On Wednesday 13 February at 12pm, Frédérique Bergholtz will give a lecture on If I Can’t Dance, its programme and its methodology, as part of the Graduate Lecture Series of the Roski graduate programme. The lecture series takes place in the frame of the Art and Curatorial Practices in the Public Sphere class led by MFA Director Jud Fine, M.A. Director Rhea Anastas, and M.A. Visiting Professor Connie Butler.

The following day, in a roundtable seminar with the MA students, Frédérique Bergholtz and curator Grant Watson will share their research as part of the project How We Behave. This project is structured around a mode of gathering material through interviews with residents of a number of cities, using questions based on the ideas that are put forth by Michel Foucault in an interview with Vanity Fair that was published in 1983. In this interview, Foucault expressed his fascination with the idea that bios itself could become the material from which a work of art is made, and identifies a precedent for this in antiquity. By studying classical texts, Foucault is not suggesting that people repeat the practices of the past, but rather that they try to invent new forms of subjectivity which might start from aesthetics.

The initial stages of the project were presented publically in The Kitchen in New York in May 2012. New interview sessions recently took place in Sao Paulo and Amsterdam, and are followed by meetings in L.A. and San Francisco.