Living As Form
Posted: September 15, 2011 Filed under: Aesthetics, Art & Politics | Tags: Exhibition 1 Comment »Living as Form provides a broad look at a vast array of socially engaged practices that appear with increasing regularity in fields ranging from theater to activism, and urban planning to visual art. The project brings together twenty-five curators, documents over 100 artists’ projects in a large-scale survey exhibition inside the historic Essex Street Market building, features nine new commissions in the surrounding neighborhood, and provides a dynamic online archive of over 350 socially engaged projects.
Living as Form will culminate with a book, co-published by Creative Time Books and MIT Press, that will highlight projects from the exhibition archive, as well as commissioned essays from noted critics and theorists in the field, including Carol Becker, Claire Bishop, Teddy Cruz, Brian Holmes, Maria Lind, and Shannon Jackson. Detailing some of the most important socially engaged projects from the last twenty years, this unique archive will provide key examples, allow insights into methodologies, contextualize the conditions of site, and broaden the range of what constitutes this form.Living as Form: Socially Engaged Art from 1991-2011 will be out in January 2012. Read the rest of this entry »
Mapping the Commons, Athens
Posted: May 19, 2011 Filed under: Aesthetics, Art & Politics | Tags: conference, Exhibition Leave a comment »Inventing Alternatives: Commons as Exodus from late Capitalism http://www.emst.gr/mappingthecommons/index.html#
[commons]
The recurrent concept of the commons elaborates on the same idea, that is, that in nowadays world the production of wealth and social life are heavily dependent on communication, cooperation, affects and collective creativity. The commons would be, then, those milieux of shared resources, that are generated by the participation of the many and multiple, which constitute, some would say, the essential productive fabric of the 21st Century metroplis. And then, if we make this connection between commons and production, we have to think of political economy; power, rents and conflict
[mapping]
However, due to our tradition of the private and the public, of property and individualism, the commons are still hard to see for our late 20th Century eyes. We propose, therefore, a search for the commons; a search that will take the form of a mapping process. We understand mapping, of course, as proposed by Deleuze and Guattari, and as artists and social astivists have been using it during the last decade, as a performance that can become a reflection, a work of art, a social action.
