Barcelona Culture is the professional webpage of Jeffrey Swartz

NEWS

-"Food Design", March 28, 2012, for Off Menu, a project by Miralda. I participated in the debate on the subject of food design as part of Off Menu, the Miralda project running parallel to the Alimentaria fair. The session, held at the Fundació Catalunya Caixa space at Gaudí's La Pedrera, looked at the diverse work of designing food, with Elena Vela from Danone R+D, Toni Massanes from the Fundació Alicia, and the artist Miralda.

-Inaugural Lecture,  Escola de l'Art del Treball, Barcelona. On Nov 17 I gave the inaugural address to the students and faculty of the Escola de l'Art del Treball, at the Escola Industrial, Barcelona. The presention was entitled "Leaps, Bursts and Lights that Come On: Reflections on Creativity and Creators".

-Martí Guixé Newsletter. A short piece appeard in mid November called "Designing Auctions", for Martí Guixé Newsletter #16. The newsletter appears quarterly a features new work, projects and exhibits.

-Panel chaired by Jeffrey Swartz: Occupy Curating: Politics, Protests and the Future of Curatorial Practice at Dublin Contemporary, Dublin. October 29, 2011 at Earlsfort Terrace. The debate on bottom-up curating, grounded in community and shared with artists and users in content and format, with the following professionals: Alfredo Cramerotti (Director, Mostyn), José Falconi (Curator, Latin American Art Forum), Oxana Maleeva (Curator, Art Apart), William Morrow, (Director, 21C Museum, Kathy Noble (Curator, Tate Modern), and Steve Picolo (Artist).

-Culture Cutbacks and the Taking Apart of the Catalan Arts Council
An information session and debate on the Catalan Budget Law and the Omnibus Law, cutting back the identity and power of the Catalan Arts Council, took place on June 16, 2011, at the Centre Artístic de Sant Lluc, Barcelona. With the participation of Jeffrey Swartz, art critic and curator. See my articles on the subject, in Catalan, on my blog.

Organized by: Associació d’Artistes Visuals de Catalunya

RECENT PUBLICATIONS

-Recent publications online include a review "Indirect Style", appearing in December 2011 in Artecontexto, and a chronicle of Dublin Contemporary, seen in January 2012 in A-Desk.

-Design Dreams. In the Catalan journal L'Avenç, a new article on Catalan design and entrepreneurial innovation. In this piece I consider the Catalan context in contrast to the thesis of the exhibition on Italian "Dream Factories" , curated by Alberto Alessi at the Triennale Museum, Milan.

-My paper entitled "Critique, Language and Strategy in Martí Guixé's 'ex-designer'" was presented at the Design Activism and Social Change congress organized by the  Design History Society Congress in Barcelona.

The paper is available online, see the link to Papers: http://designhistoryfoundation.org/congres/

EDUCATION

-"Food Cartographies" (Cartographies Alimentaires), a Jeffrey Swartz workshop for degree students. The seminar dealt with food politics and creative mapping, for the Haute École d'Art (HEART) de Perpignan, France. From January 3-6, 2012.

-I taught Design Analysis and Criticism II at Eina, Barcelona, in the first semester of 2011-2012. The course included modules on Design Rhetoric and the Project, Contexts, Analysis and Criticism.

-The Legacy of Goya in Spanish Modern Art, a course taught at Emily Carr University, Vancouver, July 4 to August 18, 2011. The course built a reading of Spanish modernity and its problems, its specificity, out of major themes in Goya, echoed throughout the 20th century in Spanish art and culture.

-From February to June, 2011, I taught History of Art and Design I, at Eina, a degree-granting design school in Barcelona. The third-year course focuses on the early 20th century to the 1960s, and emphasizes subjects and debates relevant to industrial design students in art, design, architecture and material culture.

-In the summer of 2009 I taught a summer session Humanities course at Emily Carr University , Vancouver, Canada. Held from July 6 to August 19, 2009, the course dealt with food politics, hunger and agricultural models, and also examined questions of taste dominance in gastronomy and its relation to geopolitics. "The Geopolitics of Food: Hunger, Culture and Contemporary Dietary Ideologies" looked as well at regional and local food and diet ideologies in the Vancouver context, in light of recent research.

-"The Perfect Host" (L'amphitryon parfait), a Jeffrey Swartz workshop that delved into the concept of the "host" in relation to contemporary art. From February 2-5, 2009, at the Haute École d'Art (HEART) de Perpignan, France.

The workshop dealt with the presence of the artist together with the artist's work, an attention to details, the creation of codes and languages for specific "occasions", concern for the aesthetic and social experience of the spectator-receiver, the mediation of pleasure, and the desire to see the spectator participate in the definition and completion of the work. What does it mean in the present day to speak of the artist as host, or the host as artist?

ART PROJECTS

-Thought for Food: A Gastronomical Reading Room . A project by Jeffrey Swartz for a reading room on food and gastronomy.

In artist Kristina Lee Podesva's public project Vehicle, at Langara College, Vancouver, Canada. From January 13th to February 10th, 2009.

The Jeffrey Swartz project Thought for Food was installed inside the ephemeral module-container that Podesva has designed for her artist's residence at Langara College, the first project of the Centre for Art in Public Spaces. See the short video produced for the exhibition: The Art of Eating (Nails).

CURATORIAL

-419, or 'The Spanish Prisoner', 2006-2008

The exhibition project on the Nigerian e-mail scam known as 419, with a documentary section by curator Jeffrey Swartz and a video installation by Catalan artist Pep Dardanyà, was shown at Centre d'Art Santa Mònica, Barcelona, after being seen in Vic at the Sala H, and Girona at the Centre Cultural de la Mercè.

A full overview of the documentation to be exhibited and internet links related to the show have been posted here. A more complete press release from Vic is available here .

The article published in the Spanish daily El País on November 23, 2007, can be found here.

-Since May 2007 I've got a blog with articles on cultural politics in Barcelona, Catalonia and Spain, recently updated. My most recent entry dealt with my summer in Vancouver, with reflections on Greenpeace, Occupy, Adbusters and the Canadian economy: http://barcelonacultureblog.blogspot.com/ 

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BARCELONA CULTURE STUDIO

Information

Barcelona Culture Studio is the personal project and web page of Jeffrey Swartz. You can find here information on my professional activities as critic, curator and cultural educator.

FOR MORE INFORMATION: jmswartz_2000@yahoo.com 

Jeffrey Swartz , Spring 2012