09. – 11.12.2024 | Screening, talk and workshop
Ken Okiishi: Screening, Talk, Workshop
Screening
3 films by Ken Okiishi: Vital Behaviors (2019); Telly & Casper (2000); Death and the College Student (1999)
Talk
In conjunction with the recent Warhol retrospective at The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, The Whitney organized a conference on Warhol's work through the lens of the 1970s and 80s. Okiishi participated in this conference with a new reading of Warhol's interventions into the "American socialite class, proto-genderqueer subjectivities and the authoritarian randomness of producing a coherent signification of American identity among different generations of people from immigrant backgrounds," alongside scholars (Buchloh, Ragona, Flatley, Meyer, Phelan, Printz, Mulroney) and other artist's influenced by Warhol's work (Pendleton, Quaytman, Buck). A sharp divide appeared between those who see Warhol as a celebration of queer community (most notably, Jonathan Flatley); those who see Warhol's work as "intervening in the spectacles' totalitarian forms" in a "dialectical negativity that reached further than any artist at that time toward a public annihilation of the apparatuses, by inhabiting all of them by all means at the same time," (Buchloh); and/or those who see Warhol's work as rooted in a working-class immigrant background (de Salvo, and a position taken on subsequently by Netflix).
A different generation, including Okiishi and other artists who also write art criticism, as well as the organizers of the conference (including art historians Alex Kitnik and Megan Heuer), don't see polarities in this field of terms "celebration," "queer," "community," "dialectical negativity," "immigrant," "working-class background"—with neither an "exit" to outmoded (white male) criticality nor a need to blindly celebrate queerness as a set of "values."
Okiishi will deliver an elaborated version of his Warhol lecture on this occasion and discuss with the students, among their individual questions, the conditions of visibility/invisibility and possibilities of transgressivity in complicated contemporary contexts. This is intended both as a possibility to discuss the content and context of the talk as well as how to approach speaking as an artist within scholarly and/or museum contexts.
Workshop
The students will visit the Museum Brandhorst exhibition ANDY WARHOL & KEITH HARING. PARTY OF LIFE with Okiishi, who will lead a critical discussion of its complex propositions, genealogies and implications. A continuation of a discussion of the films of Monday night's screening can happen spontaneously within this context.
Ken Okiishi’s films and media artworks incite poetic fissures and new possibilities in how we form ideas of ourselves and others: from a crumbling space of images of the self, languages and global-city-forms in feedback-loops of translation and migration in (Goodbye to) Manhattan (2010); to the space of childhood in a «homeland» made perpetually «foreign» in A Model Childhood (2018); to a film, Vital Behaviors (2019), which finds an undoing of the suffocating space of social media in a miraculously sensitized re-performance. His work is currently on view in The Living End: Painting and Other Technologies, 1970–2020 at the MCA Chicago, Digital Diaries at the Julia Stoschek Foundation, Düsseldorf, and in the permanent collection display of The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Okiishi’s writing has appeared in Artforum, Texte zur Kunst, May, Bidoun, Triple Canopy, The Brooklyn Rail and a book on his work, The Very Quick of the Word, was published by Sternberg Press in 2014. He has taught at Harvard University, Columbia University, Bard College and The Cooper Union.
The screening takes place in cooperation and with the kind support of Kunstverein München.
Screening
09.12.2024 8 pm
Kunstverein München
Galeriestraße 4
80539 München
Talk
10.12.2024 7 pm
Studio Widmann A_02.30