‘Three Uses of the Knife’ is a series of bi-weekly meetings with experienced writers, editors, critics and thinkers. It is aimed at young writers at the beginning of their careers, young editorial initiatives, artists interested in writing and publishing, as well as for the speakers, who were invited to revisit the genres, forms, functions and strategies of contemporary art writing and criticism. The title of the series is borrowed from David Mamet’s book Three Uses of the Knife: On the Nature and Purpose of Drama.

The four meetings will take place every second Friday in October and November 2009 at the CAC or the Auditorium of the National Gallery.

DAY 1
Friday 9 October, CAC Reading Room
Talking pragmatics of writing and publishing with Simon Rees & Ellie Levenson. Registration strictly required.

DAY 2
Friday 23 October, Auditorium of the National Gallery
Discussing art criticism with Jan Verwoert, Vivian Rehberg and Anders Kreuger.

DAY 3
Friday 6 November, CAC Reading Room
Case studies and exercise with Will Holder, Jalal Toufic and Maria Fusco.

DAY 4
Friday 20 November, Auditorium of the National Gallery
Studies of and propositions for art criticism in Lithuania with Alfonsas Andriuškevičius, Gintautas Mažeikis, Arturas Tereškinas and Audronė Žukauskaitė.

Workshops are free of charge. Every day except Day 4 will be spoken in English. Only Day 1 requires strict registration, but please register even if you only plan to attend the seminar on one of the other days. It will help us to know what we can expect & organise the event a bit better. Please find the registration form at www.3-uses-of-the-knife.lt/en

Brief biographies of the speakers:

Ellie Levenson (b. 1978 in UK) is a freelance journalist and author in the United Kingdom. Ellie studied English Literature at Manchester University from 1996-99 and took a Postgraduate Diploma in Periodical Journalism at City University from 2000-01. She has written for The Guardian and New Statesman among others and is an occasional columnist for The Independent. She lectures at Goldsmiths College, University of London, and on the London Programme of Syracuse University. Her book The Noughtie Girl’s Guide to Feminism was published in 2009.

Simon Rees (b. 1972 in New Zealand) was educated in Australia and New Zealand. He is a curator at the Contemporary Art Centre (CAC), Vilnius and co-editor of the journal CAC INTERVIU: the quarterly conversation about art. Rees has written for titles as diverse as New Zealand Herald, Auckland Metro Magazine, art & text, Flash Art, Frieze, artUS, Gourmet & Traveller, Australian Vogue Entertaining, Art Asia Pacific, the Sydney Morning Herald, Sculpture, Vogue Casa, and Wine Estate.

Jan Verwoert (b. 1972 in the Netherlands) – is an art critic based in Berlin. He was a tutor and leader of the Imagined Communities seminar at Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam.
He is a contributing editor to Frieze magazine and also writes regularly about contemporary art for such art magazines as Afterall, Metropolis M, Springerin and artists’ catalogues. He is author of Bas Jan Ader: In Search of the Miraculous (One Work), (MIT Press/Afterall Books, 2006). He was member of the Advisory Board of the Munich Kunstverein and has been guest Professor of Contemporary Art and Theory at the Academy of Umeå, Sweden, and the Royal College of Art, London. He has also actively contributed to unitednationsplaza, an exhibition as school project started by Anton Vidokle in the city of Berlin, following the cancellation of Manifesta 6 (2006/2007).

Anders Kreuger (b. 1965 in Sweden) is a curator and writer. He has been Director of the Malmö Art Academy since 2007, Exhibitions Curator at Lunds konsthall since 2006 and member of the Programme Team for the European Kunsthalle in Cologne since 2007. Anders Kreuger has published numerous articles and catalogue essays and is a member of the Editorial Board for the art journal A Prior in Ghent, Belgium. He is also the founder, together with the artist Praneet Soi, of Calcutta Art Research, an initiative aiming at researching the great city of Kolkata/Calcutta through contemporary art practice. He curated the exhibition ‘Self Esteem: Lithuanian Art’01’ at the CAC in 2001 and will co-curate the upcoming Vilnius Painting Triennial in 2010.

Vivian Rehberg is a Paris based art historian and critic. She obtained her PhD in art history from Northwestern University in 2000 and was a curator of contemporary art at ARC/Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris and for the City of Paris Department of Cultural Affairs from 2001 to 2004. She is currently Chair of Critical Studies at Parsons Paris School of Art + Design and the events editor for Journal of Visual Culture, which she co-founded in 2001. Rehberg publishes widely on contemporary art in exhibition catalogues and such magazines as Frieze, Artforum.com, Modern Painters, Art in America.

Will Holder‘s (b. 1969 in UK) preoccupation lies within scripting and documenting the relationship between language production (in particular the three-dimensionality of speech and conversation) and the production of objects as symbols of exchange. Will Holder is editor of F.R.DAVID, de Appel’s journal concerned with reading and writing in the arts. He is currently rewriting William Morris’ News from Nowhere (An epoch of rest) (1876) into a guide for design education and practice set in 2135.

Jalal Toufic (b. 1962 in Lebanon) is a thinker and a mortal to death. He is the author of Distracted (1991; 2nd ed., 2003), (Vampires): An Uneasy Essay on the Undead in Film (1993; 2nd ed., 2003), Over-Sensitivity (1996; 2nd ed., 2009), Forthcoming (2000), Undying Love, or Love Dies (2002), Two or Three Things I’m Dying to Tell You (2005), Âshûrâ’: This Blood Spilled in My Veins (2005), and Undeserving Lebanon (2007). Several of his books are available for download at his website: c. He currently teaches at Kadir Has University in Istanbul.

Maria Fusco (b. 1972 in Northern Ireland) is a writer, editor and academic. She contributes to a broad range of international publications, such as dot dot dot, Art Monthly, Circa, Frieze, i-D, is Director of Art Writing at Goldsmiths (University of London), and is the founder/editor of The Happy Hypocrite, a journal for and about experimental art writing. In 2008-9, she was the Critic-in-Residence at Kadist Art Foundation, Paris and is the inaugural Writer-in-Residence at Whitechapel Gallery, London.

Audronė Žukauskaitė has a PhD in the Humanities (philosophy). She is a senior research fellow at the Culture, Philosophy and Art Institute; a lecturer at the Gender Studies Centre at Vilnius University and the author of the books Beyond the Principle of Significance: Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis and the Criticism of Ideology (2001) and Anamorphosies: Non-fundamental Problems of Philosophy (2005). Her research interests are contemporary philosophy, psychoanalysis, gender studies and visual culture studies. Žukauskaitė has published over forty scientific articles in Lithuanian and international press. She writes to various journals including Art Lies, Art & Research etc.

Artūras Tereškinas (b. 1965 in Telšiai) received his PhD. in history at Harvard University in 2000. Since 2000, he has been teaching social and cultural theory at the Department of Sociology, Vytautas Magnus University, Kaunas, Lithuania. He is also an Associate Professor at Gender Studies Center, Vilnius University. He is the author of Bodily Signs: Sexuality, Identity and Space in Lithuanian Culture (2001) and Imperfect Communities: Identity, Discourse and Nation in the Seventeenth-Century Grand Duchy of Lithuania (2005) and the editor of Public Lives, Intimate Places: Body, Publicity, and Fantasy in Contemporary Lithuania (2002) and Men and Fatherhood: New Forms of Masculinity in Europe (2005, with Jolanta Reingardienė). He has written widely on the issues of gender, sexuality and popular culture.

Gintautas Mažeikis (b. 1964 in Russia, Vorkuta) – PhD, Prof. in Philosophy. He was a head of Department of Philosophy and Head of Centre of Cultural Anthropology at Šiauliai University. He is currently a head of Social and Political Theory department in Vytautas Magnum University in Kaunas. Mažeikis has developed interdisciplinary approach to art criticism, one of the fields of his research among many – including criticism of symbolic and metaphoric modes of thought, theories of propaganda, history of Renaissance and occult philosophy, city, and post- and non-institutional forms of art. He’s the author of Pragmatics and Analytics of Philosophical Anthropology (2005), Margins: Webs of Thoughts (1999) and Symbolic Thinking of The Renaissance (1998).

Alfonsas Andriuškevičius (b. 1940 in Vilkaviškis) is a poet, essayist and art critic. He graduated from Vilnius University in 1965 and defended his doctoral dissertation in 1973. He worked at the Institute of Philosophy, Sociology and Law and is currently a docent at the Vilnius Art Academy. He published four collections of poetry and a collection of essays and received the Lithuanian National Prize in 2007 for Writing with Smoke (2004) and Lithuanian Art 1975-1995 (1997). He is also the editor of a collection of interviews 72 Lithuanian Artists about Art (1998) and a compilation of articles Lithuanian Art: 1996-2005 (2006).

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The project received support from The Culture Support Fund and The Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Lithuania.

Organisers: artnews.lt, Contemporary Art Centre (CAC), Information Centre of the Lithuanian National Gallery (IC NGA).