A wide shot of a ceramics studio, featuring students working with pottery wheels and other tools.
Joseph stands in front of a mottled purple backdrop, wearing a black shirt and glasses. They are bald.

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Joseph Ravens/Rabensdorf

Lecturer

Contact

Bio

Joseph Ravens (b.1968, USA) received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in theater from UW-Whitewater and studied audiovisuals at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam before earning a Master of Fine Arts in performance from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Numerous grants and awards have allowed Ravens to build an international reputation as an artist, curator, and academic throughout North and South America, Europe, and Asia. Ravens is founder and director of Defibrillator Gallery and co-founder and director of Rapid Pulse International Performance Art Festival.

Courses

Title Department Catalog Term

Description

From Ron Athey and Kira O¿Riley, to Gwendoline Robin and Stelarc, this class explores tactics and politics for using the `extreme body¿ in contemporary performance. Pop-culture, media, and contemporary politics are examined through the lens of performance, as well as contemporary performance practice. Performance experiments, group discussions, on-going critiques, and written work are engaged as a strategy to merge art practice and theory. This is a practice-based course with material driven by the subject matter and the students¿ own work. Artists and themes explored may include: The Technological Body, The Sexual, Erotic, Pornographic Body, The Altered/ Prosthetic body, The Religious/Ecstatic body, Deprivation/Endurance/Duration, among others. In this class you will: Connect with the artist¿s body (yours) as the raw material for performance. Explore various strategies for individual and collaborative performance. Learn to operate in `Performance mode¿ with exercises to heighten your awareness of present time paired with a sense of total body performativity, and consciousness of the viewer¿s presence. Develop a collective performance vocabulary.

Class Number

1688

Credits

3