AMELIA JONES
Professor and Grierson Chair in Visual Culture, Department of Art History and Communication Studies, McGill University
Amelia Jones practices a queer, anti-racist, feminist history and theory of twentieth- and twenty-first century Euro-American visual arts, including performance, film, video, and installation—articulated in relation to increasingly global frameworks.
Jones is the author of a number of books including Postmodernism and the En-Gendering of Marcel Duchamp (1994), and Body Art/Performing the Subject (1998), Irrational Modernism: A Neurasthenic History of New York Dada (1994), and Self-Image: Technology, Representation, and the Contemporary Subject (2006). This latter book expands on her work on body art, exploring the experience and understanding of the self in relation to performances of the body via technologies of representation from analogue photography to the Internet. It is linked to Jones's new research on the problematic of identity or identification in relation to visuality and Euro-American histories and practices of contemporary art and visual culture broadly construed; this latter interest finds its way into a number of articles published in journals from Art History to Parallax and The Drama Review and will result in a book tentatively entitled Seeing Differently: Identification in Contemporary Art and Visual Culture.
Jones has curated exhibitions (including Sexual Politics [1996]), organized performance and creative events (including Theorising Queer Visualities [2005] and Faith and Identity in Contemporary Visual Culture [2006]), and edited volumes, such Contemporary Art, 1945-2003 (2005) and Feminism and Visual Culture Reader (2010), which collectively attempt to rethink standard chronologies and modes of thinking about areas of visual culture studies and art history by including voices previously marginalized, or otherwise not fully accounted for, in debates and histories of these fields. Strategically, as with Jones's curating and single-authored books, these aim to provide new ways of thinking histories of art and ideas that work in productive tension with existing dominant histories. This goal of (un)doing and/or rethinking art's histories (including the very structures through which these histories unfold and are institutionally embedded) is also reflected in the new series Jones is co-editing with Marsha Meskimmon at University of Manchester Press, entitled "Rethinking Art's Histories." For more information, visit http://www.mcgill.ca/ahcs/faculty/jones
ROBERT WHITMAN
Robert Whitman is an outstanding American artist who works primarily in the area of multi-media theater pieces. Whitman creates non-narrative theater works rich in visual and sound images that incorporate actors, film, slides, sound, and evocative props in environments of his own making. He has composed and produced more than 40 performance works, which have been shown in museums, theaters and alternative spaces in the United States and abroad. Whitman's performance work pioneered the use of film and other media as material, and his work is among the most influential of its period.
Born in New York in 1935, Whitman first studied literature and drama, then visual arts, at Rutgers University. His involvement with multi-media theater pieces began in 1960 when, together with fellow artists Allan Kaprow, Jim Dine, Claes Oldenburg, and others, he produced performances at the Reuben Gallery and then in other galleries and empty available spaces in downtown Manhattan, which he adapted to the performances. American Moon, E.G. and Mouth were produced at the Rueben Gallery. Nighttime Sky was his contribution to the First New York Theater Rally in New York in 1965; Prune Flat was first presented at the Cinematheque in New York in 1965 and has been performed numerous times since.
Whitman is one of the artists of his generation who has most successfully collaborated with engineers and scientists and incorporated new technologies into his work. In 1966 Whitman was one of the 10 New York artists who worked with more than 30 engineers and scientists from Bell Telephone Laboratories to create performance works for "9 Evenings: Theatre & Engineering" at the 69th Regiment Armory in New York. Seven automobiles, driving around and parking on the huge Armory's floor, projected film, over the air television programs, and closed-circuit television projections of live performances and actions. For this work, Two Holes of Water - 3, he made innovative use of a closed circuit television system and the latest fiber optics lenses and miniature cameras.
Whitman, along with engineers Billy Klüver and Fred Waldhauer and artist Robert Rauschenberg, was one of the co-founders of Experiments in Art and Technology, a foundation that provided artists with access to engineers and new technology. In 1967 Whitman collaborated with Eric Rawson and Larry Heilos from Bell Laboratories on a series of laser sculptures, including Solid Red Line. Pond was a sound-activated mylar mirror installation shown at The Jewish Museum in New York in 1969.
His long collaboration with optical scientist John Forkner began in 1968 when they worked together on a mirror, light and sound installation for the Art and Technology exhibition first shown at Expo ‘70 in Osaka, Japan and then at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1971. Whitman was one of the core artists who designed and programmed the Pepsi Pavilion at Expo '70, a project administered by E.A.T. In the early 1970s Whitman participated in developing a number of innovative E.A.T. projects that utilized the fast developing capabilities of the new communications media: the Anand Project to develop instructional television programming for satellite broadcast to rural Indian villages; Children and Communications, open environments for children connected by variety of communication equipment; Telex: Q&A: a world-wide person-to-person question and answer opportunity using telex equipment in New York, Stockholm, Ahmedabad, India, and Tokyo; and Artists and Television, artists' programming on New York cable channels.
In 1972 Whitman produced his first telephone/radio piece, NEWS , a program broadcast live over radio station WBAI in New York City . Over the next two years, NEWS was also performed in Houston, Texas , Minneapolis , Minnesota , and other cities. In a 2002 performance in Leeds, England, Whitman updated the piece, now known as Local Report, using cell phones instead of the original's pay phones. He continues to produce Local Report around the world, including at Stanford next year.
Whitman has had solo exhibitions at the Jewish Museum, New York (1968), and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (1968), and was the inaugural artist in the Museum of Modern Art's Projects series (1973)., at the Hudson River Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago and Thielska Galleriet, Stockholm. He has had one person gallery exhibitions at PaceWildenstein in New York from 1967. He has been included in many group exhibitions.
A retrospective, "Robert Whitman: Theater Works, 1960-1976" held in 1976 sponsored by the Dia Foundation and presented six earlier works and the premiere of Light Touch. His theater works have been presented at Galerie Maeght Festival in France; Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, Texas; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Walker Art Center; Vera List Art Center ; MIT and many more.
In the 1980s several of Whitman's theater works travelled to the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (1983), the Moderna Museet, Stockholm (1987 and 1989), the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (2001), and Vienna, Austria. Whitman's historic work was recently included in the exhibitions "Les années Pop," at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (2001), and "Into the Light: The Projected Image in American Art 1964-1977," at the Whitney Museum of American Art (2001-2002).
In 2002, his performance Ghost was staged at PaceWildenstein Gallery. And in October 2004, he presented a large-scale theater work, Antenna, as part of the Leeds New Media Festival.
In 2003, Dia Center for the Arts, New York , presented, "Playback," a large scale retrospective exhibition of Whitman's works. The exhibition travelled to the Museum of Contemporary Art at the Serralves Foundation in Porto, Portugal, in the summer of 2004 and opened at the Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA) in 2005. A major book, Playback, a comprehensive study of his work, accompanies this exhibition. For information about Local Report, visit http://whitmanlocalreport.net
MARIN BLAŽEVIĆ
Assistant Professor, Academy of Dramatic Arts and Music Academy, University of Zagreb
Marin Blažević is a theater and performance studies scholar and dramaturg based in Zagreb, Croatia, where he teaches theater history, performance studies, and dramaturgy. His research interests include performance theory (particularly acting theory), dramaturgy of performance, body politics, political spectacle, the avant-garde, and postdramatic theatre. Recently, he added opera and sports performance to his research interests.
One of Marin’s main dramaturgical projects was the organization and programming of the 15th annual conference of Performance Studies international (PSi), held in Zagreb in June, 2009. The conference theme was MISperformance: Misfiring, Misfitting, Misreading.
His publications include special English issues of Frakcija: Reflections on the Process / Performance: A Reading Companion to Goat Island's ‘When will the September roses bloom?’ (2004/2005), co-edited with Matthew Goulish. With Lada ČaleFeldman he co-edited Actor as/and Author, atheme issue for Frakcija (2001), and MIS-performance for Performance Research. In 2010, Marin published a collection of essays on the Slovenian performance-theatre company Via Negativa titled No,. Together with Lada Čale Feldman, he is currently working on a collection of essays, MISperforming: inverting, shifting, failing, to be published in English in 2012. His monographs include Razgovori o novom kazalištu [Conversations on the New Theater] published in 2007, and Izboren poraz [A Defeat Won], on the theory of new theater and its peculiar history in Croatia, to be published in Spring 2012.
In 2011, Marin was awarded a Fulbright Scholar Postdoctoral Grant. He is currently conducting a research project titled Dramaturgy: shifting concept and practice at both Columbia University and New York University. Marin is a member of the Board of Directors of PSi and the current Chair of PSi’s International Committee.
MARK FRANKO
Professor of Dance and Chair of the Theater Arts Department, University of California, Santa Cruz
Mark Franko is Professor of Dance at the University of California at Santa Cruz, and Director of the Center for Visual and Performance Studies. Franko received the Congress on Research in Dance award for Outstanding Scholarly Research in Dance for 2011. He is editor of Dance Research Journal (Cambridge University Press) and founding editor of the Oxford Studies in Dance Theory book series. His monograph Martha Graham in Love and War: the life in the work is forthcoming at Oxford University Press in May 2012. His books have been translated into French, Italian, and Slovenian; they include Dance as Text: Ideologies of the Baroque Body, Dancing Modernism/Performing Politics and The Work of Dance: Labor, Movement, and Identity in the 1930s. He edited Ritual and Event: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, and co-edited Acting on the Past: Historical Performance Across the Disciplines. His choreography has been produced at Lincoln Center Out-of-Doors Festival, Berlin Werkstatt Festival, Getty Center, Montpellier Opera, Toulon Art Museum, Haggerty Art Museum (Milwaukee), Akademie der Künste (Berlin), Mozarteum (Salzburg), and at many New York and San Francisco dance venues.
MARIO BIAGINI
Associate Director, Workcenter of Jerzy Grotowski and Thomas Richards
Mario Biagini has been a central contributor to practical research in the domain of Art as Vehicle for more than twenty years. Working in the team led by Thomas Richards, Biagini quickly became a key member of the Workcenter practical research. He was a doer in Downstairs Action and a principal doer in Action, a performative opus created by Richards that underwent continuous development from 1994 to 2009. Beginning relatively early in his residency at the Workcenter, Biagini was entrusted by Grotowski with artisanal and pedagogical responsibilities that lead him in 1987 to direct a working team at the Workcenter in which he worked not only as principal actor but also as director. Biagini’s role as director/actor further articulated itself in the framework of Project The Bridge: Developing Theatre Arts (1999 to 2006), a branch of the Workcenter research for which Biagini exercised primary creative and pedagogical responsibilities. He was the primary director of One Breath Left, in which he also acted, and subsequently of Dies Iræ: The Preposterous Theatrum Interioris Show, for which he also created the textual montage and performed the lead male role. At the Workcenter in 2007, he began the supervision of the newly formed Open Program, continuing the investigative thrust of Project The Bridge in its exploration of publicly accessible performances that keep alive within themselves aspects of the subtle interior process characteristic of Art as Vehicle. In addition to his artistic contributions to the Workcenter, Biagini refined his pedagogical skills and knowledge by assisting Jerzy Grotowski in the preparation of lessons and conferences for the Collège de France. He also frequently translated for Grotowski in public meetings and assisted Grotowski in the translation and revision of texts. As a well a recognized director and teacher, Biagini is regularly invited to speak about his work and the Workcenter’s research, and to lead workshops in prestigious schools and artistic institutions across Europe and the United States. Among other places, Biagini has been a guest teacher or speaker in several countries, among which Italy, France, Poland, Greece, Turkey, Russia, Singapore, USA, Tunisia, UK, and in prestigious institutions such as Lincoln Center, University of Southern California, New York University, SITI Company, John Jay College, La Sapienza University, University of Torino, La Sorbonne, Le Collège de France, Goldsmiths College, University of London, Kent University, and many others. He is the author of numerous essays and the editor of various volumes about the Workcenter and Jerzy Grotowski. For more information about the Workcenter, visit http://www.theworkcenter.org/
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