A work by Sanford Biggers outside the Newark Museum
ARTOS 777 + EES 79903 + IDOutsS 8 1660-01
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Mondays 2 – 4:30 PM
IN-PERSON
@ CUNY Graduate Center Room: 6417
Dr. Gregory Sholette
Email: gsholetteSTUDIO@gmail.com
** Syllabus and its content might be changed,
please always refer to online site as the latest version.
*** A copy of the basic syllabus is available here: CLICK
An increasing number of artists, curators, and critics have recently turned their energies toward a new type of participatory socially engaged art making. What had previously been marginalized is now gaining more mainstream attention, with a new prominence in museums, biennials, but also on the streets and other public spaces. Even the New York Times has hailed the emergence of this tendency as “social practice art.” The aim of this seminar is to survey, critique and historicize the theory and practice of social practice art as well as activist, interventionist, public, participatory and community based art operating within and across fields such as performance, urban studies, environmental science and other socially engaged disciplines. The class will focus on such questions as: Why is it useful, even necessary, to understand the history and theory of social practice art? Where should we look to find the historical roots of social practice art? Are these within the history of art, or external to it, or crossing a line between two spheres of cultural interpretation and understanding? And what is the “social”? In an increasingly privatized society how do we define and operate within a concept of the public sphere? And how are both mainstream and alternative types of cultural institutions responding to the increasing interest in socially engaged art by emerging artists? Through lectures, readings, discussions and student research presentations we will seek to position socially-engaged visual culture and the shifting role of the artist within an historical, ideological, and critical framework. If possible, guest speakers and offsite visits will also be added as available.
* Course objectives, expectations and assignments appear at bottom of page * Additional Readings and Resources are found here
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And with occasional guest Tom Finkelpearl: BIO HERE
SPCUNY Social Practice Teaching Scholar-in-Residence- BIO
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SYLABUS
Monday Sept. 9 – Introductions All Around and Seminar Overview
We will discuss content of class together based on your projects and research
2 Discussion of Your Projects
3:15 Oliver Ressler Presentation
Oliver Ressler is an artist who lives and works in Vienna. He produces theme-specific exhibitions, projects in the public space and videos on issues such as global capitalism, forms of resistance, social alternatives, racism and global warming. His work constantly tries to blur boundaries between art and activism.
** Note that Oliver’s exhibition A Life Worth Surviving For will open at the Grad Center’s James Gallery on the first floor at 6PM on Thurs. Sept. 12, with a special even the next evening, Friday Sept 13 in which the artist is in discussion with Professor and SPCUNY Fellow Ashley Dawson, also at 6PM **
Readings:
T.J. Demos “Climate Change as Culture War”
Adam Kleinman interview with Oliver Ressler
Ressler’s Website: https://www.ressler.at/
Additional Readings:
TJ Demos “The Politics of Sustainability: Art and Ecology”
Robert Smithson “A Tour of the The Monuments of Passaic, NJ”
Some of Ressler’s Videos:
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Sept. 16 Introduction to the Topic Continued….
Readings:
Tom Finkelpearl, Introduction to “What We Made” (2012)
Ben Davis, “A critique of social practice art…,” International Socialist (2013)
GSholete, “Memes Are Dominating Attention Spans and Clicks Like Never Before. So Why Is Serious Socially Engaged Art Also Thriving?” (2020)
FOLLOW-UP FROM SEPT. 16
TILTED ARC CONTROVERSY: site-specific, post-minimalist work by Richard Serra
The legal case surrounding Richard Serra’s “Tilted Arc” sculpture in the 1980s was marked by a clash between the artist’s rights and public interests. The controversy emerged when the General Services Administration sought to remove the sculpture from New York City’s Federal Plaza due to public opposition and complaints. Serra argued that this violated his rights under the Visual Artists Rights Act and the First Amendment. After a lengthy legal battle and public hearings, the GSA decided to dismantle and relocate the sculpture in 1987. This case illuminated the complex interplay between artistic expression, public space, and government involvement in funding and maintaining public art, leaving a lasting mark on discussions surrounding public art controversies.
See also: After Tilted Arc: Site Specificity in an age of Enterprise Culture
THE LADDER OF CITIZEN PARTICIPATION by Sherry Arnstein (1969)
Mierle Laderman Ukeles MANIFESTO FOR MAINTENANCE ART, 1969!
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Sept. 23: Meet At PS1 MoMA Long Island City, Queens 22-25 Jackson Ave
We will meet at PA1 at 2PM at the entrance kiosk to the museum where the ticket booth is and be visiting several projects including a work co-organized by Jaclyn Reyes and Xenia Diente: Little Manila Queens, Mabuhay!
ALSO – if you would like to meet with the storied artist and community organizer Tomie Arai earlier in the day she will be happy to speak with you at Noon (also Sept 23) at the Community Liaison Office in Manhattan at 127 Walker Street co-hosted by the Chinatown Art Brigade
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Sept. 30: TBD-
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Oct. 7 Meet Josh MacPhee at Interference Archive 314 7th St. Brooklyn
Josh MacPhee is a founding member of the Justseeds Artists’ Cooperative and Interference Archive (a collection of public, cultural materials produced by social movements in Brooklyn, NY), as well as an artist, designer, and archivist.
Reading: IA: Building a Counter-Institution in the USA
Oct. 14 COLLEGE CLOSED
Oct. 15 CLASS TODAY INSTEAD OF MONDAY
Oct 21: Meet at Creative Time HeadQuarters (CTHQ) 59 East 4th St. 7th floor Buzzer #14 –
Oct. 28
Nov. 4
Nov. 11
Guest: Ken Grossinger
Ken Grossinger has been a leading strategist in movements for social and economic justice for thirty-five years, in unions and community organizations, and as director of Impact Philanthropy in Democracy Partners.
Readings: Interview with Grossinger
And please visit Ken’s website and review the Art Works Workshop in a Box feature
Nov. 18
Nov. 25
Dec. 2
Dec. 9
Dec. 16
Final Projects involve 1.) presentations about your ongoing research projects, and 2.) submitted documentation about the same following the end of class before grades are due for the semester.
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Some Potential Places to Visit this Semester:
Creative Time Summit 2024: September 20 · 7pm – September 22 · 6pm EDT
AN ANNUAL CONVENING FOR THINKERS, DREAMERS, AND DOERS WORKING AT THE INTERSECTION OF ART AND POLITICS.
Express Newark is a center for socially engaged art and design in Newark, NJ, where people co-create, collaborate, and make art for social change. Since 2021, Express Newark has been led by Pulitzer-prize-winning critic and curator Salamishah Tillet as its executive director and conceptual artist and award-winning photographer Nick Kline as its creative director.
a gathering space supporting artists working at the intersection of art and politics as they continue to plot, orchestrate, and recharge from cultural, political, and social organizing work.
Some Potential Guests to Invite this Semester
An independent advisor and consultant with expertise in curatorial practice, media, philanthropy and cultural and civil society development. His current interests include the sustainability of independent creative platforms, cultural and social justice philanthropy, political philosophy and policy, alternative institutional structures, memory, film and material culture.
A time-based artist living in the Bronx, NY, and was born in the auspicious year of 1968. Ambivalent towards hyper-visual culture, she is curious about duration, embodiment, and the aural. Through collective practice and social intervention she explores aesthetic/political relationships between time + space. Her work is vigilantly raced, classed, and gendered: Black-Indigenous-Immigrant, anarchist, queer, and feminist.
A public American artist, printmaker, and community activist living and working in New York City.[1] Her works consist of temporary and permanent multimedia site-specific art pieces that deal with topics of gender, community, and racial identity,[2] and are influenced by her Japanese heritage and the urban experience of living in New York. She is highly involved in community discourse, co-founding the Chinatown Art Brigade.[3]
An artist, performer, author, and educator. Helguera was the head of public programs in the education department of the Guggenheim Museum from 1998-2007, and the director of adult and academic programs at the New York Museum of Modern Art from 2007-2019, prior to his appointment at the New School. He currently is an assistant professor at the college of performing arts at the New School and author of Education for Socially Engaged Art.
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Additional Resources:
Part of the Practice: a podcast about the intersection of art & social justice (SPCUNY)
A Socially Engaged Arts Reader
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2020: THEMM! collective photomontage envisioning a post-Covid cyber-classroom hovering between the future, present and the past in which (left to right) Malcolm X, W.E.B. Du Bois, Paulo Freire, Joseph Beuys, and Audre Lorde –all AI avatars designed by REU: Radical Educators Underground– gather to teach a student Zoombody by asking: what new, old, or repurposed learning tools are necessary now for realizing a post-social pedagogical commons? We imagine a supra-individual agency capable of mutating successfully within the hybrid classroom into an undereducational virtureality hub where an archival agency animates the electro-eusocial aesthetic of dark matter knowledge. We say: swarm the future with the agency of the past! Survival is Not Enough! Survival is Not Enough! Survival is Not…
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Learning Goals & Course Outcomes
# Develop theoretical and historical knowledge of emerging social practice art field.
# Explore and debate complexities, paradoxes and possibilities of socially engaged art.
# Engage in original research related to social practices and individual student projects.
# Foster an environment for investigating cross-disciplinary exchange and critical thinking.
# Acquire working knowledge of seminal texts relevant to this field and in relation to the broader background of art history.
Five Research Questions this Course will Attempt to Answer
1. The definition question: How does social practice differentiate
itself from social service ? Is this important to resolve? What kind of
questions and assumptions arise if we seek to make social practice its own
distinct artistic method? And what sort of questions and assumptions arise if we do not differentiate it from art or from say, community work, environmental activism, urban reform, or social justice advocacy?
2. The institutionalization/academic question: Is social practice art
radically opposed to mainstream art and culture? Is it rejuvenating it? Or is
it being co-opted by it? How can we frame this question to get beyond simple answers and find a more engaging and useful thesis from which to work?
3. The context question: Who is a social practice artist and what sort
of “agency” does she or he have in a world of hyper-surveillance and economic ? And who is such work made for and why? Is it global or local, white or black, academic, or populist? Does it have a specific historical framing? Is it logical to assume it will be part of future arts academic curricula and how will this alter the study of art and of art criticism, history, curating, etc..?
4. The “aesthetic” question: Is there a social practice art-aesthetic or form or repertoire of forms specific to this kind of work? If yes, what kind of questions do we need to ask in order to investigate what this particular aesthetic consists of? And if there is no such thing as a social
practice aesthetic how will this “lack” impact the practice of social practice
art if at all?
5. The organizational question: the practice of social practice art, as opposed to many other types of artistic practice, inevitably involves processes of organization, administration, and self-governance. What precedents exist regarding this conjoining of artistic and organizational needs and goals, and does a distinctive hybrid of some type emerge from this entanglement?
& Five Evaluative Concepts for determining the presence of a “work of art” (these might be useful for your research and projects):
1. INTENTION – the artist means for the project [the work/performance/event/etc…] to be grasped as a work of art
2. ART-CENTRICITY – artistic concerns or activities are a central concern of the project including para-fictionality and pre-figuration.
3. INSTITUTIONALITY – the project is readable within the discourse and power relations of art industry/art history, criticism & theory
4. WORLDING / WORLD BUILDING – the project’s methods draw upon, explore, and/or expand a uniquely artistic world view or approach to research or expression or making.
5. TRESPASSING – Rick Lowe’s term for mimicry & border-crossing visual art carries out into other disciplines, parts of society or the world.
Assignments and Expectations
A. Generate questions and participate in weekly discussions with each other and guests
B. Be prepared to make a presentation of your ongoing research projects
C. Submit documentation of research project progress end of semester for SPCUNY website
Grading and Requirements
You are responsible for reading and discussing all assigned texts. Attendance is essential due to the participatory nature of this course. All students are expected to come to class prepared and on time.
If a problem arises regarding attendance or assignments, you should
contact me as soon as possible. Missing a class does not mean that you are excused from an assignment. In short, participation and attendance figure heavily in your overall evaluation and grade.
Evaluation:
33 % Participation in class
33 % Class presentation
34 % Final Project Documentation
CUNY Boiler Plate:
CUNY POLICY ON ACADEMIC INTEGRITY
The Policy on Academic Integrity, as adopted by the Board is available to all candidates.
Academic Dishonesty is prohibited in The City University of New York and is punishable by penalties, including failing grades, suspension, and expulsion. This policy and others related to candidates’ issues are available to you at: http://qc.cuny.edu/?id=IUHC
USE OF CANDIDATE WORK
All teacher education programs in New York State undergo periodic reviews by accreditation agencies and the state education department. For these purposes, samples of candidates’ work are made available to those professionals conducting the review. Candidate anonymity is assured under these circumstances. If you do not wish to have your work made available for these purposes, please let the professor know before the start of the second class. Your cooperation is greatly appreciated.
REASONABLE ACCOMMODATIONS FOR CANDIDATES WITH DISABILITIES
Candidates with disabilities needing academic accommodation should: 1) register with and provide documentation to the Special Services Office, Frese Hall, Room 111; 2) bring a letter indicating the need for accommodation and what type. This should be done during the first week of class. For more information about services available to Queens College candidates, contact: Special Service Office; Director, Miriam Detres-Hickey, Frese Hall, Room 111; 718-997 5870 (Monday – Thursday 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. & Friday 8:00 a.m. to 4 p.m.).
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Reading: Pablo Helguera -Introduction to Education for Socially Engaged Art
PPT: Some origin stories about socially engaged art
Luc Boltanski & Eve Chiapello, “The New Spirit of Capitalism” (2002 version)