Work 5 (last one!)

WORK 5 – WHERE

This final prompt addresses the context and location of your work, removing it from the territory of our classroom and discussion, through extension into the public realm.

To re-cap on our visiting artists:

Michael spoke about his radio projects, directly engaging local communities through practical workshops and on-the-street interviews. His mode of working becomes more about curating and catalyzing happenings and empathies, than the individual authorship of singular artworks.

Kyong Park’s mobile dwelling caused a series of re-contextualisation, as a module of Detroit literally migrated as an events-space, to be re-inhabited in various cities across the world. Here the fabric of a specific place  (and the issues embedded within it) becomes a means to strike up new conversations, as the house relates differently to each locality whilst retaining its own narrative.

Kyong also initiated Storefront, an experimental institution in the heart of NYC that continues to host some of America’s most engaged and innovative public projects: http://www.storefrontnews.org/

Ricardo Dominguez’ ‘bio-political’ art practice, often in collaboration in forms such as Electronic Disturbance Theatre continues to probe, reveal, and antagonize existing cultural boarders (social, material and political) in the USA. 

His use of inexpensive materials and the internet as a crowd-sourcing platform inspires a realization that resistance and radical activism need not be supported by expensive technologies. Like immigrants sliding across the boarder on re-cycled car seats, the loudest statements and conceptual explosions can be small in scale and materially modest:

It’s not the size of the thing itself that matters, but the stretch it demands on existing conventions.

Dominguez’ intense involvement in the situations he aims to address becomes a powerful activism that utilizes the languages of politics, philosophy and art. The resulting works percolate the fabric of the everyday, to suggest and activate alternatives to specific repressions of contemporary existence.

THE PROMPT

Beginning once more with the struggles and motivations developed throughout the last 4 works, this is the time to locate your practice in a space where it communicates with a broader audience of your choosing. 

Now think critically about who you want your work to address, and how. It is the point at which various platforms of exhibition become relevant: the gallery is one such platform with it’s own specific audience of viewers who are largely engaged with history and theory of art itself – many others exist, from non-profit spaces for public participation, to public plazas, to the wedges of unused land in Gordon Matta-Clark’s Fake Estates: http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/events/oddlots.php

...re/ the above link, Cabinet magazine itself acts as a curated space for the two-dimensional display and dissemination of artwork (beyond reproduction of work elsewhere, the printed journal can function as a public space for the display of research-based art). 

Whether your instinct is to disrupt, collect, question or activate, it is crucial that your art becomes a conscious intervention. Whilst production of work can be self-exploratory, its exhibition will unavoidably involve communicating with a certain segment of humanity. Its affect ultimately depends upon the relation between the work itself, and the audience who experience it. The strength of an artwork often relies on an awareness of this social context. In Teddy’s words, this is about curating relationships.

That’s not to say that work must be immaterial, as Anya’s ice-block sculpture goes to show, these relationships can emerge from the existing conditions of a space or place. And a sculptural work can itself be the producer of new relationships through the gatherings it causes (the youths who returned daily to Anya’s pump-house). Interactions can be activated by the ‘stuff’ of art in a gallery context too – as in Felix Gonzalez-Torrez’ heaps of sweets: what does it mean to gather? To eat together? To build together? To move a mountain together?

So, this week: 

-       Perform, build, or instigate a process in a public space. This should relate back to a now more finely-grained awareness of the personal frustrations that motivate your practice.

-       Carefully consider the social realm you plan to address. Justify the location (its material and social preconditions), and remain conscious of the relationships ‘curated’ by your work.

-       Fully document both the work itself, and its relational outcomes. Present  this documentation and a report on the responses, behaviours and opinions of the public who engage with it.

-       Use the abstract to fully justify and (during/after) the event, criticize the effectiveness of your work in this specific context.