Research seminar with Prof. Amelia Jones (Robert A. Day Professor and Vice Dean of Academics and Research in Roski School of Art & Design, University of Southern California)

Video to be pre-recorded and available on The University of Manchester Portal. Q&A 21 April 2021, 5.15 pm on Zoom: https://zoom.us/j/97129126024

Relationality and Performance: A Critical Genealogy

How can relationality be viewed as both a deeply structuring ethos of post-war Euro-American culture and a radical strategy for performance artists? This paper looks at explicitly relational performance art works by artists such as Yoko Ono, VALIE EXPORT, Adrian Piper, and Nao Bustamante, in relation to a critical genealogy of discourses around relationality, queer, feminist, and ethnic identifications and politics, and performativity in the post-war period.

About the speaker:

Amelia Jones is Robert A. Day Professor and Vice Dean of Academics and Research in Roski School of Art & Design, USC. Recent publications include Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identification and the Visual Arts (2012); Otherwise: Imagining Queer Feminist Art Histories, co-edited with Erin Silver (2016); the catalogue Queer Communion: Ron Athey (2020), co-edited with Andy Campbell, and which accompanies a retrospective of Athey’s work at Participant Inc. (New York) and ICA (Los Angeles), has just been listed among “Best Art Books 2020” in the New York Times. Her book entitled In Between Subjects: A Critical Genealogy of Queer Performance is published in 2021 by Routledge Press.

Photo credit: Lygia Clark, The I and the You: Cloth-Body-Cloth, 1967; photo documenting relational outfit (detail)