Living as Form

BY NATO THOMPSON (FORWARD & PART 1)







Piece on the right, The Domestic Milk Carton Project, Peggy Diggs

• “What did matter was that the image, and the message, provoked me to pause, think, learn and act.”   (p 7)
• Again, different terms used:

Relational Aesthetics (Nicholas Bourriaud), social justice art, social practice, community art, social aethetics (Lars Bang Larsen), new genre public art (Lacy), dialogic art (conversation based projects) (Grant Kester)

• “social practice artists create forms of living that activate communities and advance public awareness of pressing social issues.  In the process, they expand models of art, advance ways of being an artist, and involve new publics in their efforts.” (p 8)
• Creative time, http://creativetime.org/
• Good questions i constantly think about:

How does one present site-specific, community-based work outside of its context?  How can a history be written (does it have to be written? this is where i see the gap, how about las personas que no hablan ingles? personas that don’t know how to leer?) when there are unlimited and complex social, cultural, economic, political, religious, and class constructs at play?  Where does one begin to tell the s t o r y? 

• How does one weave together the diverse narratives of feminist, African-American and Latin@ practices that have largely been dismissed as “community art”? almost as a given, “that’s been done before, we did it in the 60′s, now what?”
  What is up with that?
• Claire Bishop questions the tendency to privilege ethical standards over aesthetic ones, while Brian Holmes provides a group step process of producing social practice that values both of these standards equally.
• Women on Waves, activist/art organization founded in 2001, boat, abortions sailing coast to coast where they are illegal
• growing array of complex cultural production

What is meant by living?

• Anti-representational
• Participation
• Situated in the “Real” world
• Operating in the political sphere

What is meant by form?

• Types of gatherings
• people coming together is a form
• types of media manipulation
• research and its presentation

“it is not surprising that many artists focus on archives as a way to document histories now lost” (p 24)

• structural alternatives
• types of communicating

“Isolated artists must focus on speaking, while groups of people coming together must focus on listening- the art of not speaking but hearing”  <---- this is exactly what we experienced for 3 months gathering around stories, testatementos, creating the images for the mural.

• “Focusing on methodologies s also an attempt to shift the conversation away from the arts’ typical lens of analysis: aesthetics.  This is now to say that the visual holds no place in this work, but instead this approach emphasizes the designated forms produced for impact.  By focusing on how a work approaches the social, as opposed to simply what it looks like, we can better calibrate a language to unpack the numerous engagements” (p 24)
• Spacebank; alternative economy, actual online bank that offers real investing opportunities, and loans to activists and grassroots organizations” http://spacebank.org/
• “why not include more nonprofit organizations as artworks as well? many artists and art collectives use a broad range of bureaucratic and administrative skills that typically lie in the domain of larger institutions, such as marketing, fundraising, grant writing, real estate development, investing in start-ups, city planning, and educational programming”

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