The performance lecture form has been of interest to me and a topic on this site for an extended period of time.
It has its origins in my own professionally driven interest in Powerpoint as a Creative Medium [oof so many dead links, from when I also believed hotlinking images would be the best practice/fair use realization of a Project Xanadu-like networked utopia. I’ll fix them in a minute.]
Then I was critical of the posthumous transmutation of Robert Smithson’s Hotel Palenque lecture and slideshow, delivered at the University of Utah in 1972, into an acquirable work of art.
The next year, when I discovered—via some snide comments by disgruntled art faculty at my welcome dinner—that my invitation to speak at the UofU had been arranged under the auspices of a visiting artist lecture, I quickly decided to become an artist. I had my younger brother sloppily record my lecture on video, an homage to Alex Hubbard’s drunken bootleg video re-enactment of Smithson’s Hotel Palenque lecture, which was a topic of my talk. [That video, uploaded when YouTube had still time limits, is in eight parts.]
But I also ended the lecture by declaring it a work of art, in an edition, and I sent around a stack of signed and numbered certificates of authenticity for anyone who wanted one. I think I made 100, and got 40 or so back? [Shoutout to my OG collectors, that turned out to be CR-1.]
In 2010 I made a blog post into a slideshow into a performance at Jen Dalton & William Powhida’s #rank in Miami, “Relational Aesthetics for the Rich, or A Brief History of the Gala as Art”, with gift bag editions [on the table above].
brb, have to check and update a dozen dead links.