Kurt Weibers & The Art of Relative Time Management

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The Burchfield-Penney Art Center presents Kurt Weibers & The Art of Relative Time Management on Friday, April 30, 2004 at 8:00 p.m. University at Buffalo M.F.A. candidate Jamie O'Neil performs his persona of Kurt Weibers, a professional identity designer turned motivational speaker.

About Kurt Weibers & The Art of Relative Time Management

Mr. Weibers is a professional identity designer turned motivational speaker. With over a decade of experience working with Fortune 500, biotech, defense, sports, manufacturing and cultural industries, Weibers's seminars leverage the power of critical design to break through restrictive patterns of organizational behavior. In this premiere seminar entitled: The Art of Relative Time Management, participants will discover a radical new method for 'how to get more done in less time." Unafraid of the unorthodox, Weibers's exquisite graphics and rhetoric are nonetheless valuable in addressing postmodern time-management problems of executives and artists alike.

About Jamie O'Neil and The Global Point Strategies Project

Jamie O'Neil is a video/multimedia designer investigating the critical role of graphic design in society. Under the pseudonym Kurt Weibers, he produces mock motivational seminars that subvert oppressive or hyper-homogonous corporate culture. By choosing unsuspecting venues for his interventions, such as leadership or self-improvement seminars, his performances function within the truth context of everyday life, yet they should not to be misconstrued as real motivation or mischievous pranks. Rather, each seminar offers thought-provoking, unorthodox concepts that inspire new trajectories of self-assessment, feedback and voice for dissent inside organizational or corporate "democracies." By inserting critical strategies into existing channels of organizational control, O'Neil's performances bridge the distinction between culture jamming and commercial design, thus offering a new model for socially aware art and design.

Background on Relational Aesthetics

In the fall of 2002, the San Francisco Art Institute produced an exhibit called: Touch: Relational Art from the 1990s to Now. It gathered a contemporary works under the auspicious name "relational aesthetics." Although relational artists are known forutilizing "factitiousness" in their projects, relational aesthetics is not an art prank. The term was coined by Nicolas Bourriaud, curator and theorist of the Palais de Tokyo in Paris. He defines relational aesthetics as: "aesthetic theory consisting in judging artworks on the basis of the inter-human relations which they represent, produce or prompt." The best point of reference for relational art is the "objectless" art of the 1960s and 70s (Kaprow, Cage, Ono, Acconci, Beuys, Knowles, Rosler, Burden, Hakke etc.), yet there are key distinctions to the relational artworks categorized by Bourriaud.

Relational art concerns itself with producing works in the broader social context of "human relations." Bourriaud cites Angus Fairhurst's Gallery Connections (1991-6) that employed telecommunication hacking in order to dial London galleries at the same time and patch them together. The result was a new social exchange where two people try to figure out why they have been connected. Bourriaud provides many more examples in his book, Relational Aesthetics (Les presses du r
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