Symposium Abstraction and Economy

Kunst und Wissenstransfer

Join Zoom Meeting here:
https://dieangewandte-at.zoom.us/j/63540238093?pwd=eFBLTy9hY2VDcHVNSE8wcldKMXFQQT09
Meeting ID: 635 4023 8093
Passcode: 403594

The lecture series is organized by Eva Maria Stadler and Jenni Tischer, Department of Art & Knowledge Transfer at the University of Applied Arts Vienna.

Saturday, 30. April 2022

GRID AND ABSTRACTION

The Grid as symbolic form stands for the abstract ongoing processes of rationalization of labor, property, dynamics, but also for other aspects of live such as health, social reproduction and social activities which function just like the concrete electric grid as an infrastructural precondition of the capitalist regime. In the third panel of Abstraction and Economy we want to examine the Grid as formalistic and ideological concept in artistic and aesthetic practices and question its promise of endless growth based on implemented structural discrimination. Specific examples such as expropriation and classification of land, algorithmic filtering and pattern discrimination and the role of statistics for surveillance, will show that the grid is not against its understanding as the symbol of artistic modernism: self-referential, detached from reality, ahistorical, incapable of evolving, and anti-narrative. Are seriality, repetition, and the grid just economic operations in the service of rationalization, efficiency and growth, or are the aesthetic principles of the avant-garde, minimalism and conceptual art able to give a face to the fiction of the value of money?

Place: Seminarraum 21, Vordere Zollamtsstraße 7, 1030 Vienna

Moderation: Jenni Tischer
10:30 – 11:00 Lecture: Sabeth Buchmann
11:00 – 11:30 Lecture: Rebecca H. Quaytman
11:30 – 11:45 // BREAK //
11:45 – 12:15 Lecture: Falke Pisano
12:15 – 12:45 Lecture: Eva Kernbauer
12:45 – 13:15 Lecture: Clemens Apprich
13:15 – 13:45 Discussion