Vortragstext: Armin Medosch. Ich möchte der Direktorin des Belvedere, Frau Agnes Husslein-Arco und dem Kurator der Ausstellung, Harald Kreijci danken, dass sie mich eingeladen haben, hier zur Eröffnung des Rückblicks auf Kinetika einige Worte zu sagen. Mein Vortrag muss eher kurz gehalten werden, muss mich insofern auf thesenhafte Schwerpunkte beschränken. Nachzulesen wird es das alles in meinem Buch New Tendencies geben, das auf englisch bei MIT Press erscheinen wird. Vortrag gehalten im Kontext der Eröffnung http://www.21erhaus.at/rueckblick_kinetika_1967 Kinetika Eröffnung,

This is the text of my Riga lecture. It has a philosophical introduction, then touches on the notion of Post-Art and finally analyses the Fields exhibition. Drawing on my own curatorial work, conducted in cooperation with RIXC, in the exhibitions Waves and Fields, I hope to arrive at criteria of what makes good art today. Full text http://www.thenextlayer.org/node/1359

In this lecture, I contextualized New Tendencies with a discourse on Modernism, whereby NT were introduced as a Last Avantgarde. As a neo-avant-gare they reacted against a Modernism that had become prescriptive and captivated by the institutional system at the time already. NT deployed an entirely abstract language which is usually considered to be apolitical, but in their practice, abstract visual research was imbued with a strong politics of form which aimed at the emancipation and liberation of the viewer. Thus, their politics of form led straight towards participatory art.

When I started working on New Tendencies I recognised that for any theory of art, or theory of art and media, it is requisite to have a theory or at least an idea of what is history. I put this question “What is history?” over this talk, which is at the same time an Homage to Korcula Summer School. This question “What is history?” has been the theme of the second summer school in 1965, organised by philosophers and sociologists from Zagreb and Belgrade.