Jan Verwoert
19.05.2015 - 19.05.2015
Why Men Fail
19.MAY.15
A Talk by Jan Verwoert
8 pm
NICC has the pleasure to invite you to an evening with Jan Verwoert on Tuesday 19th of May at 8pm.
Emotional skills are a must in society today. Affective labour, traditionally associated with a woman’s role, has become a common task. To do business involves taking care of building relationships, investing passion, sutaining communication etc. So we say that work has become ‘feminized’. But the opposite is equally true. Since the pressure to perform and compete is on at all times, forms of territorial behaviour traditionally instilled in men, are getting more prominent. Deregulated working conditions bring back old patriachal patterns of dominance, as leaders seek to contain complexity with the bluntest means possible. Medieval axemen get a head start when everyone else is left frazzled by multitasking. So it may be high time to look at how hardcore competitiveness ‘masculinizes’ culture: How do men work? Why do they succeed so quickly? And why, in the end, do they always fail?
Jan Verwoert is a critic and writer on contemporary art and cultural theory, based in Berlin. He is a contributing editor of frieze magazine, his writing has appeared in different journals, anthologies and monographs. He teaches at the Piet Zwart Institute Rotterdam, the de Appel curatorial programme and the Oslo National Academy of the Arts. He is the author of Bas Jan Ader: In Search of the Miraculous, MIT Press/Afterall Books 2006, the essay collection Tell Me What You Want What You Really Really Want, Sternberg Press/Piet Zwart Institute 2010, together with Michael Stevenson, Animal Spirits — Fables in the Parlance of Our Time, Christoph Keller Editions, JRP, Zurich 2013 and a second collection of his essays Cookie! published by Sternberg Press/Piet Zwart Institute 2014.