Vortrag | Marga van Mechelen
Organisiert vom Institut für Kunst- und Kulturwissenschaften, Prof. Ruth Sonderegger und dem Institut für nildende Kunst, Performative Kunst, Carola Dertnig. Vortrag in englischer Sprache.
In 2006 Marga van Mechelen published a book about De Appel, founded in 1975, that was in its time a new type of art institution, that very soon became the centre for European performance art and somewhat later for other new media, such as installation, video art and cross-media events.
Besides presenting European performance art, it was also so to say the
airport of American artists on their trips from the US to Europe and vice
versa. In the course of time the influence of American performance art
on the European tradition became more apparent.
In her lecture Marga van Mechelen will focus on a theme that was
important for both: that of sexual identity - male, female, homosexual,
transsexual etc. She will also explain the close relation between this issue and the reason why De Appel was founded and needed.
Marga van Mechelen (1953) is a senior lecturer at the University of Amsterdam (dep. Art and Culture). She studied art history and philosophy of language in Nijmegen and Groningen. Her dissertation, Form and signifying process. Art History, Semiotics, Semanalyse (Nijmegen: Sun 1993), analyses the ways art history, semiotics and Kristevean psycho-semiotics are dealing with the form/content relation.
Since 1994 she is a member of the Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis and of several semiotic organizations.
She publishes widely on conceptual, performance, installation and digital new media art since the late seventies and on issues concerning historiography and visual theory in general and visual semiotics and psycho-semiotics in particular. In 2006 she published De Appel. Performances, Installations, Video, Projects, 1975-1983, Amsterdam: Stichting De Appel. Topics of the last couple of years were installation art (about Aernout Mik for example) and performance in fashion.
She is now preparing a monograph about the key figure of the Dutch Zero (NUL) group, Henk Peeters and two volumes of her writings, one with articles about performance and installation art and one with (psycho)semiotic and art-historiographical subjects.