This live performance/ site specific installation by Kunsthalle cromer and artist Henry Layte is a perfect example of how public art and space can be used to create a collaboration between artist and audience. He began to conduct the rhythm of the sea whilst perched on his make shift podium. The concept of the piece is hard to reach, if there is one at all but the way in which the audience is necessary for the piece to have impact has made me question my own installations on the beach. Do i really need an audience or spectators to make my piece valuable or can it exist on its own with the hope that the interaction between the audience is a constant rather than just a spectacle.
Posts
Philosophical and sociological studies of the arts and literature make up more than half of Adorno's collected works ( Gesammelte Schriften ). All of his most important social-theoretical claims show up in these studies. Yet his “aesthetic writings” are not simply “applications” or “test cases” for theses developed in “nonaesthetic” texts. Adorno rejects any such separation of subject matter from methodology and all neat divisions of philosophy into specialized subdisciplines. This is one reason why academic specialists find his texts so challenging, not only musicologists and literary critics but also epistemologists and aestheticians. All of his writings contribute to a comprehensive and interdisciplinary social philosophy (Zuidervaart 2007). First published the year after Adorno died, Aesthetic Theory marks the unfinished culmination of his remarkably rich body of aesthetic reflections. It casts retrospective light on the entire corpus. It also comes closest to the mod...
This project is an attempt to reform part of the Norfolk coastline by highlighting the obvious and damaging man-made pollution issues that surround yet blend the rich habitat that is Cove Hihth beach. After previous projects I have done there I noticed that there is a large amount of man-made building material and waste scattered around this beautiful sanctuary, the waste disturbs the habitat and also is a harsh reminder of the impacts human intervention has on our natural surroundings. This project is a collaboration with 3 other like minded graphics students who I brought on board as i thought they could help me try and take action on this large problem. The idea for the project was to mark out intervals up and down the beach and collect any man-made or waste materials that we found and the use them as pieces for a site specific sculptural installation in which we would create a wall only comprising of those materials. The wall would act as a barrier in which the audience and ...
Claire Bishop’s short paper begins with a curious quote from Dan Graham: “All artists are alike. They dream of doing something that’s more social, more critical, and more real than art” (60) . A brazen comment, this generalisation gives Bishop’s discussion a provocative start. It also anticipates her assumption that all “real” art is necessarily concerned with aesthetics. This helps to explain her interest in discussing “the social turn” as Art—or, more accurately, a lack thereof . After briefly describing both the recent proliferation of publicly engaged art practices and their value as therapy for repairing the social bond , Bishop maps prevailing perceptions of this art as polarized. There are the “non-believers,” the aesthetes who dismiss the art as uninteresting, and there are “the believers” the zealots, the activists who, according to Bishop, “…reject aesthetic questions a s synonymous with the market and cultural hierarchy ” (61). Curiously, Bishop fails to identify a third ...
A n estuarial lagoon is the place where fresh and salt waters meet and mix It is a fragile meeting and mixing not having the constancy of the oceans or the rivers It is a collaborative adventure its existence is always at risk Heavy rains increase its size and its boundaries increasing nutrients while decreasing salts Forest fire then rain can set up the conditions for heavy silting and a lagoon can turn first into a mud flat then into a swamp If the day is warm the waters being shallow warm quickly If the night is cold the waters being shallow cool quickly Life in the rivers the lakes and the oceans where the properties of water are more constant is less stressful But life in the lagoons is very special it has evolved high tolerance to the stresses that comes about from sudden changes in salt and fresh water and temperature and available food for the life web Life in the lagoons is tough and very rich it breeds quickly Like all of us it must improvise its existence very c...
Untitled 1969 is a flat, dry-stone wall built into a doorway in the gallery space. The stone is sourced locally from the place where the work is shown, requiring it to be remade in every new venue in which it is exhibited. According to the artist’s instructions, the stones should be arranged randomly, following no specific configuration, except that the wall should slope slightly so that the bottom protrudes a little way out from the doorway within which it is placed. The shape and size of the doorway should be in keeping with the architecture of the building or gallery in which the work is installed. This particular work is especially significant as it was one of the first wall pieces created by Kounellis, who continued to make interventions of this kind up until the 1980s . Untitled 1969 was exhibited for the first time at the 8th Biennale of Contemporary Art in San Benedetto de Tronto, Italy, where it became known as the ‘door walled with stones’ (Bann 2003, p...
For this piece the initial artwork wasnt documented digitally by film or phtograph, i wanted to let the objects and the piece exist on their own within the space and allow the interactions and participation to happen without there being any sense that it is an art work. I feel like the results are completely different by just writing about the interactions as a reflection and a time lapse done in the simplest form by using text. I found that the audience were rather confused about the obejcts as they were so precariously placed and people are used being informed about the art works or public art pieces. Knowing this the first investigation of this project was a success, i was able to gather an understanding of how people would interact with my art work and how it would display my concept. After this investigation I do feel as though i need to reconsider how i document these installations, I still want them to be discrete and have a sense of the unknowing but also wo...
Like Yayoi Kusama and her polka dots, Richard Artschwager , too, left a trace of spots upon the world. He called them “blps”, and from the ’60s until his death last February at age 89, these peculiar, graphic marks made unexpected appearances just about everywhere. Not easily defined (though his own description , “if you sliced a knockwurst longitudinally, that would give you a blp,” is a decent attempt) the blps were born in ’67 while Artschwager was teaching at UC Davis in California and searching for the minimum number of brushstrokes by which to depict a cat. “I think I got it down to seven or eight, and, in the process of making these black marks; there were works that traveled with that,” he said of the discovery. “Take one of those marks and put it somewhere…take a felt marker on a newspaper…black dots blocking out somebody’s eyes; somehow the black dot travelled, as a thing unto itself, not round but elongated. It turned into a ‘blp’, and the...
My idea for this collaboration project is to venture outside the hallowed institutional shrine to art with the intention of entering into dialogue with the outside world and society at large. Using the interactions of members of the public and their participation to create a collaborative art piece that will coexist within the public space and solely stay there. The dialogue of the past and present, the identification of space as place and a collaboration as material, the momentary captured in the monumental, the pursuit of subtlety in banality.. allowing those who participate and interact with the piece their own discovery of the non everyday within their everyday. By this i mean that i will use objects that people associate with their everyday, objects which may not have any significant meaning or which could hold something ultimately important. The project will consist of a selection of mirrors and photoframes (left empty) scattered within public spaces, creating the n...
Activist art is a term used to describe art that is grounded in the act of ‘doing’ and addresses political or social issues. The aim of activist artists is to create art that is a form of political or social currency, actively addressing cultural power structures rather than representing them or simply describing them. In describing the art she makes, the activist artist Tania Bruguera said, ‘I don’t want art that points to a thing. I want art that is the thing’. Activist art is about empowering individuals and communities and is generally situated in the public arena with artists working closely with a community to generate the art. Some artists concerned with activist art, are also involved in direct action, like the Women On Waves Foundation, a feminist art collective that runs a floating abortion clinic, carrying out abortions in places where they are not legal. "If anything, art is... about morals, about our belief in humanity. Without that, there simply i...
Claus Oldenbourg Lipsticks in Picadilly Circus, 1966 Tate The term public art refers to art that is in the public realm, regardless of whether it is situated on public or private property or whether it has been purchased with public or private money . Usually, but not always, public art is commissioned specifically for the site in which it is situated. Monuments, memorials, and civic statues and sculptures are the most established forms of public art, but public art can also be transitory, in the form of performances, dance, theatre, poetry, graffiti, posters and installations . Public art can often be used as a political tool, like the propaganda posters and statues of the Soviet Union or the murals painted by the Ulster Unionists in Northern Ireland. Public art can also be a form of civic protest, as in the graffiti sprayed on the side of the New York subway in the 1980s. "Public art is a reflection of how we see the world – the artist’s response to ou...
The term new genre public art, refers to public art, often activist in nature, and created outside institutional structures in order to engage directly with an audience. Tania Bruguera Tatlin’s Whisper #5 2008 Tate The term was coined by the American artist, writer and educator Suzanne Lacy in 1991, to define a type of American public art that was not a sculpture situated in a park or a square The definition was first used in a public performance at the San Francisco Museum of Art and later in Lacy’s book Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art . Lacy defined new genre public art as being activist, often created outside the institutional structure which brought the artist into direct engagement with the audience, while addressing social and political issues. In 1993 an exhibition called Culture in Action presented a series of works that could be defined as new genre public art, like Mark Dion and his Chicago Urban Ecology Action Group...