In the last two decades, we have been contending with a new -- or newly redefined – ethos of performance. Curators now regularly install choreography in galleries. Visual artists are staging operas. In this expanded cultural landscape, all participants are encouraged to act, to experience, to stage, and to try out alternate selves and behaviors. This lecture will try to take stock of recent trends in a wide cultural landscape. It explores and juxtaposes the very different vocabularies and histories that artists, critics, curators, and citizens bring to bear in this scene of aesthetic and social experiment. It also examines key sites of experimentation and debate, asking how artists and organizers are incorporating but also questioning the experiential ethos of a service economy.
IRW Distinguished Lecture Series 2014-2015
Feminist Optics: Gender and Visual Studies