User:Menno Harder/worklog

Artists to look at

Jeanne van Heeswijk
Apolonija Sustersic
Marjetica Potrc
Irwin
Tania Bruguera
Martha Roosler
Group Material
Domestic Research Society
Bik van der Pol
Rags Media Collective
Anton Vidokle

Bibliography

What we Made Conversations on Art and Social Cooperation, Tom Finkelpearl
In What We Made, Tom Finkelpearl examines the activist, participatory, coauthored aesthetic experiences being created in contemporary art. He suggests social cooperation as a meaningful way to think about this work and provides a framework for understanding its emergence and acceptance. In a series of fifteen conversations, artists comment on their experiences working cooperatively, joined at times by colleagues from related fields, including social policy, architecture, art history, urban planning, and new media. Issues discussed include the experiences of working in public and of working with museums and libraries, opportunities for social change, the lines between education and art, spirituality, collaborative opportunities made available by new media, and the elusive criteria for evaluating cooperative art.

Living as Form, Nato Thompson
Over the past twenty years, an abundance of art forms have emerged that use aesthetics to affect social dynamics. These works are often produced by collectives or come out of a community context; they emphasize participation, dialogue, and action, and appear in situations ranging from theater to activism to urban planning to visual art to health care. Engaged with the texture of living, these art works often blur the line between art and life. This book offers the first global portrait of a complex and exciting mode of cultural production—one that has virtually redefined contemporary art practice.

Artificial Hells, Claire Bishop
Since the 1990s, critics and curators have broadly accepted the notion that participatory art is the ultimate political art: that by encouraging an audience to take part an artist can promote new emancipatory social relations. Around the world, the champions of this form of expression are numerous, ranging from art historians such as Grant Kester, curators such as Nicolas Bourriaud and Nato Thompson, to performance theorists such as Shannon Jackson.

Artificial Hells is the first historical and theoretical overview of socially engaged participatory art, known in the US as “social practice.” Claire Bishop follows the trajectory of twentieth-century art and examines key moments in the development of a participatory aesthetic. This itinerary takes in Futurism and Dada; the Situationist International; Happenings in Eastern Europe, Argentina and Paris; the 1970s Community Arts Movement; and the Artists Placement Group. It concludes with a discussion of long-term educational projects by contemporary artists such as Thomas Hirschhorn, Tania Bruguera, Paweł Althamer and Paul Chan.

The One and the Many, Grant Kester
As artists increasingly produce work on international sites in conjunction with local populations, art historians seek to model these new practices and assess their conceptual and political implications. In his previous book, Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art, Grant Kester historicized the shift away from art as object-making to art as an open-ended form of exchange, which he characterized as “dialogical practice,” wherein art “unfolds through a process of performative interaction.” In his most recent book, The One and the Many: Contemporary Collaborative Art in a Global Context, Kester expands upon his definition of “dialogical practice” to advocate for collaborative, politically-engaged artwork that blurs the line between community activism and artistic production.

Art Scenes, the Social Scripts of the Art World, Pablo Helguera
Starting in the mid-1990s, either through performance, drawing, music, theater or literary fiction, the work of Pablo Helguera has extensively addressed the social dynamics of the contemporary art world. This book brings together Helguera’s research on the subject in essay form, aiming to contribute to the neglected area of the sociology of contemporary art.

In this provocative new book, Helguera argues that contemporary art makes us perform self-conscious or instinctive interpretive acts; and that the construction of value in artworks is determined less by the objects themselves—and by extension, by the art market—than by the nature of our interpretive performances, having a trickle-down effect on practically every aspect of art in society. Bringing together perspectives from sociology, education and art theory, Art Scenes aims to contribute to the inauguration of a new field described by Helguera as “Art World Studies.”

Social Works, Performing Art Supporting Publics, Shannon Jackson
Shannon Jackson’s Social Works embraces a range of late-twentieth and early twenty-first century visual and theatrical works of Europe and the Americas variously categorized as performance ethnography, site-specific art, documentary theater, public art, and post-dramatic theatre. Like Amelia Jones, Jane Blocker, and Rebecca Schneider, Jackson—Professor of Rhetoric and Theater, Dance and Performance Studies at University of California, Berkeley—takes on a capacious set of projects in theaters, on streets, and in galleries to offer “critical traction” to a field of expanded art practices vexed by medium-specific critical approaches (14). She traverses genealogies of visual and theatre studies in order to dislodge the perceptual and methodological patterns that tend to overlook the interdependencies between art and social systems. Rather than looking at how art does something to or for a public, Jackson devotes attention to works that provoke a sense of the blurred lines between the artist and the social.

Dark Matter, Art and Politics in the Age of Enterprise Culture, Gregory Sholette
Art is big business, with some artists able to command huge sums of money for their works, while the vast majority are ignored or dismissed by critics. This book shows that these marginalised artists, the 'dark matter' of the art world, are essential to the survival of the mainstream and that they frequently organize in opposition to it.

Gregory Sholette, a politically engaged artist, argues that imagination and creativity in the art world originate thrive in the non-commercial sector shut off from prestigious galleries and champagne receptions. This broader creative culture feeds the mainstream with new forms and styles that can be commodified and used to sustain the few artists admitted into the elite.

Coverley, Merlin, Psychogeography,
Debord, Guy, ‘Theory of the Dérive’, Internationale Situationniste #2,
Kaufmann, Vincent, [trans. Robert Bononno], Guy Debord: Revolution in the service of poetry,
Psychogeographic Guide to Paris: discourse on the passion of love,
The Naked City: Illustration of the hypothesis of psychogeographic turntables,
Debord, Guy, Society of the Spectacle,
Ford, Simon, The Situationist International: A User’s Guide
Hanson, S, ‘Patrick Kellier’, Street Signs
Coverley, Merlin, Psychogeography, Pocket Essentials: Harpenden, UK, 2006. p.135.

Links

http://versbeton.nl/2012/11/cultureel-ondernemerschap-kraak-de-shell-toren/
http://proximitymagazine.com/2008/12/cities-rotterdam/

Articles on empty spaces in Rotterdam and the closing of cultural centers:
http://nos.nl/video/498954-winkelstraten-vechten-met-nieuw-elan-tegen-leegstand.html
http://www.rijnmond.nl/nieuws/27-12-2011/rotterdams-poppodium-exit-failliet
http://3voor12.vpro.nl/lokaal/zuid-holland/nieuws/rotterdam/2008/december/fusie-watt-en-waterfront-een-feit.html
http://www.rijnmond.nl/nieuws/21-05-2013/flinke-toename-leegstand-kantoren-rotterdam
http://versbeton.nl/2013/05/rotterdam-moet-stoppen-met-de-bouwwoede-en-een-nieuwe-identiteit-ontwikkelen/
http://3voor12.vpro.nl/nieuws/2013/juli/Corso-sluit.html
http://3voor12.vpro.nl/nieuws/2012/juli/De-Nieuwe-Oogst.html
http://www.vandaag.be/buitenland/113236_nederlandse-theaterzalen-sluiten-de-deuren-door-gebrek-aan-subsidies.html
http://www.metronieuws.nl/010/razendsnelle-sluipmoord-op-de-unie/SrZlkn!jF0LaZnQ5rF2Y/ De zelfredzame burger in de doe-democratie
https://www.knaw.nl/nl/actueel/agenda/de-zelfredzame-burger-in-de-doe-democratie
http://www.robinvanthaar.nl/
http://www.deschaarbeeksetaal.be/
Patricia van Ulzen 'Dromen van een Metropool
http://www.aliciaframis.com/
http://ikrotterdam.blogspot.nl/