Art Metropole

23 Mar. 2013 - 30 May 2014

If I Can't Dance, I Don't Want to be Part of Your Revolution: Toronto Edition 2013

initiated by Jacob Korczynski in association with Art Metropole

Session 1: Saturday March 23, 2013, 2-4pm
Art Metropole, 1490 Dundas Street West

Session 2: Saturday April 20, 2013, 2-4pm
Whippersnapper Gallery, 594b Dundas Street West

Session 3: Saturday, May 25, 2013, 2-4pm
TPW R&D, 1256 Dundas Street West

Session 4: Saturday, July 6, 2013, 2-4pm
The Powerplant, 231 Queens Quay West

Session 5: Thursday, October 17, 2013, 7-9pm
Art Metropole, 1490 Dundas Street West

Session 6: Thursday, December 12, 2013, 7-9pm
Prefix Institute of Contemporary Art, Toronto

Session 7: Saturday, January 25, 2014, 2-4pm
Art Metropole, 1490 Dundas Street West

Session 8: Wednesday, April 2, 2014, 7-9pm
Art Metropole, 1490 Dundas Street West

Session 9: Friday, May 30, 2014, 7-8:30pm
Toronto Reference Library, 789 Yonge Street, 3rd floor gathering in the Hinton Learning Theatre.

This year’s Toronto series of the If I Can’t Dance reading group is a double response to its itinerant headquarters and their Edition V, which explores the dynamic between appropriation/dedication. Initiated by Jacob Korczynski in association with Art Metropole, it will be hosted by various Toronto institutions, organizations, and initiatives, and moderated by members of each: Art Metropole, Gendai Mobile Unit, No Reading After the Internet, The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, TPW R&D, Whippersnapper. It is free and open to the public.

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The first session will take place at Art Metropole on Saturday, March 23, 2-4pm. We will read Pre Post: Speaking Backwards by Henrik Olesen, moderated by Jacob Korczynski. We would like to learn, and we are working on a book. This book is a classroom, published by Passenger Books, will be introduced through Corinn Gerber. Copies of the Henrik Olesen text will be made available on the afternoon of March 23, and copies of the book are available at the Art Metropole shop.

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The second session of the reading group will take place on Saturday, April 20, 2-4pm and will be hosted by Whippersnapper Gallery which is located at 594b Dundas Street West.The session will be moderated by Jacob Korczynski and Whippersnapper Gallery co-director Maggie Flynn and the two texts we’ll be discussing are Isabelle Graw’s Dedication Replacing Appropriation: Fascination, Subversion, and Dispossession in Appropriation Art and Michael Alan Glassco’s Contested images: the politics and poetics of appropriation.

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The third session of the reading group will take place at TPW R&D (1256 Dundas Street West)on Saturday, May 25 from 2:00 PM to 4:00 PM in conjunction with Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin’s exhibition To Photograph the Details of a Dark Horse in Low Light. The conversation will take as a point of departure Linda M. Steer’s text “Photographic Appropriation, Ethnography, and the Surrealist Other” to address Broomberg & Chanarin’s project, and we will also revisit the final section of Isabelle Graw’s text “Dedication Replacing Appropriation: Fascination, Subversion, and Dispossession in Appropriation Art” which addresses a Marxist interpretation of appropriation. Finally, our return to the Graw text will be supplemented by a brief excerpt from Allen W. Wood’s “Karl Marx”.

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The fourth session of the reading group will take place at The Power Plant (231 Queens Quay W, Toronto) on Saturday, July 6 from 2:00 PM to 4:00 PM in conjunction with their exhibition Jimmy Robert: Draw the Line. The group will discuss a text related to the current exhibition. Email jacob [dot] korczynski [at] gmail [dot] com for more information or links to the texts.

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Toronto’s If I Can’t Dance reading group continues on Thursday, October 17 from 7:00 to 9:00 PM at Art Metropole, 1490 Dundas Street West.

Corinn Gerber, Art Met’s Executive Director, will focus upon the writing of the Milan Women’s Bookstore collective and their practice that did not call for equal rights, but instead enabled a collectivity of difference. The collective’s material will be taken as a framework to think about the theoretical and concrete ways of negotiating the ‘battlefields of subjectivities’ and the importance of these texts to our contemporary context.

Teresa de Lauretis’ text “The Practice of Sexual Difference and Feminist Thought in Italy” serves as a valuable introduction to the socio-political context of the Milan Women’s Bookstore collective. It is available via Dropbox now. Send an email for the link. We will also discuss an insert on the Milan Women’s Bookstore collective from issue #4 of MAY magazine that includes an editorial by Fulvia Carnevale (Claire Fontaine).

6 *Thursday 12 December 2013, Toronto – Appropriation and Dedication #6
Sergio González Rodríguez Prefix Institute of Contemporary Art, Toronto.*

The sixth session the Toronto Reading Group comes together in collaboration with No Reading After the Internet and No Looking After the Internet to approach images as assembled through language, with prose used to conjure scenes in the minds of readers that are already mediated as representations, rather than reality. The tension between text forming images and images forming texts returns to the question of what it means politically to both give and take voice from a subject – a question that returns us to the material surrounding the practices of the Milan Women’s Bookstore from our previous session in October.

Together we will read and discuss ‘Instructions for Taking Textual Photographs’, the epilogue of Sergio González Rodríguez’s book The Femicide Machine which is anchored upon twenty unseen images that document the abduction and murder of one of the thousands of missing women in Ciudad Juárez.

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Saturday 25 January 2014, Toronto – Appropriation and Dedication #7
Pauline Oliveros Art Metropole, Toronto..

Following the December session of the Toronto Reading Group which was a collaboration with No Reading After the Internet and No Looking After the Internet, the first reading group for 2014 takes place on Saturday, January 25 from 2:00 to 4:00 PM at Art Metropole, 1490 Dundas Street West.

For the October session led by Corinn Gerber we collectively read a text for multiple voices that she composed in response to the writing of the Milan Women’s Bookstore collective. Among the voices included was that of Sylvère Lotringer, who speaking about the work of Kathy Acker stated:

“Indeed, the “I” is not belonging to anyone or rather belongs to everyone. As soon as one says “I”, one appropriates language, or language appropriates you. The “I” is not a means of reinforcing subjectivity, but on the contrary, a means of borrowing a subjectivity which is not yours, and which, to bring this to an end, does not belong to anyone.”

For this session we will encounter some text scores by American composer, educator, and musician Pauline Oliveros as models for speech and exchange that ask a question of “we” instead of “I” for collective dialogue and listening.

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Wednesday, 2 April 2014, Toronto – Appropriation and Dedication #8 Jean-Luc Godard & Jean-Pierre Gorin and Naomi Pearce Art Metropole, Toronto.

Following the January session of the reading group which was anchored upon the text scores of Pauline Oliveros, the next session of the If I Can’t Dance Appropriation/Dedicaiton reading group takes on Wednesday, April 2 from 7:00 to 9:00 PM at Art Metropole, 1490 Dundas Street West.

Together we will screen Letter to Jane (1972), the final film produced by the Dziga Vertov Group. Here, an image of Jane Fonda in Hanoi originally published in L’Express is appropriated by Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin.

Afterwards our discussion of the film will be informed by a discussion of a text that was written in response to it, Naomi Pearce’s Letter to Jane (After Godard and Gorin). It can be accessed at the link below in order to be read beforehand:

http://cargocollective.com/workout/LETTER-TO-JANE-AFTER-GODARD-AND-GORIN

Continuing our consideration of the conditions of collective dialogue from the Milan Women’s Bookstore collective to the sonic meditations of Pauline Oliveros, Pearce moves from Godard and Gorin’s deconstruction of Fonda’s image body to body image: Jane Fonda’s Workout as a form of consciousness raising.

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Friday 30 May 2014, Toronto – If I Can’t Dance Appropriation and Dedication #9
Maïder Fortuné, Annie MacDonell and Jacob Korczynski
Toronto Reference Library, 789 Yonge Street, Toronto, 3rd floor gathering in the Hinton Learning Theatre..

Join Maïder Fortuné and Annie MacDonell for a discussion of both Frances Stark’s text The Architect & the Housewife and Annie’s project Pictures Become Objects, Objects Become Events for the Contact Festival. The text can be accessed directly from Frances Stark’s website here: http://www.francesstark.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/1999-Architect_and_the_Housewife.pdf.

Held in conjunction with Annie MacDonell’s Contact Festival project Pictures Become Objects, Objects Become Events.

Maïder and Annie present a collaborative performance at the the library the following day, on Saturday, May 31 at 4:00 pm.

Further sessions will be announced ongoing.

If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want to Be Part of Your Revolution www.ificantdance.org is an itinerant group dedicated to exploring the evolution and typology of performance and performativity in contemporary art. Initiated in 2005 by curators Frederique Bergholtz, Annie Fletcher and Tanja Elstgeest they work from a spirit of open questioning and long term enquiry with artists, through long-term collaborations with artists, researchers and partner organizations, that take form in two-year editions of commissioned productions that develop over time and are presented at different institutions in the Netherlands and abroad.

This spring, If I Can’t Dance is launching Edition V, which explores the dynamic between appropriation/dedication. What is the economic and cultural relationship proposed or produced through acts of appropriation/dedication? Does appropriation suggest subversion or simply antagonism? Is dedication necessarily memorialization?

If I Can’t Dance defines its way of working as ‘contemplation, interrupted by action’, a quote borrowed from artist Hanne Darboven. As in previous editions on feminism (2006-2008), masquerade (2008-2010), and affect (2010-2012) the questions surrounding appropriation/dedication will be an ongoing process of research-of ‘contemplation’-segmented by moments of presentations at the subsequent venues enabling public exchange – opportunities for ‘action’.

One of the primary platforms for contemplation is the reading group organized by If I Can’t Dance in conjunction with each edition. For the second time, it will have parallel reading groups outside of The Netherlands that will take place in Toronto and Sao Paulo from March 2013 to autumn 2014.

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If I Can't Dance, I Don't Want to be Part of Your Revolution.

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