<nettime-ann> Warren Neidich, Lectures Goldmsmiths College

Warren Neidich

Wednesday, November 5th, 2008

7-9pm

Small Cinema
Richard Hoggart Building

Goldsmiths

This event is supported by the Centre for
Cognition, Computation and Culture and the Goldsmiths Digital Studios

Political Art in the Sixties was about Delineation, Political Art Today is
about Differentiation

"The diagram is indeed a chaos and a catastrophe but it is also a germ of
order and rhythm…..As (Francis) Bacon says it unlocks areas of sensation".

Francis Bacon, The Logic of Sensation, Gilles Deleuze, pg. 102

"I am blind folded, a black silk scarf cloaks my eyes pressing my eye lids
tightly against my globes. I am spun around and around by my assistant. All of sudden for no apparent reason my motion is stopped. That is my sign to walk forward, which I do with my arm extended in front of me until I feel the wall. It is at that moment that my blind-fold is removed! I find my self confronted at close range by a series of words and colored lines. I am reading Extensive Culture and slightly above Intensive culture which are connected by a series of bidirectional arrows. I step back and realize, with of course some help form my memory since I was the one that drew this drawing in the first place, that I am situated in the midst of my Cultured Brain Drawing which I first began in 1999 and now has mutated into an organic amoeba like entity with multiple pseudo-pods with words like architecture, design, painting, performance and so on labeling them. All around are free floating colored lines that stretch and bend around corners or joining points of the floor and wall, the wall and ceiling or the two walls that form the north and east surfaces of my studio"

Warren Neidich, Bedeutung Magazine #2, October, 2008, pages 84-94

Thus begins Neidich's performative lecture entitled "Some cursory comments on the nature of my wall drawing…….". which was recently enacted in his studio at Iaspis, Stockholm where a large wall drawing, an expanded version of ones he had created over years of research, was produced during his residency. This work was situated between two smaller drawings on paper that were pinned to the wall on its' right and left. To the left, Political Art in the Sixties was about Delineation, Political Art Today is about Differentiation. Political Art in the Sixties, like the work of, for instance, Hans Hacke and the institutional critique, was about using art to describe and make visible the silent relations of the political conditions that surrounded art and were part of the larger world to which it was connected. Political Art Today, on the other hand, must address the homogenizing effect on culture of Neo-liberal Global Capitalism that through the Creative Industries, Art Market, Branding and Neuromarketing have created a crisis in the production of difference and variation. The challenge for Art, in Neidich's opinion, is to resist this homogenizing condition. To the right "If it looks like art it probably isn't". If we can appreciate a work as a work of art and know it to be so then it is already part and parcel of our shared perceptual habits. It is forms part of the common knowledge of members of the same culture and becomes for them what the definition of art is. Maybe the idea of beauty might be such a definition especially in its relation to its role as commodity. If it is a work of art and can't be identified as such it might mean that the perceptual habits required to perceive it have not yet been acquired. In this definition art is at first beyond recognition as such and the ability of it being understood must wait for a mutation to occur in the subject.

Perhaps the initial reception of Marcel Duchamp's Fountain,1917 and other examples of avant-garde excess proclaims such a misrecognition. Perhaps post-modernism misunderstanding of the role of this misrecognition in its attempt to understand the work of art in the expanded cultural and social field led to its demise as a condition of social change. Thus for Neidich art is a condition of the future and must await parallel and commensurate changes in the political, social, psychological, spiritual, economic and historical fabric before it can obtain full meaning.

Neidich's lecture will explore how Neuroaesthetics might answer some of the above questions and unveil the new conditions of what he calls Neuropower that has the potential to create new dispositifs for the administration of memory, attention through its action on neuroplasicity. While at the same time creating opportunities for the production of new forms of creativity and the imagination.

Warren Neidich is a Berlin and Los Angeles based artist, writer and exhibition organizer. His work explores the interfaces between culture, general intellect, phenomenology, social mind and post -Fordist economic structures. His conceptual based practice uses all media depending on the connotation and context. He is founding editor of www.artbrain.org and The Journal of Neuroaesthetics and is the author of Blow-up: Photography, Cinema and the Brain,DAP, 2003 . His work has been exhibited at such institutions as the Whitney Museum of American Art, PS1 Moma, Long Island City, The Ludwig Museum, Koln, Germany, The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Kunsthaus Zurich and the The Kunsthaus Graz. He was Arts Council/AHRC Fellow 2003-2004 and is currently research fellow at the Centre for Cognition, Computation and Culture, Goldsmiths, University of London, UK.