Dexter Sinister presents ``A More Athletic Sense of Agency''

[open-reading-group at o-r-g.com]

Dexter Sinister presents ``A More Athletic Sense of Agency,'' tomorrow 
night TUESDAY JANUARY 26, 7 PM at Every Letter In The Alphabet, 1875 
Powell Street (at Victoria) as part of the exhibition An Invitation to An 
Infiltration at the Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver. Dexter Sinister 
will read excerpts from The First/Last Newspaper. This is the first of 
five consecutive evening events. Details for each will be announced the 
night before together with a brief preparatory text:

Largely assembled from a collection of concise, diverse profiles 
originally written for a variety of style and Sunday supplement magazines 
during the decade itself, The Nineties operates at an odd speed. The book 
combines the immediacy and involvement of real-time journalism with the 
delay and detachment of reflective commentary. Its affairs remain too 
recent and their effects too tangible to be considered at a remove, as 
``history.'' Seen in relation to a school with an obvious stake in 
contemporary culture, then, what we might call The Nineties' keen 
disinterest in immediate history offers a working model, an editorial 
premise applied in order to gauge the condition from withinor as close as 
seems reasonably possible.

One of Bracewell's more vivid conceits is to isolate ``frothy coffee'' as 
the decade's all-purpose signifier, one of a few infantile treats he 
suggests amount to the ``Trojan Horse of cultural materialism.'' On 
reading this, a friend noted the not unlikely scenario of reading about 
what he calls the ``Death by Cappucino effect'' while drinking a 
cappucino, and it occurred to me that in an art/design school, such 
discomfiting self-awareness might be harnessed towards realizing a sense 
of ``criticism'' more pertinent than merely discussing someone else's work 
within the confines of its disciplinary vacuum. A ``criticism,'' rather, 
that refers to the ability and inclination to confront, engage with, and 
communally discuss a subject as it happens whether a piece of work, a 
cultural condition, or the relation between one and the other. The end of 
Bracewell's summary seems to call for as much, diagnosing the cumulative 
outcome of the nineties as ``post-political,'' a state of impotence 
characterized by a ``Fear of Subjectivity.'' Slavoj Zizek similarly evokes 
a state where reflection and reflexivity have been undermined to such an 
extent that ``it's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of 
Capitalism.'' The aim of this exercise would be to nurture this critical 
attitude towards reinstating a more athletic sense of agency.

See
http://www.dextersinister.org/index.html?id=233
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: 00375.gif
Type: image/gif
Size: 3484 bytes
Desc: 
Url : <http://six.pairlist.net/pipermail/open-reading-group/attachments/20100125/1bf77ae1/attachment.gif>