This course will explore the genre of the lecture-performance, tracing its origins to its contemporary deployment by artists working across visual art, performance, choreography, and sonic media in the present. Attending both to the academicization of artistic practice and the educational turn in art, we will study the ways in which artists have used the performative lecture as a format to interrogate social, political, and institutional models of knowledge production and rethink epistemology as embodied practice. In doing so, we will look at how the performance-lecture might also challenge disciplinary convention, critique institutional frameworks, and test the viability of authorized discourse. We will study the lecture-performance as a pedagogical, dialogical, and relational encounter and as a site of knowledge exchange to engage the political potential of such projects. And we will ask after the changing nature of artistic labor and skill within information societies and under regimes of “cognitive capitalism” in which knowledge, too, has become a resource and commodity. Through close analysis of specific lecture-performances we will think about the performative speech act; explore a range of communication styles and presentational formats; look at a variety of scores and scripts; and attend to the improvisatory, situational, and spatiotemporal dimensions of the performance-lecture. Artists discussed may include David Antin, Jérôme Bel, Suzanne Bocanegra, John Cage, Gordon Hall, Sharon Hayes, Andrea Fraser, Guerilla Girls, Liz Magic Laser, Xavier LeRoy, Robert Morris, Alexandra Pirici, Adrian Piper, Yvonne Rainer, Will Rawls, Cally Spooner, Hito Steyerl, Martine Syms, Slavs and Tartars, and more. Students will complete a series of individual research and writing assignments, and work collaboratively toward presenting a set of lecture-performances as a final project.