On Wednesday 6 March, we recommence the semi-public sessions of our ongoing reading group, focused the coming two years on the research field of Edition V - Appropriation and Dedication (2013 - 2014).

Our reading group sessions on Affect led us to a new field of interest, that is also much informed by our collaborations with Louise Lawler and Sven Lütticken within the Performance in Residence programme. A text by Helen Molesworth that we read in our first meeting on affect was important in thinking through the meaning of appropriation in Lawler's work, not from the perspective of institutional critique, but as an affective relation of acknowledgement and porosity that she establishes with her subject matter.

In our first meeting, we further introduce our interest in Appropriation and Dedication as well as our plans for the coming months. In this meeting, we will read a text by Isabelle Graw titled ‘Dedication replacing appropriation: fascination, subversion, and dispossession in appropriation art' from the catalogue Louise Lawler and Others (2004). Graw is a Professor for Art Theory and Art History at the Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste (Städelschule) in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, where she co-founded the Institute of Art Criticism. She is an art critic and co-founder of the magazine Texte zur Kunst.

Alongside this text, and to provide background for the economic meanings of appropriation that Graw proposes at the end of her text, we will read a chapter from David Harvey's book A Brief History of Neoliberalism from 2007. Harvey is the Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and Geography at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY) and a well-worn Marxist.