Martin Beck: An Organized System of Instructions

Episode 9: An Organized System of Instructions

An Organized System of Instructions is the title of a lecture by Martin Beck. The lecture is nine in a series of 10 episodes of Beck’s exhibition titled Program, which has manifested over the course of almost two years at CCVA. This ninth episode utilizes a common and frequently applied form of address to mediate between artist, institution and audience: the artist lecture. Beck’s lecture is organized from three perspectives: as an informational event about the artist’s work at CCVA; as a specific mode of visual and verbal display reflecting on the function of the artist talk in an educational framework; and, as site for connecting an institutional history with a broader discourse about communication.

This event is the penultimate episode in the ongoing exhibition Program where Martin Beck has employed a series of explorative strategies that have critically reflected on the kinds of activity the Carpenter Center has used to build, organize, and engage with its audiences, students and faculty. From the institution’s physical infrastructure to media relations, from its foundational curricular principles to visitor tallies, from building usage to welcome rituals, Beck has examined institutional behaviors at CCVA that have collectively formed its identity.

Martin Beck

Martin Beck is an artist whose exhibitions and projects engages questions of historicity and authorship and often draws from the fields of architecture, design, and popular culture. Recent exhibitions include The thirty-sets do not constitute a sequence at 47 Canal, New York (2015), Approx. 13 Hours at castillo/corrales, Paris (2014); Last Night at Kunsthaus Glarus, Switzerland (2013); the particular way in which a thing exists at Leonard & Bina Ellen Gallery, Concordia University, Montreal (2012). Beck’s works were included in the 10th Shanghai Biennale (2014), the 29th São Paulo and the 4th Bucharest Biennales (2010).  He was co-curator of Tell It To My Heart: Collected by Julie Ault at Museum der Gegenwartskunst, Basel; Culturgest, Lisbon; and Artists Space, New York (2013). His books include, About the Relative Size of Things in the Universe (2007), The Aspen Complex (2012), Last Night (2013), and Summer Winter East West (2015).