Transpersonal: Kerstin Stakemeier

Anti-Social (Art)

Alenka Zupančič has recently argued that contemporary art appears as the transgressive icon of our present. Seeking out the despotic and brutal boundaries that have been intensified and multiplied (not only) in the European Nation States throughout the last years, art as a mass cultural genre gains its visibility largely in a kind of ill-fated mimicry: the transgressions of art into politics render art as a mode of (self) accusation while those of art into labour indulge in a productivist nostalgia available to art only (because of its seemingly irrefutable zombie modernism). But what remains largely untouched within both modes of socializing art is the reproduction of art itself. What then about antisocial art? What about art’s negative socialization?

This talk follows up several historical instances of decidedly antisocial artistic practices that aimed at endangering the reproduction of art and the artist as its bearer altogether, thereby refuting the reproduction of the society that gave way to it/him/her. Where are those historical instances resurfacing today in artistic practices that are, again, acting up beyond any hopes for resolution or sublation: in mannerisms, mediumisms and expropriations?

Kerstin Stakemeier is a Berlin-based teacher and writer. She was the initiator of the "Space for Actualization" (with Nina Köller, Hamburg 07/08) and works in collaborative formats with artists, writers and curators. She has published Painting - The Implicit Horizon (2012) with Avigail Moss and Power of Materials/Politics of Materiality and The Present of the Future (2014-16) with Susanne Witzgall. Stakemeier works as a professor of Art Theory and Mediation at the Academy of Arts Nuremberg and regularly contributes to Texte zur Kunst, Artforum a.o. In 2016 Reproducing Autonomy (co-authored with Marina Vishmidt) came out with Mute and in 2017 Dramatisierter Formalismus will be published with b_books Polypen and the exhibition and magazine project Klassensprachen | Class Languages (with Manuela Ammer, Eva Birkenstock, Jenny Nachtigall and Stephanie Weber) will open at District Berlin.

Transpersonal: art and life directives is a lecture series on the theory and application of art and design, curated and convened by Dr. Stephen Wilson. It is staged in collaboration with the ICA and the Chelsea, Camberwell and Wimbledon College of Arts postgraduate community at the University of the Arts London.