"Lecture Performance"
Channel: L.A. Art Documents
Date: 2011-06-27

"Lecture Performance" 
Salon of MoCA (Museum of contemporary Art Belgrade)
Belgrade Heritage House 
Center for Cultural Decontamination
March 3 --  April 4, 2010

Artists: Fia Backström, Walter Benjamin, Pauline Boudry/Renate Lorenz, Dan Graham, Andrea Fraser, Mark Leckey, Robert Morris, Pinky Show, Piratbyrån, Martha Rosler, Grupa Spomenik, TkH, V-Girls, Jeronimo Voss, Katarina Zdjelar / Jan Verwoert

Curators: Jelena Vesic, Kathrin Jentjens, Radmila Joksimovic, Anja Nathan-Dorn

Is contemporary art a product of fascination with aesthetic objects or a space of knowledge production? In which way does art operate with knowledge in relation to the terrain of academy and science or to media channels of information exchange? Which aesthetic and formal means does it employ in order to establish this specific modus operandi?

These are some of the questions raised by the Lecture Performance exhibition in Belgrade, the exhibition whose allusive title entwines within itself two terms -- the term of lecture and the term of performance -- both with their long and changeable traditions and definitions. The Lecture Performance exhibition appeared as a result of curatorial exploration into this field, asking the question whether in the framework of rich tradition of performance and body art a specific form could be singled out -- the form of lecture performance. The lack of consensus on what lecture performance actually is produced a need to explore different manifestations and methods of operating. Within this relatively young "genre" artists operate on the boundary between lecture and performance, including elements of self-reflection, social reflection, discussion form, performance virtuosity, or different forms of action. The genesis of lecture performance can be traced all the way back to the activities of conceptual artists, although the actual term was introduced in the field of art during the nineties, through contemporary dance. Nevertheless, the goal of this exhibition is not only to offer an art historical survey or cross section of the development of this artistic "genre", where the crucial moments of this historic development would be illustrated by a certain work of art. By choosing a specific form as the point of reference, the Lecture Performance exhibition is trying to get to grips with questions on power of artistic speech, far-reaching potential of artistic voice, as well as "what is contemporary art teaching us?", and how we can use its specific teachings today.

In the classical art tradition, knowledge, cognition and instruction are inseparable from artistic gesture. One of the crucial aesthetic and social explanations of artistic operations in the age of enlightenment was Horace's treatise Ars poetica and the vision of the role of art as something that should "teach and entertain" (docere et delectare), or, to be more exact, something that teaches by other means and communicates the corpus of knowledge through a filter of aesthetic experience, namely "entertainment". This tradition is sovereignly broken by modernism, which establishes a new paradigm, and this is to perceive art as art, that is to say a social activity that is totally autonomous and completely based on its own language -- the language of art. On the other hand, the art of the sixties and the seventies that established the language of contemporaneity, i.e. what we today tend to call "contemporary art", renews its interest for the "outer world". The forms of new media and performances reintroduce the figure of artist-speaker, a kind of artist-instructor that invented a new language of art for the forms of new critical "teaching" and direct addressing to the public. Today the borders between learning, informing, aesthetic gesture, political action, amusement and entertainment are very porous -- art is used as a means of informing, education and political intervention, or it becomes a part of the entertainment industry, just like business and politics themselves use performative and aesthetic forms to accomplish their goals. Exactly these turbulent and hazy fields of today's creative practices that encompass a broad field of social life represent inspiration and basic starting point for the Lecture Performance exhibition, as well as for a number of works exhibited in it.