Friday 16 November, 2012 - 5.45pm

Booking essential.

Please call the Information Desk on 020 7522 7888 to check ticket availability and to book.

Screenings, readings and talks considering painting, colour and the written word drawing on artist Mel Bochner’s work. Participants include artist and writer David Batchelor, Chief Curator Achim Borchardt-Hume, art historian Briony Fer, artist Jonathan Monk, artist Nick Thurston and Guggenheim Senior Curator Jeffrey Weiss. Includes a screening of the documentary Blah Blah Blah by filmmaker Lizbeth Marano.

In association with the Royal College of Art.

Schedule

2-2.10pm Achim Borchardt-Hume: Introduction

2.10-3pm: Jeffrey Weiss: Keynote paper: Rock, Paper, Scissors   

3-3.15pm: Nick Thurston: What If? A reading of extracts from some conceptual poems that work in close methodological or humorous proximity to the paintings of Mel Bochner.

3.15-3.35pm: Break

3.35-4.55pm: Panel Discussion with David Batchelor, Achim Borchardt-Hume (Chair), Briony Fer, Jonathan Monk, Nick Thurston and Jeffrey Weiss.

4.55-5.55pm: Screening of Blah Blah Blah: Mel Bochner in his own words, by Lizbeth Marano (55min)

Biographies:

David Batchelor is an artist and writer with an ongoing interest in the role of colour. His recent exhibitions include Chromophilia: 1995-2010, Paço Imperial, Rio de Janeiro (2010); Color Chart, Museum of Modern Art, New York/Tate Liverpool (2008/9); Unplugged, Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh (2007);  Extreme Abstraction, Albright Knox Gallery, Buffalo, New York (2005); Shiny Dirty, Ikon Gallery Birmingham (2004), the 26th Bienal De Sao Paulo (2004);  Days Like These: Tate Triennial London (2003). He is also the editor of Colour (2008), an anthology of writings on colour from 1850 to the present, published by the Whitechapel and MIT Press in the Documents of Contemporary Art Series. Among his other books are Chromophobia, published by Reaktion Books, London, in 2000. And his most recent one titled Found Monochromes: vol.1, nos.1-250 published by Ridinghouse, London (2010). 

Briony Fer is Professor of History of Art at the University College of London. She has published extensively on 20th century and contemporary art. Key publications include her books On Abstract Art (2000) and The Infinite Line (2004), both published by Yale University Press. She has written on many contemporary artists, including Gabriel Orozco, Roni Horn, Vija Celmins, Ed Ruscha, Rachel Whiteread and David Batchelor. Much of her research has focused on the work of the American sculptor Eva Hesse, writing for the 2002 retrospective of the artist curated by Elisabeth Sussman at SFMOMA in 2002. Her monograph Eva Hesse Studiowork was published in 2009, coinciding with an exhibition originated at the Fruitmarket Gallery Edinburgh.

Achim Borchardt-Hume is Head of Exhibitions at Tate Modern and was previously Chief Curator at the Whitechapel Gallery since 2009. He has curated numerous exhibitions and projects at the Gallery including Keeping it Real: Works from the D. Daskalopoulos Collection (2010), Walid Raad: Miraculous Beginnings (2010) Wilhelm Sasnal (2011), The Bloomberg Commission: Giuseppe Penone (2012) and Think Twice: Collection Sandretto Re Rebaudengo (2012). Prior to this he held positions at Tate Modern, Barbican Art Gallery and the Serpentine Gallery.

Jonathan Monk’s work includes a wide range of media including installations, photography, film, sculpture and performance. Monk grounds his conceptual approach in his personal history, whilst alluding to the types of systems and processes pursued by artists such as Sol LeWitt and Mel Bochner. Jonathan Monk lives and works in Berlin.

Nick Thurston is the author of two books plus some twenty journal articles and artists’ pages. He is also the co-author of two pocketbooks, the latest of which, Do or DIY (2012), was written for an exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery and is now being translated into Spanish, Italian, French, and German. Nick is an academic at the University of Leeds, co-editor of the independent publishing imprint Information as Material (York), and his current exhibitions include 'Postscript' at the Denver Museum of Contemporary Art (Colorado, USA).

Jeffrey Weiss is Senior Curator at the Guggenheim Museum in New York where he is co-running a Mellon Foundation study project devoted to Minimal and Post-Minimal art.  From 2000 to 2007, Weiss was Curator and Head of Modern and Contemporary Art at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. where he has organized exhibitions of Jasper Johns, Pablo Picasso, Mark Rothko, among others.  He also greatly expanded the museum’s holdings in art of the sixties and seventies. He briefly served as Director of the Dia Art Foundation in 2007-08, but left to return to academic and curatorial work.  Since that time he has been Adjunct Professor of Fine Art at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York. His writings are regularly featured in Artforum and he has published widely in various other periodicals on modern and postwar art.  In 2006, he edited Dan Flavin: New Light, an anthology of essays from Yale University Press.  He is currently working on a catalogue of the early object sculptures of Robert Morris.  At the Guggenheim, he is preparing a major exhibition of the work of On Kawara for 2015.

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