A presentation by
Sotirios Bahtetzis

When: Monday, November 12, 15:00-15:50

Where: Faculty Lounge

Organized by: Faculty Research Seminars 2018-19 Series 

Abstract

I will focus on abstract painting of high modernism (that is, images associated with so-called Post Painterly Abstraction) and the theoretical discourse around them (the work of art critic Clement Greenberg). I will do so to prove that the difficulty that the general public had in Greenberg’s time and still has with abstract art should be seen as a difficulty in acknowledging and embracing a novel, late modernist concept of selfhood. My methodology draws on semiology and specifically on the deployment of speech act theory in visual studies. I use these tools to address the peculiarities of pictorial communication.

Sotirios Bahtsetzis is a curator, essayist, and educator. He is currently Assistant Professor in History of Art at the Frances Rich School of Fine and Performing Arts and in the International Honors Program (IHP) of the Deree – The American College of Greece, Athens (GR). His undergraduate and postgraduate training was carried out at the Technical University in Berlin (D). He holds a PhD with honors on Art History (History of Installation Art) with scholarships of the Berlin Fund for Graduates (NaFöG) and the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). He was a Fulbright Research Scholar at Columbia University in New York (USA). Bahtsetzis research interests include Installation Art, Theory of Curating, Socially Engaged Art, Image Theory-Epistemologies of Vision, Media Phenomenology, Immaterial Economy-Economies of Attention, and Posthumanism. Bahtsetzis has chapters in various books including Meta- and Inter-Images in Contemporary Visual Art and Culture (Leuven University Press, 2013), Kinematographische Räume in Film und Kunst (Fink, 2012) and Inaesthetics (Merve, 2012) as well as articles in journals such as E-flux and Afterimage. Bahtsetzis writes essays accompanying group and one-man exhibitions. He is a member of the IKT (International Association of Curators of Contemporary Art), AICA (International Art Critics Association), the AAMC (Association of Art Museum Curators) among other professional bodies.