Learning and Teaching

This research takes as its context the "social turn" in contemporary art of the last ifteen years, which has emphasised social relationships and made use of the key term dialogue. Four exhibition projects demonstrate an alternative theorisation based on the concept of negotiation. Participation is often related to notions of the public realm, where dialogical art is increasingly superseding the autonomous sculpture as the favoured form of public art. Socially engaged art projects also draw support from political concepts such as social exclusion and inclusion, and as a consequence have become increasingly instrumentalised. Three models of the public realm are explored and related to forms of public art making. Hannah Arendt's space of appearance and action is shown to relate to the Modernist sculpture of the 1970s, which forms the subject matter of one body of drawings. Mikhail Bakhtin and Jürgen Habermas provide the central notions of dialogue and the discursive public sphere, which are then shown to underpin much relational art through a detailed examination of Nicolas Bourriaud's Relational Aesthetics (2002) and Grant Kester's Conversation Pieces (2004). Subsequent debates among art critics around Chantal Mouffe's formulation of an "agonistic public realm" are also followed. The dialogical paradigm is subject to a critique based on its inability to deal with real difference. Negotiation theory is proposed as an alternative model, speciically the Harvard Negotiation Project's integrative model of principled negotiation. Four practical projects based on four aspects of principled negotiation are described and presented through documentation. These were exhibited at The Henry Moore Institute, CHELSEA Space, Picture This, OUTPOST gallery and Wysing Arts Centre between 2008 and 2010. Each project demonstrates how negotiation theory models speciic interactions between unequal parties, and together they suggest an alternative theorisation of relational art in the agonistic public sphere that avoids both dialogism's utopianism and agonism's provocative gestures. Contents Part I 1 Introduction p6 Socially engaged art. The "social turn". New Labour and inclusion. The experience economy. The dialogical paradigm. Dialogue as panacea. Inclusion and individualisation. Community, the public realm, the public sphere & publicness. Research questions and scope of the research. The Harvard Negotiation Project's model of principled negotiation. Outline of the written commentary. 2 Models of the Public Realm p14 Development of public art. The expanded ield. New genre public art. Hannah Arendt. Space of action and appearance. Private life. The social. Arendt's public realm and artistic practice. Jürgen Habermas and the bourgeois public sphere. A discursive sphere. Critiques of Structural Transformation. Idealism. Exclusion. Power relations. Counter publics.

There has been an unprecedented surge in the popularity of contemporary art in the UK in the last twenty years, linked with Millennial capital projects such as Tate Modern (2000), the initiation of the Frieze Art Fair (2003) and the annual televising of the Turner Prize (sponsored by Channel 4 from 1991-2004). It might be assumed that this has been reflected in an increase in the volume and quality of press coverage, yet a suspicious attitude to contemporary art still dominates the mainstream media narrative. The British Council has noted that, The treatment of contemporary art and young artists in the UK media has been, at best, ambivalent. […] Mockery pervades, and is seen with the-almost always negative-reception that the Turner Prize is afforded every year. 1

As universities become accustomed to the complexities of their art and design faculties, a body of literature has emerged that explores some of the possibilities of a doctorate in the creative arts. In the area of fine art in particular, although not exclusively, there has been a drive towards a purely practice-based thesis. This article argues that the notion of the practice-only thesis is not only an unrealistic illusion that puts pressure on students, but also does not reflect contemporary professional practices. For an art practice to communicate any sort of specific knowledge it must be embedded in a pre-existing and continuously evolving flux of discourse produced through written and spoken language. The American artist Trisha Donnelly’s 2014 Serpentine Gallery exhibition is taken as an example. Critical writing in the art press produces an accepted interpretation, and this is what the artist ‘Trisha Donnelly’ comes to stand for. So artwork that might appear to be producing it...

A study of the reasons behind low studio attendance for students on one element of the BA (Hons) Animation course at Norwich University of the Arts. Surveys were compared against a wider group of students to discover preferred working environments, amount of paid employment, and any problems that prevented studio work. Mental Health and anxiety were the main factors.