Conference Papers by Tom Hastings
This paper will risk interpreting a “not quite” artwork; that is, an artwork whose unclear status... more This paper will risk interpreting a “not quite” artwork; that is, an artwork whose unclear status throws the work of interpretation into relief. Manufactured by Eva Hesse at her studio on the Bowery, S-105 (1968) is one of a series of “test pieces” that were posthumously consigned to the estate. In 2010, the test pieces were newly designated “Studiowork” by the art historian Briony Fer, who curated a successful travelling exhibition of the same name. Consequently, this “not quite” artwork found passage to the centre of what Robert Pincus-Witten termed the “industry of Eva Hesse [scholarship]”. S-105 is hemmed in by the conceptual act of naming and subject to readings of mimetic inscription: What if this thing is my model of thought? enquires Fer. Thinking with Fer about how S-105 speaks to us from beyond its muteness, I ask the following: What can we do with the excessive material lure that haunts the questions we ask of the “not quite” artwork? I want to trouble the critical transmission of affect, understood as an unavoidable interpretive recourse from a material thing whose lifeline is, patently, the institution of art history. To this end, I shall conduct a surface reading of S-105 as it is mediated via Yale University Press’ catalogue raisonné (2006). How does the formal intrusion of this medium and its value-form actually manipulate S-105? My reading is indebted to Eugenie Brinkema’s programme in The Forms of the Affects (2014). Finally, and in deference to the Late 60s’ positivist grounds of dematerialisation, my argument is informed by the critique of Gillian Rose: ‘Which concepts does the object have ‘by itself’? It has the reified concepts of non-dialectical sociologies and philosophies by means of which the non-reified concepts can be derived’ (1978).
Essays by Tom Hastings
Book Reviews by Tom Hastings
Parallax, Apr 2015
Review of my book by Matthew Ellison and Tom Hastings
Programming by Tom Hastings
Performa is a Leeds Humanities Research Institute funded reading group based at the University of... more Performa is a Leeds Humanities Research Institute funded reading group based at the University of Leeds and organised by postgraduate students in the Faculty of Arts and the Faculty of Performance, Visual Arts and Communication, but open to all.
This transdisciplinary platform builds on the diverse research interests of its participants to carve out a space for inquiry into shared concerns around the subject of performance and performativity. Paramount to this enterprise is the exchange of knowledge and research skills between graduate students who might not otherwise have the opportunity to meet.
Performa sets out to interrogate the subject of performance and performativity through a concerted programme of reading that draws on foundational theoretical texts, as well as proponents of American pragmatism, phenomenology, historiography and memory studies, feminism and queer theory. The reading group will also be enriched with a programme of film screenings which will take place throughout the coming year.
The programme for the rest of 2015 will focus on the politics of performativity, ranging from identity and ethnicity in Fanon’s 'Black Skin, White Masks', Peggy Phelan’s 'Unmarked: Politics of Performance' to Judith Butler and Athena Athanasiou’s 'Dispossession: The Performative in the Political'.
In 2016, the programme will continue by considering the rubric ‘Performance and Performativity’ through the themes of ‘Violence’ and ‘the Past’.
The group organisers welcome queries and input from participants and observers. For more information, please contact:
Beatrice Ivey, School of Languages, Cultures and Societies (French departmenet), mlbai@leeds.ac.uk
Tom Hastings, School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies, fhtmh@leeds.ac.uk
*Performa Website* -----> https://leedsperforma.wordpress.com/
Call for Papers by Tom Hastings
Drafts by Tom Hastings
Call for Papers (Deadline: 15th April, 2016)
Conference to be held on Wednesday 15th June, 2016
... more Call for Papers (Deadline: 15th April, 2016)
Conference to be held on Wednesday 15th June, 2016
Leeds Humanities Research Institute, University of Leeds
Confirmed Keynote: Professor Vikki Bell, Department of Sociology, Goldsmiths.
In 2011, Athena Athanasiou and Judith Butler held a series of exchanges via email that led to the book project Dispossession: The Performative in the Political (London: Polity, 2013). As the authors contest… Acts of resistance will take established orders of subjection as their resource, but they are not condemned to hopelessly reproducing or enhancing these orders. “Self-presence” is an attachment to an injurious interpellation, which becomes the condition of possibility for non-normative resignifications of what matters as presence.
Over 2015/16, the Performa research group (LHRI, University of Leeds) has explored the relation of performance, performativity and the performative in the political through a concerted programme of reading, taking on the writings of Frantz Fanon, Judith Butler, Peggy Phelan and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick among others committed to renewed possibilities for the Left. This programme will culminate on 15th June 2016 with a one-day conference, Performance and Performativity: Actualities and Futures. Performativity is a transdisciplinary concern that informs research in disparate fields; we aim to bring scholars into conversation who might not otherwise have a chance to meet. We are thrilled to welcome as the keynote speaker Professor Vikki Bell, author of Culture and Performance: The Challenge of Ethics, Politics and Feminist Theory (2007). Bell's work on theories and critiques of performativity has particularly engaged with the implications of the performative for ethics and politics.
The organisers welcome contributions that address questions of performance and performativity through the following fields of inquiry:
Performance art/theatre
Queer theory
Questions of gender
Feminisms
Race and Identity
Mourning
Government and Society
Law
Protest
Global development/Migration
Violence
History/Memory
Trauma studies
Performing the text
Image/visibility
Technology and the post-human
Modes of Seeing
Sounds and the senses
Please send abstracts of no more than 300 words along with a short bio of max 100 words to Tom Hastings and Beatrice Ivey at leedsperforma@gmail.com by 15th April at the latest.
Papers will be 20 minutes in length.
Events by Tom Hastings
A two-day conference to be held at the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies, U... more A two-day conference to be held at the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies, University of Leeds
21-23 April 2017
Keynote speakers (tbc): Martha Rosler, Marina Vishmidt
Deadline for abstracts: 30 January 2017
Speak, body: Art, the Reproduction of Capital and the Reproduction of Life, will address the juncture of the " body " in art in relation to feminism(s) and capitalism, through the period 1960–1980. The " body " is taken to be a historically contingent concept, up for contestation. Today we are witnessing a massive conservative retrenchment in the political and legal spheres concerning images of the body, from anti-woman bans on images of female ejaculation in pornography to the far-right deployment of racist iconography in the mass media coverage of Brexit and the Trump campaign. We want to challenge the hyper-mediated landscape that has propelled the global right, by considering how a previous generation of artists, who focused on the body in their works, responded to dominant social conditions. Speak, body sets out to investigate artworks that emerged coincident with the crisis of capitalism in the 1960s and 1970s in order to consider what they can tell us about contemporary transformations in art and politics. Through an intense and sustained period of engagement, the body was explored by artists such as among others. We are especially interested in artworks that counter the museal tendency to appropriate feminist art practices within conventional art-historical categories of movements, iconographies or styles; that is, we want to solicit papers that track the social implications of feminist investigation and critique conducted through a range of media (performance, photography, video, film, etc.). Speak, body aims to reconnect artistic practices with feminism as a historic social movement, and to query its consolidation into an academic "-ism " .
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Conference Papers by Tom Hastings
Essays by Tom Hastings
Book Reviews by Tom Hastings
Programming by Tom Hastings
This transdisciplinary platform builds on the diverse research interests of its participants to carve out a space for inquiry into shared concerns around the subject of performance and performativity. Paramount to this enterprise is the exchange of knowledge and research skills between graduate students who might not otherwise have the opportunity to meet.
Performa sets out to interrogate the subject of performance and performativity through a concerted programme of reading that draws on foundational theoretical texts, as well as proponents of American pragmatism, phenomenology, historiography and memory studies, feminism and queer theory. The reading group will also be enriched with a programme of film screenings which will take place throughout the coming year.
The programme for the rest of 2015 will focus on the politics of performativity, ranging from identity and ethnicity in Fanon’s 'Black Skin, White Masks', Peggy Phelan’s 'Unmarked: Politics of Performance' to Judith Butler and Athena Athanasiou’s 'Dispossession: The Performative in the Political'.
In 2016, the programme will continue by considering the rubric ‘Performance and Performativity’ through the themes of ‘Violence’ and ‘the Past’.
The group organisers welcome queries and input from participants and observers. For more information, please contact:
Beatrice Ivey, School of Languages, Cultures and Societies (French departmenet), mlbai@leeds.ac.uk
Tom Hastings, School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies, fhtmh@leeds.ac.uk
*Performa Website* -----> https://leedsperforma.wordpress.com/
Call for Papers by Tom Hastings
Drafts by Tom Hastings
Conference to be held on Wednesday 15th June, 2016
Leeds Humanities Research Institute, University of Leeds
Confirmed Keynote: Professor Vikki Bell, Department of Sociology, Goldsmiths.
In 2011, Athena Athanasiou and Judith Butler held a series of exchanges via email that led to the book project Dispossession: The Performative in the Political (London: Polity, 2013). As the authors contest… Acts of resistance will take established orders of subjection as their resource, but they are not condemned to hopelessly reproducing or enhancing these orders. “Self-presence” is an attachment to an injurious interpellation, which becomes the condition of possibility for non-normative resignifications of what matters as presence.
Over 2015/16, the Performa research group (LHRI, University of Leeds) has explored the relation of performance, performativity and the performative in the political through a concerted programme of reading, taking on the writings of Frantz Fanon, Judith Butler, Peggy Phelan and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick among others committed to renewed possibilities for the Left. This programme will culminate on 15th June 2016 with a one-day conference, Performance and Performativity: Actualities and Futures. Performativity is a transdisciplinary concern that informs research in disparate fields; we aim to bring scholars into conversation who might not otherwise have a chance to meet. We are thrilled to welcome as the keynote speaker Professor Vikki Bell, author of Culture and Performance: The Challenge of Ethics, Politics and Feminist Theory (2007). Bell's work on theories and critiques of performativity has particularly engaged with the implications of the performative for ethics and politics.
The organisers welcome contributions that address questions of performance and performativity through the following fields of inquiry:
Performance art/theatre
Queer theory
Questions of gender
Feminisms
Race and Identity
Mourning
Government and Society
Law
Protest
Global development/Migration
Violence
History/Memory
Trauma studies
Performing the text
Image/visibility
Technology and the post-human
Modes of Seeing
Sounds and the senses
Please send abstracts of no more than 300 words along with a short bio of max 100 words to Tom Hastings and Beatrice Ivey at leedsperforma@gmail.com by 15th April at the latest.
Papers will be 20 minutes in length.
Events by Tom Hastings
21-23 April 2017
Keynote speakers (tbc): Martha Rosler, Marina Vishmidt
Deadline for abstracts: 30 January 2017
Speak, body: Art, the Reproduction of Capital and the Reproduction of Life, will address the juncture of the " body " in art in relation to feminism(s) and capitalism, through the period 1960–1980. The " body " is taken to be a historically contingent concept, up for contestation. Today we are witnessing a massive conservative retrenchment in the political and legal spheres concerning images of the body, from anti-woman bans on images of female ejaculation in pornography to the far-right deployment of racist iconography in the mass media coverage of Brexit and the Trump campaign. We want to challenge the hyper-mediated landscape that has propelled the global right, by considering how a previous generation of artists, who focused on the body in their works, responded to dominant social conditions. Speak, body sets out to investigate artworks that emerged coincident with the crisis of capitalism in the 1960s and 1970s in order to consider what they can tell us about contemporary transformations in art and politics. Through an intense and sustained period of engagement, the body was explored by artists such as among others. We are especially interested in artworks that counter the museal tendency to appropriate feminist art practices within conventional art-historical categories of movements, iconographies or styles; that is, we want to solicit papers that track the social implications of feminist investigation and critique conducted through a range of media (performance, photography, video, film, etc.). Speak, body aims to reconnect artistic practices with feminism as a historic social movement, and to query its consolidation into an academic "-ism " .
This transdisciplinary platform builds on the diverse research interests of its participants to carve out a space for inquiry into shared concerns around the subject of performance and performativity. Paramount to this enterprise is the exchange of knowledge and research skills between graduate students who might not otherwise have the opportunity to meet.
Performa sets out to interrogate the subject of performance and performativity through a concerted programme of reading that draws on foundational theoretical texts, as well as proponents of American pragmatism, phenomenology, historiography and memory studies, feminism and queer theory. The reading group will also be enriched with a programme of film screenings which will take place throughout the coming year.
The programme for the rest of 2015 will focus on the politics of performativity, ranging from identity and ethnicity in Fanon’s 'Black Skin, White Masks', Peggy Phelan’s 'Unmarked: Politics of Performance' to Judith Butler and Athena Athanasiou’s 'Dispossession: The Performative in the Political'.
In 2016, the programme will continue by considering the rubric ‘Performance and Performativity’ through the themes of ‘Violence’ and ‘the Past’.
The group organisers welcome queries and input from participants and observers. For more information, please contact:
Beatrice Ivey, School of Languages, Cultures and Societies (French departmenet), mlbai@leeds.ac.uk
Tom Hastings, School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies, fhtmh@leeds.ac.uk
*Performa Website* -----> https://leedsperforma.wordpress.com/
Conference to be held on Wednesday 15th June, 2016
Leeds Humanities Research Institute, University of Leeds
Confirmed Keynote: Professor Vikki Bell, Department of Sociology, Goldsmiths.
In 2011, Athena Athanasiou and Judith Butler held a series of exchanges via email that led to the book project Dispossession: The Performative in the Political (London: Polity, 2013). As the authors contest… Acts of resistance will take established orders of subjection as their resource, but they are not condemned to hopelessly reproducing or enhancing these orders. “Self-presence” is an attachment to an injurious interpellation, which becomes the condition of possibility for non-normative resignifications of what matters as presence.
Over 2015/16, the Performa research group (LHRI, University of Leeds) has explored the relation of performance, performativity and the performative in the political through a concerted programme of reading, taking on the writings of Frantz Fanon, Judith Butler, Peggy Phelan and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick among others committed to renewed possibilities for the Left. This programme will culminate on 15th June 2016 with a one-day conference, Performance and Performativity: Actualities and Futures. Performativity is a transdisciplinary concern that informs research in disparate fields; we aim to bring scholars into conversation who might not otherwise have a chance to meet. We are thrilled to welcome as the keynote speaker Professor Vikki Bell, author of Culture and Performance: The Challenge of Ethics, Politics and Feminist Theory (2007). Bell's work on theories and critiques of performativity has particularly engaged with the implications of the performative for ethics and politics.
The organisers welcome contributions that address questions of performance and performativity through the following fields of inquiry:
Performance art/theatre
Queer theory
Questions of gender
Feminisms
Race and Identity
Mourning
Government and Society
Law
Protest
Global development/Migration
Violence
History/Memory
Trauma studies
Performing the text
Image/visibility
Technology and the post-human
Modes of Seeing
Sounds and the senses
Please send abstracts of no more than 300 words along with a short bio of max 100 words to Tom Hastings and Beatrice Ivey at leedsperforma@gmail.com by 15th April at the latest.
Papers will be 20 minutes in length.
21-23 April 2017
Keynote speakers (tbc): Martha Rosler, Marina Vishmidt
Deadline for abstracts: 30 January 2017
Speak, body: Art, the Reproduction of Capital and the Reproduction of Life, will address the juncture of the " body " in art in relation to feminism(s) and capitalism, through the period 1960–1980. The " body " is taken to be a historically contingent concept, up for contestation. Today we are witnessing a massive conservative retrenchment in the political and legal spheres concerning images of the body, from anti-woman bans on images of female ejaculation in pornography to the far-right deployment of racist iconography in the mass media coverage of Brexit and the Trump campaign. We want to challenge the hyper-mediated landscape that has propelled the global right, by considering how a previous generation of artists, who focused on the body in their works, responded to dominant social conditions. Speak, body sets out to investigate artworks that emerged coincident with the crisis of capitalism in the 1960s and 1970s in order to consider what they can tell us about contemporary transformations in art and politics. Through an intense and sustained period of engagement, the body was explored by artists such as among others. We are especially interested in artworks that counter the museal tendency to appropriate feminist art practices within conventional art-historical categories of movements, iconographies or styles; that is, we want to solicit papers that track the social implications of feminist investigation and critique conducted through a range of media (performance, photography, video, film, etc.). Speak, body aims to reconnect artistic practices with feminism as a historic social movement, and to query its consolidation into an academic "-ism " .