Talks

Let's Make Mischief! Gutai and The Art of Independent Thinking ...in the park, in the sky, on the stage

4 February 2020

Dr Ming Tiampo :

Dr. Tiampo is Professor of Art History, and founding member of the Centre for Transnational Cultural Analysis at Carleton University, Canada. She is interested in transcultural models and histories that provide new structures for understanding and reconfiguring the global. She has published on Japanese modernism, global modernisms, and diaspora. Tiampo’s book Gutai: Decentering Modernism (University of Chicago Press, 2011) received an honorable mention for the Robert Motherwell Book award. In 2013, she was co-curator of the AICA award-winning Gutai: Splendid Playground at the Guggenheim Museum in NY. Tiampo is currently working on two projects, Transnational Cities, which theorizes the scale of the urban as a mode of reimagining transcultural intersections and the historical conditions of global modernism, and Curatorial Worlding, which considers recent practices of transnational exhibition making. Tiampo is an associate member at ici Berlin, and a founding member of TrACE, the Transnational and Transcultural Arts and Culture Exchange network.

About the Talk:

This lecture introduces audiences to the Gutai group’s art of independent thinking—their exciting innovations in performance, conceptualism, sound, and participatory art—and narrates how they were dismissed when presented within Eurocentric art historical structures. It considers how Gutai was positioned in Global Art History, beginning with how the group itself connected with art worlds in New York, Paris, Turin, Johannesburg and Capetown, as well as demonstrating the theoretical and curatorial shifts that enabled them to emerge as a paradigmatic movement that has functioned as a pressure point that decenters modernism, globalizes feminist art history, and changes how we think about fundamental artistic categories.

By Dr. Ming Tiampo,

Professor of Art History,Carleton University, Canada

Moderator: Geeta Kapur