1,720,977 research outputs found
Inside out : When objects inhabit the streets
No full textThis essay will explore the contemporary intersection of art and interior design on the level of social practice, surveying two projects that deal with pubic participation from a critical art perspective and Jacques Rancière's 'art as dissensus.' These 'design activations' offer urban inhabitants a phenomenological exchange that occurs with shifts between art and design, interior and exterior, and the subjective and intersubjective awareness of the city. A manual sewing machine and manual typewriter offer a different representation and experience of the Tenderloin District in San Francisco, the Berlin Wall and San Francisco parks
Guillermo Gómez-Peña : a "new age shaman” in a bohemian theme park
No full textThe Marquis de Sade was declared, “the fist commandment of art is ‘never to bore,’” and perhaps no other artist of his generation has embodied this sentiment more than Guillermo Gómez- Peña, the Mexican-born performance artist and cultural theorist living in San Francisco. Since the early 1980s Gómez-Peña, along with his performance troupe La Pocha Nostra, have been engaged in “reverse anthropology” staging “postcolonial” performances that foreground race and intervene in our cultural fears and desires by focusing on our obsession with the exotic. He deftly navigates the “post-multicultural” world – accelerated by globalization and nation branding – by using elaborate performative and interactive elements that expose (to the audience) their deeply embedded cultural stereotypes and desires for the other
Book review : "Artificial Hells: participatory art and the politics of spectatorship by Claire Bishop"
No full textIn the years since Nicolas Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics (1998) was published, a plethora of books (Shannon Jackson’s Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics [2011], Nato Thompson’s Living as Form: Socially Engaged Art from 1991–2011 [2011], Grant Kester’s Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art [2004], Pablo Helguera’s Education for Socially Engaged Art: A Material and Techniques Handbook [2011]), conferences and articles have surfaced creating a rich and textured discourse that has responded to, critiqued and reconfigured the proposed social utopias of Bourriaud’s aesthetics. As a touchstone for this emerging discourse, Relational Aesthetics outlines in a contemporary context the plethora of social and process-based art forms that took as their medium the ‘social’. It is, however, Clare Bishop’s book Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (Verso), that offers a deeper art historical and theoretically considered rendering of this growing and complicated form of art, and forms a central body of work in this broad constellation of writings about participatory art, or social practice art/socially engaged art (SEA), as it is now commonly known..
‘Imagination wove this flesh garment’: Fashion, critique and capitalism
No full textFashion, with its intimate connection to the logic of capitalism, has the ability to absorb all resistance into itself. Fashion makes fashionable what was once subversive. What therefore can we make of contemporary ‘alternate practices in fashion design’: textiles grown from fermented tea, garments that transform into portable habitats, or manuals that teach users how to hack mass-produced garments? Such practices would seem to be speculative at best, operating on the margins of a fashion system that will attempt to feed on their critical content for reinvention as a new trend. In this chapter we argue two points. First, we propose that speculative practices can be seen as part of a lineage of critical practitioners whose work developed in opposition to the dominant fashion culture. Second we argue that although fashion operates largely through absorbing its own criticism, profound change in fashion is also driven by clothing design on the margins. Through an analysis of the work of nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first century designers and artists whose practices have hovered uneasily on the margins of fashion, this chapter will explore how critical practice may un-design and re-design fashion
Care for care : Studio REV's strategies of engagement
No full textThe artists at Studio REV-, along with their allies in the broader non-profit sector, address domestic workers’ rights in the United States. As a social practice art project, NannyVan works to improve how information about domestic rights is disseminated to these workers, whether nannies, elder caregivers or others. As part of a larger project named CareForce, the NannyVan project shows an ethics of care by using design traces as tactics and transversal methods as strategies
Art as barometer: Uncovering a new breed of instrumental artist
No full text"The arts have long been a barometer for civilisation, registering, at the surface of our cultural consciousness, the seismic shifts in society’s bedrock. But only quite recently, with the advent of pervasive data and new sensing technologies, have artists also literally become barometers, seizing upon new materials and techniques to create instruments to measure and translate the natural environment."--http://www.carbonarts.org/articles/art-as-barometer
See to believe: the Center for Tactical Magic's sleight of hand
No full textThe Bay Area's Center for Tactical Magic has been performing “magical” art interventions since 2000. The Center's work augments traditional activist techniques by offering new conceptions of what art and activism can entail in a contemporary urban context. This article explores how Jacques Rancière's reconfigured relationship between art and politics can be applied to the Center's work, providing new distributions of the sensible for participants
Activism, art and social practice : a case study using Jacques Ranciere’s framework for analysis
No full textThe question can no longer just be whether “art and social practice” or creative forms of activism are part of larger neo liberal agenda nor if they are potentially radical in their conception, delivery or consumption. The question also becomes: what are the effects of social practice art and design for the artists, institutions, and the publics they elicit in public and private spaces; that is, how can we consider such artworks differently? I argue the dilution of social practices’ potentially radical interventions into cultural processes and their absorption into larger neo liberal agendas limits how, as Jacques Rancière might argue, they can intervene in the “distribution of the sensible.” I will use a case study example from The Center for Tactical Magic, an artist group from the San Francisco Bay Area
Liminal moments : designing, thinking and learning
Full text linkThis paper provides a contextual reflection for understanding best practice teaching to first year design students. The outcome (job) focused approach to higher education has lead to some unanticipated collateral damage for students, and in the case we discuss, has altered the students’ expectations of course delivery with specific implications and challenges for design educators. This tendency in educational delivery systems is further\ud
compounded by the distinct characteristics of Generation Y students within a classroom context. It is our belief that foundational design education must focus more on process than outcomes, and through this research with first\ud
year design students we analyse and raise questions relative to the curriculum for a Design and Creative Thinking course—in which students not only benefit from learning the theories and processes of design thinking,\ud
conceptualisation and creativity, but also are encouraged to see it as an essential tool for their education and development as designers. This study considers the challenges within a design environment; specifically, we\ud
address the need for process based learning in contrast to the outcome-focused approach taken by most students. The authors base their reflections on teaching design students at a university in Queensland, Australia
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