Jeremy Lecomte | Blank Space | 23.03.2017

Описание: Blank Space: On the White Cube and the Generic Space of Contemporary Art

There is today a growing tendency to criticise contemporary art for feeding on a formal, financial and social indeterminacy. For many authors and artists, the increased fetichization of indeterminacy has lead contemporary art to be increasingly inconsequent. But what exactly remains indeterminate in contemporary art? How this indeterminacy is generated and sustained? How can art be more consequential? By grounding this criticism in a historical and speculative debate on the white cube (Brian O’Doherty), this talk aims to both specify and potentially reorienting this critique. Drawing on seminal essays by Jeff Wall and Thierry de Duve, it will first trace this constitutive indeterminacy in the sixties, when the reinterpretation of Marcel Duchamp’s ready made by conceptual artists met the institutionalisation of the white cube as the generic space of contemporary art. From this standpoint, it will then show that only a proper architectural reading of the white cube can really grasp the role that it plays as the material, institutional, and symbolic space in which contemporary art is both exhibited and legitimised. Examining the white cube in direct connection to Le Corbusier and Max du Bois’ Maison Dom-ino (Peter Eisenman), this talk will finally show that contemporary art must be defined as a specific genre, defined by a logic of self-referential indeterminacy that directly belongs to its generic space of exhibition, hence positing that any claim about the necessity to exit contemporary art must addressed in relation to this extended space.

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Jeremy Lecomte is a researcher and theoretician working across the fields of political philosophy, cultural theory, art, architecture and urban studies. Graduated from Goldsmiths, University of London, in 2013 (Mphil Cultural studies), and from l’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, EHESS, Paris, in 2009 (MA Political philosophy), he is currently teaching at l’École Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture de Versailles, France, and a PhD candidate in Architecture at the Manchester Architecture Research Centre, in Manchester. His thesis is provisionary titled “The Transmodern City. Lagos, Urban Projects, and the Politics of Space (1880-2008)”, and focuses, through several case studies, on the interaction between urban projects, modernization, and informal dynamics of urbanization. He has recently published articles in Mute magazine (Speculative Architectures, 2013), and in Social Anthropology (Beyond Indefinite Extension: About Bruno Latour and Urban Space, 2013). Jeremy Lecomte collaborates with artists and architects (recent collaborations include one with Yves Mettler in Standard Deluxe in Lausanne in 2012; and with Holzweg on a proposal for the French pavilion at the Venice Biennale of Architecture in 2015). He is co-founder and co-director of Glass Bead, a research platform and a journal concerned with transfers of knowledge across art, science and philosophy, as well as with their practical and political dimensions.

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A conference given in the framework of Theater, Garden, Bestiary: A Materialist History of Exhibitions, a HES-SO/University of Applied Sciences and Arts of Western Switzerland & ECAL/University of Art and Design Lausanne research project.

http://theatergardenbestiary.com/