will be made manifest at

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO
AND ENVIRONS

Chicago
May 1 - 3, 2009

“Criticality must find forms appropriate to specific situations. Today, we need modes of academic engagement that recognize aspects of the aesthetic that already determine the character of our professional activity. We are not inventing new forms here — we are performing already existing, nameless ones.”

From “Institutional Critique as Institution,”
a theory installation by the Jackson Pollock Bar,
Leeds, UK 2006.

On May Day, at the University of Chicago, the second conference/event will serve as a self-dismantling of the first conference by the initial conference’s participants — joined by a larger group. By devoting an “analytical” conference/event to the reproduction and discussion of the initial “aesthetic” conference/event, we hope to begin producing in Chicago a new kind of contemporary art spectator — a person who might be described as “a specialist in our collective loss of specialization.”