Art as a Propositional Material
Lecture by Amanda Beech, organized by the studio for Art and Time | Media.
This talk will focus on a set of video art projects dealing with the question of agency and power. Most specifically, we will look at how the fictions that art and popular culture produce have produced conventions and norms that form our view of society for better and for worse. Debating knowledge, conspiracy, post-truth conditions and the force of the implacable images, this presentation will address how the construction of a method or approach to developing works from studio to public manifestation translates to a politics for art.
Amanda Beech is an artist and writer. Her work entangles narratives of power, cause and contingency from philosophical theory, science, literature and real political events. Here the material conditions of thought, myth and fiction that seem necessary for an account of human agency are explored as forms of ideological and rhetorical force. In video, painting, print and sculpture her work proposes art as a form of intelligence and power beyond the ideals of capitalism and the limits that art has set for itself by means of its critiques.
She has exhibited widely in various Biennales and has written texts for anthologies and museum catalogues. She has edited numerous books including being the contributing editor of Construction Site for Possible Worlds, 2019, Urbanomic/MIT Press and Cold War, Cold World, Urbanomic, 2015. Her recent work includes an essay on Jean Francois Lyotard’s exhibition Les Immateriaux for Beyond Matter, ZKM, Karlsruhe, and a solo show at Twelve Ten Gallery, Chicago. Recent talks include Map of the Bomb, as part of her role as visiting professor at Aalto University Finland and The Question of Realism, for Vienna University of the Angerwandte as part of her role as Visiting Professor at the Vienna Akademie of Art. Forthcoming work includes a new book on art, aesthetics and philosophy; The Intolerable Image, from MIT.