When: Tuesday, May 31, 2022, 6:00 PM - 7:00 PMWhere: Zoom/ Lecture Theatre, Centre For Commercial Law Studies, 67-69 Lincoln's Inn Fields, London WC2A 3JB
For the first event in the Art, Business and Law LLM newly established Artists Talks Series, our audience joined us for an evening conversation between artist Ben Kinmont and writer Mary Rinebold, with an introduction from Dr Debbie De Girolamo.
For the last three decades artist Ben Kinmont has radically reconsidered the situations where art can take place with actions ranging from dishwashing in a museum restaurant, to receiving strangers at his home, or asking passers-by on the street about the possibility of considering a casual conversation a form of art.
The conversation revisited Kinmont’s Towards a definition of project art and Ethical considerations in project art practices, two treaties developed during his workshops with students. These both operate as pedagogical exercises and invitations to reconsider the space between the artist and the viewer in what Kinmont calls “The Third Sculpture.”
The discussion at Queen Mary centred on Kinmont’s archival boxes, each of which contains all the pertinent documentation of one of Kinmont’s actions. These reposition the collector as an archivist who becomes responsible for updating the contents, in effect continuing the work of the artist and the gallerist. As a practical example, a new edition of Kinmont’s landmark publication produced for this occasion: Promised Relations; or, thoughts on a few artists’ contracts, a decade-long exploration of the legal and artistic role of an artist's contract. The edition produced for this conversation at Queen Mary will then be added to Kinmont’s archive in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, thus shifting the position of the audience as participants in an ongoing, discursive work of art. There will also be a limited number of copies available for those attending this event in person.
Welcome: Dr Debbie De Girolamo (CCLS)
5.45pm Registration
6.00pm – 7pm Lecture with Q & A following
Ben Kinmont is an artist, publisher, and antiquarian bookseller living in Sebastopol, California. His work is concerned with the value structures surrounding an art practice and what happens when that practice is displaced into a non-art space through actions that attempt to establish a direct, personal relationship between the artist and the viewer, using the work as a mediator. If art is supposed to be an agency of intellectual and emotional challenge, then the artist concludes that the audience should also be addressed beyond the institutional frame of the gallery and the museum, and this contact should be more direct. Kinmont also earns his living with an antiquarian bookselling business about food, wine and domestic economy, considering this activity as a sculpture entitled Sometimes a nicer sculpture is to be able to provide a living for your family, (1988- present).
Read more about Ben Kinmont on: benkinmont.com, Antinomian Press, and kinmont.com