SLOUGHT FOUNDATION SERIES

Slought Foundation encourages new futures for contemporary life through critical theory and dialogue about art.

Founded in 1999, Slought engages contemporary art, critical theory, curatorial and archival practice. We borrow our name from "slough," a wetland or marshy environment connecting species in a complex, organic network. It serves as a metaphor for our nonlinear, distributed community of artists, theorists, and curators.

As a presenting arts organization, Slought Foundation engages philosophical concerns fundamental to art practice and theory since the 1960s, such as: what constitutes an "event," or fidelity to an event, and what are its consequences? What is the relation of a live event or exhibition to its recording and obsolescence? In an age of archival, institutional and social critique, to whom or what is the artist, curator, or archivist responsible?

Events are based at the Philadelphia facility, archived, and made available online alongside digital releases.

click here to see the current Slought Foundation exhibition

Upcoming Discussions and Events
All events held at Slought Foundation, 4017 Walnut Street, Philadelphia. Events are free and open to the public.

Wednesday, June 2, 2004, 6:30 - 8:30 pm
My Lacan is Burning: Revisiting 'Television'
Featuring Catherine Liu, Charles Shepherdson, Jean-Michel Rabaté
Organized by Aaron Levy
http://slought.org/content/11175/

In 1972 Jacques-Alain Miller, then an analyst in training, approached French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan to request a television interview. "I wanted Lacan, just once, to speak to the common man," said Miller at the New York City 1987 colloquium organized around that interview and called "Jacques Lacan: Television." The two-hour program, which took the form of an interview and discourse, aired in 1973 on the French government TV network O.R.T.F. under the title Psychoanalysis. In a style that is typical of Lacan’s own playful, impassioned, and evasive seminar style, we have invited theorists Catherine Liu and Charles Shepherdson to perform this discourse live and in English, alongside a projection of the original broadcast. A public discussion, introduced and moderated by Lacanian theorist Jean-Michel Rabaté, Slought Foundation Senior Curator and Editor of the new Cambridge Guide to Lacan (2003), will follow the performance.

"When Lacan says on Television, 'I always tell the truth...' he means it. He's making this pronouncement on TV and insofar as any talking head, including Lacan's, can embody a voice, he speaks for television itself... Television wants to believe that it tells the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth... But Television tries to account for the difficulty of the truth of the Real by producing its own built in self-critique module in the form of cynicism. In this way, it tries to cover its anxiety, which is, as Lacan has taught us, precisely the one affect which does not deceive." -- Catherine Liu, from Lacanian Ink #3

Catherine Liu's February 2002 Slought Foundation lecture, "To Catch a Falling Star: Lacan Meets Warhol," engaging the original broadcast and recording, is available in audio format online at: Slought.org/content/11057/

SLOUGHT NETWORKS CONVERSATIONS

Slought Foundations has made available an archive of one-hour conversation transcripts with notable figures in the arts. Conversation transcripts are available for download, and will be periodically released online at the web site: http://slought.net/toc/publications/conversations/

Currently available conversations include:

1. Robert Whitehead and Aaron Levy (On Confrontational Theater)
2. Osvaldo Romberg and Aaron Levy (On Art and Archiving)
3. Louis Cabri and Aaron Levy (On Live Events and their Recordings)