This weekend of presentations and debates aims to explore the ideas
and practices represented in the exhibition Open Systems: Rethinking
Art c.1970, and develop the ideas represented there into other areas
of the culture. The conference on Friday and Saturday brings together
leading artists from the period of Open Systems, leading critics,
historians, theorists and curators who have made important
contributions to how the experimental art of the 1960s and 70s is
understood today. The Graduate Symposium on Sunday and Monday has been
convened by the University of Wales, Newport, College of Art, Media
and Design. It features doctoral and post-doctoral researchers from
leading universities in Europe and the US.

***

OPEN SYSTEMS CONFERENCE: 16 AND 17 SEPTEMBER 2005

Friday 16 September 2005

14.30-14.40 Introduction: Dominic Willsdon, Curator of Public Events
at Tate Modern and tutor in critical theory at the Royal College of
Art and the London Consortium.

14.40 Donna De Salvo, Anne Rorimer
Chaired by Alison Green

Donna De Salvo is the curator of Open Systems: Rethinking Art c.1970
and the Associate Director for Programs and Curator, Permanent
Collection at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. As Senior
Curator at Tate Modern (till 2004), she curated exhibitions of Giorgio
Morandi, Andy Warhol, and Anish Kapoor. She is an expert on the work
of Andy Warhol and Pop Art and has curated the exhibitions
Hand-Painted Pop: American Art in Transition, and Success is a Job in
New York: The Early Art and Business of Andy Warhol.

Anne Rorimer is based in Chicago and is an independent scholar and
freelance curator. Formerly, she was a curator at The Art Institute of
Chicago where she worked closely during the 1970s and 1980s with
artists from the Conceptual period. In 1995 she was the co-curator
(with Ann Goldstein) of Reconsidering the Object of Art, 1965-1975,
organized at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. She is the
author of New Art in the 60s and 70s: Redefining Reality (Thames &
Hudson, 2001) and has published widely in exhibition catalogues and
journals.

Alison Green is an art historian, critic and curator. She is the
author of "When Attitudes Become Form and the Contest Over Conceptual
Art's History" in the recent Cambridge University Press book,
Conceptual Art: Theory, Myth, and Practice. She currently teaches
history and theory at Central St Martins School of Art & Design in
London and writes regularly for Art Monthly.

15.45 Braco Dimitrijevic

Braco Dimitrijevic became internationally known in the early 70s with
his Casual Passer-by works, in which he exhibited the gigantic photo
portraits of unknown people on the public sites of city facades and
billboards - the places usually reserved for pictures of dignitaries
or publicity messages. In the mid-70s the artist turned his interest
to the art of the past, and started making installations in museums.
He has show at major venues internationally for more than 30 years;
his work is included in Open Systems.

16.30 Tea and coffee

17.00 Peter Osborne and Alexander Alberro
Chaired by Michael Corris

Peter Osborne is Professor of Modern European Philosophy at Middlesex
University, London and an editor of the journal Radical Philosophy. He
has published widely on philosophical aspects of conceptual and
post-conceptual art. His books include Conceptual Art (Phaidon, 2002),
and forthcoming in 2006, Art Against Aesthetics: Philosophical Essays
on Contemporary Art –Collected essays 2001-5.
Alexander Alberro is an Associate Professor of Art History at the
University of Florida, and the author of Conceptual Art and the
Politics of Publicity (MIT, 2003). His essays have appeared in a wide
array of journals and exhibition catalogues. He has also edited and
co-edited a number volumes, including Two-Way Mirror Power: Dan
Graham's Writings on Art (MIT, 1999), Conceptual Art: A Critical
Anthology (MIT, 2000), and Recording Conceptual Art (U of California,
2001).
Michael Corris is Professor at the Newport School of Art, Media and
Design, University of Wales. As a member of the Conceptual art group,
Art & Language, and as an individual artist, his work has been
exhibited and collected by major international institutions. His art
criticism has been published in Art Monthly, Artforum, FlashArt, Art
History, art+text and Mute. His most recent publications include
Conceptual Art: Theory, Myth and Practice (Cambridge, 2004).

18.30 Drinks reception

20.00 Music performance: Alvin Lucier: Open Sound Systems
(Separate ticket required: www.tate.org.uk/tickets or call 02078878888)

Saturday 17 September 2005

11.00 Margaret Iversen and Briony Fer
Chaired by Lucy Soutter

Margaret Iversen is Professor in History and Theory of Art at the
University of Essex. Her books include Alois Riegl: Art History and
Theory, and a monograph on the contemporary artist Mary Kelly. Her
forthcoming book Art Beyond the Pleasure Principle, due to appear in
2005, is a series of case studies applying psychoanalysis to the
interpretation of 20th century and contemporary art.

Briony Fer is Reader in the History of Art at University College
London. Her publications include On Abstract Art (Yale, 1997), and The
Infinite Line
Re-Making Art After Modernism (Yale, 2004). The latter offers a
radical reinterpretation of the innovative art of the late 1950s and
1960s, focusing on the tendency toward repetition and seriality that
occurred at the moment of modernism's decline and continues to shape
contemporary art.

Lucy Soutter is an artist and writer, currently lecturing in
photography at The London College of Communication. She has written
for publications including Afterimage, Portfolio and Source. Her 2001
Yale PhD thesis The Visual Idea examines the uses of photography by
first generation conceptual artists. With Alison Green, she is
currently editing an anthology of essays by younger scholars entitled
The C Word: Or Why We Should Care about Conceptual Art.

12.45 Alvin Lucier, with Seth Kim-Cohen

The legendary American composer Alvin Lucier was an early pioneer of
sound works which use systems as a generative device. He has since
produced innovations in many areas of musical composition and
performance, including the notation of physical gestures, the use of
brain waves in live performance, and the evocation of room acoustics
for musical purposes.

Seth Kim-Cohen is a conceptual sonician, writer of creative texts, and
the organiser of Friday night's performance Alvin Lucier: Open Sound
Systems.

13.30 Lunch

14.30 Sabeth Buchmann and Matthias Michalka
Chaired by Charlie Gere

Sabeth Buchmann is a professor of history of modern and post-modern
art at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. She is working on a research
project on film, avant-garde and biopolitics at the Jan van Eyck
Academy, Maastricht (in cooperation with Helmut Draxler and Stephan
Geene). For her PhD dissertation she wrote on the notion of production
within conceptual art in reference to new technologies. She regularly
contributes to publications on art, art criticism, cultural/visual
studies and media theory.

Matthias Michalka is an art historian and curator for new media art at
the Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Vienna. Among the
exhibitions he has curated are Mathias Poledna, Western Recording,
Matthew Buckingham, A Man of the Crowd, X-Screen, Film Installations
und Actions of the 1960s and 1970s, Dorit Margreiter. 10104 Angelo
View Drive, and Katya Sander - The Most Complicated Machines Are Made
of Words. He has been a lecturer at the Merz Akademie Stuttgart and
the Institute for Art History at the University of Vienna among
others.

Charlie Gere is Reader in New Media Research in the Institute for
Cultural Research, Lancaster University, Chair of Computers and the
History of Art (CHArt), and the Director of Computer Arts, Contexts,
Histories, etc... (CACHe), an AHRB-funded research project looking at
the history of early British computer art. He is the author of Digital
Culture (Reaktion, 2002), and is currently writing a book on art and
speed from the early nineteenth century up to the present day, to be
published as Art, Time and Technology in 2006.

16.15 Tea and coffee

16.45 Morgan Fisher, with Stuart Comer

California-based filmmaker Morgan Fisher began his career as an editor
in the commercial film industry before exploring the avant-garde. The
combined experience has led Fisher to examine and deconstruct the
narrative of film and the industry itself with wry humour, creating an
entirely unique and intimate view of cinema and its physical
presentation.

Stuart Comer is Curator of Film and Events at Tate Modern, and has
programmed for Tate Modern the retrospective of Fisher's films,
Standard Gauge, curated by Chrissie Iles for the Whitney Museum.

17.30-18.30 Plenary discussion
Chaired by Mark Godfrey

Mark Godfrey teaches at the Slade, University College, London. He is a
Leverhulme Award holder and is researching a book on Abstraction and
Holocaust memory for Yale. Recent projects include a catalogue essay
on Open Systems for Tate Modern and on Eva Hesse for the Jewish
Museum, New York.

20.00 Standard Gauge: The Films of Morgan Fisher Programme 1
(Separate ticket required: www.tate.org.uk/tickets or call 02078878888)

***

OPEN SYSTEMS GRADUATE SYMPOSIUM: 18 AND 19 SEPTEMBER 2005
Organized in collaboration with the University of Wales, Newport,
College of Art, Media and Design. Admission is included in conference
ticket or £10 on the day. Day tickets are valid for both Sunday and
Monday.

Sunday 18 September 2005

11:00-11:10 Introduction: Kathleen Madden
The convener of this graduate symposium, Kathleen Madden is
Commissioning Editor for Contemporary Art at Phaidon, and a PhD
candidate at the University of Wales, Newport where she is working on
late-60s Conceptual art history.

11:10-11:40 Sophie Richard (Norwich School of Art and Design)
Sculpture Inside-Out: The Tate Gallery's collecting in the 1970s
Sophie Richard's doctoral research focuses on the International
Network of Conceptual Artists: Dealer Galleries, Temporary Exhibitions
and Museum Collections (1967-1977, Northern Europe). She has been
awarded research grants from the Henry Moore Institute and the German
Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). She has published extensively in
periodicals and exhibition catalogues, notably for the Casino
Luxembourg-Forum d'art contemporain and is a contributor to the
Artistic Studies Seminar of the University of Luxembourg.

11:40-12:10 Jonathan Bass (Rutgers)
Zembla is Elsewhere: Robert Smithson's displacement of Nabokov's
Pale Fire
Jonathan Bass teaches literature, science writing, and web authoring
in the Department of English at Rutgers University. His current book
project considers the
relation between fiction and abstraction from Henry James and Gertrude
Stein to Donald Judd and Art & Language.

12:10-12:40 Irene Small (Yale)
One Thing After Another: How we spend time in Hélio Oiticica's Quasi-Cinemas
Irene Small is a PhD candidate in the History of Art, Yale University,
and is writing her dissertation on the work of Hélio Oiticica. She
previously acted as Curatorial and Research Assistant to Okwui Enwezor
for the exhibition The Short Century: Independence and Liberation
Movements in Africa 1945-1994.

12:40-14:10 LUNCH

14:10-14:40 Maja and Reuben Fowkes (Zagreb / Essex)
Croatian Spring: Art in the Social Sphere
Maja and Reuben Fowkes have curated numerous solo and group shows in
Croatia, Hungary and the UK, and have a strong interest in socially
and environmentally engaged art. Current projects include convening
the conference on Art and Sustainability at Central European
University, Budapest and curating the exhibition Croatian Spring at SC
Gallery, Zagreb. Reuben is a Research Fellow at MIRIAD, Manchester
Metropolitan University and Maja is curating for Galerija Balen,
Slavonski Brod.

14:40-15:10 Isobel Whitelegg (Essex)
Title TBC
Isobel Whitelegg completed her PhD (Mira Schendel, a radical
passivity: toward another history of art, thought and action in the
Brazilian sixties) at the University of Essex in 2005. She acted as
Senior Research Officer for the University of Essex Collection of
Latin American Art's AHRC funded UECLAA OnLine project
(www.ueclaa.org), and is currently Senior Research Officer for Wider
UECLAA.

15:10-15:40 Kathryn Chiong (Columbia)
Fair Game: Strategic Art Systems c. 1970
Kathryn Chiong is currently doing dissertation research on the work of
Lawrence Weiner. Kathryn also works as a Museum Educator at the
Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

15:40-16:10 TEA

16:10-16:40 Seth Kim-Cohen (London Consortium)
Open Systems and the Question Concerning Competence
Seth Kim-Cohen's doctoral research focuses on the failure of
representational and semiotic codes to deliver on their signaled
intentions. He is also a conceptual sonician, broadcaster, writer of
creative texts, and organized the Open Sound Systems concert featuring
Alvin Lucier and John White. His book, One Reason To Live, is due in
December from Errant Bodies Press.

16:40-17:10 Anna Lovatt (Courtauld Institute of Art)
Closed Systems: Serial Art, Solipsism, Politics
Anna Lovatt recently submitted her PhD at the Courtauld Institute of
Art. Her thesis is entitled Seriality and Systematic Thought in
Drawing 1966-1976. In Autumn 2005 she will begin a post-doctoral
research fellowship funded by the Henry Moore Foundation, which will
also be held at the Courtauld Institute. Her upcoming research will
focus on the role of drawing in New York based sculptural practices of
the late 1960s and early 70s.

17:10-17:40 Paula Feldman (Courtauld Institute of Art)
The Grapevine of the Yellow Pages: Uncovering the conceptual
foundation of minimal art
Paula Feldman received her PhD on the reception and production of
minimal art in the Netherlands at the Courtauld Institute of Art in
2005. She is the co-editor of Dan Flavin (Thames and Hudson, 2004) an
anthology of writings on the artist and has written for the Burlington
Magazine, Art Monthly, and Contemporary. She currently works at White
Cube.

19.00 Standard Gauge: The Films of Morgan Fisher Programme 2
(Separate ticket required: www.tate.org.uk/tickets or call 02078878888)

Monday 19 September 2005

10:30-11:00 Rachel Churner (Columbia)
Hans Haacke's Zero Hour
Rachel Churner is a doctoral candidate currently working on a
dissertation about Kurt Schwitters. She is the editor of Robert
Mangold: Early Works (Peter Freeman, Inc., 2004).

11:00-11:30 Nicholas Cullinan (Courtauld Insitute of Art)
From 'The Open Work' to the System: Alighiero e Boetti and Arte Povera in Italy
Nicholas Cullinan is currently a Leverhulme Scholar at the British
School at Rome, where he is researching a PhD on Arte Povera at the
Courtauld Institute of Art, London. A contributor to Frieze,
Contemporary, The Independent and Tema Celeste, he has also worked at
the National Portrait Gallery, the Estorick Collection and the Peggy
Guggenheim Collection, Venice.

11:30-12 TBC
12-13:30 LUNCH

13:30-14:00 Gloria Sutton (UCLA)
Tactical Networks: Rethinking VALIE EXPORT's Tapp und Tastkino
(1968-71)
Gloria Sutton is a doctoral candidate specializing in Expanded Cinema
and new media art. Her work on Stan VanDerBeek is included in Future
Cinema: The Cinematic Imaginary After Film (MIT, 2003). Currently, she
is the Project Coordinator for "Ecstasy: In and About Altered States"
to open at The Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles in October where
she is also an Ahmanson curatorial fellow organizing a solo exhibition
of Karl Haendel to open in January 2006.

14:00-14:30 William Kaizen (Columbia)
Ecological Art and Media Ecology: On Dan Graham, Radical Software
and Gregory Bateson
William Kaizen is currently finishing his PhD dissertation The
Immediate: Video and American Art, from Warhol to Postminimalism. His
writing has appeared in October, Grey Room and elsewhere.

14:30-15:00 Luke Skrebowski (London Consortium)
All Systems Go: Recovering Jack Burnham's Systems Aesthetics
Luke Skrebowski is pursuing research into the interaction of Art and
Technology, 1966-71. He graduated from King's College, Cambridge
University in 1999. He has worked professionally in New Media.

Please visit the Tate's website for further information and for
details about booking.
http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/eventseducation/symposia/opensystemsrethinkingartc.1970symposiumfasttrack3608.htm