Focused Discussions II
For work that is best discussed or debated, rather than reported on through a formal presentation, these sessions provide a forum for an extended “roundtable” conversation between an author and a small group of interested colleagues. Summaries of the author’s key ideas, or points of discussion, are used to stimulate and guide the discourse.
Qualities of Engagement: The Community as Rhizome
Focused Discussion Jessica Poser
How do we define community? What does participation look like? What roles do aesthetics play in community art? This paper explores the frameworks of community engagement and uses the idea of the rhizome as a generative and organic model of collaboration, dialogue and action in community based work. Examples are drawn from both personal projects (Habitat for Artists, Teen Art Lab, The Mending Wall, The First Amendment project) as well as other international projects that suggest rhizomatic ways of thinking about social and cultural engagement.
Nat King Cole : The Unsung Civil Rights Activist
Focused Discussion Donna Cox, Patrice Turner
Discussions of effective activism in the Civil Rights Movement typically center on people who overtly used his/her platform and art to address issues of injustice. Yet, the relationship between overt actions and activism are often conveyed, not simply by one’s perceived participation but by the person’s impact. In this, Nat King Cole is without rival. He represented Black America with excellence in the face of the cruelty of racism. Born Nathaniel Adams on March 17, 1919, Cole remains an American icon whose music continues to cross cultural and political boundaries. An examination of his life and career will reveal a man balanced precariously between two communities, the African American community in which he lived and was deeply seated and the White community in which he primarily worked. On one hand, high profile friends such as Frank Sinatra and necessary compromises to further his career (being “whited up” to make him more “accessible” to predominantly white audiences), often put him in the crosshair of civil rights activists. On the other, though he made television history when he became the first African American performer to host a TV series, no national sponsors were willing to back a program featuring African American entertainers. 100 years after his birth, singing Cole’s music offers an opportunity to step into his lived reality of singing beautiful, ‘easy listening’ music in an era of America’s tumultuous history and draw parallels to activism in contemporary America.
The Digital Photograph as a Craft Object
Focused Discussion Rehan Zia
The digital photograph is a vastly different medium from its film counterpart and as such needs to be understood and recognised in its own right (Ritchin 2010). This paper explores the digital photograph as a craft object by grounding it in the author’s landscape photography practice. Contemporary digital multi-shot photography techniques such as high dynamic range photography, gigapixel photography, focus stacking and digital panorama stitching make use of multiple different photographic exposures of the scene that are subsequently combined together to create a resulting image that contains more scene detail than can be captured in a single photographic exposure. Non-destructive image editing techniques and workflow allow the original camera exposures that form the raw material for the final image to remain unaltered. The digital photograph, unlike physical craft objects, can be reconstituted, moulded and crafted to generate a multitude of different outputs depending the application or creative intent of the photographer from the same raw material. The digital photograph can thus be conceived as a online craft object comprising of: the raw material in the form of the acquired exposure values of the scene, the image manipulation or digital craft operations applied, and, the resulting image outputs. The notion of the digital photograph as a online craft object highlights and celebrates the greater plasticity that the digital photograph brings whilst also identifying a number of challenges and implications for both practitioners and theorists.
Intervention Strategies for Monuments and Memorials
Focused Discussion Nik Orr
In 2016 when an equestrian bronze of Francisco Franco was wheeled out of council storage in Barcelona, the reaction was incendiary. The statue was targeted with eggs and vegetables, showered in bird feed to attract pigeon droppings, graffitied with symbols of gay pride and independentism, and then decapitated, before being uprooted entirely and left shattered on the ground. As monuments attract the ire of citizens globally and cities face crises in terms of their liveability, local governments are asking critical questions about their public art and placemaking policies. The traditional monument, as a top-down exercise in myth-making and nation-building, has received intense critique from communities, art worlds, and cultural and academic institutions. The current animosity – in Australia, the US, and Spain, to name a few – towards the colonial and fascist monument is symptomatic of a broader failure: the exclusion of historically marginalised social groups from national narratives and, by extension, from public space. This situation is the result of policy failure, but also ‘plastic’ failure in the public sculptural sphere. Against the backdrop of plural and participatory democracy, the monument is failing as a collective touchstone. But what of the solutions offered? The popular debate is often limited to just two solutions: either remove the offending work or do nothing, adding a revisionist plaque at most. This hands-on workshop opens up further possibilities by exploring a variety of spatial, plastic and architectonic interventions.
