History of Social Practice 2017

Wednesday, October 11, 2017

Community Arts!

For a long time, community arts popped in my head looking like this:

We the Youth, Haring and CityKids

AIDS Memorial Quilt

LA Commons

Community Arts also known as Dialogical Art, and Community Engaged Art is described by the internet as “an artistic activity based in a community setting.”

Maryo Gard Ewell at the Colorado Council on the Arts, also called a community arts tradition keeper and grew up in the community arts movement, provides this working definition:

“Community art is of and by the people of a place and culture, often facilitated by a professional artist. It reflects the values, concerns, and meaning of living in that place or culture.”

And this analogy:

"Long ago, I heard Merce Cunningham speak at a conference. An audience member asked him to name his best dance. He said something like this: “Everyone's body moves in a different way. The best pieces I've done have been for a particular dancer, and while many people can dance [a piece] well, only one person can dance it almost perfectly.” There's my analogy. A given piece holds its deepest meaning for, and can best be evaluated by, the people of the community that have made that piece."

Some community art:

Bread and Puppet Theater

Founded in 1963 in the NYC by Peter Schumann


Early Poster

“We are the Bread & Puppet Theater because we offer good old sourdough rye bread together with a great variety of puppetshows, some good, some not so good, but all for the good and against the bad. The art of puppetry helps women, men and children alike to overcome the established order and the obsessive submission to its politics and consequent brutalities.”

“It’s bread and puppet, and we mean that. The puppetry is to create the situation to share the bread, because without that you couldn’t persuade them, in a capitalist country, to come and eat bread. They’d be too skeptical."


Bread and Puppet anti-war parade, NYC, 1967

Oscar Romero puppet, Washington DC, 199

Tim Rollins and K.O.S.

“K.O.S., the Kids of Survival, coalesced around Tim Rollins in the early 1980s, a time of inclusion and shifting autonomy. Artist and activist Rollins had been hired to design a program to teach literacy through the arts to students considered at risk of academic failure at IS 52 in the South Bronx. His skill in the overcrowded classroom inspired him to set up an independent studio for the more seriously involved students. Succeeding at the seemingly impossible task of educating kids at risk led Rollins to the equally impossible task of facilitating works of art made in collaboration with his students that are now held by museums and collectors around the world. For Rollins, art is a means to knowledge, an ensemble of opportunities. His enthusiasm paved the way to a world beyond the dilapidated South Bronx of his students’ childhoods. Thirty years later, K.O.S. artists now hold workshops in Philadelphia, Memphis, San Francisco, Seattle, and New York. A museum retrospective of works created between 1982 and 2000, curated by Ian Berry for the Tang Museum in Saratoga Springs, recently stopped at the ICA Philadelphia and the Frye Art Museum in Seattle."

Tim Rollins and K.O.S. Workshop for Amerika IX, 1987. Mint Museum of Art, Charlotte, North Carolina.

Animal Farm - New World Order 1989–92

Detroit Summer Grace Lee and James Boggs

Detroit Summer is a multi-racial, inter-generational collective in Detroit, working to transform ourselves and our communities by confronting the problems we face with creativity and critical thinking. We currently organize youth-led media arts projects and community-wide potlucks, speak-outs and parties." Detroit Summer develops youth leadership for today’s movement by involving university youth from all over the country with local youth…


Detroit Summer Mural

Gardening

(R)evolution

“I see it as the ‘Quiet Revolution.’ It is a revolution for self-determination taking place quietly in Detroit.” - GLB

"Evolution is not linear" - GLB

Los Angeles Poverty Department

Los Angeles Poverty Department (LAPD) was founded in 1985 by director-performer-activist John Malpede. LAPD was the first performance group in the nation made up principally of homeless people, and the first arts program of any kind for homeless people in Los Angeles.

LAPD’s activities and projects have used theater and other arts to thematically focus on a constellation of inter-related issues of continuing importance to Skid Row, and other low-income communities.

States of Incarceration

A common element is to create acknowledgement for the accomplishments of the neighborhood. In articulating the new reality of the neighborhood, we create a narrative that causes re-thinking of a variety of issues, including: gentrification and community displacement, drug recovery, the war on drugs and drug policy reform, the status of women and children on Skid Row and mass incarceration and the criminalization of poverty.

Talent Show, 1985

Skid Row is a designed area, designed to concentrate the poorest citizens and services for those citizens in a restricted area. But this “containment policy” for Skid Row (officially described as such in planning documents of the city) has backfired, in the classic “watch out what you wish for cause it just might happen” mode. The containment and segregation of Skid Row has resulted in the grassroots creation of a real community.

Call home, 1991

Immigrant Movement International, Tania Brugera, and IMI Corona

Immigrant Movement International takes its name from three words with a specific context:

Immigrant, as it is the word used by legal and political institutions to label people who establish themselves in a new context.

Movement, as a way to create an alternative to the mainstream position, in the tradition and legacy of civic movements in the history of political advancement.

International, as it recognizes the impossibility of discussing migration without addressing local and international perspective.

IM International is our acronym expressing international as the identity of people who migrate outside of their place of origin. Being international as we understand it is traveling with all your human rights.

Sometimes we simply use IM as play on words affirming our right to be acknowledged and to belong .

Bruguera examined growing concerns about the political representation and conditions facing immigrants. Bruguera also delved into the implementation of art in society, examining what it means to create “Useful Art”, and addressing the disparity of engagement between informed audiences and the general public, as well as the historical gap between the language used in what is considered avant-garde and the language of urgent politics.

IMI, Corona
IMI Corona has been functioning primarily through the community and has been focusing recently on issues reflecting the neighborhood including immigrant rights, feminism, language justice, and gentrification

Dia de los Muertos

Claire Bishop

Link to pdf of Participation, edited by Claire Bishop

We will read art historian and critic Claire Bishop's essay The Social Turn published in Art Forum in 2006, and the response the magazine also published by author and art historian Grant Kester. A copy of their full interchange is here, and also in our reading section.

Grant Kester

Grant Kester is one of the founding editors of Field Journal, one of the only publications to focus on socially engaged art.

http://field-journal.com/

Along side that we are going to read A User's Guide to Demanding the Impossible by The Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination, which was initially published in 2010.

https://demandingimpossible.wordpress.com/about/

http://www.labofii.net/

https://labofii.wordpress.com/

Readings Week 4

I tried to post as a comment but it gave me some issue with an over abundance of characters and I no longer have the patiences for such things.

Claire Bishop

Quotes

Many artists now make no
distinction between their work inside and outside the gallery, and even highly established and
commercially successful figures like Francis Alÿs, Pierre Huyghe, Matthew Barney, and
Thomas Hirschhorn have all turned to social collaboration as an extension of their conceptual
or sculptural practice. Although the objectives and output of these various artists and groups
vary enormously, all are linked by a belief in the empowering creativity of collective action and
shared ideas.
Pg1

But the urgency of this political
task has led to a situation in which such collaborative practices are automatically perceived to
be equally important artistic gestures of resistance: There can be no failed, unsuccessful,
unresolved, or boring works of collaborative art because all are equally essential to the task of
strengthening the social bond. While I am broadly sympathetic to that ambition, I would argue
that it is also crucial to discuss, analyze, and compare such work critically as art. This critical
task is particularly pressing in Britain, where New Labour uses a rhetoric almost identical to
that of socially engaged art to steer culture toward policies of social inclusion. Reducing art to
statistical information about target audiences and "performance indicators," the government
prioritizes social effect over considerations of artistic quality.
Pg2

Questions

This debate over the quality or conscionability of an artwork causes me to wonder if one should not be more concerned with the art one is making and instead be concerned with who’s making the work and what are their ethical concerns?

In the description of the work They Shoot Horses 2004 I realize this critique culture is not only discourse for all viewers, it is also a direct response to the maker. In this it isn't an assault on what I do, because I have a code of ethics in which I ascribe to. And while an artistic exploration may be interesting, the motives behind it may be entirely questionable. That said, I feel less drawn to the discourse around art and art making to help guide my process. Instead I am more drawn to those who live genuine and authentic lives, and the lessons they’ve learned, live by, and teach through their actions are the best guides I could hope for in choosing a way for me to live, and make, art.

Would the critiques of larger movements hold up as well if the authors of this content were forced to include as many examples of successful works as they do works that are problematic in their writings? One can build a case for or against anything when the evidence is tailored to their case. What are we, in high school debate team?!

the Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination

Quotes

“I don’t see art as having ever, in a
real sense, affected the course of
human affairs.”
Clement Greenberg

Pg 1

It’s easy to feel paralysed by the complexities of the
world, to feel like nothing you do will ever make a
difference. Those in authority want us to feel that way,
even though they tend to be the ones in the minority.
But when we look back at history we see that every
movement, every single shift in society began with
a small group of friends having an idea that seemed
impossible at the time.

What post-capitalist machine is waiting to
be imagined inside your head?
Pg 31

But without your identity you
are free, what you do becomes more important than
who you are, and what you do can be anything. You
may be surprised how art that forgets its name can
infiltrate unexpected places. Moving into other kinds
of making, other ways of relating, means slipping
at least partly out of the pages of art history and its
institutions, But you wouldn’t be the first spectre
haunting the art school…

However Gustave Courbet put down his paintbrushes and im-
mersed himself in the Commune. “I am up to my neck
in Politics” he wrote from a Paris that he described
as being paradise without the police. With his coura-
geous imagination, he planned the festival that was
to bring down the Vendôme Column, the hated public
monument to empire and hierarchy. Collective rebel-
lion became his paint, the city his canvas.

The greatest medium is the present. As Joseph Beuys
said, “Don’t wait to begin, use what you have.”

But there is another story to art. This is the one
where it escapes the prisons of the art world,
forgets its name, drops its starlit ego and becomes
a collective movement of creativity applied to the
material of everyday life.

Although the objectives and output of these various artists and groups
vary enormously, all are linked by a belief in the empowering creativity of collective action and
shared ideas.

For example, most reject the getting and spending that not only lay waste our own powers but put intolerable
pressures on the environment. They try to eat home-grown rather than processed foods, maintain physical well-being
through healthy habits rather than by dependence on prescription drugs, try to make livings in ways that are in
harmony with their convictions.

It’s easy to feel paralysed by the complexities of the
world, to feel like nothing you do will ever make a
difference. Those in authority want us to feel that way,
even though they tend to be the ones in the minority.
But when we look back at history we see that every
movement, every single shift in society began with
a small group of friends having an idea that seemed
impossible at the time.

Pg 46

Questions

I get it, the written word has value. But how have we not evolved to even more complex pictographs over tiny shapes that together make words that strung along in a sentence has meaning. And then? How is it that all these texts profess the value of engagement and direct social action and then turn away from that to write it on a page. A page others read and hold up as law, at least those which they believe and agree with, the others lie on the ground in tatters as they walk over them to try and insist others read the text they clutch in their hand and follow it as devoutly. When will art historians and all wordsmiths for that matter realize that when they profess the values of those who deny politics and their nature they are acting contradictory to their own claims as they simply scribe words and sit back awaiting the revolution? When will those who seek to navigate and critique the colonized world through systems of colonial oppression realize they too flop and flounder in the same petri dish they believe they are on the microscope end of, but really the mirror they hold to society is none but a reflection of themselves?

Pg 14

If you are one who believes one’s actions can and will take hold in the fabric of the future as it slowly weaves itself into existence, is speculation on your ability to do so useful or inhibiting?

Tania Bruguera

Artist Statement 2009

“In my work I present various modalities of delegation of authorship. Not only the responsibility of the work is negotiated with the audience in terms of its documentation or its completion, but where the audience is at times requested to create the work itself.”

Political Art Statement 2010

“Although it is very clear for political artists that we do not want to be interior decorators, we have to rethink how to establish our relationship with power. Some artists have felt the need of entering directly into politics. I believe that, in a given way, our position should be one of dissatisfaction because of only being able to be between both, the arts and the politics.”

Teaching Statement 2006

“Education is about the ethic of knowledge, is the creation of a thinking structure and the modeling of sensibility that will prevail on someone's life for a long time, my approach to it is to create a process where the student takes full control of it.”

Born 1968 in Havana, Cuba, she currently lives and works in Havana, New York and Cambridge. Her research focuses on ways in which art can be applied to the everyday political life. Tania recently opened the Hannah Arendt International Institute for Artivism, in Havana - a school, exhibition space and think tank for activist artists and Cubans.

Artist Profile: Tania Bruguera

presented by Vince

Monday, October 9, 2017

Gran Fury Artist Presentation

https://drive.google.com/a/pdx.edu/file/d/0B_PKtrc9yqEeeE44by1yRktXVWM/view?usp=sharing

Bree Newsome

Bree Newsome is an artist, writer, musician and activist from Charlotte, North Carolina. As a young girl, Newsome started playing piano and writing music and plays. When she was 18 she received a $40,000 scholarship from the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences for a short animated film she created.

Newsome was influenced by her parents at a young age when it came to matters of art and activism. Her father is a scholar of African American religious history and the way it impacted social justice movements. Her mother, being an educator, spent her career addressing disparities and achievement gaps of education.

Stills from Newsome's film Wake

Newsome studied film at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts where she made Wake as a senior. Wake went on to win several awards including Best Short Film from BET Urbanworld Film Festival. Newsome says that being a black woman working in horror and sci-fi helped her understand activism, "The space that exists for many of us, as a young black girl, is so extremely limited so that you really can't go very far without being an activist, without being in defiance of something."

Behind the scenes of Wake

On June 27, 2015 Newsome gained national recognition and became an overnight inspirational hero for scaling a 30 foot flagpole at the South Carolina statehouse grounds and removing the Confederate flag. Newsome's intention was show the power of direct action, to create a new image/symbol of taking matters into the individual's hand.

Newsome is also a founder of the grassroots organization, The Tribe which was created after the uprising in Ferguson in 2014 in order to continue addressing issues of structural racism and police violence in Charlotte, NC.