ending

I found this course very fascinating and will definitely leave with a head full of new knowledge. It has been very different to any other theory class I have had over the past few years and although it has been hard to get at times it has left me thinking about some really interesting topics from situationism to transversal concatenation..and the list goes on.

I enjoyed the way the classes progressed a lot. It was really well structured and allowed for some extremely intriguing thoughts to come through. One thing that has made this class specifically enjoyable was how relavent it was and without doubt helped me view art and institutions from many different perspectives.

The blogs were a bit messy and hard to keep track of because of the amount of people involved, but in the end it was a great way of sharing knowledge especially in a relatively short time frame.

in the balance

When seeing 'In the Balance' it was a little confronting for me, it was definitely a form of art and life. At first I found it hard to view from an artistic point of view because my passion for the environment is very strong. But after contemplating for a while I saw great positives in bringing the awareness of current environmental issues to the world through the means of art as oppose to media and politics.

I definitely enjoyed Diego's work at the exhibition and his concepts behind it are really inspiring too. Diego's devotion to the preservation of unwanted flora is what first caught my attention. He is obviously interested in bringing to mind what good weeds can do, despite their bad name.

"The poor dudes are in the wrong places at the wrong time. A lot of them are trying to do good, like create a stable ecosystem in places that we've fully logged, but they're blacklisted"

Art and Politics

In Nikos Papastergiadis ‘Aesthetics and politics – in the age of ambient spectacles’, Ranciere’s and Raunig’s perspectives are compared and contrasted. I found that the way these two perspectives were analysed and evaluated gave me an improved understanding of how art and politics can work together.

Although I think it important to note that Raunig does not think that they are one and the same, they may integrate and affect each other but do not necessarily need each other to exist. Which I guess means that although they can connect on a certain levels forming new possibilities and opportunities they will eventually return to their own individual avenues.

“The shuttling between rather than the blurring of the fields of art and politics”

constructing the situation

Wk 5: Situations: From Anti-Art to Situationism

These are just a few points within the reading – “Constructing the situation” Gerald Raunig, which I found interesting so far:

· Creating a situation “Our central idea is the construction of situations, that is to say, the concrete construction of momentary ambiences of life and the transformation into a superior passional quality.”

· Constructing the situation is temporary “passage-ways” “without a future.”

· Situations: the active formation of environments.

· “Instead of the situation being depicted on the stage in the Aristotelian theatre, being interrupted on the stage in epic theatre, in the Situationist theatre of everyday life the situation is shifted to the everyday space of the city”

· Debord’s ideas lead to the gap between production and participation and reception. The boundary and relationship between the stage and the audience, the actors and the observers.

· “Yet what distinguishes the Situationist situation is that it is less created (as perfect) than it is becoming, an assemblage of (revolutionary) situations newly initiated again and again.”

wk 4 blog

Late entry – Wk 4: Institutional Critique

Institutional critique reflects critically on it’s own place within museums, galleries and other institutions. I agree that Michael Asher’s exhibition at the Claire Copley Gallery in Los Angeles is a great example of this. Asher removes the wall in the gallery exposing the administration workers and other gallery members to the public. After removing the wall Asher filled in the space perfectly so that there was no evidence that a wall had ever been there.

People that had been to the gallery previously would recognise the change almost instantly after entering the space whereas the people that were unfamiliar with the space would have a different experience all together. By removing this wall and presenting a space where two things conflict – in this case the, usually private, office is exposed to the public of the artworld – Asher is critiquing the institution in a very exposing, yet remarkable way.

Arty Party

In Hal Foster’s “Arty Party” there are many interesting points raised. He discusses “works which fall somewhere between a public installation, an obscure performance and a private archive” and continues stating that they can also be found outside art galleries, “rendering them even more difficult to decipher in aesthetic terms”.

There is a range of works that fall under this category that Foster mentions throughout his piece. ‘DIY, or How to Kill Yourself Anywhere in the World for under $399’ is a collaborative piece by Gonzalez-Foerster, Gillick, Tiravanija and more. They show you how to customize your own coffin out of IKEA furniture, adapting the readymade object to very unusual ends. This work, and others like it, is intriguing because the completion and or success often depends on the audience or viewer. Is it just sufficient for a work to be simply put forward? Or does the audience have to become engaged with the idea or concept enough to peruse it to its full extent in order for it to be successful?

“Underlying much of Tiravanija’s practice is a desire not just to erode the distinction between institutional and social space, but between artist and viewer; the phrase “lots of people” regularly appears on his lists of materials” Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics, Claire Bishop.