Crisis as Form

A Lecture by Peter Osborne

Monday, October 2 at 7PM
E.I.K., 32 Edgewood Avenue, New Haven

The field of contemporary art since the 1960s has been characterized by both the attempted dissolution and the reflective expansion of the concept of artistic form. This is epitomized by the phrase ‘When Attitudes Become Form’ (the opening of the subtitle of Harald Szeeman’s exhibition, Live in Your Head, at the Kunsthalle, Berne, 1969). Recently, in the wake of the revisionist historiography of the exhibitions of that time, the motif of something ‘becoming form’ has been revived and applied in new critical contexts. With regard to Moscow Conceptualism, for example, History Becomes Form (Groys, 2010); art activism, posits Living as Form (Nato Thompson, 2012). More prosaically, it has been suggested, with the artist-curator, Exhibitions Become Form (Elena Filipovic, 2013). What, if anything, delimits this expansion of the concept of artistic form? Might it be extended all the way to the crisis-ridden form of historical present? How today might we conceive crisis as form?

About Peter Osborne

Professor Osborne received a BSc in Philosophy and Economics from the University of Bristol in 1979, and a MA and a DPhil in Philosophy from the University of Sussex in 1980 and 1989. From 1992 to 2010 he taught Philosophy and Art Theory at Middlesex University, London. From 1983 to 2016, he was an editor of the British journal Radical Philosophy. He has contributed to a range of international journals (including Art History, Cultural Studies, New German Critique, New Left Review, October, Telos and Texte zur Kunst) and to the catalogues of major art institutions (including Manifesta 5, Tate Modern, Biennale of Sydney, Walker Art Center Minneapolis, Office of Contemporary Art Norway, National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design Oslo, CGAC in Santiago de Compostela, and Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León.) In 2011, he was co-curator (with Marta Kuzma) of the Norwegian Representation at the 54th Venice Biennale. In 2014, he was the keynote speaker at the 2nd World Biennial Forum, Sao Paulo, Making Biennials in Contemporary Times. From 2013 to 2015 he was Principal Investigator on the UK Arts & Humanities Research Council project on Transdisciplinarity and the Humanities. He has recently held Visiting International Chairs in the Philosophy Department at the University of Paris 8 (2012 & 2014) and in ‘Philosophy in the Context of Art’ at the Royal Institute of Art, Stockholm (2015). His books include The Politics of Time: Modernity and Avant-Garde (1995; 2011), Philosophy in Cultural Theory (2000), Conceptual Art (2002), Marx (2005), El arte mas alla de la estetica: ensayos filosoficos sobre el arte contemporaneo (2010), Anywhere or Not at All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art (2013) and The Postconceptual Condition (forthcoming from Verso in late 2017).