ARTIST TALK//////HEATH BUNTING AT UNIVERSITY OF KENT
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Panel Discussion
Date: Friday, the 15th of March 2019
Time: 11 - 12 AM - Art, Law and Politics seminar
4 - 5.45 PM - Studio3 Gallery
School of Arts (public event, all welcome)
Jarman Building
University of Kent
Canterbury, CT2 7UG
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School of Arts, Kent Law School, together with Centre for Critical Thought & Studio3 Gallery warmly invite staff and students to two collaborative events with artist Heath Bunting (1966, UK). This joint venture was initiated by Mihaela Varzari, Phd candidate in History of Art/independent curator and Connal Parsley, senior lecturer in Law.
http://www.irational.org/_readme.html Heath Bunting, Own, Be Owned, or Remain Invisible, (1998)
Heath Bunting’s international artistic career, spanning over 30 years, has roots in local political and social activism in Bristol with a strong focus on anarchism. The emergence of the internet in the mid 90’s in UK, perceived by Bunting as a social revolution, allowed him to immediately embrace it as an artistic medium, as well as a tool for social change. Street art, sports, permaculture, information sharing via networks, or forest trips, to mention only a few, become artistic ways of representation. Considered a pioneer of net.art, Bunting’s work is also associated with the second wave of institutional critique, known for challenging via networks and exhibitions available only on-line, the hyper commodification of art markets in the West. As politics and the nature of the internet have changed, so does Bunting’s questions and interests. His strong interest in recent legislation, commerce and systems of control, as seen in Status Project (2008), renders his work difficult to categorize, but nevertheless richly informative for students of history of art and law.
Each presentation will be followed by discussion with Connal Parsley and Mihaela Varzari, chaired by Dr Michael Newall, senior lecturer in History and Philosophy of Art, for the School of Arts event.
BIO
Heath Bunting was born a Buddhist in Wood Green, London, UK and is able to make himself laugh. (currently, reduced to only smile). He is a co-founder of both net.art and sport-art movements and is banned for life from entering the USA for his anti genetic work. His self taught and authentically independent work is direct and uncomplicated and has never been awarded a prize. He is both Britain's most important practising artist and The World's most famous computer artist. He aspires to be a skillful member of the public and is producing an expert system for identity mutation. At 01:42 on 31/12/2011 at his home in Bristol, he invented web 3.0 and is offering it for sale for 100 million dollars.
BIO
Connal Parsley is a Senior Lecturer in Kent Law School, and Deputy Director of the University of Kent’s Centre for Critical Thought. His research concerns the intersection of law, political thought and visual culture. Connal is the convenor of the CCT seminar series “Art, Law and Politics”, as well as an undergraduate module by the same name.
BIO
Mihaela Varzari is a PhD in History of Art at University of Kent. She has previously studied at Birkbeck and Goldsmith College between 2009-15. She is an independent curator who has worked with artists like Liliana Basarab (Ro), Ziad Antar (Lb), Heath Bunting (UK) and her recently curated solo exhibition IN IN THE THE FUTURE FUTURE featured works by Kristin Wenzel (Ger/Ro) at electroputere Gallery. In 2008 she has started publishing art criticism texts for Revista ARTA (Ro), thisistomorrow (UK), IDEA arts+society (Ro) etc.
BIO
Michael Newall is Director of the Aesthetics Research Centre at the University of Kent. He is author of A Philosophy of the Art School (Routledge, 2019), What is a Picture? Depiction, Realism, Abstraction (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), and many articles on art and aesthetics. Before entering academia, he trained as a visual artist, and worked as a critic and curator.
INTRO BY MIHAELA VARZARI
Like a pebble in one’s shoe or a spike at one’s buttonhole, or what would be a good way to start talking about someone’s life coded and inscribed through art practice. It requires the help of an experienced fiction writer. The writer Herta Muller says in her essays that literature did not give her one good sentence, and as far as she is concerned LESEN(to read) and LEBEN(to live) could be easily swappable as only one letter differentiate them. The same rule applies to SCHREIEN (to scream) and SCHREIBEN (to write), she continues.
I won’t repeat what I wrote on the newsletter and just add that there is a transition in Heath’s work from the time when he was part of a generation of net artists, mainly from Europe to his interest in identity or ecology related issues. It's known that online is always about off line but it would be good to hear it from him. We might hear from him about how more recently he lived in a forest for 9 months without computers and how it relates to his practice. I m sure you are all jealous of anyone who spent so much time in the woods away from screens, daily admin and emails. Heath is also known as a net artist who can spend long hours researching small print administrative language, legislation and finds pleasure in reading over and over again his council tax bill….. because it puts him face to face to a system of power.
I am not suggesting necessarily a repressive system of power even thou that’s quite possible. Power, like law can be both restrictive and generative. Heath is not interested in an empty ‘No’ – as form of refusal - to structures of power, but in questioning them in relation to his own subjectivity, as well as making them perhaps stronger and more ethical, as well as more self reflective. A ‘No; to something needs to come with a different vision, one that takes into consideration a variety of factors, some of them contradictory and paradoxical.
