SMFA Graduate ColloquiumApril 4, 201110:30 am–4:30 pm
The April 4 colloquium aims to facilitate rigorous conversation about how artists respond to a society saturated by mass media through their practices, focusing on the point where performance and appropriation tactics intersect with our technologically mediated public sphere.
With interest in eliciting a healthy range of perspectives, SMFA faculty Nate Harrison and graduate student Jordan Tynes (MFA ’11) have invited a diverse group of artists and activists to present their projects and working methods. These individuals represent models for critical cultural practice today, sharing an interest in the infiltration of mass media processes in order to question the constructs those media create; their works encourage us to question, engage and renew our sense of agency.
PANELISTS
Bill Drummond is a Scottish musician, media personality, record producer, writer and artist. He is best known as co-founder of late 1980s avant-garde “pop group” The KLF and its 1990s “avant-art” media-manipulating successor, the K Foundation. He has also written several books, produced a variety of conceptual art projects and helped to set-up The Foundry, an arts center in Shoreditch, London. Drummond’s current project is a choir called The17.
Steve Lambert made international news just after the 2008 U.S. elections with The New York Times “Special Edition,” a replica of the Grey Lady announcing the end of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and other good news. He is the founder of the Anti-Advertising Agency, lead developer of Add-Art (a Firefox add-on that replaces online advertising with art) and has collaborated with numerous artists including the Graffiti Research Lab and the Yes Men. He is a regular full-time faculty member at School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
Eva and Franco Mattes are the Brooklyn-based artist-provocateurs behind the infamous Web site 0100101110101101.org. Pioneers of the Net Art movement, they are renowned for masterful subversions of public media, such as their notorious (and unauthorized) Nike advertising campaign.
Superflex (Rasmus Nielsen) is a Danish artists’ group founded and directed by Jakob Fenger, Rasmus Nielsen and Bjørnstjerne Christiansen. It has been working since 1993 on a series of projects related to economic forces, democratic production conditions and self-organization.
Marisa Olson’s work combines performance, video, drawing and installation to address the cultural history of technology, the politics of participation in pop culture and the aesthetics of failure.
Founded in 1876 and accredited by the National Association of Schools of Art and Design, the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (SMFA), is one of only three art schools in the country affiliated with a major museum—the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. SMFA offers an interdisciplinary, self-directed education in the fine arts for undergraduate and graduate artists.
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