Anarchic gestures in America do not do well. They tend to refute the official optimism born of hope.
—Brian O’Doherty, Inside the White Cube.
Dean Inkster and Pierre Bal Blanc present and discuss the work of the North American artist Christopher D’Arcangelo (1955–1979): “In 1975, D’Arcangelo undertook a series of unauthorized actions in New York’s major museums. The anarchist statement that accompanied them as well as all of D’Arcangelo’s subsequent interventions until his untimely death breached a long-standing taboo of anarchism as a legitimate political belief and doctrine, reiterated in anarchism’s popular re-emergence with the advent of punk.”
The discussion broaches, among other things, D’Arcangelo’s self-proclaimed anarchism (from the mid-1970s, New York) in the contemporary context and ecology of Exarchia. Exarchia is considered as symbol of resistance and home of anarchist and anti-fascist groups. In fact, it has been the center of political struggles and self-organisation since 1901 which escalated in 1973 to the student uprising against military dictatorship.
The event includes the screening of two video interviews, with art historian Benjamin Buchloh and artist Stephen Antonakos and Naomi Spector Antonakos, part of a series of interviews conducted from 2006-2010 by Dean Inkster & Sébastien Pluot, intended as an oral history of Christopher D’Arcangelo’s practice and legacy. (Coproduction Solang production Paris Brussels, Centro Cultural Montehermoso Kulturunea Vitoria-Gasteiz and Centre d’art contemporain de Brétigny - CAC Brétigny).
Pierre Bal-Blanc is a French Curator based in Athens and Paris. He was the director of the Contemporary Arts Center in Bretigny, Paris. Bal-Blanc’s curatorial work mostly serves to “de-gentrify” the philosophical works of Pierre Klossowski (whose drawings he has also collected in ‘The Death of the Audience, 2010) , and by extension, the curatorial works of Bal-Blanc, focus on paradoxes of perversion and transgression, living and object, via industrialization and processes of production. He currently works as curator of documenta 14.
Dean Inkster teaches art history and theory at the Ecole Supérieure d’Art et Design Grenoble Valence in the south of France. He is the co-curator, with Pierre Bal-Blanc and Sébastien Pluot, of the exhibition Anarchism Without Adjectives: On the Work of Christopher D’Arcangelo (1975-1979) (2011), which opened at the CAC Brétigny in France in (2011), before traveling internationally. He is currently co-editing, with Katia Schneller, Art, Theory, and Critical Pedagogy: The Legacy of Craig Owens, which will be published in 2018 by [SIC].
