Seminar Director: Gwyneth Shanks, University of California, Los Angeles

Seminar Description:

This seminar explores the interface among cultural institutions, labor practices, and bodies. Thinking across a variety of institutions—museums, festivals, schools, universities, non-profits, and cultural centers, amongst others—the seminar questions how individual subjects are impacted by and, in turn, can impact the infrastructural, material, and economic conditions of such organizations. The relationship between the individual actor and the institution asks us to think across scales, attentive to the friction of the encounter.

Particularly informed by performances studies, this seminar frames institutions through questions of performance and embodiment. How do bodies reveal both the discord and collaboration between individual and infrastructural labor? How do labor infrastructures obfuscate or reveal gender and race, and how can an individual actor’s body trouble prescribed labor narratives? While we might frame our discussion through examples of performances proper that occur in institutions (for example in art museums), the seminar is also interested in theorizing institutions and their actions through the lens of performance broadly.

This seminar imagines how our contemporary moment re-informs the robust body of scholarship on institutions and their role in shaping individual subjectivities and behavior. For example, in the past decade art museums have increasingly turned to performance-based work, which represents a transformation in museum culture, the definition of art expanding to include live performers. Concurrently, major museums are adopting corporate management models. These shifts render legible a set of concerns vis-à-vis objectification, exploitation, and best labor practices as performers, historically undervalued within a broader cultural landscape, come into relationship with far more financially solvent institutions. We might also think closer to home and engage the shifting labor practices of colleges and universities, increasingly dependent on adjunct labor.

Application Process:

In advance of the seminar, we will read three works that place artistic practice in dialogue with institutionality and embodiment. We will read the introduction to Shannon Jackson’s Social Works, David Joselit’s short and performative book After Art, and the second chapter of Tony Bennett’s The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics. The seminar will question how we can expand the theoretical frames each author offers to think broadly about the intersections among bodies, labor, and institutions. Each participant will also write and pre-circulate a brief (500-1000) word case study that illustrates the intersection among bodies, labor, and institutions.

All interested seminar participants should submit a one-paragraph statement of interest- to- the seminar director: Gwyneth Shanks ([log in to unmask]) by April 30, 2016. All materials and inquiries about the seminar should also be sent to the director.

For more information: http://www.culturalstudiesassociation.org/seminar22016