This class – a kind of “advanced” Art for Everyone – investigates the process of creating objects and performances that explicitly interact with people and spaces around campus. With such diverse roots as sports, mural painting, street fairs, or community activism, art as interaction endeavors to insert itself into specific contexts and directly engages its audience, transforming the very structures of society into art. In what ways can audience participation and collaboration be part of artistic practice? What kind of aesthetic decisions does recording call for? What kind of questions can art pose while still being art?
Sample reading list:
Pablo Helguera, Education for Socially Engaged Art
Claire Bishop, Artifical Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics
Nato Thompson, Living As Form
Bruno Latour, Re-Assembling The Social
Jacques Rancierre, The Emancipated Spectator
Maria Lind, Taking the Matter Into Common Hands
Reading/Writing assignments:
One socially engaged art project will be produced by the end of the term; one oral presentation/written paper of a case study of a socially engaged work; one collaborative project, which creates a sculptural structure that engages a site on campus; one social research exercise
