In honor of her new publication, In the Canyon, Revise the Canon: Utopian Knowledge, Radical Pedagogy and Artist-run Community Art Spaces in Southern California (les presses du réel, 2015), philosopher Géraldine Gourbe joins writer and independent curator Flora Katz and ICI’s Director of Exhibitions Alaina Claire Feldman to discuss Gourbe's research and to propose a framework for which we can continue to use feminism as a tool to engage with art and culture at large.
"Believing is not to have one's hand on something so much as to be effected by what’s not there."
– Michel de Certeau
Before the onset of the social and cultural backlash that was brought on by the Reagan administration in the early eighties, Southern California was ripe territory for the genesis and development of emancipation movements for and by African Americans, Chicanos, pacifists, Marxists, feminists and homosexuals.
Starting in the late sixties, these revolutionary waves particularly influenced practices such as performance art, video, installation and collaboration, which led to the construction of alternatives like artist-run spaces, non-profit spaces and artist-run community art spaces.
In Santa Barbara, Los Angeles, and San Diego, collaborative public action was constructed around utopian knowledge, which was then redirected towards universities and art schools that favored the emergence of radical pedagogies.
These other manners of experimental thinking, doing and teaching permitted artists to deconstruct certain canons that were inherited from European tradition and art history, and provoked a reexamination of “the American way of life.”
Edited by Géraldine Gourbe. Texts by Mark Allen, Juliette Bellocq, Vera Brunner-Sung, Nancy Buchanan, Carol Cheh, Matthew Coolidge, Jill Dawsey, François Esquivié, Rita Gonzales, Géraldine Gourbe, Robby Herbst, Walter Hopps, Robert Irwin, Chris Kraus, Leslie Labowitz, Suzanne Lacy, Fred Lonidier, Pauline Oliveros, Elana Mann, Emily Mast, Senga Nengudi, Janet Sarbanes, Annette Weisser, Joshua Young, Andrea Zittel.
This event is free and open to the public. To attend, please RSVP to rsvp@curatorsintl.org with CANON in the subject line.
