« Radio Spezial » A Beautiful Thing
During the final days of In Transit 09, The Resistance of the Object, Andre Lepecki and Fred Moten hid out in the Hausradio studio to discuss different approaches to peformance art work. Moten, a former professor of Lepecki, partly inspired the festival theme in his book In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition, with an essay on the work of Adrian Piper (who also participated in the In Transit festival).
Lepecki and Moten discuss beauty and aesthetics in performance work, poetry and that magic stuff that goes into it. While the focus is on works performed during the festival, they also take up the past and carry on discussions from the festival’s lab, ethics and invisibilty, actions that are meaningful. The discussion spans William Carlos Williams, Sankai Juko, Maria Jose Arjona, and the contemporary role of performance in art. It is a beautiful discussion.
Andre Lepecki is a dramaturge, author, artist and curator of In Transit 09, The Resistance of the Object. He is the author ‘Exhausting Dance‘ (Option Tanz) and one of the leading theoreticians who view performance as a political act in the field of tensions of post-structuralism, anthropology and post-colonialism. Fred Moten works at the intersection of black studies, performance studies, poetry and critical theory. He is author of Arkansas (Pressed Wafer Press, 2000), In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (University of Minnesota Press, 2003), I ran from it but was still in it. (Cusp Press, 2007), Hughson’s Tavern (Leon Works, 2008) and of two forthcoming books, B Jenkins (Duke University Press, 2010) and Open Secret: Essays in Stolen Life (University of Minnesota Press, 2010).