Amanda Beech

Vortrag: “Final Machine”
Am 06. März 2013
Ort: Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin

Vita
Amanda Beech makes artworks, writes and collaborates on curatorial projects. Her research looks to the possibilities of a realist critique in the context of neo-liberal democracy by examining the tenability of a politics in the context of contingency. Her work is a research of art's material and forceful claims both in the architecture of exhibition making and in discrete works, constructing narratives that take in particular biographies, social mythologies, philosophical inquiry and political argument. Operating as a space of seductive power, will and force the work looks to a world that emphasises decisiveness as its guiding principle and that deals with our share in it. She is a member of the steering committee for The Political Currency of Art Research Group and is Dean of Critical Studies at CalArts, California.

Her work in video, drawing, print and sculpture has been exhibited internationally, including solos exhibits: Final Machine, Lanchester Gallery Projects, Coventry, UK and Ha Gamle Prestagard, Stavanger, Norway, 2013, The Church, The Bank, The Art Gallery, Banner Repeater, London, 2012, Sanity Assassin, The Armoury Show, Los Angeles, 2011, and Spike Island Bristol, 2010. Group exhibits include: Urbicide, Venice, Italy, 2012,The Real Thing, Tate Britain, 2010, Predators and Pests, (with Diann Bauer) 2011, LoBe Gallery, Berlin and Greetings Comrades, the Image has Now Changed its Status, Occular Lab, Melbourne, Australia, 2010. Recent writing includes: Realism, Materialism, Art, Sternberg Press, 2013; “An Exercise in Fatality” (an essay on image-power-knowledge in the TV series Columbo),Burnt Wood Stories, Anthony Gross, ed., The Agency Gallery, London, 2011, Transmission: Host (Artwords 2010), “The Friend” (Artwords, 2010) and “Body Count” Parallax Journal, April, 2010 co-authored with Robin Mackay. Recent publishing includes: Final Machine, 2013 Urbanomic Press;Episode, Pleasure and Persuasion in Lens- based Media, Artwords, 2008 and Sanity Assassin, 2010 Urbanomic Press. She regularly speaks at conferences and symposia including a keynote at Exhibiting Video, Westminster University, London 2012, Object Oriented Thinking, The Royal Geological Society, London 2012, and the CAA and AHH conferences.

Vortrag “Final Machine”
ABSTRACT: Amanda will speak about her recent video work “Final Machine” (2013); a three channel video installation (45mins). The work continues Beech’s examination into the nexus of art, politics and morality and interrogates the realist status of the image and the contract this holds with systems of power. Beech uses Louis Althusser’s lecture series ‘The Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists’ (1968), to predicate a politics that is recalcitrant to ideological systems. The work questions how it is possible to engage art as a site of realism, free from our unswerving faith in modes of critique that have now become our bad habit.

The question is how our 'science' can instead be understood with the image, that is, without transcendence, idealism, or vitalism; and without the predilection to condemn the image as a representationalist problem guides this talk. Such questions demand a re-thinking of both aesthetics and philosophy, of the thought that thinks both, and the implications of concept as connected to the operations of image-force.