What is Public Space?
- Week 1
This seminar offers an introduction to the history of the idea of public space, pointing to the transition from "public space" into "corporate space." What is meant by critical practice?
Presentation of ideas of public space as laid out by Pierre Bordieu, Richard Sennett ("Flesh and Stone"), Bertold Brecht, Walter Benjamin ("Paris, Capital of the 19th century") and cyber theory.
Group project
Student assignment for week 3: How would their placement (critical intervention in public space / performance / installation at a chosen site) look like? What issues are of interest (Sites could be: plaza, post office, train station, corporate offices, zoo, prison, supermarket, schools, hospitals, churches, city streets, hotels or (suburban) housing projects). The intervention could take on forms as divers as bumper stickers, bill boards, post cards, posters, street signs, bus ads, fake newspapers, guides to soup kitchens, comics, guides- audio tapes, stencils, walking tours, directional signs capturing the history of a house or a family or the character of a community.
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Site Specificity
- Week 2
The "site" is introduced in spatial and physical terms, as discursive vector, as site of action or intervention. The site of action as intervention, the site as repressed history, as political cause, as disenfranchised group.
Slide Presentation:
Summary about the discussion on Richard Serra's "Tilted Arc"
Reading:
Miwon Kwon "One Place After Another: Notes on Site Specificity" in OCTOBER 80
Suggested Reading:
Douglas Crimp, "Serra's Public Sculpture: Redefining Site Specificity," in Krauss, Richard Serra / Sculpture (exhibition catalogue, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 27 Feb- 13 May 1986)
Claire F Fox, "Mass Media, Site Specificity, and the U.S.- Mexico Border: Guillermo Gomez-Pena's Border Brujo (1988, 1990)", in Chon A. Noriega, The Ethnic Eye Latino Media Arts (Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press, 1996) Art in Public Spaces
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Project Discussion
- Week 3
Group Project
The aim of this seminar is to create a class room situation where people talk about what they are uncomfortable about in their social surrounding. We will discuss material presented by students, aim for clarity of intention, start to zoom in on one project based on feasibility and content.
Step-by-Step Project Deadlines:
1) site visit 2) research assignments 3) meeting with concerned community, organizations etc 4) practical details 5) media work for project 6) execution of piece 7) interrogation of interrogation
Suggested Reading:
Linda Fry Burnham & Steven Durland, eds. , The Citizen Artist 20 Years of Art in the Public Arena, (Gardiner, NY: Critical Press, 1998)
Richard Sennett, Flesh and Stone The Body and the City in Western Civilization (New York, London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1994)
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Project-Oriented Collaborations
Week 4
This seminar argues for inter-communal coalitions, emphasizing a shared ground for commonalities of struggle. The seminar for artistic work to engage with disenfranchised communities and their concerns, which usually do not find a way into the public. It is concerned with notions of community as subversive space and argues from the position of a sort of spiritual belief therein without inscribing a false unity. Community is constructed of people who share a social space, and possibly share an approach to ethics. Nevertheless, we are aware of the burden of each community, which is its binary opositionality: Homelessness/housed, HIV Positive/negative, et cetera. Those inscriptions tend to cement the status quo. How can we avoid getting stuck in polarities within our practice?
Slide Presentation:
Joseph Beuys "7000 Eichen" (7000 Oaks)
Martha Rosler's "If you lived here", Dia Foundation
Group Material: "Democracy" project, Dia Foundation
Reading:
Chantal Mouffe, "Democratic Citizenship and the Political Community", in The Return of the Political (London, New York: Verso, 1993)
Suggested Reading:
Dot Tuer, "Parables of Community and Culture for a New World (Order)", in, eds.,Questions of Community (Banff, Alberta: Banff Center Press, 1995)
Heiner Stachelhaus, Joseph Beuys, (New York, Abbeville, 1991)
Film:
Yvonne Rainer, "Privilege" (1990)
Group Project:
We continue the discussion and decide about which project the group will work on with respect to what is feasible and interesting in the given time frame and within the given financial possibilities.
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Queer Theory and Art Informed By It
- Week 5
Slide Presentation:
Looking at work by Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Barbara Kruger, Gran Fury, Act Up
Reading:
Douglas Crimp, Aids Demo Graphics (1991)
Judith Butler, "Imitation and Gender Insubordination" in Diane Fuss, ed.,
Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories (New York: Routledge, 1991)
Suggested Reading:
"Bad Object Choices, eds., How do I look?" Queer film and video (Seattle: Bay Press, 1995)
Douglas Crimp, "The Boys in My Bedroom", in Abelove, The lesbian and Gay Studies Reader
Video:
Gregg Bordowitz, "Fast Trip/ Long Drop" (1993)
Group project
We address practical questions (cost, funding, eventually getting official permits to put piece up, writing of press release).
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Frantz Fanon, Post-Colonial Theory and Contemporary Art in the United States
- Week 6
How do we address questions of the first world hegemony in a national-racial formation like the United States? Aim of the discussions is to encourage students to talk about racism in terms of their everyday life. What does it have to do with you? How does it concern you?
Slide Presentation:
Projects by Adrian Piper "Catalysis IV", "A Reactive Guerrilla Performance for Dinners and Cocktail Parties", Coco Fusco, Guillermo Gomez Pena
Required Reading:
Frantz Fanon "The Fact of Blackness" in Black Skin White Masks (New York: Grove, 1991)
Suggested Reading:
Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994)
Richard Dreyer, White (New York: Routledge, 1997)
Alan Read, ed., The Fact of Blackness Frantz Fanon & Visual Representation (Seattle: Bay Press, 1996)
Video:
Isaac Julian "Frantz Fanon Black Skin, White Masks" (1995)
Group project
We visit the site, and research projects are assigned.
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Feminist Theory and Art Practices Informed By It
- Week 7
Presentation:
Billboards of Barbara Kruger ("We don't need another hero"), posters and
performances by Guerilla Girls, Jo Spence ("Putting myself in the Picture", Camden Press, 1986)
Reading:
Judith Butler "Gender Trouble- Feminism and the Subversion of Identity" (1990)
Suggested Reading:
Elizabeth Hess, in "Guerilla Girl Power: Why the Art World Needs a Conscience" in Nina Felshin, ed., "But is it Art" (Seattle: Bay Press, 1995)
Laura Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989)
Griselda Pollock, "What's Wrong with Images of Women?" in Rosemarie Betterton, ed.
Looking On: Images of Femininity in the Visual Arts and Media (London, New York: Pandora Press, 1987)
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Eastern Europe
- Week 8
What can we learn from contemporary works that were created in a different social context? One of the aims of the seminar is to foster a non-US-centric view on art practices. These artists work(ed) in a more repressed atmosphere and have therefore a political approach particular to their situated vision.
Slide Presentation:
Dubravka Knezevic, street work in Belgrade (Yugoslavia), Roza El Hassan, "Secured Space", Budapest (Hungary) and Marina Avramovic
Reading:
"Marked with Red Ink" by Dubravka Knezevic in Jan Cohen Cruz, ed., Radical Street Performances An International Anthology (London, New York: Routledge, 1998)
Suggested Reading:
Laura J. Hoptman, eds., Contemporary Art from East Central Europe Beyond Belief, (Chicago: Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, 1995)
Nicola Hodges, ed., New Art from Eastern Europe: Identity and conflict
(Art & Design, No 35, 1995)
Laura J. Hoptman, Beyond Belief: Contemporary Art from East Central Europe, (1995)
Video:
Alexander Kluge (and others) "Germany in Autumn" (1978)
"East Germany Opens its Borders" (1989)
Group Project
We have a discussion with the concerned community about the work. II)
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Activism and Questions of Efficacy
- Week 9
What are our changes to be affective/effective as individuals or small groups dealing with issues like homelessness, the U.S. prison system, progressive union acrivities, and (urban) poverty in the prevailing surrounding of corporate late capitalism?
Slide Presentation:
Krysztof Wodiczko project on homelessness, Group Material " DaZiBaos" (1982)
Hans Haacke's project "And you were victorious after all" (Und ihr habt doch gesiegt) (1988), David Avalos "Welcome to America's Finest Tourist Plantation" (1988)
Dennis Adams, Muntadas
Required Reading:
C. Ondine Chavoya, "Collaborative Public Art and Multimedia Installation: David Avalos, Louis Hock, and Elizabeth Sisco's Welcome to America's Finest Tourist Plantation (1988)", In: Chon A. Noriega, The Ethnic Eye Latino Media Arts (Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press, 1996)
Suggested Reading:
The Lure of the Local (New York: The New Press, 1997)
Moore, Alan & Marc Miller, ABC No Rio Dinero: The Story of a Lower East Side Art Gallery (New York: Collaborative Projects Publishers, 1985)
Arlene Raven, (ed.), Art in the Public Realm (New York: Da Capo Press, 1993)
Jacob, Mary Jane, Michael Brenson, and Evam Olson, Culture in Action:
A Public Art Program of Sculpture in Chicago (Seattle: Bay Press, 1995)
Group Project:
We work on the creation of the piece I)
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Memory Structures
- Week 10
Who is mobilizing what in the articulation of the past, deploying which identities, identifications and representations and in the name of which political visions and goals?
Slide Presentation:
Jochen Gerz and Esther Shalev-Gerz "Harburger Denkmal gegen Faschismus" (Harburg Monument against Fascism), projects by "Repo history" concerning the re-inscription of a communal past in Manhattan neighborhoods, Maya Lin (Vietnam Memorial Monument)
Reading:
James E. Young, "The Counter-Monument against Itself in Germany Today" in, ed., W.J.T. Mitchell, Art and the Public Sphere
Suggested Reading:
James Young, ed., Holocaust Memorials in History: The Art of Memory (1997)
Jacques Derrida, Memoires for Paul de Man, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986)
Group Project:
Collaboratively the piece is created II), press work
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The Museum
- Week 11
Which histories do we refer to? Who speaks and who is silent? (Introducing the notion of selected histories by Raymond Williams)
Slide Presentation:
projects of Andrea Fraser, Michael Asher, and Fred Wilson
Required Reading:
Lisa Corrin, "Mining the Museum: An installation by Fred Wilson" (The New Press/The Contemporary)
Douglas Crimp, On the Museum's Ruins, (London, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993)
Suggested Reading:
Hal Foster "The Primitive" Unconscious of Modern Art or White Skin Black Masks" in Recodings (Seattle: Bay Press, 1985) 181-208, 228-233
Marianne Torgovnik "But is it Art?", chapter 3 of Gone Primitive
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990)
James Clifford, "On Ethnographic Surrealism", chapter 2
The Predicament of Culture
Group Project:
We collectively take down the piece.
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Interrogation of Interrogation
- Week 12
After the production of the piece the group analyzes the outcome and process of the course and placement at the site.
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Action
- Week 13-15
Action
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Description of "Art As Social Practice"
- Keywords
public space, the "site," community, Eastern Europe, queer theory, post-colonial theory, feminist theory, activism, efficacy, memory, museum
- Course Description
This series of seminars will familiarize the group with histories of politically engaged work in the public sphere. "Art as Social Practice"is a seminar and studio course.
Bringing in my cultural background, we will focus on working models in Eastern Europe, Britain, and the United States as well as linking cultural theory and art practice. Each seminar will be divided into a seminar segment and work on a site-specific group project. The art project will be a collaborative work on one interventionist project that draws from your experiential background. It is hereby linked to the demographics of the class.
Issues discussed in seminars then will be applied to practice. The course encourages a sense of solidarity amongst the student's through the collaboration on this group project. In the prevailing atmosphere of the disenfranchisement of critical interventionist art practices this course argues for a critical practice that is based on a socio-economic analysis of societal processes but is inclusive of pleasure and desire as well. It aims to create an awareness of different sites in today's United States where critical art practice is taking place. Areas we will consider are gender, queer politics, and race. Also discussed are related questions of memory structure, community, site specificity, and institutional critique.
These canonized but useful notions are dealt with as interwoven non-hierarchical aspects of the social text. The course focuses on visible artists like Joseph Beuys, Hans Haacke, Adrian Piper, Michael Asher, Felix Gonzalez Torres as well as less well known artists like Dubravka Knezevic, Tom Kalin, Roza El-Hassan and others. "Art as Social Practice" advocates a practice that is "invested in questions challenging the surety of knowledge, to displace the flow a bit or redirect it". (Barbara Kruger). A practice that does not approach these questions in terms of oppositionality in its binary sense of anti's and pro's. Political work tactically aligns, affirms, and fosters ideas. It creates an argument, a productive confusion that causes discussion.
- Questions
What are our chances to be affective / effective as individuals or small groups dealing with issues like homelessness, the US prison system, progressive union activities, and (urban) poverty in the prevailing surroundings of corporate late capitalism? How do we handle the arbitrary nature of a sign? Are we concerned with direct change or do we define political interventionist artwork mainly in terms of causing a productive confusion leading to discussion? How do we think about the necessity of a connection between political discursiveness with artistic media-specific memory? How do we make our own (in many respects privileged) subject position visible in the interrogation? Do we have the right to talk for "the Other"? How do we avoid a reductive "over-identification" with the "Other" that assumes that they are by nature always right?
How can we avoid pseudo-political work and cultural practices that are rather orientated on self-aggrandizement or a sort of "feel goodiness"?
