February 19 – 20, 2025, 10 am – 1 pm

Many thanks to the artist James Krone for his seminar THE SUBJECT OF AVAILABILITY and discussing the works of our participants within the Studio Program at BAI | Berlin Artist Residency, Art School, Arts Incubator, and Live Online Courses & Classes.

“In this seminar we’ll consider the distinctions and implications between picture and image through the lens of contemporary painting. To what degree is any subject available to representation? What is the relation between an artist and their subject if the process of representation inevitably abstracts all subjects into referents or signs? This question seems to have haunted us for tens of thousands of years, whether in the Lascaux cave painters’ apparent ambivalence to render a human face, in Elaine Sturtevant’s sharply galvanized responses to Warhol’s flowers or in the burgeoning polemics of AI.

If illustration presumes the possibility of transference through mimetic generalization, a type of illusionism, what if rather than trying to represent or signify a subject as something from the outside, the artist was to inhabit this relation as a kind of internalized behavior?

If one is willing to think of art as a kind of social antimatter, where ambiguity and confusion can be useful tools towards an understanding of non-transference, as a production of questions over answers, perhaps we can arrive at a more generative and expansive relation to the problems of subject and subjectivity. Let’s think about these things together and discuss the difference between the politics of representation and the representation of politics.” (Text by courtesy of James Krone)

James Krone was born in Chicago in 1975 and has lived and worked in Berlin since 2008. Recent solo and group exhibitions include Pattern of Emergency at Repertoire Berlin, The Promise of Happiness at M LeBlanc Chicago, Wet Resistance at the Dortmunder Kunstverein and When There is no Laughing Matter, Laughter Matters at the Halle für Kunst Lüneberg. In 2022 Krone opened the exhibition space Louche Ops in his apartment where he curates and hosts projects with other artists. 

More information on the James Krone Website.