The first of these meetings takes place on Monday, the 26th of January, 2009 when Jacques Derrida will NOT be presenting an inaugural explication of the Art of the Non-lecture and the Spectre of the Public Intellectual. At 18.00 hours, at the Nieuwe Ooster Begraafplaats. Please email to artofthenonlecture@googlemail.com with further questions.
In a series of ‘non-lectures’ the Usual Suspects propose the mock staging of a lecture where we “invite” intellectuals who are perhaps dead or never likely to turn up (Edward Said, Hegel, Naomi Klein as examples), and when they never pitch, hold a round-table discussion of our own with those guests who are actually present and who could speak around the topic already laid out for the evening (themes such as: postcoloniality in European exhibition-making; art’s autonomy or lack thereof in upcoming biennales; new institutionalism). These discussions will be held in a less formal setting – a café, bar or restaurant near the supposed lecture venue in an institutional auditorium. Given five or ten minutes each member of the audience (now the discussion participants) are offered a platform to contribute their perspective on the specific theme of the evening and use this to generate further dialogue. The model will hopefully inspire cross-pollination between disciplines and provide a forum for less established creatives and thinkers to air their views while being balanced by other more experienced members of the art community. Challenging top-down modes of knowledge exchange these sessions opens up art conversations to encompass the shifts in audience-institution, curator-artist, east-west, centre-periphery and public-private binaries.
Visit the Art of the non-lecture blog for all information and updates.