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Seminar with Lars Bang Larsen and Sören Andreasen

The Middleman part II: Dead Authors and Flexible Personalities

For the workshop at the Free School for Art Theory and Practice, our idea is to take our starting point in representations of productive subjectivities from the 1950s to the 1980s. Thus the American sociology of the 1950s talked about the organisation man, Herbert Marcuse wrote about one-dimensional man and Roland Barthes mediated the death of the author, while the popular culture of the 1970s developed an obsession with the living dead, the zombie - a convenient, if not very subtle, representation of the consumer. So this is a period at the end of modernism and at the beginning of the post-modern era when authorship and subjectivity became blurred or even declared dead; a fate that art itself would later share in the 1980s, as foretold through the discourse on the dematerialisation of the art object.
With this in mind we would like to open up to a discussion about current modalities of artistic agency. How have the concept of art and the role of the author been vindicated since the 1990s? How do we diagnose and act within them today?

Texts:
Søren Andreasen and Lars Bang Larsen: Introduction to the Echo Show (can be sent for request)

Søren Andreasen and Lars Bang Larsen: The Middleman. Beginning to think about mediation (can be sent for request)

Roland Barthes: Death of the Author

Brian Holmes: The Flexible Personality, in Brian Holmes: Hieroglyphs of the Future. Art and politics in a networked era. What, How and for Whom/WHW + Arkzin. Paris/Zagreb 2002/3.

Curating with institutional Visions. Conversation between Nina Möntmann, Roger Buergel, Anselm Franke and Maria Lind. In Möntmann (ed.): Art and its Institutions. Current conflicts, critique and collaborations" NIFCA/Black Dog 2006

Lars Bang Larsen

Born in 1972. Lives in Frankfurt and Copenhagen.

Writing Ph.D. in Global Psychedelia, Űnstitute of Art History, University of Copenhagen 2007-10, MA in art history and history of literature, University of Aarhus. Guest teacher at several art academies, guest professor at Kungliga Konsthögskolan, Stockholm, 2006-07. Editor of the art magazines Siksi, NU in the 1990s, regular contributor to Afterall, Artforum Űnternational, and Frieze. Curator of several exhibitions and seminars, recent 2006/7: co-organizer of Űdeas and Processes. 4 seminars on contemporary art production, Royal Danish Art Academy, Copenhagen, 2005: Co-curator of Populism. Group show at Frankfurter Kunstverein and other sites. Published the books: HK. On the project Heroin Kills by Joanne Tatham and Tom O’Sullivan, 2003; Sture Johannesson. About the 1960s psychedelic art of Sture Johannesson, 2002.


Soren Andreasen

Born 1964. Lives and works in Copenhagen, Denmark. Visual artist and writer. Participant of international exhibitions. Part of the art-collective Koncern (1989-93) and has been collaborating with rasmus knud (Sebastian Schiorring and Johannes Christoffersen) 1999-2006. Has produced texts for various magazines and publications, and published a series of leaflets (i.e. SYNTHESIZER, 2001, and CIVIC, 2003) and the book Session Work (Pork Salad Press, 2005) with rasmus knud. Curator of several and teaches at The Jutland Academy of Fine Art, Aarhus, Denmark.