Vā Moana / Pacific Spaces Reading Group 02 2018

The second Vā Moana / Pacific Spaces reading group for 2018 – Methods for Making / Making Methods will take place Thursday September 20.

One of the selected readings by Keti Chukhrov, ‘On the False Democracy of Contemporary Art’, offers the following:

Historically there have been two methodologies of resisting the complacency of the culture industry and bourgeois society’s reliance on the judgment of taste. One was the modernist stance: it required extreme estrangement and abstaining from alienated capitalist reality; it turned the artwork into a piece, blocking perception, pleasure, or the judgment of taste, so that such work would exist in extra-social conditions rather than be perceived by a society that can never evade the capitalist economy and the cultural industry…. Another position—the avant-garde one—resisted bourgeois culture and its traditions of connoisseurship via dissolving art within life and making life the matter of political and social transformation. (2014)

We will be discussing this text, Keti Chukhrov, ‘On the False Democracy of Contemporary Art’, 2014, and Hito Steyerl’s ‘Art as Occupation: Claims for an Autonomy of Life’, 2011 and a final forthcoming text specific to methodology which we will supply in a follow up email.

The reading group is generously hosted by our friends over at the University of Auckland as organised by Billie Lythberg on Thursday September 20, 9.30am–11.30am (room to be specified). This is open to Māori and Pacific postgraduate students and those in their final year of their undergraduate degrees. Spaces are limited so please RSVP to lana.lopesi@aut.ac.nz.

Image: Rabih Mroué, I, the Undersigned, 2007. Video still