TALK with Melissa Gordon: The Embarrassment of SUCKCESS

In conjunction with An exhibition with an audio script by Sarah Demeuse and Wendy Tronrud, as well as a soundtrack by Mario García Torres in collaboration with Sol Oosel Melissa Gordon will deliver a presentation in ‘stand up’ form of a new piece of writing, which addresses questions of success and value in relation to contemporary discourses of gender and identity in art practice.

Thinking of embarrassment in terms of its relationship to quantity, and thus in an art world context, Gordon’s talk will question our understanding of the lived embodiment of the drop-out in contemporary art within the living artists' struggle for and with representation.

The ghostly, absence of the body of the artist, an art-historical trope, pervades discourses of the valorisation of authorship: what happens when negative shapes become positives?

• Note on the title: In Lee Lozano’s ‘Dropout Piece’ (1970), the artist states: "I WILL NOT SEEK FAME, PUBLICITY, OR SUCKCESS”.