Articles tagged with 'writing'
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Reading List?
by ruth barker 20 May 2009 in The Editorial: The Planning Season
Hello,
Yesterday I met with my friend Allison, who is hoping to co-ordinate or curate a public project involving a small group of artists and an area of ground which is slated for furture redevelopment.
I waxed lyrical about the power of public art, and in particular the legacy of invention and non-conformity gifted by the work of many feminist, black, and gay artists in 1960s and ‘70s America. Many of these artists, who felt disenfranchised by the gallery systems of the time, moved out into the public realm as a response to that, starting a lineage of practice that we have inherited today. Of course, that’s not the only history of public art – we also have to think about the history of civic sculpture and memorial, and other histories of marking and inhabiting public spaces – but at least it’s somewhere to start.
Anyway, I said I would post a list of texts that I’d found influential or helpful or interesting somehow (even if I didn’t wholly agree with them). If anyone’s seeking but not finding these titles, I would recommend trying Aye Aye Books. Check them out online or in person in the CCA Foyer on Fridays and Saturdays. If they don’t have what you’re looking for in stock you can contact them and they’ll try to get it in for you. And they’re dead nice.
Here goes:
Decadent: Public Art – Contentious Term and Contested Practice
David Harding and Pavel Buchler
Glasgow School of Art
Link to davidharding.netThe Lure of the Local: The Sense of Place in a Multicentered Society
Lucy Lippard
The New Press
Link to Lucy Lippard info.Public Sculpture of Glasgow
Ray McKenzie
Liverpool University Press
Read here.Written in Stone: Public Monuments in Changing Societies
Sanford Levinson
Duke University Press
Read here.Remove Not the Ancient Landmark: Public Monuments and Moral Values
Donald Martin Reynolds
Routledge
Read here.Public Monuments: Art in Political Bondage, 1870-1997
Sergiusz Michalski
Reaktion Books
Read here.The Society of the Spectacle
Guy Debord
Rebel Press, London
Read here.The Practice of Everyday Life
Michel de Certeau
University of California Press
Read here.The Production of Space
Henri Lefebvre
Willy Blackwell
Read here.Invisible Cities
Italo Calvino
Vintage
Link to essayConversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art
Grant Kester
University of California Press
Read hereRelational Aesthetics
Nicolas Bourriaud
Les Presse Du Reel
Link to GlossaryEssays on the Blurring of Art and Life
Allan Kaprow
University of California Press
Read here.One Place After Another: Site-specific Art and Locational Identity
Miwon Kwon
MIT Press
Read here.Aesthetics and Politics
Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Bertolt Brecht, Georg Lukacs
Verso Books
Read here.The Politics of Aesthetics
Jacques Ranciere
Continuum International Publishing Group Ltd.
Verso Books
Read here.Image-Music-Text
Roland Barthes
Fontana Press
some extracts here.Regarding the Pain of Others
Susan Sontag
Penguin
Observer Review.The Poetics of Space
Gaston Bachelard
Beacon Press
Inevtitable Amazon link here.The Art of Participation: 1950 to Now
Rudolf Frieling & Boris Groys
Thames & Hudson
Link to original exhibition.Art and Social Change: A Critical Reader
Will Bradley & Charles Esche
Tate Publishing / Afterall
Link to Afterall.So good luck Allison! There’s lots in there – tons of interesting ideas, and many arguable arguments. If anyone’s got any other suggestions, stick ‘em in a comment. It’s kind of an endless list, I guess…
More later,
R -
Places and Spaces
by Ruth Barker 12 Jul 2010 in The Editorial: The Planning Season
Hello,
so I just finished writing a Feature article for the next issue of NABROAD magazine, which is due out in August. The subject I was asked to write about was an interesting one, catalysed by the questions behind the project Third Space, a NABROAD Production for the Baltic Bienalle for Contemporary Art in St Petersburg.
Third Space’s curator, Pavla Alchin, wrote the following about the project:
“At the beginning of the 21st century, the Earth has been changed by globalization into a planet of nomads. It is hardly surprising that among the recent waves of immigrants are thousands of visual artists – history after all, is littered with creative people on the move. In the past the reasons for their exile where varied – persecution, a search for the exotic, from the need to survive to the need to be at a place of artistic innovation. Today many of these reasons remain the same.
However, I would like to suggest here another reason why artists find living abroad appealing. According to Czech born philosopher Vilem Flusser, exile and creativity are closely linked. In exile everything around us is new and becomes sharp and noisy. Uprooted people have to be creative to process an ocean of chaotic information that surrounds them, to change it into meaningful messages (1). It is perhaps this heightened state of perception that attracts creative minds.
The title of our project was borrowed from postcolonial scholar Homi K. Bhabha who first fore-grounded the concept of Third Space in his book The Location of Culture (1994). Bhabha sees the Third Space as a space of enunciation, where two social groups with different cultural traditions carry out special negotiations, which eventually lead to a displacement of the members of both groups from their origins. However, it is also supposed to bring about common identity, new in its hybridity (2).
Taking the above ideas as a kind of springboard, our project wishes to focus on artists who have decided to make this leap of faith in making their home in homelessness (3) and as a result are benefiting from a similar crosspollination of cultures."
1&3 from V. Flusser Writings, 2002.
2 from K. Ikas and G. Wagner, Communicating in the Third Space, 2009.It’s an interesting set of relationships that Alchin presents, and it was a useful incentive for me to think around some of these ideas of space and placelessness. One of the most fruitful realisations I made as I wrote was that of a personal paradox, which I’ll try to describe.
We speak a lot, after all, about the need for places rather than spaces, about the need we have to inhabit landscapes that have meaning and memory and association. We often feel that we know as a fact, that spaces with which we don’t connect, or territories that we pass through rather than inhabit, are sterile and lacking in humanity or love. And yet as I wrote this piece about placelessness, I realised that I actually feel a kind of joy about being in a place I do not know, and that I have no connection to.
I travel a lot, and one of my greatest pleasures is to walk the streets of a city that I don’t know and don’t quite understand, feeling my lack of connection and my outsideness. I really relish that sense of wonder that comes with dislocation. Does any on else feel that kind of pleasure? It can’t be that unusual, surely? It’s a great feeling! Or am I just weird? And does this devalue, in a way, our notions of placemaking?
Thoughts welcome! I’ll post a link to the article here once it’s up on NABROAD.
More later,
R. -
just a quick one
by Ruth Barker 6 Sep 2010 in The Editorial: The Planning Season
Hello,
Just wanted to send you a link to that article I was telling you about. You can find Maag Mag here. Scroll through the find the article, titled Places of Belonging. Or you can also read the whole thing here.
Let me know any thoughts,
more later,
R
PS: Oh, but I just saw this and had to share it. This is a form of musing very close to my own heart (and practice) but I also think it’s essential fodder for a site like this, which is essentially a forum to verbalise our experiences of contemporary public art. How we discuss and describe art matters. I firmly believe that the languages we use to talk about art influence how we experience, perceive, remember and understand – not just art, but the wider world. As such, finding ways to talk about (and write about, and think about) public art is one of the most important things we can do – other than making it, of course! ;)
Speak soon, R.
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On Seeking
by Ruth Barker 12 Sep 2010 in The Editorial: The Planning Season
Hello,
thought this might interest. It was published (in MacMag) at the start of the summer, but I only just got my act together to ask for a copy! Thanks for sorting that, Gareth.
More later,
R
On Seeking The Temporary In Contemporary Public Art
Of a short story, I once heard someone say that ‘its brevity doesn’t matter because its resonance remains.’ Thinking about public art, I find I disagree: not with the statement’s sentiment, but with its specificity. Because actually I think that brevity matters very much indeed. Sometimes, after all, it’s the brief nature of a work – the sense of the fleeting, the transient, the ephemeral – that lends its resonance.
Why? How might it be that significance is leant rather than lost by temporary-ness? I thought about it, sitting on the train between London and Glasgow, watching the landscape flash past the dull toughened glass of the window. I found a blue biro in my black bag, and on the back of a pink paper bag I wrote, slowly, as each point occurred to me in turn:
1. In art, resonance sometimes becomes permanence in memory (we may see something once, and remember it forever).
2. = Ephemerality as a kind of individual (but non-physical) permanence. The unexpected gift of the original moment of encounter might be dulled if repeated.
3. Also, public artwork is generally produced for a specific context. This context is not only physical but also social, emotional, economic, ergonomic, &c. In time, these contexts may shift. As they shift, a permanent public artwork may lose its moorings. Temporary work exists in the moment, and departs with it.
4. We are creatures of habit. If we see something (anything) too many times, we may find that it becomes invisible to us. Temporary work arrives and leaves again, asking us (as we pass that way to work) to notice first its presence, and then its absence.
5. A change is as good as a rest.
6. Familiarity breeds contempt.
Chewing my pen, I turned the paper bag over, still thinking, and not quite satisfied. On the side where the company’s logo was printed in light grey, I wrote quickly with my blue pen:
- But don’t we have confidence in our ability to make valuable, significant things?
- Isn’t there a value to having artists shape our civic spaces?
- Don’t we want to leave a legacy for the future?
- Don’t we have a responsibility to give value for money? How can we justify spending thousands on something that only lasts a year, a season, a month, a day, an hour?
- You talk about temporary works as if they’re a gift – appearing and disappearing, to remain in our memories like gold leaf glimpsed on a dirty wall (I mean, like something precious, unexpected, and gone the next time we look). But aren’t you actually taking something away when a temporary work disappears or fades away? You talk about giving, but I feel like I’ve lost something important.
- Out of sight, out of mind.
But at Carlisle I read the paper again. I was as dissatisfied as I thought I would be. With decision, I screwed the bag up and turned it into rubbish. So long as we’re still wondering, I thought, we’re doing all we can.