OFFICE FOR CONTEMPORARY ART NORWAY ANNOUNCES
The Experience of Defeat
a lecture by T.J. Clark
Thursday 17 November, 18:00
Auditorium Santa Margherita, Università Ca' Foscari
Venezia, Campo Santa Margherita, Dorsoduro 3689, Venice
www.oca.no
OCA
Channel
The Office for Contemporary Art (OCA), as commisioner of
Norway’s representation at the 54th Biennale di Venezia, would like
to announce The Experiene of Defeat, a lecture by art
historian T.J. Clark as part of 'The State of
Things'. Following previous contributions by Jaques
Rancière, Leo Bersani, Vandana Shiva, Jan Egeland, Eyal Weizman,
Judith Butler, Franco Berardi and Saskia
Sassen, T.J. Clark’s lecture will be the closing event of
'The State of Things', a programme that for six months has brought
to the Venice Biennale a discussion of the urgent issues affecting
the world today.
About the lecture
The Left in advanced capitalist countries has lived for the past
two decades looking failure square in the face. The disappearance
of a Left alternative from the space of politics, or even from the
space of political imagination, remains the great fact of our time.
Taking its title from Christopher Hill's great study of radical
writing after the English Civil War, this lecture is concerned with
the Left's sense of progress. It asks what it could mean to a Left
politics for it no longer to consider itself 'on the side of
history': not to imagine its task, in other words, as the
realisation of the baulked potentials of capitalism and/or
modernity, not to see its eventual victory written into the DNA of
an economic order, not to posit some version of utopia – not, in a
word, to 'have the future in its bones'. Is a Left with no future a
contradiction in terms? If not the future, then what? Is it only
the Right that can (imaginatively, politically) dispense with the
myth of freedom waiting to be realised – freedom at last in
full possession of a technics? What aims and imagery might there be
for an 'un-modernity' to come?
About T.J. Clark
T.J. Clark (b.1943, Bristol, UK, lives and works in London, UK) has
until last year held the George C. and Helen N. Pardee Chair as
Professor of Art History at UC Berkeley in California. His writings
on art history throughout the 1970s and 80s single-handedly
redefined the history of modernism internationally. His books
include The Absolute Bourgeois: Artists and Politics in France,
1848–51 and Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the
1848 Revolution (both 1973); The Painting of Modern Life:
Paris in the Art of Manet and his Followers (1985);
Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism
(1999); Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of
War (co-written with Iain Boal, Joseph Matthews and Michael
Watts under the name Retort, 2005) and The Sight of Death: An
Experiment in Art Writing (2006).
About The State of Things
'The State of Things' is a series of public lectures that is
held throughout the biennale period, reflecting upon themes such as
diversity, the environment, peace-making, human rights, capital,
migration, asylum, Europe, aesthetics and revolution. Each
presentation aims to tackle the 'state of things' today, drawing
from the speakers' fields of activity and research, and from what
they consider the intellectual and political priorities of today.
The programme takes its cue from the Nansen Passport, created by
Norwegian diplomat and explorer Fridtjof Nansen at the end of World
War I in an attempt to enable refugees move across borders in
search of political and intellectual shelter.
Norway's representation in Venice in 2011 is commissioned by OCA
and organised by its director, Marta Kuzma and its associate
curator, Pablo Lafuente, together with Peter Osborne, director of
the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy at Kingston
University, London. Norway's representation at the 54th
International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia, also includes
'Beyond Death: Viral Discontents and Contemporary Notions about
AIDS', a graduate programme by Bjarne Melgaard at the Faculty
of Design and Arts, Università Iuav di Venezia.
*The lectures are free and open to everyone. They are also
available through live streaming
and later archived on OCA’s
website. A publication compiling
all the papers will be published upon the completion of the
programme in 2012.
'The State of Things' has been generously supported by Fritt
Ord.
