Photo credit: Ruby Washington/The New York Times
Artists in Context will join with Australian artist, designer and engineer Natalie Jeremijenko to open an Environmental Health Clinic field office in 2011. Using the familiar context of medical care, Dr. Jeremijenko treats environmental issues and their concomitant impact on human life and emotion, especially anxiety. The New York Times writes:
Visitors to the clinic talk about an array of concerns, including contaminated land, polluted indoor air and dirty storm-water runoff. Dr. Jeremijenko typically gives them a primer on local environmental issues, especially the top polluters in their neighborhoods. Then she offers prescriptions that include an eclectic mix of green design, engineering and art — window treatments, maybe, or sunflowers, tadpoles or succulents.
Dr. Jeremijenko will introduce the project and new office in a lecture Thursday, September 30, 7-9PM, at the Cambridge Public Library (map) in Cambridge, MA. The event is free, but space is limited, so please take the time to RSVP with Artists in Context here.
BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil spill has taken center stage internationally, and the disaster has brought to the fore questions about the connection between cultural organizations and their sponsors. The Tate celebrated 20 years of BP sponsorship [PDF] last week, as one of many London-based institutions accepting money from big oil. The artist/activist group Liberate Tate intervened, staging an oil spill inside the party and outside, at the gallery’s entrance, as documented in the video below.
Liberate Tate made headlines, and was joined by many outspoken allies in an open letter published in the Guardian condemning BP’s sponsorship of the Tate. Among the signatories are many recognizable names, including art world luminaries, well-known artists/activists we’ve covered, or friends of Groundswell.
The organizers show no sign of slowing. We’ll continue to follow the action; regular updates are also available from Liberate Tate’s Twitter account.
The Free Store, courtesy of Gallery 400
Following on the heels of LA’s counter-CAA, Chicago plays host to the gathering of visual arts professionals in 2010 – beginning today – and organizers will offer programming for socially engaged artists both within and outside of the conference center.
Three Walls will workshop the history, practice, and theory of experimental pedagogy inside and outside institutions, in conjunction with AREA Chicago’s issue #9 (Peripheral Vision), with Greg Sholette, Dara Greenwald, Counter Cartographies Collective, Bert Stabler, and others this afternoon.
The ongoing Art/Work exhibit (get your free copy of the newspaper from us here) and Free Store are promoted in conjunction with the conference, as is Mess Hall‘s Chicago Activist Art Spaces, Collectives, and Projects.
Within the conference walls, the Radical Art Caucus offers a range of meetings and sessions, from pedagogical to cartographic concerns, the schedule for which can be found here.
Transform (a project of EIPCP) and mayfly books teamed up to bring us this new collection of essays on institutional critique.
In furtherance of the critical practice that developed in the late 1960s and early 1970s, these essays both cover familiar ground and look beyond the art world for new definitions of institutional critique. Given their perceived “global transformations of contemporary life” and specifically regarding the
work of philosophers and political theorists such as Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, Gilles Deleuze, Antonio Negri, Paolo Virno and others, these essays reflect on the mutual enrichments between critical art practices and social movements and elaborate the conditions for politicized critical practice in the twenty-first century.
Art and Contemporary Critical Practice: Reinventing Institutional Critique is edited by Gerald Raunig and Gene Ray, with texts by Boris Buden, Rosalyn Deutsche, Marcelo Expósito, Marina Garcés, Brian Holmes, Jens Kastner, Maurizio Lazzarato, Isabell Lorey, Nina Möntmann, Stefan Nowotny, Gerald Raunig, Gene Ray, Raúl Sánchez Cedillo, Simon Sheikh, Hito Steyerl, Universidad Nómada, Paolo Virno
The book can be downloaded for free, purchased from Autonomedia for readers living in the US, or directly from mayfly for readers living in the UK.
Gestures of Resistance returns this January with a re-envisioned show at the Museum of Contemporary Craft. Like the 2008 public presentation, the upcoming show focuses on craft actions, “direct political statements, public interventions, or dialogical, community-specific project.” This is furthered by the exhibition’s planning; each of the eight artists participate by creating their work in the space, sharing it with other artists as the show unfurls, emphasizing both the work produced and the process of its making.
The exhibition takes the approach that to understand ‘performative craft’ requires a relational lens that sees objects and gestures as deriving meaning largely from how and where they are deployed, and that sees action as situated within social and political particulars.
While the studio/town hall/venue is on-going, upstairs in the Museum will be a study center with one work by each artist and reading materials on performative craft. A podcast of the same materials read aloud will also be available.
Participating artists include Sara Black and John Preus, Anthea Black, Carole Lung, Cat Mazza, Mung Lar Lam, Ehren Tool, and Theaster Gates, and the show is co-curated by Judith Leemann and Shannon Stratton.
Disclosure: Co-curator Judith Leemann is a friend of Groundswell, and the artist-in-residence at DS4SI, where we think and work together.
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