This course will explore the genre of the lecture-performance, tracing its origins to itscontemporary deployment by artists working across visual art, performance, choreography, andsonic media in the present. Attending both to the academicization of artistic practice and theeducational turn in art, we will study the ways in which artists have used the performative lectureas a format to interrogate social, political, and institutional models of knowledge production andrethink epistemology as embodied practice. In doing so, we will look at how the performance-lecture might also challenge disciplinary convention, critique institutional frameworks, and testthe 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 politicalpotential of such projects. And we will ask after the changing nature of artistic labor and skillwithin 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 communicationstyles and presentational formats; look at a variety of scores and scripts; and attend to theimprovisatory, situational, and spatiotemporal dimensions of the performance-lecture. Artistsdiscussed will 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 individualresearch and writing assignments, and work collaboratively toward presenting a set of lecture-performances as a final project.