 | herbst Academy
Workshops
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This year again, three workshops bring international artists, theorists and students to Graz during the festival to reflect on questions of virtuosity as a strategy for art and survival and on the art works on show at the festival.
27/09 - 02/10
Workshop I: Demon Air Nike Stan Smith Exorcism
Virtuosity as a method of working
By Mårten Spångberg (S)
With Sven-Olov Wallenstein (S) et al.
This workshop quite simply turns virtuosity against itself: for we do not want to be healed, do not want to be freed of our compulsive behaviours. We want the demons to work for us, corrupt our bodies, and undermine all reason. Virtuosity has become a ritual, but in fact it should be seen as a method of working that turns life itself into a productive factor.
It is a romantic conception of virtuosity that this workshop follows. A virtuosity that operates on the peripheries of the discourses, thus gaining its own sovereignty. Theoretical undertakings will be part of the workshop, but the focus is on a practical, creative project that cuts the ground from under the masterpiece and creates a new one between motion and sound.
Co-presented by NXTSTP, sponsored by the Cultural Programme of the European Union
04/10 - 09/10
Workshop II: Academy of tricksters
By and with geheimagentur (D)
»Casino of Tricks
»Masters, tricksters, bricoleurs – Conference on virtuosity as a strategy for art and survival
Tricks are a special form of knowledge not concerned with the way the world is but rather with how it may be overturned. Trick knowledge is local, situational, clandestine, virtuoso, omnipresent. Trick knowledge creeps into other discourses and sticks there. Tricks also produce hybrids between art and politics, creating transitions between activism and artistic practice. At the Casino of Tricks, where this workshop is taking place, all manner of tricks are traded, collected and shared: magic, economic, political, mundane and extraordinary. For centuries, disdain of tricks was common to rationalism and religion. Today, we affirm the critical potential of the trick. So how do critical analysis and trick expertise relate to each other today?
10/10 - 15/10
Workshop III: Between Post-Fordism and political action
Virtuosity in the 21st century
By Kai van Eikels(D)
With Jan Holger Mauss (D) & Tino Sehgal(D/GB)
Having being practically absent from modern aesthetics for a hundred years, the concept of virtuosity is suddenly reappearing in debates on performance art at the beginning of the twenty-first century. With the boundary between artistic performance and political intervention being increasingly often overstepped by both sides, Hannah Arendt’s claim that political action possesses a virtuosic quality is becoming topical once again. On the other hand, the post-Fordist economy is absorbing the artistic and political virtues of playing, working and living together. How can art respond to these new challenges? Are there any strategies to turn ”servile virtuosity” (Paolo Virno) into a non-servile virtuosity, to reactivate the political potential of virtuosity in artistic performance?
»Application Form
»Open Ups – Public Lectures
A further workshop within steirischer herbst festival 2010:
»Sound in immersive digital performance environments
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