June 13-15 2014 at Overgaden, Copenhagen.

 

Interdisciplinary, strategic, embodied, experimental, highly subjective or otherwise undefined. These words could equally be used to describe the practices of Live Art and Art Writing, two distinct artistic discourses which nevertheless have a significant area of crossover. If Live Art approaches performance from a vantage point of visual art (and vice versa), then Art Writing approaches text with a toolbox derived from visual and conceptual practices. If Live Art breaches, fertilises and interweaves other disciplines of knowledge production, then Art Writing does the same. And if Live Art imagines an engaged, embodied spectator, then Art Writing suggests a practice of active readership imbued with potential, criticality and the possibility of change.

It is this approach to subjectivity (as applied to the artist/ author, as well as the viewer/ reader) that makes both practices urgent, relevant and increasingly widespread. Both Live Art and Art Writing engage and produce subjects ‘to be’ rather than ‘to do’ in the presence of the work, inviting a response-ability that sustains the links between art and experience, theory and practice, fact and fiction. As such, they are a prototype and a simulacrum of contemporary subjectivity, and the best place to start to explore a modern discursive sphere.

Critics and Cocktails is a three-day symposium on the intersection between Live Art, Art Writing and the discursive sphere: why, how and to whom do we communicate in relation to art? It aims to use embodied, experimental and critical practices of writing and thinking to investigate the contexts of Live Art, its documents and associated forms of dialogue. It aims to be rigorous, porous and meaningful. It aims to be inclusive, highly subjective and experimental. It aims to produce speculation, doubt and problems. It aims to take place through conversation, workshops and social spaces. It aims to mix approaches, disciplines and ideas. It aims to make you giddy, drunk and in the mood to do things you might regret later.