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SIRIUS Summer School – Brian O’Doherty: Reading Time

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The SIRIUS Summer School examines the relationship between art and politics. The 2023 edition explores the practice of the Irish artist Brian O’Doherty (1928–2022) and the location of SIRIUS. One, Here, Now is the title O’Doherty gave the mural he carried out at SIRIUS in 1996; Cobh is from where he emigrated to the United States in 1957. All of this leads us to consider the art ecosystem’s various affordances and potentialities, and what a visionary, strategic artist such as O’Doherty can offer toward our interventions (through art and/or research) in the world.Led by Christa-Maria Lerm Hayes
Organized by SIRIUSChrista-Maria Lerm Hayes is a scholar, currently Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History at the University of Amsterdam.


INFORMATION

SIRIUS
6 – 10 June; 11am – 5pm
Free
Attendance to all sessions is encouraged but not mandatory
Travel and subsistence costs are covered by participantsRegistration via Eventbrite is essential
https://www.eventbrite.ie/e/sirius-summer-school-brian-odoherty-reading-time-tickets-624310458387
View of Patrick Ireland, aka Brian O’Doherty, HCE Redux, 2004 (remade 2023), SIRIUS, 2023. Paint, cord, table, chair, typed paper. Dimensions variable. Courtesy of The Estate of Brian O’Doherty. Photograph: John Beasley
 
PROGRAMME

6 June
11am  – 1pm: Brian O’Doherty and Social Practice
2.30pm – 5pm: O’Doherty/Patrick Ireland and (Artists’) Instituting Practices: A ‘State-Crafting’ Irish Emigrant between Ballaghaderreen, Dublin, Cobh, Boston, New York, and Washington
In a discussion at Printed Matter in New York in 2018, the artist and writer Gregory Sholette (who conducted the inaugural SIRIUS Summer School in 2022) encountered Brian O’Doherty for the first time and was surprised that O’Doherty, given that he was from a previous generation of artists, had already developed a distinct social practice. Using a recording of O’Doherty’s remarks at that event at Printed Matter, we connect O’Doherty’s work to current social practice discourse. Developing these thoughts further, we explore the question of O’Doherty both working in institutions and developing an institutionally critical, experimental, and/or interstitial institutional practice, with reference to, among other topics, recent work on ‘state-crafting’ through art and documenta fifteen (2022).

7 June
11am – 1pm: James Joyce’s Social Practice Legacies: Brian O’Doherty, Reading Groups, and Art
2:30pm – 5pm: An Expanded Artistic Finnegans Wake Group Reading
Approaching James Joyce’s literature through a reader like Brian O’Doherty can arguably help recoup the rich and critical, even dissident and decolonial, charge that Joyce’s (late) work unleashed for many readers in ‘marginal’ or otherwise less-than-privileged communities. Reading groups of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake have flourished since the 1960s and have been found to be affective and enabling for readers. How does literature relate to our lives? How does reading enhance our understanding and acceptance of complexity? What is Joyce’s work’s impact on readers, communities – and democracy?

8 June
11am – 1pm: Art(istic) Research, Brian O’Doherty: Knowing/Not Knowing in Art, Medicine and (Other) ArtScience Fields
2:30pm – 5pm: Participants’ Focus
One institutionally critical institution with an affinity to social practice is art research (or artistic research/practice-based research). Brian O’Doherty’s work – for instance Aspen 5+6 (1967) – has been considered foundational to this field, per Lucy Cotter. Sarat Maharaj is another theorist (and curator) of this non-disciplinary discipline, whose concepts have grown out of his formative reading of Joyce. We probe the research elements in/of some of the works in the exhibition ‘Brian O’Doherty: Reading Time’, on view at SIRIUS. Participants also have an opportunity to bring their own works to bear on these issues and engage with one another as well as the organisers and convener of the SIRIUS Summer School.

9 June
11am – 5pm: Sites of Cork Caucus – Public Space, Social Practice: The Legacies of Empathic Exchange
Cork Caucus is the umbrella term for a wealth of exhibitions, events, and a book coinciding with Cork City’s status as a European City of Culture in 2005. Curated by Charles Esche and Annie Fletcher, with important local participation by Art/Not Art and others, it profiled and enabled positions from social practice, art research, decolonialism, instituting, and institutional critique. Visiting the sites in which Cork Caucus took place, we ‘read time’ and ask questions about Brian O’Doherty’s and Cork Caucus’s legacies.

10 June
2:30pm – 5pm: Brian O’Doherty’s Work Furthering Empathic Exchange through Art’s Multi-Modal Empowerment
This lecture reflects on a week of being with and thinking collectively about Brian O’Doherty – a unique artist and consummate art world operator – and his actions in the art ecosystem’s various modes. Christa-Maria Lerm Haye’s contact with O’Doherty has heightened her sense of empathy, warmth, and generosity as major ingredients of his work. These are also markers of his practice’s connectedness to his home country and Cobh specifically. The expression ‘empathic exchange’ in the title of this lecture is borrowed from the title and concerns of SPACEX, a European Union-funded project in which both SIRIUS and the University of Amsterdam are involved. The lecture also seeks to tie these various elements together – that is, to read Brian O’Doherty/Patrick Ireland in time and place, ‘one, here, now’, to cite the title of his mural at SIRIUS.
 
Christa-Maria Lerm Hayes. Source: the author.
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