Closing this week at Gallery 400 at the University of Illinois at Chicago is the accompanying exhibition to OUR LITERAL SPEED. An event produced by the University of Chicago in association with Art Chicago, the Art Institute of Chicago, the University of Illinois at Chicago, the Renaissance Society, and the Smart Museum, OUR LITERAL SPEED is constructed as a conference with a schedule of events that includes lectures, performances, and an exhibition. The multi-faceted event manifests the imperatives that materialize the theoretical and the pedagogical. It’s organizers lay the ground work for this claim by stating:

“No longer can we interpret forms of academic and artistic professionalism as neutral, abstract backgrounds to the aesthetic and performative. These activities have produced their own distinctive surfaces and procedures: the ‘aesthetic’ has become discursive and ‘discourse’ has become aesthetic.”

Rather than a series of academic lectures, the conference/event is imagined as a kind of “media pop opera” or “administrative gesamtkunstwerk” that includes fluid and/or jagged transitions among scholarly presentations, panel discussions, artist’s talks, performances, and an art exhibition within an academic conference. The organizers further elaborate that: “These emerging, hybrid forms demand a synthesis of collective activity (OUR), a self-reflexive examination of art history and its constitutive technologies (LITERAL), and an intense concern for the pace and texture of our movement through institutional mediation (SPEED).”

The project offers a temporary laboratory in which a concerned public can investigate non-formulaic, experientially vibrant and theoretically precise responses to the modes of distribution, consumption, and circulation that drive contemporary art. OUR LITERAL SPEED will next manifest at the Getty Center in Los Angeles in the winter of 2010.