Content Praxis
Anxiety of Our Age: Domestic Art and the Perversion of Privacy
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Jill Foltz
In contemporary art and culture, extroversion and sociability often enjoy a place of privilege, whether in the realms of job descriptions, social media, or relational aesthetics. Introversion is viewed as a personality defect, the need for privacy is eyed with suspicion, and the arts of craft and interior design are relegated to the “decorative arts” section of the museum. However, several recent artists have chosen to use the site of the home or other private spaces as the subject of their sculpture and installation. This paper will investigate how these artists subvert dominant cultural values of gregariousness and shared space by creating paradoxical “private” spaces in the gallery, reclaiming the values of safety and privacy in an increasingly exposed culture. Drawing on Foucault’s concept of “heterotopias” and Bachelard’s Poetics of Space, I will explore the work of contemporary artists who employ the visual vocabulary of domestic interiors as sites of respite or prostheses of privacy. These artists include Andrea Zittel, whose A-Z Units (1994-2008) and Indy Island (2009) are life-sized spaces for individual comfort; Jessica Stockholder, who describes her colorful, domestic installations as being “about controlling the structure and surface quality of one’s environment”; and Marc Camille Chaimowicz, who creates gallery-sized installations of decorative and domestic settings in an attempt to “dissolve the hierarchical and disciplinary divide between fine art and the decorative arts.” Though many today may consider self-seclusion a perversion, these contemporary artists create other spaces that respond to and compensate for the anxiety of our loud, open, and complicated world.
Anchors in the Wind: Avoiding Polemics While Shouting about Climate Change
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Catharine Salmon
For many years, I have noted how small changes of temperature produce a tumult of extreme weather events, and ocean and icesheet impacts. In parallel, the climate change discourse has been almost as tumultuous. Fueled by the ongoing updating of environmental data, the analysis of its implications and our responsibilities has been intense. All of these aspects concern me, involve me. The question of how to express these concerns through art is complicated. How to raise this most critical issue, communicate the complexity, stimulate the art lover’s sustained reflection yet avoid didacticism is challenging. Is situating climate change or any other environment concern at the heart of an art practice an instrumentalization of that practice? Moreover, if art, as the English novelist Ian McEwan observes is “entirely and splendidly useless” how does an artist with burning concerns avoid shouting in the wind? This paper will consider these questions in relation to my own environmental art practice that is prefaced on belief in art’s potential to communicate the urgent issues of our times through visual poetics and text.
Audio Cartography, Ethico-aesthetics and Orderliness: Divining Models of Participant-institution Connection in Social Practice
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Michael Anthony Mc Loughlin
Over the past 20 years, I have developed an audio-cartographic methodology of context-related praxis that examines the inter-relationships between the aesthetic, the ethical and the institutional/relational dynamics that shape the contexts of the sound based projects I undertake. This means that conceptually my work explores community building, place making and active citizenship. In practice, it involves a process of recording conversations/discussions with specific communities of interest around social themes relevant to them; in order to develop sound based artworks that in turn represent that community of interest. I apply spatial sound based methods to sociological research through artwork involving choreographed moments of exchange through agreed, staged, multi-channel spatial recordings of unmediated conversations between small groups of individuals who share some commonality. The "subject" of this work is not the individuals participating in the recording, but the methods through which the particular group involved create "orderliness" (Garfinkel,1967) in their shared constructed realities and how this "adjusts" through involvement in the recording. The artwork discussed here is in itself a provocation to open dialogues. The people who take part in these recordings have Power of Veto over any future installation of this artwork. This paper will use this art making process as a means to examine this overlooked aspect of social arts practice specifically relating to institutional/participant relationship and ethics. The paper will discuss the procedures through which the art institution creates orderliness impact potential for relationship building between the participant and institution in social art practices.
