Dali’s Paranoiac Critical Pizza
with Dr OWEN G PARRY
Course Structure: 2 x session (7 hours total)
Course Venue: Online
Course Dates: 12 - 13 March 2021
Course Fee: Pay what you can (minimum suggested £10)
Plot
“We need a plot against all plots”
(Christine Quinn, Selling Sunset, Netflix 2020)
Dali’s Paranoiac Critical Pizza is an international business meeting for a cabal of antifascist art witches, queer automationists, eco-conspirators and you! Let’s conspire to “breath together” for the first time at a secret and highly convenient utopia [on zoom].
The plot for this meeting is that there is no plot, except the plot to plot against all plots; To explore the latent potential of conspiracy theory as an engine for the construction of counter myths and narratives set against those miserable fascist ones that dominate our daily feeds.
This course is for:
LGBTQIA+ or allied individuals who are intersted
LGBTQIA+ or allied individuals who the ability to access zoom and discord.
Rabbit hole
If in the “post-truth era” the truth teller has refashioned herself as the conspiracy theorist, then what happens if we take conspiracy theory from the hands of the perpetrator/victim and repurpose it as an antifascist methodology? Or, what if we conspire against conspiracy itself? What new critical-aesthetic practices might such an endeavour unravel?
This international business meeting will use these questions as a prompt for brain storming, presentations, and appraisals. It will turn to art as the business best positioned to respond to conspiracy theory. For art has already taught us how to conspire against the tyranny of representation and form via techniques of abstraction, and against knowledge by, for instance, “deserting from the culture wars” (Hlavajova and Lütticken).
We will explore how art’s potential to construct new logics, combined with its fashionable appropriation by the powers of commerce, puts art in a good position to influence and queer reality against all totalising narratives. Get your best tin foil hat on!
Owen G. Parry is and artist and researcher working across contemporary art, theatre practices and the web. He is an Associate Lecturer in Fine Art at Central Saint Martins, and Researcher on the Staging Decadence project at Goldsmiths.
Owen has an expansive performance and visual arts practice synthesising avant-garde and pop culture with the creation of fictional artefacts and fake occultist techniques. He creates playful situations and experiences (often with others) for the production of new imaginary languages, communities, worlds and images. He stages projects and publications internationally.
Images:
1) Lead Image: Artist’s collage
2) Secondary Image: Artist’s collage
3) Bio Image: Christa Holka