We are pleased to confirm the first of our Joan Carlisle-Irving Lectures this 2020-2021 academic year with Amanda Beech. This lecture will take place online on Zoom in light of COVID-19. We hope you will join us at this free talk open to the public.
Art and the Conception of Reality
A lecture by Amanda Beech
Presented as part of the Joan Carlisle-Irving Lecture Series
UBC Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory
5:30 p.m., Wednesday, September 30, 2020
This event is free and open to the public.
Please register for the talk at https://ubc.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_SJS1TlaJTQiVXK9sOWMu2Q
It is true that our lived reality has been and remains constituted by abundant and incorrect comprehensions of the real. Art’s fascination with the real, that is, structures that subtend our lived reality and are beyond our immediate perception or even cognitive grasp, is shared by philosophy and science.
Each discipline has made different claims to and of the real including the idea that art can never be equal to the real, but can only hypothesize about it. But such an elimination of art’s claim to the real as a possibility for knowledge ultimately resuscitates a mythology of Art, binding Art to regimes of failure and impossibility and new theological paradigms; that of knowing what we do not know. In this, we see Art’s failure to live up to the critical task of holding others’ claims to the real in check and a failure of thought to grasp the real, “unknown unknowns” that would locate Art’s stake in a project of the future.
In a world of politics today that predominantly naturalizes massive social inequalities as “the way things are and should be” Beech’s talk will ask: What role can art have in actualizing futures that are progressively and even radically different from the one we experience today? This talk will work through some of the terms, histories and claims regarding both the real and the role of reason and critique. She will explore the configuration of the real in the process of reason in her own art practice that finds alignments and companionships with science and philosophy in different parts.
Amanda Beech is an artist and writer living in Los Angeles. She is Dean of Critical Studies, California Institute of the Arts. Beech has shown her artwork and presented her writing at major international venues including; Cause and Effect, Artericambi Gallery, Verona, 2019, This Time, a video commission for the Remai Modern, Canada 2017, Covenant Transport Move or Die at The Baltic Center for Contemporary Art 2016, and Sanity Assassin, in Neocentric, at Charim Gallery, Vienna, Austria 2016.
