Beta 2024 - The Cambridge Conference by Tristan Whalen and Noemi Iten

For Beta 2024, the curatorial team invited proposals for covers of a previously presented public lecture. Participants were asked to document and then re-stage any chosen lecture given by an architect or artist. A range of creative interpretations of the task were submitted that ranged from mimicry and method acting to abstraction, satire, homage, and beyond. In the end, such a cover is always unauthorised and open to interpretation, and the selected proposals were chosen to test these limits. From a competitive pool of proposals, six teams were commissioned to realise their cover.
The Cambridge Conference
Tristan Whalen and Noemi Iten
covering Carl Andre, Joseph Beuys, Ronald Bladen, and others
October 5-6, 1970 at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design
(Halifax)
On October 5th, 1970, at the invitation of gallerist Seth Siegelaub,
seventeen of the world’s most prominent and provocative artists-
including Joseph Beuys, Robert Smithson, Lawrence Weiner, and Daniel
Buren-gathered in a nondescript boardroom at the Nova Scotia College
of Art & Design. The Halifax Conference, born from Siegelaub’s belief
that there is “something positive to be gained by artists speaking to
one another” was to have no leader, no agenda, and no expectations
for a particular outcome. Siegelaub proposed that by simply colliding
the disparate practices and perspectives of the artists, something that
resembles a common experience would emerge through conversation.
Despite Seigelaub’s intentions, the event quickly descended into a farce
of miscommunication and unintelligibility, as the invited guests argued
about even the most elementary questions, such as whether or not the
proceedings of the conference should be open to the public. In the end,
NSCAD students and faculty were allowed to watch the conversations
via monitors in a separate room, where they struggled to make sense of
the barely comprehensible conversations.
While the Halifax Conference failed to live up to its utopian ambitions,
as a cultural reference point, it is rich with possibilities for re-animation.
More than half a century later, The Cambridge Conference takes up
Seigelaub’s original proposition that there is “something positive to
be gained by artists speaking to one another,” but adjusts the topic of
conversation to questions about the current state of architecture and
design, and updates the invited guests to feature students-among
them architects, curators, and visual artists. Ultimately, the Cambridge
Conference emerged from the question: are the conversations taking
place in so-called top architecture schools today any more coherent,
comprehensible, and, most importantly, more relevant than the male-
dominated art discourse of the 1970s? Directly juxtaposed against each
other on full public display here, cover and original decisively render the
public the bearer of the final judgment.
Team: Tristan Whalen, Noemi Iten, Paris Bezanis, Maria Ferrari, Dennis
Sola, Constanza Lara, Alexa Resendiz, Galena Sardamova, Alyona
Sotnikova