Taking our current Jasper Johns exhibition as a starting point, this discussion explores the question of how we view and interpret art more widely. Where a work of art has a narrative, would our experience of it be enhanced by having more knowledge, or are our senses enough? Where art is explained, who is the author of that interpretation and how are they directing us in how we view art? Is it the role of the artist to explain their work?

Our panel:
Cathie Pilkington, artist
Gill Hart, Head of Education at the National Gallery
Kirsteen McSwein, Curator, Interpretation at Tate
(chair) Dr David Dibosa, reader in Museology at UAL

How much context and knowledge do you need to enjoy art?

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Wolfgang Tillmans RA (b.1968) is regarded as one of the most influential figures working within photography today. In 2000, he was the first non-British artist to receive the Turner Prize. Since the
early 1990s Tillmans has been challenging the potentiality of making pictures. His work has epitomized a new kind of subjectivity in photography, pairing intimacy and playfulness with social
critique and the persistent questioning of existing values and hierarchies. Through his seamless integration of genres, subjects, techniques, and exhibition strategies, he has expanded conventional
ways of approaching the medium, and his practice continues to address the fundamental question of what it means to create pictures in an increasingly image-saturated world.

Wolfgang Tillmans Studio Visit Q&A, Monday 25th January 2021

Marie de Brugerolle is an art historian, curator and author. She has worked in many institutions at Mnam-Pompidou center, the MoMA in New York, the CNAC-Magasin in Grenoble, France, Carré d’art
Nîmes. Her work focuses on the history of performance art, from the 1960s to its current state of dematerialization and absorption by the society of the spectacle. This complements her theoretical project, Post Performance Future. She is the leading authority on the French-born Californian artist Guy de Cointet and has been instrumental in introducing Californian art to Europe (first retrospectives
of Allen Ruppersberg (1996), Guy de Cointet (2004) John Baldessari (2005), and Larry Bell (2010).

Marie de Brugerolle’s Lecture, 15th June 2020

Eventually Dust: On the Particulars of the Present as Seen Through Its Devices': visual culture and the idea of the end of history, the emergence of the device, the antipathy of the device to dust.

Esther Leslie (b.1964) is a lecturer in English and Humanities at Birkbeck and Co-Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities. Her research interests are Marxist theories of aesthetics and culture and critical theory, with a particular focus on the work of Walter Benjamin and TheodorAdorno.

Frank B Wilderson III’s lecture, 25th October 2021

Eventually Dust: On the Particulars of the Present as Seen Through Its Devices': visual culture and
the idea of the end of history, the emergence of the device, the antipathy of the device to dust.
Esther Leslie (b.1964) is a lecturer in English and Humanities at Birkbeck and Co-Director of the
Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities. Her research interests are Marxist theories of aesthetics and
culture and critical theory, with a particular focus on the work of Walter Benjamin and Theodor
Adorno.

Esther Leslie’s lecture ‘Eventually Dust’ 4th May 2020

Charlie Fox (b. 1991) is a London based writer and curator.
Curator of My Head is a Haunted House, Sadie Coles HQ 5 June - 31 August 2019
‘When I was a weird little kid in suburbia obsessed with horror of all kinds, my grandfather (who isn't
alive anymore) built me a haunted house. I could pretend I was a ghost or a bat or a werewolf crying
blood over a cardboard tombstone. It was a make-believe world where my imagination could get
deranged and it was magic. My Head is a Haunted House grew out of that hallucinogenic memory
and its psychic hold on me.’

How much context and knowledge do you need to enjoy art?

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