Schedule

Week	Day	Topics	Activities/Readings	Due
1	Mon Sept 25	Who are we to each other?	Activities: Syllabus, Assignment sign-up, Group Agreements, Co-interviews
	Wed  Sept 27		Activities: Discuss & Define Social Practice
2	Mon Oct 2	Everyday life as ready-made Since Marcel Duchamp’s Urinal there has been an impulse running through art history to conceptually frame or designate everyday life occurrences as art experiences. This reframing of ordinary activities as art has helped to bring a wide range social engagement into contemporary art.	Seminar: Art As Experience by John Dewey, Art Which Can’t be Art by Allan Kaprow and Education for Socially Engaged Art – Definitions by Pablo Helguera Artists: Allison Knowles, Adrian Piper, Joseph Beuys, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Michael Rakowitz, Cildo Miereles	Sunday: 3 Questions & 3 Quotes from readings
	Wed Oct 4		Movements: Fluxus &­ Conceptual Art Activity: Sharing Inventories	Personal Inventory of Ideas & Values Extra: OCT 7 Greg Sholette Talk at PNCA
3	Mon Oct 9	Culture From Counter-Culture Populist political movements have changed the world around us, brought participatory and political practices into the arts, and moved artists to get out into the streets. Tactics and ideas, especially from the global people’s uprisings of the1960s continue to be at the core of many socially engaged artists work. In particular, strains of Marxist political theory are either overtly or implicitly animating most contemporary art, including especially, social practice.	Seminar: What We Made by Tom FinkelPearl, The Art of Activism by Steven Duncombe and Steve Lambert & These are the Times that Grow our Soul by Grace Lee Boggs Artists: Tania Bruguera, Bree Newsome, Judith Baca, Gran Fury, Laurie Jo Reynolds, Suzanne Lacy, Guerrilla Art Action Group	Sunday: Qs & Qs
	Wed Oct 11		Movements: Community Arts & New Genre Public Art Activity: Simultaneous Timelines	Extra: Brian Holmes Talk at PNCA
4	Mon Oct16	Reimagining Strategies & Organizations There has been a surge of artists incorporating or mimicking institutions as a tactic to produce socially engaged art, and especially to accomplish specific social change goals through fusing art and institutional power. This work brings up questions about what happens when art is intentionally instrumentalized to achieve set goals: Is art an effective way of making tangible change? Is art still art when it sets out to accomplish predetermined goals rather than pursue open-ended meaning?	Seminar: The Social Turn by Claire Bishop and response by Grant Kester & Users guide to the impossible by the Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination Artists: Critical Art Ensemble, Project Row Houses, The Yes Men, Rebuild Foundation, Wochenklasur, Conflict Kitchen, The Institute for Human Activities	Sunday: Qs & Qs
	Wed Oct 18		Movements: Institutional Critique & Tactical Media
5	Mon Oct 23	Activating Audiences & Citizens Social Practice as a field of art is commonly considered to be part of the history of visual art, but it has also grown out of theater and performance histories, especially feminist performance art and liberatory political theater. Important topics and questions have been brought into play from these legacies, including the body as material and subject within artwork, and the politics of spectatorship and participation.	Seminar: Performance: The body Politics  Interview with Shannon Jackson, New Museum Glossary: Participation by Andrea Liu  & Theatre of the Oppressed by Augusto Boal Artists: Helio Oiticica, Mammalian Diving Reflex, Tino Sehgal, Jeremy Deller, Los Angeles Poverty Department, Lygia Clark	Sunday: Qs & Qs
	Wed Oct 25		Movements: Feminist Performance Art & Neo-Concretism Activity: Share Family Trees	Family Tree
6	Mon Oct 30	Presence + Context > Any Thing Following conceptual art’s shift away from object based work and towards ideas themselves being understood and celebrated as the site of a work of art, socially engaged art is often primarily sited in an interaction between people. Even though most socially engaged work involves material elements the primary focus of this kind of work is usually on immaterial/relational experiences. These works are often made with specific people or places but frequently the context of the work is less physical and incorporates a political or cultural moment as a fundamental element of the piece.	Seminar: One Place After Another by Miwon Kwon and Relational Aesthetics by Nicolas Bourriaud Artists: Ben Kinmont, Francis Alys, Artist Placement Group, Rirkrit Tiravanija	Sunday: Qs & Qs
	Wed Nov 1		Movements: Relational Aesthetics & Site Specific Art Activity: Share Research Proposals	Research Proposals
7	Mon Nov 6	Collective Consciousness There are and have been many artist groups who work collectively among themselves and then also collaborate with other people outside that unit to make their work. Artist groups are a particularly potent model for socially engaged art practices because they fundamentally embody collaborative methods and generate work through relational processes. By their very structure artist groups call into question the mythic status of individual artistic authorship. These artistic experiments with collective structure seem to have become more prevalent since the collapse of the Soviet Union took with it any official large scale collective political vision.	Seminar: Education for Socially Engaged Art – Community & Collaboration by Pablo Helguera and  Collaboration Interview Artists: Ghana Think Tank, Group Material, Transformazium, Temporary Services, Super Flex, Public Movement, HaHa	Sunday: Qs & Qs
	Wed Nov 8		Activities: Discussion on collaborative models, Group preparations for Public Presentation event
8	Mon Nov 13	We all bring a piece of the truth Socially practice often follows an ethnographic model by embedding itself in contexts outside of the arts and making work based on the experiences of those communities. This type of ethnographic work is influenced by the shift towards acknowledging that cultural bias is built into our view of what is objective or true, leading to the need for a greater diversity of perspectives to be represented in order to see beyond each of our blind spots. In contemporary documentary this manifests through revealing the artist’s position within the work and allowing the art’s outcome to be determined at least in part by the participants. Alongside this there is a drive to question disciplinary divisions and for art to fully embed itself in fields of lived knowledge.	Seminar:  The Art of Ethnography by Larissa Hjorth and Kristen Sharp Artists: Wendy Ewald, Harrell Fletcher, Alyse Emdur, Sharita Towne, Mark Strandquist & Courtney Bowles	Sunday: Qs & Qs Grads: Research Reading
	Wed Nov 15		Activities:   Share Draft Research Presentations Research Workday	Draft Participatory Research Presentation
9	Mon Nov 20	Social Practice is a field we are making	Seminar: Grad Readings Activity: Presentation Run-through	Sunday: Qs & Qs
	Wed Nov 22		Activity: Presentation Run-through
10	Mon Nov 27	Public Presence	Activity: Public Presentation	Final Participatory Research Presentation
	Wed Nov 29		Activity:  Reflection

Schedule subject to change