Serious Art Is Only Made in Black and White

Lecture 4 in the 2010-2011 Speaking of Photography series

WIth Jayne Wark, Professor, Historical and Critical Studies, NSCAD

When:
Tuesday, February 15, 2011 at 6:30 p.m.

Where:
York Amphitheatre (EV 1.605), Concordia University
Engineering, Computer Science and Visual Arts Complex
1515 Ste-Catherine St. W., Metro Guy-Concordia

Cost:
Free of charge. Everyone welcome.

Description:
The premise that photography achieved the status of art when it began to be used by conceptual artists c. 1967-75 is now widely accepted. Conceptual artists valued photography as the "artless mass medium" of commerce, documentation, reportage and information, and they deployed its indexical, referential and amateurish aspects to ends that aimed to supersede the high-modernist aesthetic values of transcendence and autonomy. But apart from such notable exceptions such as N.E. Thing Co., Michael Snow and the so-called Vancouver School of photo-conceptualists, little attention has been paid to how photography was used in conceptual art in Canada. This lecture will begin to address that question by considering a selection of works by Canadian and other artists working in Canada in light of both broad international tendencies and of the particular conditions that inflected its manifestation in Canada.

Jayne Wark is Professor of Art History at NSCAD and has published on performance, video and conceptual art.  Her book, Radical Gestures:  Feminism and Performance Art in North America, was published in 2006 by McGill-Queen's University Press.  She is the curator of the Atlantic section of the exhibition Traffic: Conceptual Art in Canada 1965-1980, which opened in Toronto in September 2010 and will tour to Halifax, Edmonton, Montreal and Vancouver until 2012.  She is also currently working on a book on the history of conceptual art in Canada.

Speaking of Photography is made possible by the generosity of an anonymous donor, with additional support from the Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Institute for Studies in Canadian Art; the Concordia University Research Chair in Art History; the Art History Graduate Student Association; Figura, centre de recherche sur le texte et l'imaginaire, Université du Québec à Montréal; and Château Versailles Hotel.