New Institutions, 5th Annual Graduate Student Conference

April 7, 2012

10:00am-6:30pm

UC San Diego, Visual Arts Facility, Performance Space

9500 Gilman Drive, La Jolla

The Visual Arts Department at the University of California San Diego will host its annual conference entitled New Institutions. This conference seeks interpretations of twenty-first century changes taking shape in artistic institutions and their alternatives. Invited guests and attendees will help to position the tactical and strategic choices facing artists and writers.

With the expansion of art production into the social realm, alternative methods routinely assert themselves as counterfactuals to inherited models of exhibition and dissemination. Artists, curators, and collectives model themselves after all sorts of institutions or even abandon traditional institutional affiliation altogether, slipping in to and out of alternative styles and unconventional modes. These inventive tendencies take shape in light of cultural processes such as social networks and information globalization, neo-liberalism and financial collapse, and perennial returns to the political vanguards of the 1960s and ‘70s. How and why are artists mimicking institutions to critique and change them?

New Institutions is a term that indicates the increased integration of media, display, reception and promotion. The result is new kinds of cinema and time-based art, readymades, publications, press releases, schools, libraries, services, stage productions and works of literature, as well as forms of creative capitalism and businesses that don’t look much like other art-world institutions of the past. These expanding categories of artistic activity have comparable global features, though they occur under different conditions in separate societies around the world. How do artists or scholars orient themselves towards these changing institutions, integrating separate industries from the fields of entertainment, science, and technology? How do they change them? How has self-institutionalization in the art world changed over time with increased social integration?

Institutions are not to be considered only as conservative containers or bricks and mortar, but also as dynamic processes that may be both localized and/or drifting. Is it possible to conceive of an institutional borderland not only between continents and countries, but also between industries?

Participants are invited to add specificity to the heterogeneity of these expanding categories built on modeling institutions and exploring their alternatives.

We are pleased to welcome Blake Stimson as our keynote speaker. Blake Stimson is Professor of Art History at the University of California, Davis. Recent publications include The Pivot of the World: Photography and Its Nation, Collectivism after Modernism: The Art of Social Imagination after 1945 (co-edited with Gregory Sholette), and Institutional Critique: An Anthology of Artists’ Writings (co-edited with Alexander Alberro).

Conference Schedule

9:30AM, Opening reception with coffee and bagels

10:00 - 10:15, Introduction

10: 15 - 11:30AM - Panel 1 - The story of Institutions: An old kind of model

Mary McGuire, Building a Social Frame: The Judson Memorial Church and the New American Avant-Garde, 1958-1965

John A. Tyson, Institutional Critique Goes Global: Hans Haacke and the Large-Scale, International Show

Respondent: John Welchman

Moderator: Emily Goodman

11:45AM – 1PM - Panel 2 - The work of Institutions: A new kind of work

Cara Baldwin, The Index Wants You [Dead] Eric Golo Stone, Working Group Discussions on the Relations and Conditions of Exhibitory Activity

Respondent: Norman Bryson

Moderator: Matthew Schum

1 PM - 2:30PM - Lunch

2:30 – 4:15PM - Panel 3 – Institutional Borderlands

Manuel Shvartzberg, The Architecture of Radicality: Between Soft and Hard Institutions

Brandi Jolie Kulakowski, Atomic Shelter as National Symbol: The Case of the Bosnian Biennial

Rebecca Blocksome, The Artist as Bureaucrat: Subverting the Apparatus of the Nation-State

Respondent: Grant Kester

Moderator: Drew Snyder

4:30 – 5:30PM – Keynote

Blake Stimson – The Enclosure of Contemporary Art

5:30 – 6:30PM - Closing Reception

Conference Coordinators: Samara Kaplan, Tim Ridlen, and Matthew Schum

For more information please visit: http://visarts.ucsd.edu/ or contact Sheena Ghanbari, sghanbari@ucsd.edu