Lisa Le Feuvre
Bureaucracy and Despair
In an age where the institutionalization of institutional critique is a given and critique has been firmly recuperated into institutions, how can structures of power be affectively addressed by artworks and curatorial imperatives? The overplayed debates of entrenched positions of institutional critique too often result in consensual expressions of dissatisfaction. In documenting what ‘is’ or yearning for what ‘might be’, art turns away being ‘in’ and ‘of’ the world and instead replicates what already exists to only reinforce the world as it is. Art is a demand to rethink assumptions and find ruptures in consensus; to simply resent the state of the present is an impossible position as it is to believe what has gone before can be transformed.
Lisa Le Feuvre is a curator and writer based in London. She is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Art at Goldsmiths, University of London. Between 2005-2009 she directed the contemporary art programme at the National Maritime Museum, commissioning new work by Dan Holdsworth, Esther Shalvez-Gerz, Lawrence Weiner, Simon Patterson, Renee Green and Jeremy Millar. In 2009 she curated the exhibitions Joachim Koester: Poison, Protocols and Other Histories at Stills, Edinburgh and Economies of Attention: Leisure, Resistance, Desire and Labour from the Arts Council of England. In 2010 Le Feuvre will co-curate British Art Show 7. She is currently editing a book in the MIT Press/Whitechapel Art Gallery series Documents on Contemporary Art on failure.
www.gold.ac.uk/art/research/staff/llf/01
Bureaucracy and Despair
In an age where the institutionalization of institutional critique is a given and critique has been firmly recuperated into institutions, how can structures of power be affectively addressed by artworks and curatorial imperatives? The overplayed debates of entrenched positions of institutional critique too often result in consensual expressions of dissatisfaction. In documenting what ‘is’ or yearning for what ‘might be’, art turns away being ‘in’ and ‘of’ the world and instead replicates what already exists to only reinforce the world as it is. Art is a demand to rethink assumptions and find ruptures in consensus; to simply resent the state of the present is an impossible position as it is to believe what has gone before can be transformed.
Lisa Le Feuvre is a curator and writer based in London. She is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Art at Goldsmiths, University of London. Between 2005-2009 she directed the contemporary art programme at the National Maritime Museum, commissioning new work by Dan Holdsworth, Esther Shalvez-Gerz, Lawrence Weiner, Simon Patterson, Renee Green and Jeremy Millar. In 2009 she curated the exhibitions Joachim Koester: Poison, Protocols and Other Histories at Stills, Edinburgh and Economies of Attention: Leisure, Resistance, Desire and Labour from the Arts Council of England. In 2010 Le Feuvre will co-curate British Art Show 7. She is currently editing a book in the MIT Press/Whitechapel Art Gallery series Documents on Contemporary Art on failure.
www.gold.ac.uk/art/research/staff/llf/01
