This module primarily concerns individual practice surrounding a student's area of research and as such required reading will be negotiated between the individual student and their tutors during tutorials. Students are expected to compile their own specialist reading list in discussion with their tutors. A range of primary and secondary resources should be used.
Artist Scholar by
Artist Scholar: Reflections on Writing and Research is part history, introduction, and discussion for artists and designers entering, graduating, and employed by the contemporary art academy in the United States. The evolution of art education in the university continues to expand in the 21st century as the variables of craft, skill, technique, theory, history and criticism shift and expand as the perspective of arts-based research is introduced into this professionalized environment. Given this context: what can M.F.A. students do to improve their understanding of writing and research without sacrificing their commitment to their studio art process? Through a series of essays, the text argues for better writing at the M.F.A. level with the purpose of becoming better artists. By contextualizing art practice in the university and providing a foundation for future artist scholarship, it serves as an invitation to artist scholars to push their work further and develop the confidence to situate their art in the university context.
Contemporary Art: From Studio to Situations by
Contemporary Art from Studio to Situation collects together texts and interviews with key artists, curators and writers involved in the issue of context and site-specificity in the contemporary international art scene. Included are artists such as Thomas Hirschhorn and Kathrin Bohm, who have - in very different ways - investigated the relationship between architecture and social interaction; Nicolas Bourriaud, the author of the influential book Relational Aesthetics; and curators from innovative art museums including Catherine David (currently at Witte de With, Rotterdam), whose extensive list of projects includes Documenta X. This book continues and expands on the critical investigations of writers such as Douglas Crimp, Rosalyn Deutsche, Brian Wallis and Lucy Lippard into the shifting relations between artist, institution, and practice/production."
The Curator's Handbook by
The Curator's Handbook is the essential handbook for curators and curatorial students, mapping every stage of the process of putting on an exhibition, no matterhow traditional the venue, from initial idea to final installation.An introduction explores curatorial work from its origins in the seventeenth century onward and outlines the various roles of the curator today. Twelve chapters then trace the various stages of the exhibition process in clear, informative language and using helpful diagrams and tables, from developing the concept to writing contracts and loan requests; putting together budgets and schedules; producing exhibition catalogues and interpretation materials; designing gallery spaces; working with artists, lenders, and art handlers; organizing private views; and documenting and evaluating a show.With advice and tips from a cast of international museum directors and curators--including Daniel Birnbaum (Moderna Museet, Stockholm); Aric Chen (M+,Hong Kong); Elizabeth Macgregor (Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney); Hans Ulrich Obrist (Serpentine Gallery, London); Gao Peng (Today Art Museum, Beijing); Jennifer Russell (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York); and Nicholas Serota (Tate, London)--this volume is a crucial guide for anyone involved in, or studying, the dynamic field of curation.
Visualizing Research by
Visualizing Research guides postgraduate students in art and design through the development and implementation of a research project, using the metaphor of a 'journey of exploration'. For use with a formal programme of study, from masters to doctoral level, the book derives from the creative relationship between research, practice and teaching in art and design. It extends generic research processes into practice-based approaches more relevant to artists and designers, introducing wherever possible visual, interactive and collaborative methods. The Introduction and Chapter 1 'Planning the Journey' define the concept and value of 'practice-based' formal research, tracking the debate around its development and explaining key concepts and terminology. 'Mapping the Terrain' then describes methods of contextualizing research in art and design (the contextual review, using reference material); 'Locating Your Position' and 'Crossing the Terrain' guide the reader through the stages of identifying an appropriate research question and methodological approach, writing the proposal and managing research information. Methods of evaluation and analysis are explored, and of strategies for reporting and communicating research findings are suggested. Appendices and a glossary are also included. Visualizing Research draws on the experience of researchers in different contexts and includes case studies of real projects. Although written primarily for postgraduate students, research supervisors, managers and academic staff in art and design and related areas, such as architecture and media studies, will find this a valuable research reference. An accompanying website www.visualizingresearch.info includes multimedia and other resources that complement the book.
Ways of curating by
What can curating help us do? Hans Ulrich Obrist is one of the most influential figures in the art world today. Drawing on his own experiences - from staging his first exhibition in his kitchen to encounters with artists, impresarios and thinkers - he shows us how curating allows us to create new futures. 'The man who made curating an art.' New York Observer 'Engaging, erudite, unapologetically personal . . . an entertaining explanation of why curating is a vital part of the arts today.' Ekow Eshun 'Highly intelligent, thoughtful and thought-provoking. Obrist emerges as both scholarly and energetically engaged with the proliferation of ideas in modern culture.' Financial Times 'Hans Ulrich Obrist is a passionate communicator.' Yoko Ono 'A guru for young curators.' Independent
Anywhere or Not at All by
Contemporary art is the object of inflated and widely divergent claims. But what kind of discourse can open it up effectively to critical analysis? Anywhere or Not at All is a major philosophical intervention in art theory that challenges the terms of established positions through a new approach at once philosophical, historical, social and art-critical. Developing the position that "contemporary art is postconceptual art," the book progresses through a dual series of conceptual constructions and interpretations of particular works to assess the art from a number of perspectives: contemporaneity and its global context; art against aesthetic; the Romantic pre-history of conceptual art; the multiplicity of modernisms; transcategoriality; conceptual abstraction; photographic ontology; digitalization; and the institutional and existential complexities of art-space and art-time. Anywhere or Not at All maps out the conceptual space for an art that is both critical and contemporary in the era of global capitalism.
New Media in the White Cube and Beyond by
This provocative, cutting-edge anthology addresses the challenges of curating, presenting, and preserving new-media art--artworks that use digital technologies as media and emphasize process over object. As an art form that is inherently time based, dynamic, interactive, collaborative, customizable, and variable, new-media art resists objectification. It boldly challenges the traditional art world's customary methods of presentation and documentation as well as its approach to collection and preservation. Edited and introduced by Christiane Paul and featuring contributions by prominent practitioners--institutional and independent curators, theorists, and conservators--this volume charts developments in an exciting field and addresses the conceptual, philosophical, and practical issues of both curating and presenting new-media art.
Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art by
Ambitious and interdisciplinary, this long-awaited collaboration is a landmark presentation of the writings of contemporary artists. These influential essays, interviews, and critical and theoretical comments provide bold and fertile insights into the construction of visual knowledge. Featuring a wide range of leading and emerging artists since 1945, the collection--while comprehensive and authoritative--offers the reader some eclectic surprises as well. Included here are texts that have become pivotal documents in contemporary art, along with writings that cover unfamiliar ground. Some are newly translated, others have never before been published. Together they address visual literacy, cultural studies, and the theoretical debates regarding modernism and postmodernism. The full panoply of visual media is represented, from painting and sculpture to environments, installations, performance, conceptual art, video, photography, and virtual reality. Thematic concerns range from figuration and process to popular culture, art and technology, and politics and the media. Contemporary issues of gender, race, class, and sexuality are also addressed. Kristine Stiles's general introduction is a succinct overview of artists' theories in the evolution of contemporary discourse around art. Introductions to each chapter provide synopses of the cultural contexts in which the texts originated and brief biographies of individual artists. The text is augmented by outstanding photographs, many of artists in their studios, and vivid, contemporary art images. Reflecting the editors' shared belief that artists' own theories provide unparalleled access to visual knowledge, this book, like its distinguished predecessors, Hershel Chipp's Theories of Modern Art (with Peter Selz and Joshua Taylor) and Joshua Taylor's Nineteenth-Century Theories of Art, will be an invaluable resource for anyone interested in contemporary art. "In New York in 1915 I bought at a hardware store a snow shovel on which I wrote 'in advance of the broken arm.' It was around that time that the word 'readymade' came to mind to designate this form of manifestation."--Marcel Duchamp (1961) "Women have always collected things and saved and recycled them because leftovers yielded nourishment in new forms. The decorative functional objects women made often spoke in a secret language, bore a covert imagery. When we read these images in needlework, in paintings, in quilts, rugs and scrapbooks, we sometimes find a cry for help, sometimes an allusion to a secret political alignment, sometimes a moving symbol about the relationships between men and women."--Miriam Schapiro and Melissa Meyer (1978) "I want to create a fusion of art and life, Asia and America, Duchampiana modernism and Levi-Straussian savagism, cool form and hot video, dealing with all of those complex problems, spanning the tribal memory of the Nomadic Asians who crossed over the Bering Strait over 10,000 years ago."--Shigeko Kubota (1976) "Black for me is a lot more peaceful and gentle than white. White marble may be very beautiful, but you can't read anything on it. I wanted something that would be soft on the eyes, and turn into a mirror if you polished it. The point is to see yourself reflected in the names. Also the mirror image doubles and triples the space."--Maya Lin (1983) "Artists often depend on the manipulation of symbols to present ideas and associations not always apparent in such symbols. If all such ideas and associations were evident there would be little need for artists to give expression to them. In short, there would be no need to make art."--Andres Serrano (1989)
Beyond Objecthood by
The rise of the exhibition as critical form and artistic medium, from Robert Smithson's antimodernist non-sites in 1968 to today's institutional gravitation toward the participatory.In 1968, Robert Smithson reacted to Michael Fried's influential essay "Art and Objecthood" with a series of works called non-sites. While Fried described the spectator's connection with a work of art as a momentary visual engagement, Smithson's non-sites asked spectators to do something more- to take time looking, walking, seeing, reading, and thinking about the combination of objects, images, and texts installed in a gallery. In Beyond Objecthood, James Voorhies traces a genealogy of spectatorship through the rise of the exhibition as a critical form-and artistic medium. Artists like Smithson, Group Material, and Michael Asher sought to reconfigure and expand the exhibition and the museum into something more active, open, and democratic, by inviting spectators into new and unexpected encounters with works of art and institutions. This practice was sharply critical of the ingrained characteristics long associated with art institutions and conventional exhibition-making; and yet, Voorhies finds, over time the critique has been diluted by efforts of the very institutions that now gravitate to the "participatory." Beyond Objecthood focuses on innovative figures, artworks, and institutions that pioneered the exhibition as a critical form, tracing its evolution through the activities of curator Harald Szeemann, relational art, and New Institutionalism. Voorhies examines recent artistic and curatorial work by Liam Gillick, Thomas Hirschhorn, Carsten H ller, Maria Lind, Apolonija Sustersic, and others, at such institutions as Documenta, e-flux, Manifesta, and Office for Contemporary Art Norway, and he considers the continued potential of the exhibition as a critical form in a time when the differences between art and entertainment increasingly blur.