closing.

I've found this semester to be such a good end note for my time at SCA.
I think the way we explored art not as a singular model but as a larger, more communal structure, leads this to be the main idea I have embraced through the course. The fact that we discussed so many different topics and ideas; institutional critique, Laibach, political activism, public art etc...
The way in which we approached critical theory, by examining the real world, I see as particularly significant and rewarding. By understanding more about the world we live in we can make more astute decisions in regard to the everyday.

This has reaffirmed my belief that art actually means something. In the same semester where I had to discuss "the death of painting," I have found that art it is still a vehicle that has the potential to disrupt the everyday and subvert it, to create a better understanding of where we are, where we have come from and where we are going.
The course had a particularly positive sense, in that through researching into all these different collectives it promotes a sense of action. Especially after the class with Lucas and Diego, and their 'do it because you can' attitude.

Makeshift

Lucas mentioned a collaborative group today called 'Makeshift', and I read a bit more about them. It's a design collaboration between Tessa Rapaport and Karl Logge who create works that hope to develop sustainable means of living. Rapaport sees that the design community needs to be far more critically engaged and responsive.

Earlier this year, the Makeshift duo created a work at the 4A Centre for Contemporary Art that involved a variety of potted edible plants built into a "make-do garden" city. Nurturing the plants for over four weeks, they created a garden that was more akin toward sprouting plants from cracks in the sidewalk or neighbourhood nature-strips.

"It's our vision of what a city could be ... covered in huge rooftops that get full sun all day, and here we are in this funny little place using lights to grow plants… if you can do it here, you can do it anywhere,” - Rapaport

“[We're using] the space as a place to make things in a responsive fashion rather than working in our studio and importing things from there into the gallery. Instead, the gallery becomes a stage for conversations, response, gives us a chance to try things out,” - Logge

They even got advice from the mother of an artist that was exhibiting upstairs, on how to cultivate their taros plants.

I see this kind of interaction with the people in the space of 4A, and how information is spread by word of mouth etc, to be very similar to the work Lucas and Diego are doing in the garden they are developing at SCA. They are similarly promoting a positive sense of sustainability. A "why not?" sensibility.

Sound/body/labour

The Ultra-Red group mentioned in Susan Kelly's article is a collaborative group of with a level of political activism that explores social issues such as public health, homophobia, education, public housing, public trading and immigration through sound art. The group not only consists of artists but also researchers and organisers from different social movements. They saw that they, as musicians, had the potential to break away from from the monopoly of universal signification by transforming the soundscape of everyday life.

From their website - "Some take their music, their noise, to the streets, claiming a space against its official uses or, conversely, reterritorialising it for its official use."

Their 'works in progress' are entitled "PS/Occupations" - Public Space/Occupations. There are eight 'occupations' in total, and all are works about social issues. For example, their first public space action was 'Soundtrax' (1992-1996) and was a collaboration with LA's first clean needle exchange program, 'Clean Needles Now', involving a number of performances and installations.

Another of their works began an inquiry into the impact of neoliberal economic policies on low-income homes in Los Angeles. Specifically the residents of public housing in east LA.

"We believe in a grassroots movement that puts into question the essential relationships on which the system is based. The focal point of these cultural campaigns is the evolution of political conviction into artistic actions and vice versa. We will present cultural performances as political actions because everyone is artist and activist at the same time."

The focus of the two-year collaboration with Union de Vecinos was the residents' resistance to demolition and displacement. The overall themes address the impact of public policy on public housing residents and the ways in which language is used to rationalise demolition. The four Ultra-Red installations were multimedia works—involving combinations of video, soundscape, photography and framed testimonies—and participatory, involving artists and residents.

Ultra-red's approach brought a new perspective to the thinking of the key organizers and in turn to the residents as well as to the artists.

When I was researching into Viktor Misiano, I came across an interview he conducted with a Ukranian group called the R.E.P. (Revolutionary Experimental Space) Group. The article is titled "R.E.P.: The Art of the Multitudes (Community)". They discuss the globalisation of the world, which led to a backlash, resulting in attempts to defend local autonomy, individuality and ethnic identity. Similarly to the NSK, the R.E.P. seeks to develop local brands based on these local identities.

The group was established by young Ukrainian artists in 2004 in Kiev as a reaction in accordance with the Orange Revolution. The Orange Revolution was a number of protests that occurred in the Ukraine in the wake of the 2004 Ukrainian presidential election which was claimed to be marred by corruption, voter intimidation and direct electoral fraud.

The Orange Revolution was the first instance of such phenomenon as contemporary art in social and cultural contexts, and became an opportunity to negotiate conditions for its way of existing in a new political reality. Which is why the R.E.P. chose public space as an area of their artistic experiments. However there were also no alternatives, because art galleries, institutional background and art critique did not exist yet.

The R.E.P.'s work has strong ties with its Ukrainian history, but also attempts to create a new national language for contemporary art in a country that has been somewhat milked of its cultural heritage. There are instances where once Ukrainian artists' careers would lead them to Moscow, they would become Russian artists. Artists such as Archipenko, Malewicz, and Tatlin all come from a Ukrainian background.

In 2005 R.E.P. won a national competition to represent the Ukraine at the Venice Biennial. The new government however wanted more traditional forms of art, leaning toward a folk aesthetic, and did not warm to the R.E.P.'s modern language and forms. The government eventually sent more folk works and the R.E.P. reacted by creating a new artistic movement called "Patriotism" which concerned universal art that was accessible for all.

" The new language for art established by REP and the new artistic tendency called “Patriotism” is from one point of view an ironic commentary to the official cultural policy of the Ukrainian state, but on the other hand is a patriotic gesture and reflection on the ways of development and existence of contemporary art, its language, importance and its potential impact on social and political reality." - Magdalena Kownacka



The R.E.P. currently have works exhibited at the White Box gallery in New York, in part of a multimedia group show curated by Denise Carvalho and Monika Szewczyk. The show is particularly about the globalisation in former Eastern European countries now known as Central Europe. The press release says that the show explores two sides of an "iron self-definition: one, which has become central, therefore losing all the privileges of subversion, resistance and rebellion of its previous state of difference and otherness; and another, still a memory of itself, a self-stereotype humoring itself as a parallel reality."

Public art... really?

After reading the excerpt from Miwon Kwon's 'One Place After Another' it seems that community-based, site specific art is riddled with issues that even in the 21st century, we seem to not be able to control. I think dividing public art into either works like Richard Serra's 'Tilted Arc', having an "aggressively interruptive function", or like John Ahearn's "assimilative" sculptures for Jerome Avenue is besides the point. In Kwon's book, he seems to politely say that both styles of public art are flawed, and that there will be criticism at both ends of the spectrum.

I think this then leads to other issues such as public taste and who is the actual audience who is allowed to decided whether the work is site and community appropriate. In regards to public taste, it is easy to acknowledge that everyone will have different opinions. This is without a doubt the truth. But then how do we decide which of these differing opinions is the most acute and suitable.

When Kwon debates whether works that have a utilitarian purpose are more suitable to site-specific works than the more traditional avant-garde like Serra's, I think this is an important issue to raise. If the work becomes more utilitarian, then art critics condemn the work saying that it has lost its worthiness of being deemed art. Then if the work becomes too isolated, in its ideas and subject, then the public and community come out and say that this work has no relevance to this site and its people, even though, such as in Serra's case, the work may have a very site-specific concept and idea.

If you have been to Manly wharf, you know of the steaming metal shell (shit) that presides there. When it was first unveiled in 2000, many people misconstrued the sculpture for a large piece of faeces. The sculpture, by Queensland based art consultancy Urban Art Projects, polarised the locals to extreme levels. It is cast aluminium and shoots steam out of 32 misting nozzles. Why I'm talking about this work is because this is a great example of a work that is seemingly misunderstood by the community (however bad it may be) and that public art seems to be a very difficult thing to pull off.The Manly Council created a small pamphlet, promoting the supposed "great number of public artworks", that read "Manly Council is committed to promoting public art for the benefit of the Manly community.

My problem here is, what 'benefit' do we seem to attain from a steaming (admittedly cool... as in temperature) metal shit (shell). How is the community meant to interact and create a dialogue, as suggested by Kwon?

Now ten years on, most of the public seem to just ignore it. And the only dialogue and interaction that occurs is when the steam is expelled leading to tiny children finding entertainment in jumping and running over the steaming metal shell (shit). Go figure.

Conversation Pieces

I find the works of the WochenKlauser and the other artists Kester mentions to be much more significant and profound than some of the works discussed in week 3 (Relational Aesthetics), for example the space that was open 24 hours for the duration of the exhibition. These dialogical art works are literally living and breathing, and I find this element to be quite poignant.They have a direct connection with society and I feel that this is what makes the works resonate with the public.

To question the validity of these works in the realm of art seems fair, and I think Kester raises a good point about Suzanne Lacy, that her attempt to challenge the stereotypical view of young people parallels the avant-garde artists and their attempt to,

"challenge the deadening representational conventions of academic art and to reveal instead the experiential specificity of the world around them."

This in fact is exactly what Lacy is doing by taking the work out of a gallery and putting it in a real world situation. I think that by this action alone, reacting to the contemporary art world and its constructs, evoking art-history itself, her actions are therefore an act of art.

As I slowly start to get my head around Situationist theories,
I am presented with confusing quotes such as, 'In a world which really is topsy-turvy, the true is a moment of the false.' - Debord.
It seems to me as if the Situationist International are the people who are in on the joke.
If a constructed situation is 'a moment of life concretely and deliberately constructed by the collective organisation of a unitary ambiance and a game of events,'
then what a fun joke it could be.


Also, Debord's early experiments with film and his interest in the provocation of the audience, reminds me of the somewhat similar Exploding Plastic Inevitable shows Andy Warhol toured across America in the 1960s with the Velvet Underground and much of the Factory gang. Most of the time the crowds would swell at the start of the shows due to public fascination with Warhol, but by the end most of the crowd would have disappeared due to the Velvet Underground's raucously loud aural assault. Audiences were also left equally bewildered by the strange gyrating dancers, Warhol's own film projections, and hypnotic light show.