From Would You Like to Participate in an Artistic Experience? to the Collective-Conversations: Some Comments on Collaborative Projects
“What is a collective body?” How are “contact, contamination, memory, and repetition” part of contemporary art? In this talk, Ricardo Basbaum will address these central questions to his practice and his more than 30 years of work in developing collaborative projects. These projects involve participants around propositions, experiences, performative actions, and collaborative authorship. Usually grounded on group dynamics, Basbaum’s projects articulate references that range from Brazilian Neoconcretism and conceptual art to performance and contemporary music. Basbaum will also discuss four of his main pieces—which will be part of his residency at the University of Illinois:
1. “Would you like to participate in an artistic experience?”: a proposition that works with the NBP (new basis of personality object) and has been circulating worldwide since 1994.
2. “Collective Conversations”: a collaborative statement of multiple local voices.
3. “Diagrams”: devices that emphasize the tense relation between visuality and discourse, in dialogue with contemporary art’s transdisciplinary field.
4. “Me-You Choreographies, Games, and Exercises”: a proposition around group dynamics and related developments.
This talk is the inaugural event of Ricardo Basbaum’s hybrid art residence at the University of Illinois as part of the project “On-Contamination: An Extended Space for Sustaining Encounters through Art.”
Artist, writer, and teacher Ricardo Basbaum (São Paulo, 1961) investigates art as an intermediary device and a platform for integrating sensorial experiences, sociability, and language. Since the late 1980s, he has created a specific vocabulary for his work. This vocabulary manifests itself in different projects as drawings, installations, videos, and urban interventions. Basbaum’s work is held at, among other museums, the Tate Modern Collection in London. He has exhibited at Documenta XII in Kassel, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, São Paulo’s Biennial, and the Secession in Vienna, among other shows. Currently he works as Professor at the Art Department at Federal Fluminense University in Brazil.
Sponsors
George A. Miller Residency, Center for Advanced Study
Lorado Taft Lectureship on Art Fund/College of Fine and Applied Arts
School of Art & Design Visitors Committee
Generous donations by the Humanities Research Institute, the Lemann Center for Brazilian Studies, the Center for Global Studies, and the Department of Dance