Performance Lecture
Friday 8 August 2008 8PM
PLATFORM centre for photographic + digital arts is thrilled to present The Critical Object, a performance lecture by Winnipeg-based psychoanalytic theorist, Jeanne Randolph. This presentation will act as a digital redux of her infamous lecture, previously presented at Castlefield Gallery in Manchester, UK. The lecture will be free and open to the public. All are welcome + encouraged.
This lecture performance is presented in conjunction with the exhibitions Staged by Adrian Fish and Voice Over by Brian Joseph Davis, which take into consideration the performative space of theatre and its related culture of promotion.
For the past twenty-five years Dr. Jeanne Randolph [MD, FRCP], psychoanalyst, theorist, critic, art writer, and performer, has published consistently and lectured widely in universities and galleries across the country and abroad.
Randolph was the first and only writer in Canada to develop Object Relations psychoanalytic theory as a medium for cultural criticism. Randolph counters the conventional Freudian interpretation of “art-as-neurosis,” with an invitation for us to consider the implications of the writings of psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott (1896-1971). Her pivotal essay “The Amenable Object,” (1983) is required reading in many university art courses. In the 1980s Randolph’s theoretical position on art and contemporary society had been established by major essays such as “Influencing Machines: the relation between art and technology”(catalogue essay for group exhibition curated by Randolph 1984), “Fifty Normal White Men” (Impulse magazine, Toronto, 1987) and “Illusion and the Diverted Subject: a psychoanalysis of art and entertainment,” (Parachute, Montreal, 1989).
Since 1983 the politics and ethics of writing about art and artists are being explored through Randolph’s practice of ficto-criticism. She has worked with such notable Canadian artists as Joey Morgan, Robin Collyer, Nicole Jolicoeur, Elizabeth MacKenzie, Stan Denniston, Joanne Tod, Fastwurms, Bernie Miller, Ian Carr-Harris and Vera Frenkel, all of whom welcomed an approach to the exhibition catalogue that explores narratives of ambivalence, issues of authorial/authoritative individuality, collegial contemplation of issues specific to each artist’s work and playful absurdity. YYZ Books, the publishing arm of the artist-run YYZ Artists’ Outlet gallery published the first edited collection of Randolph’s critical essays as Psychoanalysis & Synchronized Swimming and other writings on art in 1991. It was extensively reviewed, and within one year it was out of print.Ficto-criticism performs an analysis of art criticism itself. Numerous examples of this method of criticism were reprinted in the second YYZ Books publication of Randolph’s collected writings, Symbolization and its Discontents (1997). A third edited collection Why Stoics Box: essays on art and society was published in 2003. In 2007, her treatise Ethics of Luxury – materialism and imagination was co-published by Plug In Editions and YYZ Books.
For more information, please contact the Centre directly: PLATFORM wishes to thank Manitoba Arts Council, Winnipeg Arts Council, The Winnipeg Foundation, and Canada Council for the Arts for their continued support.
Posted 08/2008
