Aesthetic Journalism Book Review in Flash Art
Flash Art Italia, agosto-settembre 2010
by Veronica Valentini
(in italiano – Italian only)
AGM Conversation Series, Cairo Session: On Dialogue
AGM Culture Conversation Series, Cairo Session: On Dialogue
During the upcoming Cairo Biennale, AGM will coordinate a recorded conversation between curators, artists and cultural producers on the 16th December 2010. This one day session will focus on social and geo-political topics relevant to the Mediterranean region, opening up to some tactics for producers and audiences to employ via modes of aesthetic journalism, ficto-criticism and political fictions. Having recently interrogated the nature of collective production and collaboration as part of Chamber of Public Secrets’ contribution to Manifesta 8, AGM wishes to expand on this to address the term “dialogue”. If, as in the realm of cultural diplomacy, dialogue is to be understood as a reciprocal act and as a prelude to collaboration/cultural understanding, then the session asks: who sets the terms of dialogue, where is it enacted, how does it function and what are its inherent asymmetries? More specifically, we hope to delve into the realm of questioning the instrumentalisation of “dialogue” in contemporary art and institutional practices as well as on the geo-political scale.
This session will be disseminated through attendees networks and on agmculture.org.
Participants
Khaled Ramadan (Lebanon, Finland & Denmark) Alfredo Cramerotti (Italy & UK) Hannah Conroy (UK) Yesomi Umolu (UK), Khaled Hafez (Egypt), Aida Eltorie (Egypt & USA), (Dermis Leon (Spain), Achilleas Kentonis (Cyprus) Patrizio Travagli (Italy) Giuseppe Moscatello (UAE), Alexandre Gurita (France), Michael Thoss (Germany).
Sponsors/Supporters
Allianz Stiftung
European Union House of Delegation Cairo-Egypt
About AGM Conversation Series
The AGM Conversation Series brings together, in different configurations and venues, artists, curators, thinkers and contributors variously involved in processes of “knowledge production” via art, media, research or other forms of critical engagement. Adopting AGM’s itinerant format, these sessions seek not only to assess the “state-of-play” at various moments in the lead up to the exhibition or research process in which they are involved at that time, but to continue discussions around thematics that are central to their approach and productions.
A significant feature of the Conversation Series is that they have taken place in semi formal settings, requiring no audience but a camera and an amassed group of participants. They sit somewhere between the formal setting of the commonly used artists talk /seminar format and the informal nature of social/networked conversations between arts practitioners and producers. The sessions provide an open forum for sharing and exchange with no underlying pretext but to consider the current state of affairs.
The edited versions of the AGM Conversation series are distributed online through open networked communities such as Facebook, Vimeo, LinkedIn, Flickr, Twitter and also on agmculture.org.
About AGM
AGM Culture is a curatorial project with some of the inbuilt features of a parasite. Each time, by changing partner, location, form and content, its primary focus is to explore the peculiarity of the hosting body – be it a site, an institution or a theme. Previously, AGM has explored new modes of knowledge production within art and the media in Austria, Canada, Denmark, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, the U.K. and in the Web space
Art Expanded. From theory to practice, and back again.
Lecture at MA in Art and Media Practice in the University of Westminster
Guest speaker: Alfredo Cramerotti, curator at QUAD, Derby, presents his art-as-research practice as curator of Manifesta 8 and author of the book Aesthetic Journalism How to Inform Without Informing (Intellect, 2009).
Session format: Visual Lecture. The author will give a lecture illustrated with images of the artworks of M8 and the book followed by Q&A
Abstract: ” My curatorial approach is not about creating new (artistic) knowledge but rather shifting existing modes of knowledge production and distribution. It implies entering a mutual relationship with other systems such as mass media, science, law, architecture or other areas, constantly shifting society’s perception of itself through non-artistic disciplines.
In my most recent curatorial project, the European biennial of contemporary art Manifesta 8, Region of Murcia, Spain, I opened up a space for artists to cross boundaries with the realm of media information and communication, a daunting terrain as opposed as the ‘safe’ environment of art. By creating new sequences of knowledge and generating what I regard as ‘aesthetic journalism’, artists and audiences alike become active participants of the curatorial concept since they become a part of the information chain, of the sequence of knowledge.
The talk will investigate this approach, from the development of the concept to its practical implementation, and will open up to the audience to discuss how hybrid practices – think about biopolitics, sustainable development, experiential reality and other processes that are the sum of different parts of ‘set’ disciplines- are re-constituting us and our world on a daily basis.”
Reading for week 05
Visit the following websites:
- Alfredo Cramerotti’s own website for text and image resources
- Manifesta 8 website
http://www.manifesta8.com/manifesta/manifesta8.home
Download the press dossier
http://www.murciaturistica.es/manifesta8/descarga_en_9.pdf
read about the projects
http://www.manifesta8.com/manifesta/manifesta8.manifesta_artists
http://www.manifesta8.com/manifesta/manifesta8.artists_commissioners
- Curatorial statement
Alcramer, 210. Curating in the context of Manifesta 8: A conversation between ACAF (Alexandria Contemporary Art Forum), CPS (Chamber
of Public Secrets – Alfredo Cramerotti & Khaled Ramadan) and tranzit.org. [online] Available at: http://www.alcramer.net/cms/publications/Curating%20in%20the%20context%20of%20M8_cut_invisible%C2%A0.pdf [Accessed 7 October 2010].
- Cramerotti, A., 2009. Aesthetic Journalism How to Inform Without Informing. London: Intellect.
Full text available as electronic resource in Westminster catalogue
- Aesthetic Journalism: wikipedia entry
http://en.wikipedia/org/wiki/Aesthetic_Journalism
Etivity for week 05
In the blog “An ABC of Aesthetic Journalism” you are invited to choose one letter from A to Z to respond to the book and Fay’s response to it.
http://fayinc.wordpress.com/category/1-about/
“We invite you to engage in the ABC blog by responding to a post/s or by creating your own. You can add to, comment on, critique, extend, oppose or digress from the current content. Responses can take the form of text, image, video, audio or web link. Directly or indirectly consider our opening bullet points in relation to this invitation. Your approach can be academic, artistic, communicative, reflexive, objective or personal. The only rules are that you cannot delete existing content and that responses are indexed in their respective alphabetical category. You will be given the username and password to the blog.” Alfredo Cramerotti / Fay Nicolson
After you post in the ABC blog, post the full text in the TP blog, with a permalink to your text in the ABC blog.
TVE Metropolis – Manifesta 8
Special Metropolis TV format from TVE Spain about Manifesta 8 / CPS Chamber of Public Secrets
Mediascapes. Nolens Volens 4
This fourth issue of Nolens Volens has been edited in collaboration with Alfredo Cramerotti, member of the curatorial group Chamber of Public Secrets, in the framework of their participation in Manifesta 8.
The subject explored was “mediascapes”. And the contributors have worked with the concept of how the media construct rather than reflect the world; they are hardly a public forum, and have transformed into an industry which has a powerful influence and exerts discursive manipulation over the audience and society.
Extending the notion of reality as a construct, as symbolic coordinates that determine our experience of reality, the central importance of the media in the definition of the framework in which reality takes place in the contemporary world is evident. Since the spread of what is denominated as communication technologies, the construction of reality through the media establishes the limits of our possible experience in a construction of the world with a totalizing vocation. Baudrillard’s critical considerations of simulacra and hyper-reality or Debord’s spectacle are positions which, although they are an efficient diagnostic of the state of matters, do not leave many options for operating in an effective way in the construction of a set if images that determines our experience of reality from other positions, opposing the versions of media power. Thus, the experiential framework proposed by the business conglomerates of communication should be confronted with other forms of treating, narrating and, finally, constructing this certain sense of reality.
Lastly, we are printing an excerpt of Alfredo Cramerotti’s book “Aesthetic journalism: How to Inform Without Informing” (2009), published by Intellect, which discusses how the production of truth has shifted from the domain of the news media to that of art and aestheticism, which marks a new approach to the debate of the possibility of the critical potential of art within the aestheticization of the information.
The contributors to this issue are: Los colaboradores de este número de Nolens Volens son: Carlos Jiménez, Alfredo Cramerotti, Arturo/ fito Rodríguez Bornaetxea, Jesús Aguilera, Ramon Parramon, Anders Eiebakke, Erlea Maneros Zabala, Andreja Kulunčić, Daniel García Andújar, Extrastruggle, Michael Takeo Magruder, Nada Prlja, Nemanja Cvijanovic, GenderArtNet, Virginia Villaplana and Michael Baers
On Failure
Video, sound essay, 15 min, on the downsides, prestiges and spaces of failure, via the figure of Orson Welles, who is paradigmatic for his relationship with failure. Among our contemporaries, failure has no space, no room for development –in other words – it should not exist.
But failure is a precious space where we can stretch our boundaries and experiment with another dimension of living. At this point, most of you will feel the urge to ask why should we fail. It’s not that we should fail in order to live better. Rather I believe we should allow ourselves the space, the mental dimension, of failure.
Welles is considered not for what he manage to realize in relation to his non-materialized ideas, rather for the way he – through the notion of failure – involuntarily played a game according to his rules.
Symposium: How to Inform without Informing, Collective Gallery, Edinburgh
Symposium at Collective, City Observatory, Calton Hill
Edinburgh, UK
Friday 30 July 2010
To celebrate the launch of two new commissions, Collective devised a symposium which took place on 30th July 2010 featuring exhibiting artists Hito Steyerl, Kim Coleman and Jenny Hogarth. Other speakers included theorist Alfredo Cramerotti (author of Aesthetic Journalism), Francis McKee (curator and writer), Lisa Panting (Director of Picture This, Bristol) and Collective director Kate Gray. The symposium was chaired by Ian White (LUX, London) and was held at the City Observatory atop Calton Hill.
Audio of the Symposium available at: http://collectivegallery.podomatic.com/entry/2010-08-15T09_36_37-07_00
Nottingham Contemporary – The Geopolitical Turn: Art and the Contest of Globalisation / Evidence and imagination: the urgency of geopolitics and the necessity of geopoetics by Alfredo Cramerotti
Talk for The Geopolitical Turn: Art and the Contest of Globalisation Conference 08 May 2010 at Nottingham Contemporary, UK.
What are the reference points for contemporary art in a global economy that creates enormous wealth as well as widening inequality? The opening conference explores the many strategies artists use to reveal the processes and human consequences of the globalised market economy.
Over the past five years Alfredo Cramerotti has written about the aesthetic merger of contemporary art and the news media. By adopting the ubiquitous tropes of interviews, graphic mapping, and Magnum style photography an increasing number of artists have borrowed from these visual languages to present their work into a context closely aligned with investigative journalism. Drawing from his recent book Aesthetic Journalism: How to inform without informing (2009, Intellect) and select works from Uneven Geographies, Cramerotti will be speaking about the growing overlap between global news media and contemporary art.
By addressing this topic Cramerotti will seek to answer a number of questions including: Does such an integration of art and journalism emancipate art from a closed sphere of discourse allowing it a more social and political dimension? Does the use of an investigative methodology within contemporary art practice shift an understanding of truth and subjectivity? By borrowing from forms of news media, what new modes of exhibition practice are artists, curators, and writers enabling to develop cultural relationships between the global relevance to local issues?
Audio of talk available at: nottinghamcontemporary.org/sites/default/files/Alfredo_Cramerotti.mp3
Curatorview [Alfredo Cramerotti] 
1 comment