Archive for Syllabus
Pedagogy: What in Art Makes Change
My BIG QUESTION is: how do arts-based cultural works effect change? And the inverse of that is: what is missing in the understanding of the effectiveness of participatory, relational, or socially-engaged art when we want to find cultural resistance within it? What other ways can we think about “effectiveness” or “utility” or the impact of […]
Insurgency and Anarchafeminism
Basically my life is totally great because I decided to make it my part-time job to study how people are collectively, creatively rebellious. Again, this means I look at participatory extralegal systems like socially-engaged, guerilla and performance art, tactical media, forms of DIY/DIWO production cultures, copyleft, and pop-ed. One of my absolute favorite pop-ed/guerilla art […]
Tactical Media and Disturbance Art
“The shift in revolutionary investments corresponds with a shift in the nature of power, which has removed itself from the streets and become nomadic.” — Critical Art Ensemble artist-tacticians, Qud in Rita Raley’s Tactical Media. Tactical Media Enter tactical media, a resistant form of cultural production that uses networked intelligence and digital forms to create […]
Power is Just a Snack
Power is going to come up a lot, so it’s worthwhile to think about a bit. One of the ways that I am interested in how activist art manifests is against, alongside, parallel to, and in opposition to P/power. But how does it work? Chomp, Chomp A mental exercise: Imagine a delicious cracker sandwich, made […]
Usership, Intersubjectivity, Political Meaning
If the people who are making vernacular, politicized cultural forms are also using these forms and doing so in groups, how do we talk about them? What about when them are us? Users are Experts Steven Wright*, in a 2007 lecture about people using socially-engaged art, points out that they are experts of their […]
Hierarchical Power, Invisible Users
“Envisaging an art without artwork, without authorship, and without spectatorship has an immediate consequence: art ceases to be visible as such.” – Steven Wright Part of the confusion between high art, activist art and participatory art and vernacular forms of politicized cultural works lies in determining where resistance emerges from, and against what. Perhaps, as […]
Where It Lands: Users and Relational Aesthetics
We did an overview of what activist, and socially-engaged / participatory art is and who it is made by in the last posts, so now lets look at some of the ideas artists and makers invoke behind this type of work: users and usership, relationality, intersubjectivity* and groups. Users of the Art/Cultural Experience Activists and […]
Makers: Actors, Artists, … Users
Who makes activist/political arts? The individuals and groups who make this kind of cultural production are primarily: movement actors [e.g. activists] within the communities meant to experience and co-create the work; artists, cultural activists, tool-having professionals, also often from within the discourse communities. These groups are far from mutually exclusive and often involve a lot […]
Activist Art & Participatory Art
What We’re Looking For The first place I began researching was in and around the concepts of “activist art” and “political art,” both of which are colloquial terms that I hear and use regularly. I was hoping to find a repository where an understanding of the critical importance of the role of those using or […]
Intro To Study
Over the next three months there will be weekly [ish] posts with writing and readings. Learn with me, talk back to me and each other. To get started and read along, I suggest the following: “Contributions to a Resistance Visual Culture Glossary” by Nato Thompson, http://journalofaestheticsandprotest.org/new3/thompson.html Peruse Beautiful Trouble: A Toolbox for Revolution, edited by […]
