Audio: Adrian Rifkin – Imperfecting Practice, Implicating Theory

Part 1:

Part 2 :

13.04.2011, 7 p.m.
DG14/Turm 4 (top floor, then go up the staircase by room 214)
Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, Schillerplatz 3, 1010 Vienna

Lecture held in English, presented and hosted by “Troubling Research. Performing Knowledge in the Arts”, a research project funded by WWTF Art(s) & Sciences and based at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna

In his lecture, London-based art historian and theorist Adrian Rifkin will engage with some histories of art making and theory and and making art as research in different mainly UK institutions over the last four decades. The strange relations of intentions and outcomes, theoretical suppositions and eventual forms of practice, innovatory programmes and formation of bureaucratic norms will be discussed anecdotally, historically and critically in a broader context of the evolution of the international art world. Rifkin will address specific examples of PhD projects and pedagogical programmes as well as some more general issues of philosophical coherence.

Adrian Rifkin is professor in art writing at the art department of Goldsmiths, University of London. His extensive CV and bibliography (including landmark books such as “Street Noises: Parisian Pleasure 1900–1940”, Manchester 1993, and “Ingres then, and now”, London 2000) can be consulted on his website: http://www.gai-savoir.net
There you’ll also find a link to the MAF in Art Writing program at Goldsmiths where Rifkin is teaching: http://www.gold.ac.uk/pg/mfa-art-writing/

Rifkin is currently working on a book length text provisionally titled “Losing myself”. This is a series of engagements with and against the autobiographical as the figure of an archive – whether historical, theoretical or imaginary. Each section will be an attempt to map or interrogate moments of Rifkin’s own life against their determinants, conditions or outcome, but in such a way as to secure diffusion rather than focus, dispersal against coherence and logic, complex series of uncontrollable ‘events’ rather than sensible narratives. In doing this Rifkin wants to explore how what we call cultural theory becomes possible in a description of living, but as if living is not what belongs to oneself.















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