WTF is Lecture Performance?
SCHEDULE AND ABSTRACTS NOW AVAILABLE
The lecture, by its very nature, is performative. At first glance it would seem that Lecture Performance is a tautology: an over qualification of an established mode of knowledge delivery that has been employed within the Academy for centuries. Yet Performance in this context is not simply a reiteration, it is in fact an expansion that challenges the lecture form. It demands that the lecture question its performativity through an experimentation with its delivery. By opening up the lecture format to a broad range of speculative modes of information dissemination, the Lecture Performance format can provide new ways of thinking about how knowledge is produced and exchanged within, and even beyond, the university.
Performance is at the core of the visual arts. Performance both structures experience and produces artefacts as a register of the creative act. All creative expression – from painting to musical expression to writing – is in some way a register of the performance of its generation. Being a hybrid of artistic research culture, visual art and performative narrative techniques, the Lecture Performance format can address the status and potential of knowledge production through art.
This one-day symposium event will bring a diverse range of artists and scholars together to explore the lecture as an artistic medium.
Convened by Dr Tessa Laird, Dr Sean Lowry, Dr Kim Donaldson and Dr Mark Shorter of the Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne.
This event has been made possible through the generous support of the Centre of Visual Art (CoVA) at the University of Melbourne and Buxton Contemporary.
Image: Lou Hubbard, Bare, 2019