Starting 26th January 2017, the Art & Theory Reading Group met once a month for four months, at Wollaton Street Studios, to discuss Jacques Derrida’s Given Time: 1. Counterfeit Money, examining the implications for artistic practice of its ostensible theme of the gift.
Given Time is structured around Derrida’s deconstructivist analysis of the anthropologist Marcel Mauss’s 1925 essay The Gift, a study of gift-giving rituals in tribal societies, and Charles Baudelaire’s short story Counterfeit Money (1869).
In advance of each meeting I wrote a commentary on one of the book’s four chapters, in the form of a series of blog posts. The project culminated in a symposium, in which the artist and critic Peter Suchin (Art Monthly) discussed the question “What is Given in Marcel Duchamp’s Given?”
Derek Hampson
(Convenor, Art & Theory Reading Group)
Derek Hampson 