15-18 June, Wysing Retreat

Wysing Arts Centre, Eastside Projects, New Contemporaries, S1 Artspace, Spike Island and Studio Voltaire, have together developed The Syllabus; a new programme that will support ten artists across one year.

The artists who have been selected for The Syllabus 2015/16 are Simon Bayliss, Noel Clueit, Susie Green, Mathew Parkin, Rory Pilgrim, Jessica Sarah Rinland, Tom Salt, Lucy Steggals, Tom Varley and Rafal Zajko. Wysing's retreat is the first in this year-long programme and has been devised by Andy Holden. It will explore what it means to be an artist, taking in:

Day 1

Kant After the Internet - This session will take as its starting point De Duve’s essay, Kant after Duchamp, in which he discusses art after the proposition that ‘everyone is an artist’.

What is an Artist? - Artist Richard Wentworth will make a 45 minute presentation followed by questions, discussion and time to reflect.

Artists Teaching Artists - We will look at a collection of artists’ writing in which advice and guidance is given, with particular focus on writing by Paul Thek, John Cage, and Virginia Woolf.

Day 2

Reading Group and discussion of Ben Lerner’s novel, 10:04

Updates from some of the programme partners on future sessions.

Field Trip to Museum of Classical Archaeology, Cambridge - A trip to a museum in Cambridge that contains one of the largest collection of Greek and Roman Sculpture in the world. We’ll undertake a variety of drawing exercises amongst the 600 plaster casts of great works that are disseminated all over the Europe but that are all gathered together here in replica.

Public Event - Andy Holden performance: Laws of Motion in a Cartoon Landscape. Full details here.

Day 3

A full day of participant crit sessions.

Day 4

New Ideas About Objects - A short introduction to current developments in thinking about materialism and the nature of the object. This will provide an introduction to some of the ideas currently being explored in Speculative Realist Philosophy and Object Oriented Ontology, with particular focus on The Quadruple Object by Graham Harman and Vibrant Matter by Jane Bennett, new writing on materialist philosophy and politics, including Neo Materialism by Joshua Simon, and ideas around collaboration and ‘making’ as explored in The Craftsman by Richard Sennett.  A brief historical contextualisation will be provided through a reading of We Have Never Been Modern by Bruno Latour.

Updates from some of the programme partners on future sessions and planning sessions for individual mentoring.

Please not that we have selected the participants for this year's The Syllabus programme.

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