THINKING CONTEMPORARY ART is the archive of video recordings and texts from the public lecture series dedicated to the issues of contemporary art history and theory I have been organising in Vilnius since 2013. It is conceived as an internet-based hub for thinking and talking about a phenomenon of contemporary art produced by the characteristic social, political, economic and scientific transformations of the 20th century and contains a multitude of different artistic practices and world-views. According to art historian Carrie Lambert-Beatty, art history and theory as a “belated” discipline is a means to slow down this rushing heterogeneous global system a.k.a. contemporary art, and to open it up to a critical eye and thought. The raison d’être of the lecture series, texts and now this website is an attempt to outline the aesthetic, political, social and economic facets of contemporary art, i.e. to formulate what could be called contemporary art theory (or theories). Freely accesible to public and, hopefully, increasing in the future on the basis of upcoming lectures, this archive of the major ideas and texts (translated to Lithuanian for the first time) by art historians, curators, and philosophers from around the world, is believed to become a place for thinking and talking about the issues of production, distribution and reception of contemporary art, and thus contribute to the formation of a specialized discourse on contemporary art in Lithuania.
At the moment the archive contains the material from the two lecture series (2013-2014): lectures and texts by Alexander Alberro, Armen Avanessian, David Joselit, Dieter Roelstraete, Michael Sanchez and Terry Smith. The initial series took place at Vilnius Academy of Arts in 2013 and aimed to highlight tendencies of realism in contemporary art practices as well as to reflect on the theoretical approaches reviving the concept of realism. The second lecture series in 2014 took place at the National Gallery of Art and the Contemporary Art Centre’s Reading Room and was devoted to the question of how the contemporary art practice and its spectator change in the face of a contemporaneity saturated with technological and geopolitical turmoils.
Inesa Pavlovskaitė-Brašiškė
Vilnius, 2014