14 research outputs found
The Poetics of Participation: The Organizing of Participation in Contemporary Art
No full textThis thesis engages with the organizing of participation in participatory art that constitutes the so-called social turn in contemporary visual art. The purpose of the research project is to generate new knowledge about participatory art, in particular, by investigating the organizational processes involved in these practices. To this end, an in-depth, qualitative case study of the organizing of participation for a public work of art was conducted. Using sociologist John Law’s notion of modes of ordering as a tool to sharpen an analysis of the patterning effects discerned from fieldwork observations, the thesis argues that the organizing of participation in contemporary art is an effect of four main interacting modes of ordering, termed artistic autonomy, administration, the site, and public interest. First, the thesis respectively explores the modes of ordering as singular ordering patterns in the networks of the social, and then describes how they interact and the effects of that interaction in the case study. The thesis thus contributes to a new ‘organizational turn’ in art theory that considers the way in which artistic practices are concerned with the organizing and reorganizing of social ordering processes, while themselves being embedded within and filtered into other organizing practices. The thesis also contributes to organization studies’ interest in the relationship between art, aesthetics, and processes of organizing, suggesting that contemporary art theory and organization studies both ponder the question of how artistic practices generate new forms of organizing that counter society’s prevailing economic rationale
Organizing in the Public Interest: Participatory Organizing and Art’s Organizational Turn
No full textArt’s engagement with social practices has promoted reflections in art theory about strategies of organizing. Whether in the form of temporary self-organized initiatives, interventions into society or as the possibility of art developing alternative, sustainable organizations, questions of organizing come to the fore. In this article, I suggest that art theory will benefit from engaging with organizational theory, and I point to sociologist John Law’s concept of “modes of ordering” as a useful analytical tool with which to study the organizing practices involved in and affecting contemporary art. In particular, the article targets the field of participatory practices and suggests that they might be interpreted as the effect of cross-institutional modes of ordering. The potential of such an analysis is twofold. First, it offers an alternative analytical entrance point into the field of participatory practices, as opposed to the two dominant positions of a durational-dialogical and a conflictual-interventionist perspective. Second, it underlines how organizational processes cut across disciplinary fields and institutional barriers, generating networks of processual relations that support and strengthen certain practices, while challenging and impeding other practices
Corrigendum to Trent Hamann's Review of Edward F. McGushin's Foucault's Askesis published in Foucault Studies 6
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