Butt, Danny. “Ethics and the Infrastructure of Artistic Research: Thomas Hirschhorn’s Gramsci Monument.” In The Meeting of Aesthetics and Ethics in the Academy: Challenges for Creative Practice Researchers in Higher Education, edited by Barbara Bolt and Kate MacNeill, 25–37. London: Routledge, 2020. [Accepted version]

The relationship between the political and the ethical is one of the timeless questions of political aesthetics, and the historical tension between the two is clearly echoed in attempts to manage the ethics of artistic research today, whether they occur within the academy or institutions commissioning and presenting artistic work. In the Western tradition, through colonial expansion the modern nation state transforms its model of governance from one based on kinship to one based on territory. With this transition comes a mode of citizenship based on the human subject who is ruled by an authority that governs the city or polis, this authority resting in an infrastructure we call political. Actual participation in the governance of the city is, however, reserved for the governing representatives who solicit expert input, or more commonly, financial investment, which they use to justify their decisions on behalf of the polis. The nation-state’s political structures manage lands and the production of subjects that inhabit them, but at such a scale the state is less able to intervene directly in the relationships between citizens, except through the passing of laws that hold wrongdoers to account after the fact (even if actual policing has never adhered to the juridical framework). In this democratic mode, therefore, daily behaviours are said to reside in the sphere of the ethical, where conduct is governed by extra-legal relations of responsibility between citizens.

 In modern terms, according to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1995: 70), ‘The ethical is not a problem of knowledge but a problem of relation’ or, as she later revises, ethics are ‘a problem of relation before they are a task of knowledge’ (Spivak, 2004: 531). Ethics in this mode is not conceived as ‘doing the right thing’ in a teachable way: this formulation sees ‘ethics training’ as oxymoronic. Instead, ethics is understood as ‘openness toward the imagined agency of the other’ (Spivak, 2004: 531), an openness that holds the essential calculation of democracy: the ability to see the other as potentially substitutable for oneself. However, we must also attend to the singular difference of the other so our imagined substitutability does not run roughshod over what makes the other both individual and different from us. Between this singularity of ethics and the massification of politics lies an aporia that Spivak (2004: 531) suggests is ‘disclosed only in its one-way crossing’, with no neutral place to understand it without doing it. The crossing of the political via the ethical — the attempt to make the world adequate to one’s own values through one’s relationships — is each citizen’s unique task.

What is the implication of this task for artistic research? At the very least, it questions the university’s protocols for managing institutional research, as the ethical in Spivak’s frame consists in how we handle the political dynamics inherent in our institutional location as university researchers. This is a theme which has been explored at length in critical accounts of qualitative research methods. Cannella and Lincoln (2007: 318) note that our desire to be ‘good’ and ethical researchers cannot redeem our work while the institution’s ethical regulatory systems are more concerned with protection against reduction of funding, degradation of research prestige, and associated legal and liability issues, rather than the actual well-being of communities. While regulatory systems operate ‘on behalf of’ the public interest, and those of us who work in them take such responsibilities, it is hard to take these claims for the system at face value when communities are almost never involved in decision-making or review mechanisms. In a related argument, scholars Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang (2013) have written on the potential of ‘refusing research’, noting that ‘the ethical justification for research is defensive and self-encircling – its apparent self-criticism serves to expand its own rights to know and to defend its violations in the name of “good science”’ (Tuck and Yang, 2013: 424). The professionalising mechanisms of ‘best practices’ then become barriers to genuine ethical engagement with communities toward just outcomes that exceed their role as ‘stakeholders’. Cannella and Lincoln (2007: 318) propose instead that:

Attention must be given to (a) new forms of imperialism as exhibited in contemporary global hypercapitalism – that construct research and ethics as related to market philosophies; (b) the multiple life positions, locations, and voices of those who have been research participants and created as the Other historically, whether indigenous people, poor women, prisoners, children, or anyone who has been ‘represented’ through some form of research; (c) academia itself and the ethical research perspectives and practices of those who conduct research and train others in those practices; and (d) the contemporary legislative, policy, and enforcement environment that would impose particular behaviours a priori on individual researchers.

This trenchant critique echoes that of Māori researcher Maui Hudson (2009: 127) who points to two levels of ‘ethicality’ in research infrastructure: an ‘internal ethicality’ focused on respect, harm minimisation, compensation and concern; and an ‘external ethicality’ of justice, community engagement and cultural responsibility. The institution seeks to manage the ‘internal ethicality’ of the researcher through ethics review in advance of any engagement between researcher and community, but the ‘external ethicality’ is where the true political impact of research is to be found. Thus, the role of the critical and ethical researcher will be to continually seek and disrupt those locations where bureaucratic machinery appropriates or subjugates the specific and situated life experience of researchers and communities affected by research. Barbara Bolt (2015: 63) points to a distinctive role for artists in exploring these questions as ‘artistic researchers graduate into the artworld, and in that world it is the community and not the ethics committee that will be the arbiter of efficacy and the ethics of the work’. This public accountability would also affect any academic seeking to consider ‘impact’ outside of internally validated mechanisms of the university.

However, to understand how we can engage ethically outside of the university, we firstly need to know exactly how we are interpellated into the university. This is a difficult process when the university appears to us as scholars much like a polluted waterway might appear to resident fish, surrounding and sustaining us in whichever imperfect fashion, regardless of any independent assessment of its value or impact. Rather than asking how we can be more ethical in our practice, we can perhaps figure external ethicality by borrowing from Lisa Weems and Elizabeth Ellsworth (2006: 1103) to ask, ‘Who does ethics think you are?’ This impossible question leads us away from ethical ‘decision-making’ to consider the assumptions of the subjective habits that are normalised in academic infrastructures, assumptions that the ethical encounter inevitably ruptures.

Infrastructure, institutional critique and reflexive institutionalisation

According to the critic Benjamin Buchloh (1990: 105-143), since Duchamp the matter of art as a linguistic convention has become joined with a conception of art as ‘both a legal contract and an institutional discourse (a discourse of power rather than taste)’. The critic and curator Marion von Osten (2010: 69) thus proposes an analysis of exhibitions in general that ‘would need to be read beyond their representational intention or composition of narratives’, including a discussion on ‘how, why and by whom they have been produced, under which conditions and, most importantly, what they finally enable’. Andrea Fraser (2006: 88). has described the professional field of art as undergoing changes in the ‘structure, organisation, and orientation of institutions’, including a ‘growing emphasis on income-producing activities.’ For the critic Isabelle Graw, rather than accepting ‘Institutional Critique’ as a contained history, we must note that the institution can no longer be delimited, and it ‘nowadays consists of a global art industry producing visuality and meaning, with people like us [the “independent” arts professional] more or less “institutionalized” within it’ (Ai et al. 2008: 303). Tom Holert (2012: 31) asks the question this way: ‘What if the “citizenship” of artists and art communities is proven less by their conforming to “civic interests” and “worldly attention” than by their questioning and ultimately attacking the very complicity between art and higher education, research administration, galleries, museums, biennials, government, and social utility? In short, is there an art imaginable that disrupts and splits reality, and makes incompatible claims with regard to what is communally shared?’ We have moved a long way here from quiet contemplation in the ethical encounter with art as a preparation for politics. Instead, the art of institutional critique asks us to consider the political as happening immediately and immanently within our own situation (Butt, 2017).

Fraser’s (2006) account of the generic capitalist forces that are turning the art industry into just another business seem to echo the erosion of academic autonomy through the transformation of the university’s business practices under neoliberalism. Elsewhere, I have outlined science’s limitations as a model for artistic research through its displacement of the independent critical voice and thus the suppression of an ethic of care (see Butt, 2016). However, science is no longer the dominant enterprise in the university as it was at the beginning of the artistic research debates: the major field of study for postgraduate students today is business and commerce, constituting a full quarter of Australian enrolments, compared to fewer than ten percent for the natural and physical sciences (ABS, 2005). This shift in university enrolments reflects the times, for as the critic Marina Vishmidt (2010) has noted, education ‘has become one of the most highly commodified and instrumentalised sectors worldwide and debt slavery and ‘employability’ are the real products of most universities’. Students, it seems, are ultimately seeking education in the financial principles that strictly govern their debt-laden futures in a way that was not the case for those a generation earlier.

Whether education in business as a field of academic study delivers on its promise to students is neither here nor there for artistic researchers, who usually operate in a different faculty. Our own work is challenged by finance not as a topic, but as a dominant governing ratio of the university’s internal organisation. Methodological distinctions between the arts, sciences, and commerce are rendered moot through the evisceration of discipline-specific research infrastructure and the occupation of university research by a new generic set of operations under the ever-expanding category of ‘overhead’: risk management; commercialisation; construction and property services; intellectual property; contract management; security; insurance; service-oriented architectures; organisational reviews; stakeholder management; monitoring and compliance; occupational health and safety; space utilisation charges; governance; business intelligence; and portfolio management to name but a few. These domains of practice will be familiar to any university administrator.¹

There is little of interest to say about the growth of these new domains in the university, except that they are impervious to academic knowledge of the type generated in research. Foucault’s conception of disciplinary society involved an institutional accretion of power/knowledge (puissance/connaissance) that reflexively incorporates the sub-disciplinary forces of pouvoir/savoir (Spivak, 1993: 43). The university, as the self-consciously disciplinary institution, saw its role as intellectually understanding new knowledges emerging in the world, in turn bringing about new university disciplines (engineering, gender studies, or contemporary art, for example). Today, the corporate form that Clark Kerr (1963) called the ‘multiversity’ deliberately insulates itself from its own disciplinary expertise. To take one example, my own university’s high-profile restructuring of professional staffing was not designed or run by our highly-ranked business faculty with their well-promoted intellectual leadership in strategy and change management, but instead by a global consulting firm.² Similarly, universities do not generally seek to implement the innovative designs of its design school; the information technology of its IT faculty; or most of all, the research-based pedagogy of its education professors, outsourced to casuals and assessed by student satisfaction metrics.

These forces rationalising and reformatting university operations can be filed under the generic description of infrastructure. Angela Mitropolous (2012) articulated infrastructure’s binding of the political to the ethical when she defined infrastructure as ‘an answer to the question of movement and relation’. Here, infrastructure is what comes to program relationalities, and her formulation of infrastructure as an ‘answer’ also captures the important point that all infrastructure is also a statement, an assertion, a performance. Increasingly, infrastructure is discussed as a platform (Butt, McQuire and Papastergiadis, 2016). The multilayered life for platform infrastructure is captured in Brian Larkin’s (2013: 329) definitions as ‘objects that create the grounds on which other objects operate’, as ‘things and also the relation between things’. 

Infrastructure as a genre written through global capitalism is somewhat of a challenge for creative researchers, who usually seek to customise, if not autonomously develop, their infrastructure in each artistic situation. How then, is the creative researcher able to resist this new generic infrastructure of non-thought in the university? Jacques Derrida’s (2002) suggestion was to call for a ‘university without condition’, a site of singular actions with an aesthetic signature that would be indigestible by the factory of academic ‘worldwideization’. Since the 1990s, the political and economic conditions of university life have radically constrained the possibility and significance of such individualised gestures. Perhaps instead we can look to the artistic tradition of institutional critique for guidance on the ethics of infrastructural engagement, though as Isabelle Graw (2008: 303) notes ‘critique implies distance, but this distance has to be renegotiated as well on the basis of the critic’s own implication within this system [this] should have consequences on what we assume and how we operate’. In this framing of complicity, Graw puts us in mind of Spivak’s and Gramsci’s interrogation of the institutionalisation of the intellectual, where rather than figuring the democratic inside the artwork – a perennially popular performance of political aesthetics — the artist as activist must consider their own location within circuits of power, working to understand how such labour maintains or is defective for the operation of that power.

Going private: neoliberal artistic subjectivity as infrastructure

Vishmidt (2017) claims that Kant’s distanciated set-up of art’s autonomy comes to be ‘instrumental in the ‘last instance”’ in so far as it forms a ‘universal subject’ that is fully appropriate to the bourgeois era. To what extent is art’s bracketing of the ‘situation’ that allows an intervention that can be read as ‘artistic’ complicit in reinforcing the axiomatics of dispossession that underwrite it? How would those involved in artistic production unpick that complicity toward models that not only situate the question of inclusion among audiences and the work, but also among all those involved in the networked supply chains of art in a debordered or rebordered aesthetics? This requires a more technical analysis of the forces that constitute audiences through all stages of the artistic project’s lifecycle.

For presenting institutions, the tangibility and specificity of information brought about by new technologies have allowed new kinds of measurement, and fundamentally changed the nature of audiences. Audience development is now a key strategy and performance indicator to be tracked and managed. Far from simply producing the traditional ‘blockbuster’, today the cultural institution is required to specify and develop specific audiences, large and small. Various regimes of value attached to funding and revenue streams constitute this variegated public, which links the development of the wealthy patron to the development of education initiatives and other ‘inclusion’ measures such as diversity and outreach programmes, all falling under the domain of stakeholder development. We can understand network technologies as allowing a new relation between these forms of public, where alternative audiences no longer exist outside the institutions of power but are actively managed by it. This multiplicitous, monitored, and above all managed institutional public sphere also rests on an explicitly sociological conception of the artwork’s public. This type of sociological management is not necessarily to do with the academic discipline of sociology, but is visible in the way new techniques of audience segmentation have a statistical logic that can be graphed with an indicator, tracked with a metric, and visualized on a dashboard. From the 1970s through to the 1990s, academic sociologists such as Erik Olin Wright (1985) tested new class schema by correlating an empirical and theoretical class analysis through economic instruments. They were in some ways ahead of their time but behind the technology, trying to retrofit bad statistics onto a preferred analytical reality. Today the active graphing of segmentable audiences means that the statistical indicator in Stiegler’s (2010) terms has an ‘advance’ on social reality, in that it comes to program the reality of the audience.

With this given, it is curious that Boris Groys should use the introduction to his book Going Public (2010) to launch a critique of what he terms the ‘sociological’ mode of art criticism, when this sociological approach is being fully mobilised by administrators in the actual undergirding infrastructure of artistic audiences. Within modernist and post-modernist artistic production there has always been a kind of generalised resistance to Kant’s diagnostic of the aesthetic experience, a position that sees the viewer as the site where art’s political effects become visible. Most dissenters, like Groys, adopt some version of Nietzsche’s critique that Kant ‘instead of envisaging the aes­thetic problem from the point of view of the artist (creator), considered art and the beautiful purely from that of the “spectator”’, leaving the disinterested definition of the beautiful in which ‘a lack of any refined first-hand experience reposes in the shape of a fat worm of error’ (Nietzsche, 2010: 104). The perspectival seeing and thinking that is the hallmark of the artist is deprioritised in Kant’s critical framework, where he attempts to understand a universalisable and thus ‘democratic’ freedom of the viewer, while the producer is altogether more materially constrained.

Groys is rightly anxious to avoid the illustrative fallacy of political art, where it exhausts its ability to do aesthetic work precisely once it is a recognisable portrait of a political situation. An aesthetic politics should be in the work’s own movement rather than in its representation of the political, it should make the polis rather than talking about it. Yet, Groys seems to turn to a kind of sociological argument of his own in diagnosing today’s participatory condition of art, suggesting that because more people are interested in image production than image contemplation – and he was talking in 2010, before the rise of Instagram – that it is necessary to understand artistic production from the point of view of the producer, and the ‘technical and political decisions for which their subject can be made ethically and politically responsible’ in art’s artificiality. Thus, Groys (2010: 15) suggests, ‘poiesis or techne [rather] than as aisthesis or in terms of hermeneutics’. Ironically, in making this move Groys locates the problem of responsibility in an individualist frame, where an independent artist will act and will then be judged in the social world only after the act has occurred – a version of Hudson’s ‘internalist’ mode of ethical responsibility in the liberal/individualist and latently Christian paradigm.³

Groys acknowledges the artistic persona as fundamental but he does not materialise its production in a way that could see the persona as infrastructural. However, seeing artistic identity as a kind of infrastructure allows us to grapple with the sociological conditions that underpin the production of artistic ethics today, a problematic Groys entirely misses by suggesting that a sociological critique has failed to understand the lessons of the avant-garde. Groys and the historical avant-garde’s aging defenders have failed to understand the lessons of feminist and anti-racist critique, particularly as made within institutional critique. We know today that the actions of the avant-garde rely on specific modes of universalised subjectivity that are impossible to dissociate from the neoliberal ideal of the blank entrepreneurial self. The latent claims to authority embodied in this mode of ‘projectile sovereignty’ (I thank Lauren Berlant for the phrase) are what must be made available for critique if the interventions made on behalf of the public are not to reinforce the axiomatics of domination that are all too familiar in artistic production. To take this a step further: if today the contemporary art world relies on an ‘artistic persona’ at the heart of capital-intensive production, works and practices which do not make available their grounding modes of subjectivity to critique will invariably participate in a kind of ‘privatisation’ of practice that reinforces the privatisation of cultural infrastructure.

Hirschhorn’s Gramsci Monument

The problematics of artistic personae as infrastructure are well illustrated by the various analyses of Thomas Hirschhorn’s Gramsci Monument, a project commissioned and produced by the Dia Foundation, located in the Forest Houses, a public housing development of the Southeast Bronx in 2013. The Gramsci Monument was a makeshift building constructed of plywood, tarpaulins and Hirschhorn’s signature packing tape, that for one summer housed a media laboratory and library containing Gramsci publications and ephemera, as a platform for engaging the housing estate as a ‘non-exclusive audience’.⁴ It is one of Hirschhorn’s ongoing attempts to create a ‘universal’ artwork that escapes from terms such as ‘identity’ and ‘culture’ by locating a supposedly public work outside traditional high-visibility public spaces. Julian Rose (2013: 235) describes the Gramsci Monument as ‘the culmination of Hirschhorn’s series of four homages to great thinkers. The evolution of these projects represents a remarkable effort to resurrect both public space and that which has historically defined it: the monument, whether hieratic statue or symbolic space.’ They move from the monolithic Spinoza Monument of 1999, located in the red-light district of Amsterdam, to the Deleuze and Bataille monuments of 2000 and 2002 that are built in collaboration with communities in low-income housing developments and become platforms for a range of community events.

For Gramsci Monument, Hirschhorn sought to dispense with the residual ‘monumental’ aspects of the Bataille monument that he felt distracted from the ‘total artwork’, or the ability to see all the aspects of site that should be associated with the work all at once. As Ara Merjian (2013) notes ‘Hirschhorn has long inveighed against the reduction of art to any moniker – “piece”, “show” or “installation” – that might ossify its necessary, vital precariousness’. This is a clear adoption of the avant-garde position that proposes movement as an important force against the sclerotic tendencies of diagnosed and sociologised culture. The provisional; the temporary; and the improvisational is seen as an expression of freedom or creativity to open up new models of action. The public here is performative, being constructed in the anew at each moment, potentially evading all the forces that constitute it. Hirschhorn thus formulates the ‘non-exclusive audience’ as his target in artistic work (see Rittenbach, 2014). Implicitly, what is valorised here is the force and intensity of the artistic gesture which can create works that could ‘stand up’ and become monumental, even more so by being anti-monumental. The monument would then no longer distract from the artistic persona and gesture. The artist takes these anti-monuments from site to site, demonstrating the possibility of new worlds in a paradigm of mobility and autonomy. Such a mode is particularly ironic in the case of the Gramsci monument, as Gramsci himself noted that intellectuals forged a ‘stratum of administrators, scholars and scientists, theorists, non-ecclesiastical philosophers, etc.’ who come to think of themselves as ‘autonomous and independent of the dominant social group’ (Gramsci, 2009). But for Gramsci this is all an illusion. The production of Hirschhorn’s globally mobile artistic subjectivity that allows such neutrality displaces the very terms of racial dispossession that made the Bronx poor enough to be able to ‘benefit’ from his intervention. Attention to these forces structuring such dispossession have become the grounds for the most effective social movements working from and for public housing communities like those in Forest Houses (Black Lives Matter, for example). The metaphor of the ‘organic’ used by Gramsci points to the fact that one does not choose one’s own institutionalisation into epistemic privilege, something Hirschhorn seems either oblivious to, or wilfully dismissive of.

Responsibility

‘I have always seen my mission’, Hirschhorn (see Oliva and Rezende, 2007) has written, echoing Groys (2010), ‘as taking over responsibility. Responsibility for everything touching my work, but also responsibility for what I am not responsible for.’ As Glenn Ligon’s analysis of the Gramsci Monument noted, Hirschhorn’s taking of responsibility always leads us back to the question of his artistic persona as a type of infrastructure, yet one which remained stubbornly unavailable to the existing people in the site. For Ligon (2013), the way every question led back to Hirschhorn’s position as an artist, however rigorously articulated, resulted in an eventual distancing from the concerns of the community. Hirschhorn’s ultimate accountability to the art world, and thus his artistic persona, was necessary infrastructure – we could think of it like a toll-road – that allowed the Dia Art Foundation to connect to a part of its city that it was not prepared to face directly before this commission. Therefore, when Hirschhorn takes responsibility for his work, rather than sharing it, he performs a privatizing operation that is essential for Dia’s capital to appropriate the Bronx’s difference as an aesthetic opportunity.

Spivak (2004) gave a talk at the monument, and her work on responsibility emphasises that the ability to ‘answer to’ and ‘answer for’ is overdetermined by the institutional constraints that distribute responsibility in advance. ‘At the moment where one “takes” responsibility for authoring one’s actions, one precisely fails to take responsibility for the fact that one can decide to take it’ (Butt, 2016). For Dia’s purposes, as for Hirschhorn’s, the actual events that took place under his responsibility had little effect on the success or failure of how it could be evaluated within the artistic institutions to which they were accountable. In other words, in the formulation of the ethical Spivak provides at the opening of this chapter, Hirschhorn evades an ethical relationship by effacing the opportunity for his responsibility to be held by those he is working with. The problem here can be understood in the developmentalist paradigm as a kind of white man’s burden. The artist becomes machinery that is always looking for a site of investment. Hirschhorn, after all, had a number of meetings in different sites in New York before he was invited to create the monument in the South Bronx.

The most interesting account of the Gramsci Monument came from Fred Moten, as recounted by José Esteban Muñoz (2014: 120):

One interested audience member asked Fred how he felt being there, at the Gramsci Monument, in the Bronx. He talked about feeling good in the space and how rare that feeling could be. He explained that he was always happy to be invited somewhere to speak, but it was a special kind of luxury to really feel good at the place one is happy to be invited to. The audience breathed in that idea of feeling good, on this mild summer day, with the sun shining, in this canyon surrounded by red brick towers where this ship, our ship, had landed. Someone asked him what he thought of Hirschhorn’s project, and he responded by saying that there had always been something here and the installation did not unveil anything new. He used the metaphor of food to elaborate this point. He explained that sometimes, even though not always the healthiest thing to do, one must salt one’s food to really taste the flavor. The bright flavor of this space was brought out by the monument, but that taste had always been there, which is to insist that the effervescence of the actually existing relationality of the Forest Houses and the promise of collectivity was and is always present in such spaces.

To conceive of one’s own work as a kind of seasoning requires us to understand our own work as supplementary to social forces much larger than ourselves, and thus in a certain way to allow responsibility to be held in the meal itself. Salt production occurs in many communities across the globe, and yet no one would want to eat a meal of salt. The conditions of salt production are also, in some places, synonymous with exploitation. Perhaps Moten’s metaphor gives us a way to think about our own institutionalisation in the salt mines of culture: if our aesthetic seasoning were to be produced ethically, what would a cooperative for salt production look like, against the industrially scaled salt makers?

Against the extractive modes of fly-in fly-out aesthetic infrastructure, if we think today about public political movements such as Occupy, or the indigenous-led activism at Standing Rock and the North Dakota Access Pipeline, a prominent mechanism for going public is through refusal to be moved on, and the use of networks not to discover new territories for exploration, but to defend them against instrumental incursions. Against the settler colonial paradigm of movement, these protests speak to an ecological concern with a responsibility for infrastructure that exceeds the individual. On the one hand these movements represent a practice of collective autonomy: the ability to propose a collaborative answer to the question of movement and relation, rather than having it imposed. However, in the case of Standing Rock and other struggles against neo-colonial extraction, it also speaks to an extended temporality of struggle that situates action outside the human-directed event and into an ecological or planetary time to which we become responsible, rather than taking responsibility for it. Such an orientation refuses to override ethical concerns for political ends, or to put it in Derrida’s terms, this mode refuses all externally-mandated conditions, and becomes an ‘unconditional’ commitment that we can understand as the hallmark of the professor. In this ecological terrain, professorial complaints about the changing character of universities as workplaces focused on compliance and profit have a shared basis with student demands for consumer satisfaction and ethical institutional behaviour.⁵ To affirm such demands ethically and politically, that is to say, practically, may require us to subject our own ambivalent positions in education’s economic logic to more stringent critique. This critique will require more organisational and financial literacy than artistic subjectivity has traditionally rewarded, but brings with it the potential for alliance not only with our students but with other groups resistant to neoliberalisation. This would allow us to displace questions of responsibility as right into collective actions that forge solidarities with those from outside the institution’s walls, rather than treating such communities as targets of our natural beneficence. This mode of ethical reflection, which engages the politics of our own institutionalisation, rather than disavowing it, is harder to adjudicate through our inherited academic mechanisms, but it perhaps better serves the communities outside the university who ultimately sustain artistic research.

Notes

1. Universities increasingly contract such functions externally to global infrastructure firms – see for example the University of Newcastle’s award of a five year $88 million integrated facilities management and property services contract to Transfield Services / Broadspectrum in 2015. The potential for this overhead to stifle artistic research is further elaborated in my essay “How Artistic Research Ends” (Melbourne: Research Unit in Public Cultures) 2020. This section includes material published there and in Artistic Research in the Future Academy (2017)

2. For a range of responses to the Business Improvement Program, see Campbell, Marion, and Philip Morrissey, eds. 2016. The People’s Tribunal: An Inquiry into the “Business Improvement Program” at The University of Melbourne. Melbourne: Aboriginal Humanities Project in association with Discipline.

3. I have pursued this problem of responsibility at length in Danny Butt and Local Time, “Colonial Hospitality: Rethinking Curatorial and Artistic Responsibility,” Journal for Artistic Research, no. 10 (2016), https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/228399/264279.

4. For a good account see Valle, Luisa. 2015. “Object Lesson: Thomas Hirschhorn’s Gramsci Monument: Negotiating Monumentality with Instability and Everyday Life.” Buildings & Landscapes: Journal of the Vernacular Architecture Forum 22 (2). 18–35. Also Hirschhorn’s own “Gramsci Monument” in Rethinking Marxism 27 (2): 213–40.

5. This conjuncture was on display in the actions against the University of Sydney taken by students at Sydney College of the Arts. See Joyner, Tom. 2016. “More than 130 Students Take on Sydney University for Alleged Breach of Consumer Law – Honi Soit.” Honi Soit. August 9. http://honisoit.com/2016/08/more-than-130-students-take-on-sydney-university-for-alleged-breach-of-consumer-law/

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Rittenbach K (2014) The Gulch Between Knowledge and Experience: Thomas Hirschhorn’s Gramsci Monument. Afterall, November 17. Available at: http://www.afterall.org/online/the-gulch-between-knowledge-and-experience_thomas-hirschhorn_s-gramsci-monument (accessed 17 May 2018).
Rose J (2013) Building Complex. Artforum International 52(2): 235–38.
Spivak G C (1995) Ghostwriting. Diacritics 25(2):65–84.
Spivak G C (2004) Righting Wrongs. The South Atlantic Quarterly 103(2-3): 523–81.
Tuck E and Yang K W (2013) R-Words: Refusing Research? In: Paris D and Winn M T (eds) Humanizing Research: Decolonizing Qualitative Inquiry with Youth and Communities. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, pp. 223-248.
Valle L (2015) Object Lesson: Thomas Hirschhorn’s Gramsci Monument: Negotiating Monumentality with Instability and Everyday Life. Buildings & Landscapes: Journal of the Vernacular Architecture Forum 22 (2): 18–35.
Vishmidt M (2017) Speculation as a Mode of Production. Leiden: Brill.
von Osten, M (2010) Another Criteria… Or, What Is the Attitude of a Work in the Relations of Production of Its Time?,” Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry , 25: 56-69
Weems L (2006) Unsettling Politics, Locating Ethics. Qualitative Inquiry 12(5): 994-1011.
Weiwei A, Cappellazzo A, Crow T, De Salvo D, Graw I, Joannou D, Pincus-Witten R, Meyer J, and Griffin T (2008). Art and Its Markets: A Roundtable Discussion. Artforum. 46(8): 293–303
Wright E O (1985) Classes. London: Verso

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Below the reading list for the two “Arts and Communities” theory classes I taught for the Master of Arts and Community Practice at the Centre for Cultural Partnerships (CCP), Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne in 2016. These are not the final version presented to students, which were supplemented by a number of texts from the various participants in the courses. Histories and Sites was also taught before Values and Methods, though pedagogically it should have probably been the other way around. The topics were developed by CCP staff in a collaborative workshop session I facilitated in 2015, though the descriptions represent more my own interests. The bibliography largely represents my own best attempt at an archive, though input also came from CCP staff Lachlan MacDowall, Marnie Badham, James Oliver, Dean Merlino, Jen Rae, Margie Mackay, Amy Spiers, and also Tania Cañas and Léuli Eshraghi who co-taught the Values and Methods class. There are a few missing readings from the PDFs but hopefully both the list and readings are useful. If you have content in the PDFs which you would like not to be online please let me know danny at dannybutt.net. Please also let me know if this turns out to be useful for you in some way – hoping to continue to build on this archive in a more collaborative fashion. xx

Arts and Communities: Values and Methods Reader – PDF (93MB)
– https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B2A0k6xhkuiIU3NkZUVtYU9HdWs

Arts and Communities: Histories and Sites Reader – PDF (58MB) – https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B2A0k6xhkuiINjRpa3Z6cGxaeG8

CCDP90009 – 2016 Arts and Communities: Values and Methods

Week 1: Liberalism and its Discontents: Structural Inequality and Democracy

The democratic state that dominates Western political thought emerges from the liberal tradition, where each person is assumed to be freely in charge of their own actions, even though the distribution of such freedom is clearly unequal. A number of oppositional traditions have asked, what forces are required to construct an individual? These questions – emerging from marxist, feminist, indigenous and other positions – destabilise our idea of the citizen and open our sense of collectivity to new genres of action.

Required Reading:

Hannah Arendt, “The Perplexities of the Rights of Man,” in The Origins of Totalitarianism (Harvest, 1966), 290-302. http://digilib.bc.edu/reserves/po659/chac/po65905.pdf.

Land, Clare. 2015. Decolonizing Solidarity: Dilemmas and Directions for Supporters of Indigenous Struggles. London: Zed Books. Chapter 2: “A political genealogy for contemporary non-Indigenous activism in Australia”

Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric. Minneapolis: Graywolf Press. 2014.  Chapter 3

Recommended Reading:

Lauren Berlant, “Claudia Rankine” (Interview). BOMB 129. 2014. http://bombmagazine.org/article/10096/claudia-rankine

Reckitt, Helena. “Forgotten Relations: Feminist Artists and Relational Aesthetics.” In Politics in a Glass: Case Feminism, Exhibition Cultures and Curatorial Transgressions. Edited by Angela Dimitrakaki and Lara Perry. Value: Art: Politics. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, July, 2013. http://research.gold.ac.uk/7103/

Kester, Grant H. Conversation Pieces : Community and Communication in Modern Art. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. Chapter Three “Dialogical Aesthetics”

Week 2: Human Rights and Human Development

The Declaration of the rights of Man and of the Citizen, passed by France’s National Constituent Assembly in August 1789, marks a transition from natural law being managed through the church to a Christian nation-state, whose form became globalised through the processes of European colonisation. The concept of “human rights” remains one of the strongest discourses to be mobilised against oppression, yet this discourse has also been critiqued for its universalism. Similarly, the concept of human development flourished during the peak era of intergovernmentalism in the United Nations (1945- ~1990) but the mechanisms of development have more recently come in for critique as they are circumvented and infiltrated by private capital. How are these discourses still relevant and what work can they do in contemporary communities? As well as thinking of “human rights”, could we also think about “human wrongs”? Can the idea of developing communities co-exist with a self-determination framework?

Required Reading

Amartya Sen. 2005. “Human Rights and Capabilities.” Journal of Human Development 6 (2): 151–66.

Escobar, Arturo. 1992. “Imagining a Post-Development Era? Critical Thought, Development and Social Movements.” Social Text, no. 31/32. 20–56.

Kester, Grant. 2011. The One and the Many: Contemporary Collaborative Art in a Global Context. Art Theory and Criticism. Duke University Press. Chapter Two (excerpt) 116-153

Recommended Reading

Cohen, Jean L. 2008. “Rethinking Human Rights, Democracy, and Sovereignty in the Age of Globalization.” Political Theory, 36(4): 578-606.

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 2004. “Righting Wrongs.” The South Atlantic Quarterly 103 (2-3): 523–81.

Week 3: Modernity / Postmodernity

Modernism was a consensus of Western-educated people about the structure of history, identity and core cultural values. In the logic of modernism, history has passed and contemporary activity will depart from that past into a progressive future. Postmodernity  is described from the 1970s as a collapse in that consensus – modernist ideals have not go away, but they can no longer claim to be the only true path – narratives and meta-narratives of history become conflicted.

Required Reading:

Benjamin, Walter. 1968. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” In Illuminations, 217–51. New York: Random House.

Haraway, Donna J. 1991. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century.” In Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, 149–81. New York: Routledge

Kapur, Geeta. 1990. “Contemporary Cultural Practice: Some Polemical Categories.” Third Text 4 (11): 109–18.

Recommended:

Baudrillard, Jean. 1994. Simulacra and Simulation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Chapter 1, “The Precession of Simulation.”

Week 4: Critical Approaches to Community

The double bind of community: communities are naturally occurring groups, that evolve with no set plan. Yet communities are identified by those wishing to change those plans, by definition departing from an organic approach to community and toward an intentional one. On what grounds can intentional communities be diagnosed or constructed?

Rimi Khan: “From Consensual to Open-Ended Communities”, in Art in Community: The Provisional Citizen (Palgrave 2015) pp. 14-36

Jackson, Shannon. “Quality Time: Social Practice Debates in Contemporary Art.” Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics. London: Routledge, 2011. 54-86.

Joseph, Miranda. “Introduction: Persistent Critique, Relentless Return.” Against the Romance of Community. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002. Vii-xxxvi.

Recommended:

Nancy, Jean-Luc. 1991. The Inoperative Community. Minneapolis: University Of Minnesota Press. Chapter One.

Week 5: Qualitative Research, the Ethnographic Eye, and the Politics of Knowledge

The community artist is often sponsored by a state or corporation that has sought knowledge about a community for its own ends. What does it mean to understand a community ethnographically, to visit for a time and inductively form a structure? What is the relationship between those who visit and those who always remain? How do knowledge-making practices travel across such differences?

Required Reading

Tuck, Eve, and K. Wayne Yang. “R-Words: Refusing Research.” Humanizing Research: Decolonizing Qualitative Inquiry with Youth and Communities. Ed. Django Paris and Maisha T. Winn. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2013. 223-248.

Rangan, Pooja. 2011. “Immaterial Child Labor: Media Advocacy, Autoethnography, and the Case of Born into Brothels.” Camera Obscura 25 (3 75): 143–77.

Janke, Terri. 2015. “Chapter 7: Avatar Dreaming: Indigenous Cultural Protocols and Making Films Using Indigenous Content.” In Indigenous Intellectual Property: A Handbook of Contemporary Research, edited by Matthew Rimmer, 177–99. Research Handbooks in Intellectual Property Series. Edward Elgar Publishing.

Recommended Reading

Alcoff, Linda. “The Problem of Speaking for Others.” Cultural Critique 20 (1991): 5-3

Week 6: Mythology, Story and Narrative

For the Native American writer Thomas King, “the truth about stories is that is all we are”. Some stories may be legitimated (governmental stories, scientific stories) and some not, but story is the process by which we give meaning to phenomena. Story and myth are often ritualised, told and received as much because of the conditions of their telling (such and such a person was here; at this time of the day we tell stories; we need a story to sell this product; I need to find a way to convey this information) as any actual content. How do we engage different genres of narrative and story, across different institutions?

Required Reading:

King, Thomas. 2003. The truth about stories: A Native narrative. Toronto, ON: Anansi Press.  Chapter 1. [CBC lectures: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wzXQoZ6pE-M ].

Cybermohalla Ensemble. “On Writing.” Cybermohalla Hub. Ed. Nikolaus Hirsch and Shveta Sarda. Delhi/ Berlin: Sarai-CSDS/Sternberg Press, 2012. 14-20

Recommended Reading:

Richardson, Laurel, and Elizabeth Adams St. Pierre. “Writing: A Method of Inquiry.” The SAGE Handbook of Qualitative Research. Ed. Norman K. Denzin and Yvonna S. Lincoln. Thousand Oaks; London; New Delhi: Sage, 2007. 959-978.

Week 7: Art and Health – Readings and materials TBC

Week 8: Nation, Culture and Citizenship

For much of the 20th century, official discourses of culture related to the nation state, and thus to citizenship. However, in greater number since the 1980s, the state is seen as being able to embrace many cultures. What does this mean for citizenship as a mechanism of belonging? What is the relationship between multiculturalism and indigenous culture in settler societies? How does this state conjuncture relate to “private” “cultural” practices such as food, religion, etc?

Required Reading:

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Culture Alive.” Theory, Culture & Society 23. 2-3 (May, 2006): 359-360.

Rickard, Jolene. 2011. “Visualizing Sovereignty in the Time of Biometric Sensors.” The South Atlantic Quarterly 110 (2): 465–86.

Langton, Marcia. 1993. “ Well, I Heard It on the Radio and I Saw It on the Television”: An Essay for the Australian Film Commission on the Politics and Aesthetics of Filmmaking by and about Aboriginal People and Things. Australian Film Commission Sydney.

Recommended Reading:

Appadurai, Arjun. 1990. “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy.” Public Culture 2: 1–24.

Week 9: Ethics

The movement of artistic practices into the academy, and the emergence of claims to self-determination has brought with it an increased focus on ethics in community-engaged practices. Far from artistic interventions being seen as only positive, the ethical paradigm requires artists to consider more dialogical engagements with communities, and to critically assess their own power. Are these dynamics predictable in advance? Do they impose constraints on the value of artistic actions, which usually present their own autonomy? .

Required Reading:

Bolt, Barbara. “Beneficence and contemporary art: when aesthetic judgment meets ethical judgment.” Visual Methodologies,  v. 3, n. 2, p. 53-66, dec. 2015. ISSN 2040-5456. Available at: <http://journals.sfu.ca/vm/index.php/vm/article/view/51>.

Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. 1999. “Ethical Research Protocols” in Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. Dunedin: University of Otago Press. 118-122.

Thornley, Jeni. “Island Home Country: Working with Aboriginal Protocols in a Documentary Film About Colonisation and Growing Up White in Tasmania.” in Passionate Histories: Myth, Memory and Indigenous Australia. Ed. Frances Peters-Little, Ann Curthoys, and John Docker. Acton, A.C.T.: ANU E Press, 2010. 247-280.

Recommended Reading:

Danny Butt and Local Time, 2016. “Colonial hospitality: rethinking curatorial and artistic responsibility”, Journal for Artistic Research 10 (2016) https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/228399/264279/0/0

Treloyn, S. & Charles, R. G. (2014). How do you feel about squeezing oranges?: Reflections and lessons on collaboration in ethnomusicological research in an Aboriginal Australian community. In K. Barney, (Ed.), Collaborative ethnomusicology: New approaches to music research between Indigenous and Non-Indigenous Australians. Melbourne, VIC: Lyrebird Press. 169-186.

Week 10: Affect, Aesthetics, Creativity

The term “aesthetic” is commonly used to discuss the “artistic” aspects of form, as opposed to the content. However, for Kant and other philosophers who have influenced our use of the term, the aesthetic is a much deeper force that describes a space where the human senses the free play of concepts in a form not dictated by the tight confines of reason, enabling the possibility of new modes of thinking and social ordering to emerge. In the late 20th century, influenced by psychological researchers such as Tomkins and philosophers Deleuze and Guattari, the concept of “affect” gains traction as a mode of analysis that operates outside the residual logics of philosophical aesthetics and their propositional subject.

Required Reading:

Bourriaud, Nicolas. 1998. Relational Aesthetics. Les Presse Du Reel, France. Chapter Three & 4: “Art of the 1990s” and “Space time exchange factors.” 24-48.

Ahmed, Sara. 2014. “Introduction: Feel Your Way”, from The Cultural Politics of Emotion. New York: Routledge. 1-19.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, and Adam Frank. 1995. “Shame in the Cybernetic Fold: Reading Silvan Tomkins.” Critical Inquiry 21 (2). 496–522.

Recommended Reading:

Felix Gonzalez-Torres, “1990: L.A., “The Gold Field”,” in Roni Horn. Earths Grow Thick (Columbus: Wexner Center for the Arts Publication, 1996), 68.

Najafi, Sina, David Serlin, and Lauren Berlant. 2014. “The Broken Circuit: An Interview with Lauren Berlant.” Cabinet 31. http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/31/najafi_serlin.php.

Ball, Karyn. 2008. “Primal Revenge and Other Anthropomorphic Projections for Literary History.” New Literary History 39 (3). 533–63.

Week 11: Capital, Economy and the Market – social economies

According to the curator Charles Esche, all cultural funding in the former west can be linked to the Cold War and the desire for governments to demonstrate the cultural superiority of individualist freedom over socialist collectivity, and since 1989 this mandate for cultural support has declined. In the context of neoliberalism, the ability of nations to maintain their cultural and economic sovereignty has become ruptured, as global finance capital permeates territorial borders, while reinforcing different kinds of divides between firms, individuals and nation states. How are arts practitioners responding to these new flows of capital? What role to divestment and boycott campaigns have in contemporary cultural politics? How does the artist survive in a financialised community while avoiding exploitation and being exploited?

Required Reading:

Bourdieu, Pierre. (1986) The forms of capital. In J. Richardson (Ed.) Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education (New York, Greenwood), 241-258.

Hopkins, Candice. “The Golden Potlatch
: Study in Mimesis and Capitalist Desire.” Fillip 13

Purves, Ted., and S. A. Selzer. 2014. What We Want Is Free, Second Edition: Critical Exchanges in Recent Art. State University of New York Press. (Chs 1 & 2)

Recommended Reading:

Colapinto, John. “The Real-Estate Artist.” [Theaster Gates] The New Yorker  January 29, 2015. <http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/01/20/the-real-estate-artist>

Week 12: Governance, Bureaucracy, Evaluation

Required Reading:

Gressel, Katherine. “Public Art and the Challenge of Evaluation.” Createquity. January 7, 2012. Web. <http://createquity.com/2012/01/public-art-and-the-challenge-of-evaluation/>.

Belfiore, Eleonora, and Oliver Bennett. “Beyond the “Toolkit Approach”: Arts Impact Evaluation Research and the Realities of Cultural Policy‐Making.” Journal for Cultural Research 14.2 (March 24, 2010): 121-142.

Hope, Sophie. “Cultural measurement on whose terms? Critical friends as an experiment in participant-led evaluation.” In Making Culture Count, pp. 282-297. Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2015.

Norris, Niles. “The Politics of Evaluation and the Methodological Imagination.” American Journal of Evaluation 26.4 (December 1, 2005): 584-586.

CCDP90007 – 2016 Arts and Communities: Histories and Sites

Week 1: Arrival and welcome

Recommended Reading:

Birch, Tony “Nothing has changed: The Making and Unmaking of Koori Culture”,  in Grossman, Michèle. Blacklines : Contemporary Critical Writing by Indigenous Australians (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 2003), 97-103.

Edmonds, Fran, Lee Darroch, Maree Clarke, and Vicki Couzens. “Ancestral Memory Out of the Shadows.” Artlink 32.2 (2012): 56-61.

Anonymous. “The Art of the Question: Thinking Like a Public Artist.” The Practice of Public Art, eds. Cameron Cartiere and Shelly Willis. (New York: Routledge, 2008), 219-230.

Week 2: Community art and social practice: navigating sites of power and representation

In recent years, the liveliness of debate over socially-engaged art has less to do with the aesthetics and ethics of practice itself and more to do with the terms of criticism and policy to define it. Employing a range of social strategies to amplify broader political concerns, the field is distinguished by its artistic sensibility while encompassing a range of creative collaborations between artists and communities of both place and interest. Histories stem from a number of competing artistic and institutional motivations rooted in the geopolitical. For instance, American narratives stem from identity politics of the Harlem Renaissance, Second Wave Feminism, postwar New Deal with a focus on regionalism and the artistic practices of the Situationists, Fluxus and social sculpture.  Australian histories, meanwhile, are usually associated with the community arts movement that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s of workers theatre and children’s festivals, indigenous self determination, disability arts, the multicultural agenda alongside cultural development in local neighbourhoods.

Required Reading:

Danielle Wyatt, Marnie Badham, and Lachlan MacDowall (2015) “Vexing History: The Problem of Telling the Story of Community Arts in Australia” draft discussion paper

Gay Hawkins, From Nimbin to Mardi Gras: Constructing Community Arts (St Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 1993). Chapters 1 & 2, Chapter 6.

Lind, Maria. “Complications; On Collaboration, Agency and Contemporary Art.” Public: New Communities 39 (2009): 53-73.

Recommended Reading:

Lacy, Suzanne. “Debated Territory: Toward a Critical Language for Public Art.” Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art. Ed. Suzanne Lacy. (Seattle, WA: Bay Press, 1995), 171-185.

Jackson, Shannon. “Quality Time: Social Practice Debates in Contemporary Art.” Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics. (London: Routledge. 2011), 54-86.

Week 3 – Histories of Help: Charity, settlement and missionary aesthetics

The 19th century settlement movement was an important precursor to the idea of community development in the British Empire. Shifting the model of charity from a distance, organisations like Toynbee Hall in the UK and Jane Addams’ Hull House in Chicago advocated for middle-class reformers to actually participate in the lives of migrants and the poor. Influenced by the ideas of culture as a civilising force espoused by Matthew Arnold, these activists played important roles in welfare reform and working class participation in democratic culture in the late 19th century, while sometimes maintaining paternalistic attitudes, dynamics of power that still circulate in art and community today.

Required Reading:

Jane Addams. “The Subjective Necessity for Social Settlements” (1892)

Diana Maltz, “Missionary Aestheticism as Emancipatory Aesthetics?” in British Aestheticism and the Urban Working Classes, 1870–1900.  (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006),  206-217

Tania Cañas, “10 Things You Need To Consider If You Are An Artist – Not Of The Refugee And Asylum Seeker Community – Looking To Work With Our Community.” http://riserefugee.org/10-things-you-need-to-consider-if-you-are-an-artist-not-of-the-refugee-and-asylum-seeker-community-looking-to-work-with-our-community/

Recommended Reading:

Grant Kester, “Aesthetic Evangelists: Conversion and Empowerment in Contemporary Art,” Afterimage 22:6 (January 1995), 5–11

Heather E. McLean,  “Cracks in the Creative City: The Contradictions of Community Arts Practice.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 38.6 (October 16, 2014): 2156-2173.

Week 4: Community as event: performance, action, happening

The technological developments of the industrial revolution reconfigured European communities through the abstraction of labour-power, loosening traditional values and establishing new systems of domination and affiliation, including the circulation of cultural goods. Some artists came to question the social values associated with art, seeing potential liberation to emerge from aesthetic experiences that focussed on the social effect of art rather than the object. Meanwhile, theatre developed a concern with the formal mechanics of the stage and the alienating effects of representation, to be either broken (Artaud) or ironically heightened (Brecht). These critical gestures open the dialectic of transgression characteristic of contemporary art, where non-art gestures in a community come to be understood within artistic frameworks, and art’s rituals bring affective significance to a secular society.

Required Reading:

Boal, Augusto. “A Theoretical Foundation.” The Aesthetics of the Oppressed. Trans. Adrian Jackson. (London; New York: Routledge, 2006). 11-43.

Recommended Reading:

Sell, Mike (1998) “The Avant-Garde of Absorption: Happenings, Fluxus, and the Performance Economies of the American Sixties”, Rethinking Marxism, 10.2 (1998): 1-26

Bishop, Claire. Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship. London: Verso 2012. Chapter Two: “The Historic Avant Garde”

Week 5: The Art of Politics

Unions played a key role in the development of infrastructure for health, education and culture outside of the upper classes. In the 20th century, through strike and petition, social reformers called upon the social democratic nation-state to adopt responsibility for this infrastructure, including the management of culture and cultural development. During the neoliberal era, corporatisation has produced new, internationalised flows of power and resistance, with renewed attention to the political force of the artistic activity.

Required Reading:

Ellen Feiss, “What is Useful? The paradox of rights in Tania Bruguera’s ‘Useful Art’” http://www.artandeducation.net/paper/what-is-useful-the-paradox-of-rights-in-tania-brugueras-useful-art/

Kelly, Owen. (1984). Community, Art, and the State: storming the citadels. London; New York, Comedia Publishing Group in association with Marion Boyars. Excerpts TBC.

Recommended Reading:

Gregory Sholette, excerpt from Dark Matter: Art and Politics in the Age of Enterprise Culture, London: Pluto Press, 2011.

Mouffe, Chantal. “Artistic Activism and Agonistic Spaces.” Art & Research: A Journal of Ideas, Contexts and Methods 1 .2 (2007)

Patricia C. Phillips,  “Creating Democracy: A Dialogue with Krzysztof Wodiczko.” Art Journal 62.4 (Winter 2003): 32-47.

Wallis, Brian, ed. Democracy: A Project by Group Material. Bay Press/Dia Art Foundation, 1990.

Week 6: Globality and Locality

The double bind of non-indigenous community is that the term “community” is by definition is imposed from elsewhere, bringing with it assumptions about the need for local change. Therefore, changes in the local cultural environment imply changes in the world, and vice-versa. In the West, the era of cultural nationalism has viewed internationalism through the labour movement and intergovernmental agencies such as UNESCO. Moving into the neoliberal era, new configurations of global movements are becoming palpable, enabled by new globe-girding technologies and discourses of decolonisation.

Required Reading:

Cuauhtémoc Medina, “Contemp(t)orary: Eleven Theses”, e-flux journal #12.

Lucy Lippard, The Lure of the Local: Senses of Place in a Multicentered Society (New York: The New Press, 1997). excerpts.

Recommended Reading:

Butt, Danny. “Local Knowledge: Place and New Media Practice.” Leonardo, 39.4 (August 2006): 323-326.

Week 7: Racism, rights, and community (19th April)

Through the 20th century the Western concept of culture came to be seen as no longer a tool of benevolence, but a powerful disciplining force that relied on the exclusion of non-white practitioners. Influenced by broader dialogues of decolonisation and resistance, the Black Arts and Multicultural arts movements posited cultural autonomy as something belonging to communities against the colonial state rather than being developed by the state.

Required Reading:

Paul Gilroy “Art of darkness: Black art and the problem of belonging to England”, Third Text, 4.10 (1990): 45-52.

Audre Lorde – “Poetry is not a luxury” (1977) In Women’s Voices, Feminist Visions: Classic and Contemporary Readings, Shaw, Susan M. and Janet Lee eds. 371-373.

Interview with Robin DiAngelo, “Why White People Freak Out When They’re Called Out About Race” <http://www.alternet.org/culture/why-white-people-freak-out-when-theyre-called-out-about-race>

Recommended Reading:

Walter Mignolo et. al, Decolonial Aesthetics <https://transnationaldecolonialinstitute.wordpress.com/decolonial-aesthetics/>

Week 8: Biopower: Art and institutional bodies

Michel Foucault saw an emergent politics in institutionalised technologies of human management: prison and clinic. These sites have also been sites of intervention by artists. How are bodies regulated, how does art ameliorate, support or challenge such regulation?

Required Reading:

Cheliotis, Leonidas “Decorative justice: deconstructing the relationship between the arts and imprisonment.” International Journal for Crime, Justice and Social Democracy, 3.1: (2014): 16-34.

Week 9: Engendering community: feminist histories

Feminist movements attempted to displace the patriarchal ordering of society as public-political-male vs the private-ethical-female; and many saw in art a powerful vehicle to transform the personal into the political. This also made these movements a vibrant ground for debates on the limits of subjective affinity and white dominance. The uneasy conjuncture between intimate practices and political goals structures community-based movements toward inclusive gender and sexuality today.

Required Reading:

Martha Rosler, “Feminist Art in California,” Artforum, September 1977.

Vivien Green Fryd, “Suzanne Lacy’s Three Weeks in May: Feminist Activist Performance Art as ‘Expanded Public Pedagogy’” NWSA Journal 19.1, Spring (2007) 23-38

Mierle Laderman Ukeles, “Manifesto for Maintenance Art 1969 – Proposal for an exhibition “CARE”

Recommended Reading:

Sykes, Roberta. “Bobbi Sykes,” in Women who do and women who don’t join the women’s movement, ed. Robyn Rowland, (Melbourne: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984), 63-9. (Also, Ngahuia Te Awekotuku, same volume)

Lauren Berlant and Elizabeth Freeman, “Queer Nationality”  boundary 2, 19.1, (Spring, 1992), pp. 149-180

Week 10: The right to the city

Urbanisation is one of the dominant forces in society. In the west, artistic practices are almost always seen as emerging in an urban metropolis, given the task of humanising the abstract forces of capital-intensive infrastructure, and through gentrification contributing to its reformatting of human life. How has the city changed, what kinds of community have changed with it, and what is the role of the artist in reimagining the city?

Required Reading:

Tom Finklepearl. “Introduction: The City as Site.” Dialogues in Public Art. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2001.

Josephine Berry, “Everyone is Not an Artist: Autonomous Art meets the Neoliberal City”

Recommended Reading:

Ivan Chtcheglov “Formulary for a New Urbanism” (1953)

Week 11: Environment and ecology

On the flipside of the conflation of the creative and the urban, a Romantic tradition has seen in nature the essence of beauty that could inform the production of art. Community arts has often worked to evade this dynamic, by seeking artistic outcomes in regional and rural environments that do not necessarily point back to the urban centre, or that engage environments for their intrinsic processes rather than simply as picturesque locations to be documented for an urban viewer. How have community-engaged arts tracked the discourses of the environmental movements?

Week 12: The Community and The Gallery: Critical Social Practices

In the 19th century it was assumed that art galleries could improve communities’ taste, and there were advocacy movements to make them open on Sundays when working class people could visit. Policies in the 1980s focused on a democratisation of the arts and to provide access to those experienced social or financial barriers to participating in the cultural life of their community; however, many of these policies overlooked how institutions maintain these cultural hierarchies. Today, the gallery is understood as both an economic sector and site of politics, and artistic attempts to bring other communities into the gallery are more likely to be understood as a critique.

Required Reading:

There is No Now Now reader. 2014. [Letters from Biennale of Sydney 19 Artists Working Group] January 29, 2014. <http://aaaaarg.org/thing/53489813334fe0078b2164d4>. Chapter One.

Fraser, Andrea. “A Museum Is Not a Business. It Is Run in a Businesslike Fashion”.” Art and Its Institutions: Current Conflicts, Critique and Collaborations, ed. Nina Möntmann. (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2006), 86-98

Recommended Reading:

Marina Vishmidt – “Mimesis of the Hardened and Alienated”: Social Practice as Business Model – e-flux 43 (2013) http://www.e-flux.com/journal/%E2%80%9Cmimesis-of-the-hardened-and-alienated%E2%80%9D-social-practice-as-business-model/

Stimson, B. “What Was Institutional Critique?” In Institutional Critique: An anthology of artists’ writings. A. Alberro & B. Stimson. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009), 20-42

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This piece co-authored with Local Time: “Colonial Hospitality: Rethinking Curatorial and Artistic Responsibility”, published in the Journal for Artistic Research 10 2016. Read on the JAR Website here.

Abstract: The recent enthusiasm for gestures of hospitality in contemporary art promises relief from the individualising forces of neoliberal capitalism and the professionalised hierarchies of the art world. Yet, Jacques Derrida describes the gesture of hospitality as paradoxically asserting a kind of sovereignty that underwrites the ‘right to host’, returning hospitality to the conditionality of the authorising institution. In settler-colonial territories, these institutionally underwritten gestures always sit uneasily atop indigenous sovereignties that have not been ceded, requiring the positive gestures of hospitality to remain open to their structuring fissures. This paper considers figurations of hospitality and responsibility in works by Derrida, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Raqs Media Collective in reading the art collective Local Time’s research-driven practice that seeks to reconcile indigenous self-determination and settler gestures of hospitality.

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