in Books'
AA Bronson will present images and reflections on his life in art as seen through publications, beginning with the underground newspapers of the 1960s, and continuing with his involvement with artists' books and periodicals from the early 1970s to the present. In particular, he will focus on his 25 years with the artists' group General Idea from 1969 through 1994, when they produced FILE magazine (1972-89) and founded Art Metropole (1974). Bronson will also offer a narrative of his ongoing projects, including the New York Art Book Fair and publishing projects at Printed Matter, New York, the non-profit organisation that he has directed for the last five years.
21 October to 19 December
Project: 'QUEER ZINES'
Organized by Printed Matter, Inc., New York, NY
'QUEER ZINES' presents a survey of serial, independent publications with a queer sensibility, spanning from the early 1970s to today, from Straight to Hell, Boyd McDonald's ground-breaking, filthy, oft-times political, sex zine of the 1970s, to BUTT Magazine, the Dutch mainstream super-zine still circulating today. Among these seminal publications, the project includes an explosion of punk zines, perhaps best epitomized by the mythic JDs – zines that crossed the traditional boundaries of race, class, gender; cheaply produced and largely distributed by mail. Their formal dynamism, mixed media and radical politics find a striking analogue in contemporaneous queer theory.
Friday, 29 January 2010 /11–16:00
Organiser: AA Bronson
Workshop: 'Queer Zines, Queer Strategies'
AA Bronson will lead a discussion about self-publishing and the fanzine, considering the history of General Idea, FILE magazine, the phenomenon of queer zines, and today's technologies of YouTube and on-demand publishing.
Wednesday, 10 February /11–16:00
Organiser: Mikkel Astrup
Workshop: 'On Literarity: A workshop on Samuel Beckett's Writings'
Mikkel Astrup, a Research Fellow at the University of Oslo in the Department of Literature, Area Studies and European Languages, organises a workshop on the prose of Samuel Beckett: In an increasingly plastic life, challenged by sophisticated intellectual control, biochemistry and genetics alike, what are the criteria for a literary subgenre that can do justice to this situation? This workshop will explore this by revisiting the plastic qualities of Samuel Beckett's prose. Beckett's literature is singular in its use of socio-cultural and physical resistances to articulation. His frequent reversals of historical and socio-cultural impact, from signification to psychophysical imprints, were seen as comical obstacles to expression in his own time. In the contemporary context, the interest of his writing might reside in the capacity his techniques have to expand the realm of creative linguistic composition. The discussion will draw on selected texts by Beckett, theoretical texts, literary samples and works of J.M. Coetzee and Bruce Nauman.
10 February to 15 April
Project: 'Bruce Nauman: Run from Fear, Fun from Rear, (1972)'
Organized by Mikkel Astrup
Astrup's workshop 'On Literarity' is accompanied by a presentation of Bruce Nauman's work Run from Fear, Fun from Rear, 1972. Bruce Nauman conducted several readings of Samuel Beckett's work, perhaps most notoriously the Slow Angle Walk (Beckett Walk) of 1968, paying homage to the awkward walks of Watt (1945) and Molloy (1951). A comparative reading of the work of the two authors will illuminate how close Beckett came to treat words and meaning as plastic material, broadening the scope for possible definitions of what literarity might be.
Saturday, April 17 / 19:00
'Sounds and Measures': Nils Bech in Concert with Bendik Giske, Ole-Henrik Moe, Kari Rønnekleiv and Daniel Herskedal
Accompanied by works of Anders Nordby and Arild Tveito
Singer and performer Nils Bech and saxophone player Bendik Giske, together with Daniel Herskedal, Ole-Henrik Moe and Kari Rønnekleiv, inaugurate OCA's public platform as a music performance space, and officially close the programme 'Columns, Grottos, Niches: The Grammar of Forms – On Art Criticism, Writing, Publishing and Distribution'. Bech's performance practice combines sparse a capella versions of contemporary and classical music with songs of his own writing and electronica sounds, which are often extended into informal performances in cooperation with other musicians and artists in contemporary art events both internationally and throughout Norway. Marking the release of Bech's forthcoming album Look Back by the label Fysisk Format 19 April, this performance features acoustic versions of the songs from the new album.