Bitef

25 th SEPTEMBER

MUSEUM OF NATIONAL THEATRE

18.00

LECTURE PERFORMANCE: ARTISTIC GENRE OR SPECIAL EDUCATION EDY FACTORY?

Lecture by: Jelena Vesić

★ This lecture will lean on the exhibition Lecture Performance, shown in Köln and Belgrade in 2009/2010 as the first exhibition directly concerned with this art form which has become extremely popular and present at art scene in the last decade. The exhibition has been organized in cooperation between Belgrade Museum of Contemporary Art and the museum Kölnischer Kunstverein, as a result of collaboration between four curators: Anja Nathan-Dorn, Kathrin Jentjens, Radmila Joksimović, and Jelena Vesić. Lecture Performance as such contains two practices - the one of lecture and the one of performance - with their long and changeable histories and policies. A genre approach would raise a question if rich tradition of performance and body art recognizes the specific form of “lecture performance”. The lack of

agreement about what lecture-performance actually is (or could be) creates the need to explore various phenomenal concepts or modes of action, and their supporting ideologies. That process brings us to the questions of “institutional” competencies and disciplinary limitations because, regardless of of contemporary “interdisciplinary approaches”, as soon as we tackle the issue we come upon various contexts and interpretations within visual and performing arts. When it comes to performing arts, the form of theoretical performance was the central point of numerous performances and critical texts long before the concept of lecture-performance has been created, and yet the term Lecture Performance has become a dominant “theoretical brand” that comprised these practices. In those practices, artists act between lecture and performance, introducing the elements of self-reflection, social reflection, and discussion into their own speech, or inviting participa-

tion, action and critical intervention of various kinds. The genesis of lecture-performance can be traced back to the activities typical of conceptual artists, through theoretical articulations of artistic work suggested by the group Art&Language, although the notion itself wasn’t introduced as a part of terminology until the end of the nineties, through contemporary dance, where work of artists such as Xavier Le Roy played the crucial part. The exhibition Lecture Performance, which tried to deal with "definitions of genre’’ but also with the policies that follow the “lack of consensus” in the articulation of phenomena, was built around four basic problems: the question of the policy of artistic speech and the far-reaching quality of artistic voice, as well as the question “what does contemporary art teach us?”, and how its specific knowledge co-opts or diverges depending on the reality of contemporary capitalism.

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New Theatre Tendencies