“…the specific openness or porosity of contemporary art for instance has functioned as a weird kind of hosting system: as a kind of asylum for various cultural forms and encounters apparently impossible elsewhere.”
— from Michael Hirsch’s Professional Amateurs, Outsiders, Intruders – On the Utopia of Transdisciplinary Work in the Cultural Field in “Waking up from the Nightmare of Participation”.
KN: One of the things you hope to explore in this project is what ‘use’ might be. But why should art be useful? Arguably, an important point of art is not to have a ‘use’, in a literal sense, but to be something else in our lives.
TB: All art is useful. But the Spanish word for useful, útil, also means ‘tool’. So we are talking about art as a social tool, as well, which has a long tradition that I want to re-evaluate.
–from “Useful Art” by Kathy Noble from Frieze Magazine, issue 144, emphasis mine
It’s always a bit strange to get so many random emails about great work, and so often there’s not enough time to really explore. Today, though, I’m glad I took a couple minutes to look this over.
The Szpilman Award is awarded to works that exist only for a moment or a short period of time. The purpose of the award is to promote such works whose forms consist of ephemeral situations.
Above, Péter Szabó lit fireworks and fired confetti-canons and smoke-machines for the workers who arrived early in the morning at factories and a bus-station in Romania and Hungary. As some of these factories were to be shut down soon, his labor of love towards the stressed and worried workers appears almost like an alien artistic ritual in the midst of a hopeless daily routine.
The winner of the award, Jaroslav Kyša uses doves as living barriers in the city of London by secretly scattering their favourite fodder in front of shops or across busy streets.
After a long wait, we’re very excited to announce the (working) schedule for our upcoming conference, Homework: Infrastructures & Collaboration in Social Practices! We’ll be updating this page with information regarding the venues shortly.
Please note that the following is subject to change, but this is what we’re planning so far:
Introducing Homework: 9am
with Justin A. Langlois, Research Director, Broken City Lab.
Panel #1: Education: 9:30am
Unpacking the artist’s role in education and beyond educational institutions, what art education does and could look like, the changing roles of student and educator, and the dissemination of knowledge through creative praxis.
Heather Davis
Stephanie Springgay
Amber Yared
Elizabeth Underhill & Stacey Sproule
Panel #2: Collaboration: 11am
Examining resistance through collaboration, models for processes and participation, collaborative possibilities across disciplines, and collaborations with communities.
Yael Filipovic
Tim Maly
Markuz Wernli Saito
Labspace Studio
Susan Gold
Panel #3: Artist-Run Infrastructure: 1:30pm
Looking at existing infrastructures accidentally and intentionally support alternative practices, borders creating opportunities and crises, role of artist-run centres as a counter infrastructures, and the motives for working creatively between infrastructures.
Sarah Margolis-Pineo
Anthea Black
Anna Lise Jensen
Panel #4: Cities & Space: 3:00pm
Unfolding spatial pockets of everyday life, the in-betweeness of cities and engagement, uses and misuses of public spaces, the ways in which we understand place, and open-ended landscapes.
Megan Mericle
Ryan Legassicke
Catherine Campbell
Ellyn Walker
Burcu Yigit Turan
Dannys Montes de Oca
Panel #5: Collaboration at Work: 4:30pm
Featuring all Homework artists-in-residence discussing their work together over the course of the four-day residency.
Andrea Carvalho
Brennan Broome and Chloé Womack
Brett Randall Jones & Jack Forinash
Charlie Michaels
Department of Unusual Certainties
Zoe Kreye
Elliott Jocic
Immony Men
Laura Leif
Lea Bucknell
Megan Deal
Nick Tobier Ann
Rodrigo Marti
spmb
Roving Studio
Special Parallel Projects: Ongoing
Amber Landgraff – Revolting Dance Party (see info below)
Allison Rowe & Nancy Nowacek – Crouch, Touch, Engage
Keynote Panel Discussion: 7:00pm at the Art Gallery of Windsor
More details are available on our Keynote Page.
Gregory Sholette
Temporary Services
Marisa Jahn
Revolting Dance Party with Amber Landgraff: 10pm at Villain’s Beastro
The Revolting Dance Party is an ongoing project, based on Group Material’s project of the same name, that engages with music that is focused on social and political issues. Amber Landgraff DJs the event using songs shared on sites like Youtube in order to bring social media as an act of activism back from the imaginary space of the Internet and into a physical community space.
Publication Plans: Saturday am
Homework is a four-day residency, two-day conference, and collaboratively written publication, and as such, we will utilize the morning of Day 2 to start generating content for our book, together. Details about times and locations to participate in this process will be forthcoming. However, as you already know, simply by attending, you have the opportunity to participate in the creation of this book. More soon.
Group Work: 12pm-5:00pm
Large discussion groups led by each keynote to delve into further detail around the issues being addressed throughout Homework. These Group Work sessions will address the following:
How do we support or invent the practices that are needed to respond to the economic, social, and political realities of today? How might we find solutions, inspirations, and models for a way forward through new schools, new byproducts, new practices, and new infrastructures, leading us toward a critical and novel way of integrating art with everyday life.
Group Work #1: Marisa Jahn: 12pm
Practices that embed themselves in existing infrastructures.
Group Work #2: Temporary Services: 1:30pm
Practices that invent infrastructures and infrastructural services.
Group Work #3: Gregory Sholette: 3pm
Practices that collectivize against and alongside new, old, and unimagined infrastructures.
Closing Remarks: 5pm
with Broken City Lab.
Group Rates
We have secured a group rate for anyone attending Homework to stay at one of three hotels in Windsor’s downtown core. If you book the room, please note that you would like the Broken City Lab Homework Conference rate. This group rate is only valid until September 19th, 2011.
Hilton Windsor: $115 per room, per night, $11 self parking per car, per night or $21 valet parking per car, per night.
Windsor Riverside Inn (formerly the Radisson): $105 per room, per night, $10 self parking per car, per night.
Travelodge Hotel: $89 per room, per night, $10 self parking per car, per night.
While not every art school graduate has a hard time finding a way to pay the bills, some graduates find financial refuge far outside the realm of art.
Josh Dickinson is one such person. He “has participated in almost 100 medical experiments in order to pay his rent. He’s been wired up with electrodes, stuck with needles, interrogated, subjected to pain and intentionally suffocated. In any other context, some of it might be considered torture. For him, it’s turned into an art project.”
He initially had no intention of documenting his experiences, but after about a year of strange tests and odd scenarios, he decided to capture what made up a large part of his life.
“Finding answers is entertaining to me,” says Dickinson. “I like the process. And if an audience can learn a little something while being entertained, it’s worth it.”
Via: WIRED
I found this post not too long ago and have been wanting to make one of these ever since. What’s making these balloons glow is the pollutants in the air around them, with colours ranging from green (signifying excellent air quality) to red (poor air quality).
Gorgeous ‘making of’ short for Hector Zamora‘s Errante — a large-scale urban hanging garden. The rest of his work is well worth some exploration too.
via The Pop-Up City
A great downloaded book/PDF is available over at Half Letter Press. A Users Guide to Demanding the Impossible by the Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination presents a very accessible and readable overview and introduction to the history of art+activism based practices.
Well worth the half-hour or so that it will take to read through it.
The ending, which will particularly resonate with Danielle, I’m sure:
Creative resistance is not simply about designing glitzy visual stunts that the media will pick up on, it’s a lot more than that, it’s about making things that work, fashioning situations that both disrupt the mechanisms of power and show us our own power, our own potential to connect and create. The beauty is in its efficient use, and nothing is more beautiful than winning.
Ceyetano Ferrer, City of Chicago (Iowa #2), 2006
Street artist Ceyetano Ferrer specializes in blending urban objects into their environments by painting layers over them in a way that makes them seem transparent. Ferrer uses photo stickers on public objects like street signs, boxes and billboards and camouflages them to create an illusion of the objects fading into the landscape. -via PSFK.com
The public art works of Ceyetano Ferrer are quite stunning on first glance. The optical illusion he creates seems at first impossible and mysterious, though the process is as “simple” as placing a well-planned sticker on to a surface. As far as “street art” goes, this very much falls in line with the guerilla style shock and awe that makes the genre so exciting and valuable in a certain sense of subversiveness.
Continue reading “Urban Camouflage And The Potentials of Commissioned ‘Street Art’”
Anyone who has an interest in the world of guerilla street art probably already knows about the recently published Trespass: A History of Uncommissioned Urban Art. The book, published by Taschen of course, contains photographs of many ephemeral works that might have been easily lost forever. The street art movement is more than deserving of a dedicated book, especially one that encompasses more than four decades of temporary work.
According to Taschen, “Trespass examines the rise and global reach of graffiti and urban art, tracing key figures, events and movements of self-expression in the city’s social space, and the history of urban reclamation, protest, and illicit performance. The first book to present the full historical sweep, global reach and technical developments of the street art movement, Trespass features key works by 150 artists, and connects four generations of visionary outlaws.”
Image Above: Paolo Buggiani, Minotaur, Brooklyn Bridge, New York City, 1980