Giving Notice
2016
Lecture script, powerpoint, lapel microphone
20min
Performed by Heleen Schröder at the Dutch Art Institute in June 2016.
Behind closed doors, voices are substituted. A script is to a scene: that is the first instance. The reiteration of the performance of a script is the basis of the construction of social reality, says Butler. The necessity to examine the difference between routine work and the transmission and cultivation of ‘living knowledge’ within the same building was where this began. Who is seen to be working? What is seen to be work?
Giving Notice is a fictional art history lecture in which the question 'We at the university, who is we?' is attempted to be answered. Originally posed by Virginia Woolf in her essay Three Guineas, in which she questions women’s exclusion from the university system, it is applied here in the context of the Dutch Art Institute to draw attention to the type of ‘work’ that is noticed (or unnoticed) within the community of the art school. As such, the art practices discussed in this lecture are fictional and are, in attempt to bring different contributions and forms of labour into the frame, based on the work of actual employees at the Dutch Art Institute—some of whom were largely unknown by the student body.
