Consortium fellow Tom McCarthy is speaking in the symposium on Futurism and the Avant-Garde taking place at Tate Modern on 27th June 2009, to coincide with the recently-opened Futurism exhibition. His talk, entitled ‘These Panels Are Our Only Models for the Composition of Poetry, or, How Marinetti Taught Me How to Write’, asks what characteristics a genuinely Marinettian contemporary literature might have. Other contributors include Lutz Becker, Mary-Ann Caws, David Cottington, Alex Danchev and Matthew Gale.

Tate Modern Saturday 20 June 2009, 14.00-21.30

Saturday 20 June 2009, 14.00–21.30

14.00–17.00 symposium 18.00–21.30 dinner in the East Room

In short, this event brings together practitioners and theoreticians of the humanities, arts and sciences to extol or berate, to discuss, explore and explain shortness in all its spatial and temporal manifestations.

Shortness tackles topics ranging from aphorisms, txt msgs and short attention spans to nanophilology, sampling, ephemeral relationships, punch lines, short narratives and other short-lived entities and phenomena (insects and fashion).

The short conference is followed by a long dinner in Tate Modern’s East Room. Dinner guests will be entertained by short speeches and the whole event is supplemented by short films, performances and various interventions.

Conference speakers: DJ Spooky, Sadie Plant, Dan and Lia Perjovschi and Tom Shakespeare. Dinner speakers include Clare Wigfall and Steven Connor amongst others. The compère for the dinner will be Nicholas Parsons.

Organised by Tate Modern Public Programmes in collaboration with Irini Marinaki and Konstantinos Stefanis (London Consortium) and Ricarda Vidal (Institute of Germanic & Romance Studies)

In collaboration with The London Consortium and with additional support from LCACE
Tate Modern Starr Auditorium
£15 (£10 concessions), booking required
£50 (£45 concessions) for dinner and conference

For more information about the event and to book tickets, please visit Tate’s website http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/eventseducation/symposia/18189.htm
book online or call 020 7887 8888.

www.shortness.co.uk

The ICA, in collaboration with the London Consortium and the Canada Council for the Arts, will host a retrospective of short films by the Canadian filmmaker Jamie Travis. Featuring a post-screening Q&A with Travis and professor Barry Curtis, the event will take place at the ICA Cinema at 18:30 on 22 April, 2009.Jamie Travis’ ironic and hyper-designed comedies - The Saddest Boy in the World, The Patterns Trilogy and Why the Anderson Children Didn’t Come to Dinner - have established him as ‘one of the most original voices in Canadian cinema’ (The Toronto Sun). Recurring themes of childhood frailty and self-conscious suspense — alongside painstakingly designed interiors and musical vignettes — have engendered a distinct and consistent cinematic universe that straddles the divide between humour and grief.

‘Passivity isn’t really an option when watching his films as the mise en scène is handled with the meticulousness of a serial killer’. (Ion Magazine, Vancouver)

The Saddest Boy in the World (2006) — 13:30

Timothy Higgins, picked last for the team, is the saddest boy in the world. Friendlessness, suburban complacency and prescription drugs have conspired against the youngster to make this his worst year yet. Musical Chairs and birthday cake can’t save him now — at his ninth birthday party Timothy prepares for a show-stopping suicide.

‘A miniature masterpiece — impeccable set design, humour and timing. The self-explanatory story is a wonder, and if Jamie Travis isn’t the next big thing we’ll be entirely gutted’. (The Torontoist)

The Patterns Trilogy (2005-2006) — 40:30

A suspense thriller, a comedy, a love story, a dreamscape and a musical extravaganza, The Patterns Trilogy presents, in three parts, the epic anti-romance of Michael and Pauline.

‘Patterns is a coloured amphetamine that spreads through your entire body’ (Omagiu Magazine, Bucharest)

Why the Anderson Children Didn’t Come to Dinner (2003) — 16:30

Three seven year-olds endure the culinary abuses of their mother. When Mother’s aversion to brown eggs goes too far, young Chester, Eliza and Godfrey employ their queer preoccupations for a communal objective — their heroic absence from dinner.

‘Imagine David Lynch attempting to make a children’s TV series and you’ll be halfway to understanding this movie’. (Channel 4 UK)

The event will be held at 18:30 on Wednesday 22 April, 2009 at the ICA Cinema 1, The Mall, London SW1Y 5AH.

Tickets may be purchased at ica.org.uk or by calling the ICA box office at 020 7930 3647.

Curated by Christien Garcia.

Call for Submissions - Shortness, Tate Modern, 20 June 2009

shortness - a very short conference and a very long dinner

Deadline: Friday 20 March 2009

This event will bring together practitioners and theoreticians of the humanities, arts and sciences to extol or berate, to discuss, explore and explain shortness in all its spatial and temporal manifestations.

Topics that Shortness aims to cover include: aphorisms, txt msgs, short attention spans, nanophilology, music samples, ephemeral relationships, short narratives, punch lines, orgasms and other short-lived entities and phenomena (insects and fashion).

The conference itself will only last a few hours and will be followed by a very long dinner. Guests will be entertained by short dinner speeches and the whole event will be supplemented by short films and various interventions.

This call invites submissions for presentations or performances of up to 7 minutes to take place during the long dinner. Please note that we cannot cover any expenses incurred nor can we accommodate installations.Speakers include DJ Spooky, Sadie Plant, Tom Shakespeare, Clare Wigfall and Steven Connor amongst others. The Compère for the dinner will be Nicholas Parsons.

Please send an abstract of no more than 200 words to the organisers and include a short bio of no more than 100 words.

Contact:

short.at.tate@googlemail.com

Shortness is organised by Irini Marinaki, Konstantinos Stefanis, Ricarda Vidal and Tate Modern Public Programmes in collaboration with The London Consortium and the Institute of Germanic & Romance Studies, School of Advanced Study (University of London).

Last June, Peter Greenaway took computers, projectors and speakers into a Milan monastery in an attempt to reinterpret Da Vinci’s The Last Supper. Now he comes to the ICA to argue that the world of text is giving way to a exciting new age of visual literacy. Greenaway is the director and writer of The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover and The Draughtsman’s Contract.

The use of camera phones and recording equipment during talks and events in the Feedback series is encouraged.

£10 / £9 Concessions / £8 ICA Members.

The recent emphasis on public education as a means of thwarting the “obesity epidemic” in the UK has made the campaign against obesity part of a national program for “good health.”  The assumption seems to be that it is only with collective action that our waistline can be reduced and good health maintained or obtained.  How much are we as individuals responsible for our own health and how much should we rely on the “nanny state” or even Jamie Oliver to make us healthy?

Free entry.

At the extreme of physical and mental damage lies trauma. But what causes trauma in the first place and what makes it different from other injury? This is a subject fraught with difficulties. This event will bring together anthropological and psychological perspectives to tackle these contemporary issues.

Notorious for her rape-revenge novel and film Baise-Moi, Virginie Despentes is at the ICA to present ideas from her new book King Kong Theory. A trenchant new defence of feminism, shaped by her experiences in the porn and prostitution industries, the book argues that feminism is needed to rip away the trappings of femininity in a society obsessed with consumption and packaging. Despentes will be in conversation with Zoe Williams, columnist at The Guardian.

£10 / £9 Concessions / £8 ICA Members.

Join the Photographer’s Gallery team for a discussion on the molecular physics of sand and sand castles.

£5.00/ £3.50 concs. (ticket includes free beer).

To book email the Information Desk on info@photonet.org.uk

DAWOOD/DEORA is a collaboration between artists Shezad Dawood and Mukul Deora that bridges the gap between the politics of experimental electronic music and video art, exploring notions of nationalism, modernism and secularism in the new India.

Their new project Expressway has been commissioned as a soundtrack to the Serpentine’s exhibition Indian Highway and features the Mumbai/Pune expressway as a point of departure for an audio-visual journey through the virtual/viral context of the exhibition. Expressway will take a number of forms – from gallery interference to live off-site electronic sets – and build into an array of sonic and video mutations of the original soundtrack.

Free, seats allocated on a first-come-first-served basis.

On Saturday January 17th at 4.30 p.m., the INS Joint Declaration on Inauthenticity, by Tom McCarthy and Simon Critchley, is to be delivered in the Clore Auditorium of Tate Britain. This is the statement, originally delivered in The Drawing Center, New York, that Zadie Smith goes on about at some length in her recent New York Review of Books piece on Remainder, and that Peter Schwenger claims in Triple Canopy ‘didn’t actually take place’. Come and decide for yourself how authentic or in- it is, and say hello afterwards (the Tate’s generously serving free drinks to all who come).

£8 (£6 concessions), booking required

How do we think about visual art now? What is happening to art history? Are visual culture studies taking its place? What is the place of fine art practice as thought, critical knowledge or transformative practice? Are we left in an interdisciplinary free-for-all or are disciplinary models of knowledge still valid? The Centre for Cultural Analysis, Theory and History is a transdisciplinary project straddling fine art, histories of art, and cultural studies promoting a radical concept of research as intellectual and aesthetic encounter. CentreCATH’s work is now emerging in a series of collections and monographs that will be launched with an afternoon of discussions.

Speakers include Elisabeth Bronfen, Victoria Anderson, Nicholas Chare, Vanessa Corby, Griselda Pollock, Alison Rowley and Liz Watkins. Chair: Adrian Rifkin.

£15 / £12 Concessions / £10 ICA Members.

Founded in Canada in the late 1960s by AA Bronson, Felix Partz and Jorge Zontal, ‘General Idea’ was a collaborative group who produced witty and humorous critiques of modern culture in a variety of media. This retrospective of their films features peeing poodles, crescent moons and spilled cocktails, all hallmarks of the group’s lunatic inspiration.

Free, no bookings taken

Ferran Adria has been described as the best chef on the planet, and his restaurant, elBulli, was voted the World’s Best Restaurant for the fourth time this year. It receives over two million requests for 8,000 places each year. To mark the publication of A Day at elBulli, published by Phaidon Press this autumn, Ferran Adria is joined by Observer food writer and restaurant critic Jay Rayner to discuss his inspiration, philosophy and the extraordinary techniques which lie behind his spectacular creations. Questions from the audience follow.

£12 (limited concessions available)

The Pulitzer Prize-winning creator of Maus returns to autobiography in his latest graphic novel, combining multiple reflections on how comics have warped his life with a facsimile reprint of Breakdowns, his rare collection of conceptual strips from the 1970s which anticipated the medium’s most progressive innovators today. Art Spiegelman will be talking to Posy Simmonds.

£10 / £9 Concessions / £8 ICA Members.

David Harvey, American geographer and author of seminal book The Condition of Postmodernity, has written the introduction to a brand new edition of The Communist Manifesto by Marx and Engels. On a rare visit to the UK, he comes to the ICA to talk about the contemporary relevance of the manifesto, how it might inspire a new generation of political activists and how it might be rewritten for contemporary times. Harvey will be in conversation with Frank Furedi, professor of sociology at the University of Kent and author of Invitation to Terror.

£10 / £9 Concessions / £8 ICA Members.

In The Marriage of Reason and Squalor, Jake Chapman slashes the romantic novel down to bare bone and constructs his own disfigured version from the slaughtered remains. At this exclusive event, Dinos Chapman talks to his brother Jake about this debut work of fiction.

£10 / £9 Concessions / £8 ICA Members.

Bruce Altshuler discusses some of the many roles played by art exhibitions in the history of modern culture. These include the introduction of the museum as an educational enterprise, the presentation of new forms of artworks to the public, and varying political uses to which exhibitions have been put. Central to the effectiveness of exhibitions in their diverse purposes is the relationship between forms of display and the content presented. This connection between exhibition form and content is explored through examples ranging from shows of early modern art through conceptual art presentation practices of the late 1960s and 1970s.

£8 (£6 concessions), booking recommended
Price includes drinks afterwards

Psychoanalysis has been used to discuss visual pleasure and the significance of the gaze in the apprehension of art. Freud suggested that visual pleasure is also related to shame, the complex, universal and painful affect that connects subjects to social relations. The recent publication Shame and Sexuality: Psychoanalysis and Visual Culture brings the issue of shame into sharp focus by using psychoanalysis as a method for the analysis of visual culture. The authors will present their topics in relation to Tate’s current exhibitions and displays and launch the book as a contribution to visual culture debates.

This event is chaired by Tamar Garb (University College London), panellists Griselda Pollock (University of Leeds), Malcolm Pines (psychoanalyst), Claire Pajaczkowska (Middlessex University), Amna Malik (Slade School of Fine Art) and Ivan Ward (Freud Museum) will present a number of perspectives on shame, sexuality, the gaze and the image today.

In collaboration with the Royal College of Art and the Freud Museum

£10 (£8 concessions), booking required

Screening Andy Warhol’s film Kiss as a historical backdrop, this event looks at kissing, both as physical act and metaphor, as a gesture of exchange or desire, as hidden by the very anatomy of faces and bodies, as playing with the invisible aspects of love. Speakers: artists Melanie Manchot and Wiebke Leister, who will both be presenting new work, writer and curator Lisa Le Feuvre and film historian A.L. Rees.

Followed by a drinks reception.

£10 / £9 Concessions / £8 ICA Members.