20th anniversary of TEXTE ZUR KUNST:
Symposium
"Where do you stand, colleague?"
and exhibition "With your art",
Berlin, December 2010

On the occasion of its 20th anniversary TEXTE ZUR KUNST organized an international symposium at Theater Hebbel am Ufer (HAU1) in Berlin on December 11, 2010. Under the programmatic title, “Where do you stand, colleague?”, lectures and panels addressed the fundamental question of the relationship between art criticism and social critique. Previously, the exhibition "With your art" (curated by Annette Kelm and Matthias Mühling) opened at Haubrok Collection in which for the first time all one hundred and eighty artist’s editions of TEXTE ZUR KUNST were shown together. Issue #81 "Where do you stand, colleague?" compiles all seventeen lectures and statements of the symposium and documents the exhibition "With your art" photographically.

Where do you stand, colleague?
Art criticism and social critique

Symposium on the occasion of the 20th anniversary
of Texte zur Kunst

December 11, 2010 / starting at 4 pm

Hebbel-Theater am Ufer (HAU 1)

Conference organizers: Isabelle Graw & André Rottmann
Conference language: English
The Symposium is already sold out.

On the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the renowned Berlin-based journal for contemporary art, this symposium investigates art criticism’s potential to become social critique. When the journal was founded in Cologne in 1990, returning to the methods of social art history promised to link current artistic production to larger economic and ideological frameworks. Even if this approach has remained an important touchstone in the critical work of the journal and its most frequent contributors, new models have emerged: discussions around biopolitics and immaterial labor under post-Fordist conditions have radically questioned long-held methodological assumptions about the visual arts’ potentially antagonistic role in the capitalist societies of the West. Moreover, the notion of the aesthetic, which had for many years been utterly dismissed due to its association with idealist concepts of autonomy, has returned in unforeseen ways—by way of a recourse, for instance, to an emphatic and ethically motivated defense of aesthetic experience and an immersive attention to formal detail.

The symposium takes this situation as a point of departure in order to reflect on the role and potential of art criticism as social critique today.

Program, Saturday, December 11, 2010

4 pm	Introduction by Isabelle Graw, Frankfurt am Main/ Berlin & André Rottmann, Berlin
4:15 pm	Opening Statement by Diedrich Diederichsen, Vienna/ Berlin
4:30 pm	Panel I: New Spirit of Criticism? The Biopolitical Turn in Perspective with Franco Berardi, Mailand Luc Boltanski, Paris Sabeth Buchmann, Wien/ Berlin André Rottmann, Berlin geleitet von Martin Saar, Frankfurt am Main/ Berlin
6:30 pm	Panel II: Between Specificity and Context. Social Art History Revisited with Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Cambridge, Mass./ New York Andrea Fraser, Los Angeles Isabelle Graw, Frankfurt am Main/ Berlin geleitet von Susanne Leeb
8:30 pm	Break
9:30 pm	Panel III: From the Anti-Aesthetic to Aesthetic Experience? with T.J. Clark, London Helmut Draxler, Stuttgart/ Berlin Jutta Koether, Hamburg/ New York Juliane Rebentisch, Frankfurt am Main/ Berlin geleitet von Christoph Menke, Frankfurt am Main/ Berlin
11:30 pm	Reception at the WAU restaurant (HAU 1) with DJ Carsten Jost and guests

in cooperation with Berliner Künstlerprogramm/DAAD