Talks

Max Glauner

Curatorial Talk
Participate Now! Challenge the Arts

9 March 2018, 6pm
at Helmhaus Limmatquai 31, Zurich

https://vimeo.com/259577462

At the latest since the nomination of the former Tate Modern director Chris Dercon as the new director of the Volksbühne at the Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz in Berlin, the fear of curators has passed to German theaters. While strategies of the visual arts occupy increasingly the field in the theater, performative and participative practices capture museums, galleries, fairs and biennials. But here, too, the fears of producers and the audience are high, the knowledge of performance formats is low, as the artist revue “Il Tiempo del Postino” under the responsibility of Philippe Pareno at the Manchester International Festival in 2007 and at the Art Basel in 2009 made obvious. Do we need a dramaturgic instead of a curatorial hand in this transitional situation? Does the concept of curatorial respectively dramaturgical participation need to be reconsidered?

Participate Now! Challenge the Arts outlines a threefold concept of participation and explores its modi interaction, cooperation and collaboration in order to explain its limitations and transitions by means of examples. What are the underlying differences? What is the difference between interactive entertainment and art event? How do collaborative approaches succeed, why do they fail? In this lecture, the concept of participation is assigned a primarily production-aesthetic role against its receptive-aesthetic reading; this undermines the relationship between producer and recipient, as well as the relationship between work and performance, curator and dramaturgy.

Max Glauner studied Comparative Literature, Religion Sciences, Philosophy and Art History in Paris and Berlin (there Magister Artium 1998 on the concepts of truth in the visual arts by Platon and Philostratus), Lecturer in Cultural History and Urban Design for the Berlin Senate (1987-2001) and Lecturer in German as a Foreign Language at the Goethe-Institut (1998-2005), since 2006 full-time editorial and journalistic activity also as editor of various publications and print media including FAZ-Sonntagszeitung, Tagesspiegel Berlin, Stuttgarter Zeitung, Der Freitag, Artforum, frieze.de, Kunstforum international. Since 1992 dramaturgical consultation and lecture performances among others at the Berliner Podewill, the Deutsches Theater and the Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz. Since 2013 lecturer at the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK). Members of various juries including the Senator for Art and Europe Berlin. Work and research focus is currently on hybrid production and performance formats, the interaction of new media, literature and visual and performative art, as well as participation and collaboration as strategies of the arts, lives and works in Berlin & Zurich.