scholarly journals A NOTE ON SOCIALLY ENGAGED ART CRITICISM

2017 ◽  
Vol 25 (53) ◽  
Author(s):  
Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen
Keyword(s):  
Art Criticism ◽  
Institutional Critique ◽  
Community Based ◽  
Participatory Art ◽  
Critical Potential ◽  
Relative Autonomy ◽  
Socially Engaged Art ◽  
Relational Art ◽  
Tactical Media

This article is a discussion of Grant Kester’s notion of socially-engaged art criticism via a retrospective mapping of the four most important 1990s artistic practices: relational art, institutional critique, tactical media and socially-engaged art. While both relational, or participatory, art and institutional critique seem to have run out of steam, and have fused more or less seamlessly with the institution of art, socially-engaged art still seems to hold critical potential by making use of the relative autonomy of art beyond the narrow confines of the art institution. The journal Field, founded and edited by Kester, is an attempt to develop a new art criticism that is able to account for this kind of practice. The turn to ethnography in order to analyse often open-ended community-based projects is relevant – and the

Participatory, art-based appreciative inquiry with artists labelled/with intellectual and developmental disabilities

2021 ◽  
Vol 00 (00) ◽  
pp. 1-17
Author(s):  
Sara Miller
Keyword(s):  
Developmental Disabilities ◽  
Appreciative Inquiry ◽  
The United States ◽  
Intellectual And Developmental Disabilities ◽  
Community Based ◽  
Participatory Art ◽  
The Future ◽  
Online Methods ◽  
And Control ◽  
Community Access

People labelled/with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) participate in community-based studio programming across the United States, yet their experiences and preferences for studio programming are not well known. The goal of this research was to learn what artists in a community-based studio think is important about their studio and what they want to change in the future. Using art-based appreciative inquiry and online methods, the artists were prompted to talk and create artwork about ‘what is most important’ in the studio and ‘what we want for the future’. The artists reported that the most important aspects of the studio are the staff and their friends at the studio and the opportunity to make art that is motivated by their interests. The wishes expressed by the artists included increased opportunities to be social, to make more money, to have more community access and more choice and control in the studio.

Gestures of institutional critique

2018 ◽  
pp. 26-50
Author(s):  
Sruti Bala
Keyword(s):  
Institutional Critique ◽  
Artistic Practice ◽  
Participatory Art ◽  
Institutional Conditions ◽  
Tel Aviv ◽  
Activist Group ◽  
Visual Artist ◽  
Participatory Performance ◽  
Opera Production

Chapter I deals with the question of institutional critique in relation to participatory art. What is the place of institutional critique in relation to participatory performance? The chapter reflects on the conundrums of institutional critique, exploring the formation of participatory art forms as emergent from the critique of mainstream art institutions. It compares a number of approaches to institutional critique: the institutional affiliations of a community-based theatre project from Darfur, Sudan, a flash mob performance by an Israeli activist group protesting a Cape Town Opera production in Tel Aviv Opera House, a breaching experiment by visual artist Pilvi Takala, of trying to enter Disneyland dressed as Snow White, amongst others. Sometimes the gesture of critique consists in building counter-institutions, and sometimes in fleeing them. Institutional critique, understood as the explicit use of an artistic practice to interrogate, oppose or break out of art institutional frameworks has very asymmetrical trajectories across the world and across domains. The chapter argues that the changing institutional conditions of participation expose not just the norms of a certain institution, but also its specific traditions of institutional critique.

The gestures of participatory art

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sruti Bala
Keyword(s):  
Collective Action ◽  
The Netherlands ◽  
Visual Arts ◽  
Civic Life ◽  
Institutional Critique ◽  
Community Theatre ◽  
Participatory Art ◽  
Art Practices ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Critical Investigation

The gestures of participatory art offers a critical investigation of key debates in relation to participatory art, spanning the domains of applied and community theatre, immersive performance as well as the visual arts. Rather than seeking a genre-based definition, it asks how artists, audiences and art practices approach the subject of participation beyond the predetermined options allocated to them. In doing so, it inquires into the ways that artworks participate in civic life. Participation is the utopian sweet dream that has turned into a nightmare in contemporary neoliberal societies. Yet can the participatory ideal be discarded or merely replaced with another term, just because it has become disemboweled into a tool of pacification? The gestures of participatory art insists that the concept of participation must be re-imagined and shifted onto other registers. It proposes the concept of the gesture as a rewarding way of theorizing participatory art. The gesture is simultaneously an expression of an inner attitude as well as a social habitude; it is situated in between image, speech and action. The study reads the gestural as a way to link discussions on participatory art to broader issues of citizenship and collective action. Moving from reflections on institutional critique and impact to concrete analyses of moments of unsolicited, delicate participation or refusal, the book examines a range of practices from India, Sudan, Guatemala and El Salvador, the Lebanon, the Netherlands and Germany. It engages with the critiques of participation and pleads for a critical reclaiming of participatory practices.

scholarly journals Injection versus Extraction

Athanor ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 37 ◽  
pp. 37-52
Author(s):  
Yue Ren
Keyword(s):  
Social Issues ◽  
Vital Role ◽  
Community Art ◽  
Participatory Art ◽  
Socially Engaged Art ◽  
The Social ◽  
Art Practices ◽  
Art Community ◽  
Art And Activism ◽  
Interdisciplinary Scholarship

Socially Engaged Art (SEA) is a conventional yet emerging phenomenon at the broadest level. On one hand, art practices stimulated by and generated from social issues have taken a vital role along the development of modern and contemporary art, as we can now hardly indicate a single artwork that stands by its pure aesthetics; such situation only intensifies in the era of globalization, urbanization and information-explosion. On the other hand, while clusters of art practices appropriating and rebinding the social reality, a much longer list of analogous terminologies including public art, community art, participatory art, and activism art, are still enriching and complicating the concept SEA in the realm of interdisciplinary scholarship.

scholarly journals TRANSART. Transactions, Transferences and Transitions in Participatory Art

2018 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 322
Author(s):  
Saioa Olmo Alonso
Keyword(s):  
Point Of View ◽  
Transactional Analysis ◽  
Artistic Practice ◽  
Community Art ◽  
Participatory Art ◽  
Freudian Psychoanalysis ◽  
Collaborative Art ◽  
Relational Art ◽  
Art Community ◽  
Dialogical Art

This article centres on the exchange of necessities, projections, ways of behaving and of establishing relations, of people involved in participatory art projects and collective artistic practices. For that, we explore how these exchanges happen, thinking about the transactions (from the point of view of the Transactional Analysis), the transferences and counter transferences (from Freudian Psychoanalysis), the concept of “habitus” (of Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology) and the transitional phenomena (from Donald W. Winnicott’s theory). We cross these concepts with the artistic fact andspecifically with ways of doing art usually appointed under labels such as Participatory Art, Collaborative Art, Relational Art, Dialogical Art, Community Art, Social Engaged Art, Artivism, New Genre Public Art and Useful Art. We pay attention to artistic practices that specifically put the focusof interest on exploring different possibilities of sociability that let people and collectives make transitions (ideological, practical, emotional, material, relational ones…) from one situation or position to another. We call “Transart” to this kind of artistic practice that works under the idea that art isa human creation that experiment with ways of exchange, that facilitate transits and that can contribute to processes of transformation.

Socially Engaged Art Education

2017 ◽  
pp. 1-20 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ross H. Schlemmer
Keyword(s):  
Art Education ◽  
Careful Consideration ◽  
Relational Aesthetics ◽  
Community Arts ◽  
Socially Responsible ◽  
Community Based ◽  
Aesthetic Quality ◽  
Artistic Production ◽  
Socially Engaged Art

Community Arts have a long history within art and education, yet its practices continue to evolve. The issue of nomenclature when discussing such socially engaged practices raises the deeper questions of whether work in this area suggests the formalization of yet another new genre of art, or does it entail a more profound re-ordering of the discursive system that underlies most existing modes of artistic production? This chapter attends to individual differences and similarities in perception and practice through a careful consideration for how the field of art education might nurture new and diverse articulations of community-based practices that emphasize relational aesthetics, participatory pedagogy, and socially engaged artistic practices. This chapter will (re)frame the discourse as Socially Engaged Art Education (SEAE) to emphasize a new terrain of consciousness that is socially responsible and ethically sound, and goes beyond mere promotion of aesthetic quality to contribute to improved quality of life.

scholarly journals Konstmässan och barn: Pilvi Takalas The Committee

2014 ◽  
Vol 42 (118) ◽  
pp. 175-192
Author(s):  
Saara Hacklin
Keyword(s):  
Lived Experience ◽  
Contemporary Art ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Dimension ◽  
Participatory Art ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Socially Engaged Art ◽  
The Arts ◽  
The Spectator ◽  
The 1960S

Participation has become a popular strategy within contemporary art. Previously, it has been associated with avant garde art, yet nowadays it has become central strategy in the arts, often favored by politicians and other funders. As a result, participatory art finds itself in a strategy becomes unreflected. Phenomenology, and especially Maurice Merleau-Ponty's philosophy, has been mostly associated with the 1960s Minimalism, as it influencedAmerican artists to explore the position of the spectator and the lived experience of the artwork. However, as phenomenology was associated with modernism, it has been often deemed insufficient to address the political dimension of contemporary art from the late 1960s onwards. In order to find a way to connect the apolitical phenomenology of the 1960s minimalism to the political art of today, I discuss a case study of Pilvi Takala's (b. 1980) The Committee (2013). With this piece Takala won the Emdash prize at Frieze art fair in London. The work consisted of a simple gesture: in it she gave, 7.000 pounds, most of the production budget included in the prize to a group of children. The children could freely use the money as long as they made the decision together. The Committee brings together children and money at an art fair, using the strategies of socially engaged art. In the article I examine the piece from a phenomenological vantage point in order to understand the different levels of the work.

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