Speculative Art Histories

PROGRAM

Thursday 2 May 2012

Location: Erasmus University, H5-32

Speculative Philosophy and Art

19h00 Panel
Armen Avanessian (FU Berlin) – Against the Regime of (aesthetical) Correlationism Charlotte De Mille (Courtauld, Uni Sussex) – Immanence and Art’s Histories: towards a Bergsonian methodology
Sarah Kolb (Akademie Vienna) – Diagonal Science and Philosophy of Art: Bergson after Duchamp after Caillois
Joost de Bloois (UvA) – 'Let us be communists like Mallarmé'. Speculative politics and aesthetics after Badiou
21h30 Reception

Friday 3 May 2013

Location: Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art

10h00
Welcome by Samuel Saelemakers (Witte de With)
Introduction by Sjoerd van Tuinen (EUR)

Diagrammatics and the Radical Picturesque

10h20 Keynote lecture
Lars Spuybroek (NOX, Georgia Tech) – The Politics of Beauty
Respondent: Andrej Radman (DSD, TU Delft)
11h45 Coffee break
12h00 Panel
Kamini Vellodi (Kingston Uni) – From the Speculative to the Constructive: Deleuze and Peirce on diagrammatics
Vlad Ionescu (Sint-Lucas Brussels) – The Rigorous and the Vague: On the Concepts of Wölfflin, Riegl and Worringer
Sjoerd van Tuinen (EUR) – Serpentine Life: A Speculative Reading of Mannerist Art Theory
13h30 Lunch

Speculative Conceptions

14h30 Keynote lecture
Reza Negarestani
Respondent: Henk Oosterling (EUR, Skillcity Rotterdam)
16h00 Coffee break
16h15 Roundtable with conference participants, including Armen Avanessian (FU Berlin), Bram Ieven (UU), Charlotte De Mille (Courtauld Uni., Sussex), Henk Oosterling (EUR), Bertrand Prévost (Uni. of Bordeaux)
17h00 Reception

Saturday 4 May 2013

Location: Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art

Speculative Presences

10h00 Keynote lecture
Elisabeth von Samsonow (Ak. bildenden Künste Wien) – The Plasticity of the Real
Respondent: Rick Dolphijn (UU)
11h30 Coffee break
11h45 Panel 3
Adi Efal (Uni. Cologne) – Ravaisson’s ‘Habitude’ and the Past Reality of Things
Erik Bordeleau (McGill Uni.) – Tsai Ming-Liang and the Cosmopolitical Slowing Down of the Soul
Fleur Courtois L’Heureux (GECO/ULB) – From Etienne Souriau’s L'ombre de Dieu to Mats Ek’s Shadow of Carmen
13h15 Lunch break, soup served

Speculative Expressions

14h15 Keynote lecture
Kerstin Thomas (Uni. of Mainz) – Expressive Things: Art Theories of Henri Focillon and Meyer Schapiro Reconsidered
Respondent: Adi Efal
15h45 Coffee break
16h00 Keynote lecture
Bertrand Prévost (Uni. of Bordeaux) – What is a Plastic Idea? Light, Problem, Intensity
Respondent: Kamini Vellodi (Kingston Uni.)
17h30 Reception

On Friday 3 and Saturday 4 May, Insurgence (2013) will be on view at Witte de With. This documentary by Épopée groupe d’action cinema accounts the anonymous event of the Printemps Érable, the 2012 student protests in Montreal.

Please consult http://www.caponline.org/speculative-art-histories for speaker’s biographies, abstracts and program updates.

PRACTICAL

Language of the event:
English

Tickets and reservations:

Thursday 2 May 2013: free
Because of the limited number of seats, please register by e-mail with Monique Goense – [email protected] – if you want to participate.

Friday 3 and Saturday 4 May 2013:
One day ticket: € 15 full rate / € 7.5 reduction (students)
Two day ticket: € 25 full rate / € 12.50 reduction (students)
Book your tickets via [email protected] or call +31 (0)10 411 0144

Addresses:

Erasmus University Rotterdam
Complex Woudestein H5-32
Burgemeester Oudlaan 50
3062 PA Rotterdam

Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art
Witte de Withstraat 50
3012 BR Rotterdam

CONFERENCE THEME

Following the recent ‘speculative turn’ in Continental philosophy, prepared by Gilles Deleuze and Alain Badiou and elaborated by Quentin Meillassoux, Brian Massumi, Graham Harman, Isabelle Stengers and Reza Negarestani among many others, the aim of this conference is to propose a counter-discourse of speculative approaches to art and, especially, to art history.

The guiding intuition of this conference is that both the modern gap between philosophy and art history and the postmodern call for more interdisciplinarity are inspired by a consensual abhorrence of more speculative approaches to art. How could today’s materialist, realist, pragmatist, vitalist or object-oriented speculations offer alternatives to the mere complementarity of philosophy of art and art history, often based on mutual recognition and critical limitation rather than imaginative crossovers? What new intermedial methodologies for art and art historical writing do they provide? Or vice versa, how can the encounter with art induce new forms of philosophy? How do speculative concepts of time, past and contingency challenge typically modern engagements with art’s ‘history’?

ORGANIZERS

This conference is organized by the Center for Art and Philosophy (CAP, www.caponline.org) in collaboration with Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art (http://www.wdw.nl). It is the outcome of the CAP reading group on speculative philosophy which runs from 2011 to 2013 at the Erasmus University Rotterdam and at Witte de With. It follows upon the Philosophers’ Rally 2012, which was organized by students of the Faculty of Philosophy of the Erasmus University Rotterdam in collaboration with CAP and which also had the speculative turn in Continental philosophy as its guiding thread (with Didier Debaise, Elisabeth von Samsonow, and Levy R. Bryant among the speakers).