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.

Unpacking the self

Forum+ ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 29-37
Author(s):  
Manju Sharma
Keyword(s):  
Visual Arts ◽  
Personal Narrative ◽  
The Self ◽  
Cross Linking ◽  
Artistic Practice ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Personal Stories ◽  
The World ◽  
Visual Artist ◽  
Sensitive Issues

Abstract In this essay, visual artist and writer Manju Sharma reflects on the use of autobiography as a methodology for storytelling in the visual arts. She focuses on the methods that she uses to explore the self and its relatedness to the world that she wishes to grasp. She also sheds light on how autobiography fits into her artistic practice as a means of finding hidden narratives and to keep the personal narrative related to the world. The essay touches upon the use of personal stories, cross-linking and note-taking to unpack everyday sensitive issues that can allow people to find their voice and to speak out.

Materialities of Abstraction

2021 ◽  
Vol 67 (2) ◽  
pp. 191-214
Author(s):  
Brandon Truett
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Abstract Art ◽  
Artistic Practice ◽  
Material World ◽  
Bloomsbury Group ◽  
Art Object ◽  
Visual Artist ◽  
The Aesthetic

This article recovers the 1918 chapbook that the understudied Vorticist poet and visual artist Jessie Dismorr composed for the American sculptor John Storrs and his wife Marguerite. It examines the ways the chapbook reorients the aesthetic criteria by which we recognize abstraction in the early twentieth century. Studying how Dismorr’s divergent and feminist approach to Vorticist practice exploits “the materialities of abstraction,” or the traces of the material world that evince the outside of the abstract art object, it suggests that these material traces lead us to reimagine the boundary between inside and outside, and thus the way an art object indexes and interacts with the material world. Proposing that the recovery of an object as seemingly inconsequential as an individual chapbook in fact raises questions about how we construct the literary- and art-historical field of modernism, the article situates Dismorr’s work in relation to other feminist understandings in British modernism of the socialized space of artistic practice across media exemplified by Virginia Woolf ’s account of sociability within the Bloomsbury Group, and argues for the importance of such unique objects as chapbooks to the study of material culture within literary history and within art history as well.

The lines are open: An artist’s experience of working with dementia research

Dementia ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 17 (6) ◽  
pp. 755-762 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles R Harrison
Keyword(s):  
Potential Role ◽  
Neuropsychological Testing ◽  
Artistic Practice ◽  
Art Making ◽  
People With Dementia ◽  
Creative Art ◽  
Dementia Research ◽  
Visual Artist

This paper offers a first-hand account from a visual artist working with people living with a rare dementia. It explores the processes and motivations involved in situating an individual artistic practice in the field of dementia research. The paper discusses the potential role of creative art-making for neuropsychological testing and some of the complexities of interpretation that this involves. This account also highlights the ways in which working with people with dementia can be personally and artistically transformative.

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 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

scholarly journals Punctures in the Periphery. Show-Bix and the Media Conscious Practice of Per Højholt.

Nordlit ◽  
2007 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 115
Author(s):  
Morten Søndergaard
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Contemporary Art ◽  
Artistic Practice ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Art Scene ◽  
Art Forms ◽  
Visual Artist ◽  
The Media ◽  
Paradigmatic Change ◽  
Definition Of

Around 1967 and onwards, Per Højholt (1923-2004) performs a series of punctures in the periphery of a small and self-conscious avant-garde in Denmark - experiments that combine most of the known art forms and genres in a still more active dialogue with new media and technology.One of the first things Højholt engaged himself in at the time was Show-Bix, which is best described as an artist group consisting of the photographer and visual artist Poul Ib Henriksen, composer Gunner Møller Pedersen, and Per Højholt (at the time described largely as a poet). The group was operative from 1968 and until 1971, a period during which it conducted a series of complex experiments involving an audience as well as a media consciousness which is quite unique in Denmark - perhaps even more so today. In fact, I claim that Show-Bix is the visible proof of a paradigmatic change in Per Højholt's artistic practice, as well as in the overall definition of the contemporary art scene.

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.

scholarly journals Modern Digital Art Practices and “More-than-Human” Perception

2021 ◽  
pp. 200-221
Author(s):  
A.A. Denikin ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Human Perception ◽  
Digital Art ◽  
Artistic Practice ◽  
Participatory Art ◽  
Individual Perception ◽  
Art Practices ◽  
Affective Attunement ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Matter Energy

The article analyzes the concept of “more-than-human” perception, the features of which are constructed in the networks of relations, as a result of the interaction and relationships of heterogeneous forces (human activities, animals, bacteria, objects, technologies, etc.). This is not a subjective human perception, personal judgment of individual taste or social “distribution of sensitive”, but the collaborative process of configuring affective “field of the possible things” (define perception) as a result of the participation of multiple actants in the creation of life events, situations, processes, and conflicts. Based on the philosophical ideas of A. Bergson, W. Whitehead, J. Simondon, J. Deleuze, and F. Guattari, the author examines the affective nature of the interaction between the works of contemporary artists and the audience-participants. It is argued that creativity and artistic practice can be reinterpreted as processes of co-creation with the movements of matter formation. It is a way to think of art not as a form, but as a process open to a continuous interval of renewal and invention, which is revealed through the material relations of matter-energy, duration, transitions, and intuition. Through affective attunement techniques, participants organize the movements of matter-en- ergy flows, and each individual perception by the subject-actant becomes a joint “more-than- human” perception. Interactive and participatory works do not reflect reality in aesthetic forms, but instead create new processes, new places of creativity (manifestations of chance), in which the aesthetic is performatively realized before it is understood and reflected by the participants themselves. The text clarifies what constitutes “more-than-human” perception, how it relates to the usual understanding of the sphere of human sensory experience, and how it is implemented when working with modern interactive and participatory art projects.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document