ABANDONED PRACTICES – something out of the ordinary

a NEW PERFORMANCE SUMMER INSTITUTE

www.abandonedpractices.org 

Hosted by The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC)

Monday July 6^th – Friday 24^th 2009

Monday – Friday , 9.00 a.m. – 4:00 p.m.

Instructors: Matthew Goulish, Lin Hixson, and Mark Jeffery

VISITING SCHOLARS:

Dr. Jane Blocker, writer and Associate Professor, Director of Graduate Studies, Art History Department, University of Minnesota

Dr. Paul Clarke, Research Fellow on ‘Performing the Archive’, University of Bristol & Arnolfini (UK), and director of Uninvited Guests

This NEW PERFORMANCE SUMMER INSTITUTE looks forward by looking backward, researching, enacting, and embodying practices that for one reason or another have been disregarded in the wake of progress, and relegated to the archives of history. Students will participate in individual and collaborative projects involving writing, installation, documentation, and live performance. Teachers and visiting scholars will lecture on related subjects. Available for credit or non-credit enrolment.

Abandoned Practices constitutes an emerging field of inquiry pioneered by Alan Read of King’s College, London, author of Theatre, Intimacy, and Engagement: The Last Human Venue (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). The course focus will allow a thematic meeting place that confronts the common accelerated temporalities of the 21st century, whether in the form of economic and artistic globalization, technology’s ceaseless upgrade, or the general shifts in understanding of the word local. The course does not propose that we share a mutual past, but rather that we might mutually discover a shared strategy of thinking about our pasts, a strategy of reimagining and reenacting the different abandoned practices that once defined the ordinary.

Week one: Abandoned technologies. Mode: installation.

Forgotten machines, crafts, stagecrafts, thought as craft, the place of the hand in art making, player pianos, slowness as resistance.

Week two: Abandoned concepts. Mode: writing.

The archive as repository of outmoded ideas; the pastoral; the senses.

Week three: Abandoned behavior. Mode: performance.

Forgotten labor practices; town criers; discontinued social customs.

 Abandoned Practices is available for non-credit registration at $1710.00, half the regular graduate credit rate. Non SAIC degree-seeking students must include: A short statement that may include education, training, influences, beliefs, aims, why you wish to participate; plus documentation of your work that may include one of the following: 10 slides and description list; audio or video documentation (maximum of 10 minutes); printed material or written statement of your creative work.

For further information on this NEW PERFORMANCE SUMMER INSTITUTE please see www.abandonedpractices.org