Social Sculpture

With the rapid increase of social media users migrating to varying online platforms, the Internet has become a world-changing phenomena allowing for instant interchange across the globe for those with access. These virtual interactions have changed many aspects of daily life such as communication, the sharing of information, and ways in which art is approached, created, and viewed. Social media has been labeled with buzz words like “hive mind” and “collective conscious” to define instances of Internet users coming together to share information and opinions. While the Internet has become a rapidly developing stronghold in contemporary culture, it was not a resource during the prime art-making years of German artist Joseph Beuys. The technology of today now presents itself as a potential tool allowing for the artist's decades-old philosophy of “social sculpture” to be realized on a wide-spread scale. Beuys' definition of  “social sculpture” stemmed from his belief that everyone could contribute their artistic talents to his or her society – forming his mantra “everyone is an artist.” Through Internet access, perhaps people are able to share their artistic talents with society and thus participate in Beuys' ideal social sculpture. By focusing on the artist's biography, artworks, and philosophies, comparisons can be made between contemporary use of the Internet as an environment for hive mind and the occurrences of bee-themed ideologies in the works of Joseph Beuys.

Let’s consider the blackboard as a site; a presentational tool used in classrooms and lecture halls. Students, colleagues or strangers may observe an individual transcribing information with language, even drawings, or perhaps simply brainstorming collaboratively with the audience. The blackboard provides a space for sharing knowledge.

Certainly for Joseph Beuys, blackboards functioned as sites for art during his “lecture actions.” An artist primarily known for performance, installations and physical sculptures, Beuys is equally influential for his socio-political activities and his pedagogy. He conceived of and taught his theory of “social sculpture,” a belief that human beings have inherent potential to revolutionize society through their creativity and art. As he famously said, “Every human being is an artist.”

Should architectural education pull away from the design studio as the dominant form for architectural education? Can live projects offer a more relevant, inclusive, and engaging model? In order to establish points of divergence from studio-based learning and using a definition of live projects established in collaboration with Colin Priest, a comparative analysis is made between contemporary architectural live projects and the Public Art Projects led by David Harding at the Environmental Art Department, Glasgow School of Art from 1985. This comparison reveals the potential of live projects to extend collaborative ways of working beyond graduation and between the university and its community. With reference to Lave and Wenger’s theory of situated learning as legitimate peripheral participation the paper demonstrates how live project learning can be understood and valued. A case is made for a shift towards a transformative, democratic and holistic form of learning made possible by live projects.
Keywords: live projects, design studio, architectural pedagogy, public art, situated learning.
Paper available at: http://ingentaconnect.com/content/arched/char/2014/00000001/00000001

A solo exhibition of Anusapati at ROH Projects. Titled PLANTSCAPE, the artist's childhood memories of trees in plantation areas around him became source of curiosity, quest, as well as artistic practice; which are cultivated into forms of knowledge, space, time and reality. Anusapati (b. 1957) is a celebrated artist and lecturer at ISI (Institut Seni Indonesia) based in Yogyakarta, who throughout his career has always been preoccupied with wood and its origin: trees. “Memories are a source of inspiration, explanation and knowledge,” Anusapati said. Levels and dramatizations are a requirement in this thinking sequence. Memory is the mind's ability to reproduce feelings or impressions based on something that has been experienced. While remembrance is the reappearance of a thought that existed once because it was triggered by something outside of the self.

Socially engaged art since the 1990s has become a global trend. The practices of socially engaged arts, while creating new kinds of arts and opening up the entire institutional domain of the art world, are inseparable from the practices of museums that undertake significant changes. In this essay, I theorize the concept of “socially engaged art museum” - a practice that unveils art as an aesthetic force for rendering everyday life performative or playful - to examine both socially engaged arts and museums under what the philosopher Jacques Rancière calls “aesthetic regime of art” (2009). Comparing with the current scholarship that mostly examines European and American examples, I examine cases from Chinese contemporary art. Specifically, I discuss artistic practices of the Yangdeng Art Collective in Southwestern China. My argument is that a socially engaged art museum - qualitatively different from a conventional art museum that engages social life through its curated collections and exhibitions - is both a context-specific artwork of aesthetic experience and a technology of the individualized self in contemporary risk society. Not only does this study question the common scholarly view of socially engaged arts as “post-autonomous” or “anti-aesthetic,” but it also advances a notion of sociality that accounts for the complexity of everyday life.

Immersive Theatre is no longer an inviting term; it does little to ‘unconceal’ the strife in the open centre of (Heideggerian) truth. How do we rescue the registers of experience and reflection emerging from works that employ ‘participation’, ‘play’, and/or ‘action’, from the operative vocabulary of Immersive Theatre? This essay examines propositions implied in a sleep-performance series named DOWNTIME, performed in Berlin and New Delhi simultaneously in the winter of 2014. A week long series of performance-invitations, this project manufactured situations for people to experience and/or perform sleep, and directed them to create and contribute to a phenomenological archive of different sleep practices. This paper builds a critique of the interiority of immersion that this project forged; architectures, rituals, economies for sleep, the ‘labour’ of audiences performing sleep, and the interpenetration of the material of the ‘lived-everyday’ as performance.

My thesis is concerned with the analysis of two long-term community-based socially engaged art projects of German artist Michal Kurzwelly: "Słubfurt" (1999-2018) and "Nowa Amerika" (2010-2018). The research methodology for the analysis is drawn from the fields of art theory and criticism, and sociology. More specifically, in order to evaluate the social impact of long-term social art practices on the local community I borrow the criteria from the sociological discourse of bottom-up community development, while simultaneously, combining it with the insights from art criticism to discuss aesthetic dimensions of the work. I am arguing that Michael Kurzwelly's projects are good examples of a successful long-term socially engaged project as they reconciles the antagonism between ethics and aesthetics, keeping both artistic and social critic in tension. I contend that the powerful imaginative component in combination with dedicated community work has led to the tangible social transformation of the local community, enabling its sustainable development through infrastructures of grassroots civil society and engagement in critical self-reflective dialogue. These social changes became possible due to the emancipatory potential of the mediated collective aesthetic experience that enabled the release of social imagination: the capacity to imagine better worlds, manifested in real action.

"Artists are peculiar beasts and spirits... No longer are metropolises their Mecca; artists are now descending upon the periphery hosted by members of small communities to create new life and opportunity in their towns via artist residencies, where both artists and hosts orchestrate a durational slow change within the heart of remote Icelandic villages, often rekindling the economies of dwindling hope. In the words of Derrida: " ​ ...we rediscover the mythopoetical virtue (power) of bricolage. In effect, what appears most fascinating in this critical search for a new status of the discourse is the stated abandonment of all reference to a center, to a subject, to a privileged reference, to an origin, or to an absolute arché. " Within bricolage, the origin of perception is recaptured; the centre is disseminated. Authority and hierarchies are subject to distant, contorted imaginations as a previous reality twists into new artistic accounts and documentations conceived from deep in the field. The rebellious act of withdrawal and an international 'elsewhere' ethic contributes to a decentralisation of power within the institutional art world and gives flight to new peripheral centres of infamous activity; with a royal finger to the establishment, the periphery almost feels punk."

This informal essay explores the history and intentions of the SongBird project from my perspective as Co-founder/Developer and Creative Director. From the text:
"SongBIrd was also born out of a desire to explore how different ways of knowing about the world – especially the arts and sciences – could come together to engender better “place relations”, and more sensitive choices and behaviours in regard to local and global habitats and ecosystems. Launched in the spring of 1998, pre-dating the buzz of “sustainability” and of recent mainstream arts practice engaging questions around “environment”, SongBird was the first project (and later, organisation) of its kind in Canada, and perhaps in the world.

In contemporary culture installation has become the leading genre
of artistic creativity. In connection with this the question of criterial base
for its evaluation becomes an essential one. In this article it is examined on the basis of a methodology suggested by cultural theoretician Boris Groys, who criticizes the “realism” of installation-based art which characterizes the presentation of results of its thematic research by artists who use open sources of information, including the internet, from the positions of the symbolic context of museum representation. The “museum” in the broad sense of the word plays the role of the symbolic replacement of the universal government which endowed a sovereign status to art in contemporary culture. Thereby, installation must not simply represent in a most accessible manner certain information in a spatially unfolded form, but to problematize the very structure of representation as a derivative of global historical transformation. The art characterized by the conception of “post-internet,” is particularly the type of such installation-based solution. The article examines
in detail the installations of German artist Hito Steyerl within the framework of the Muenster Sculptural Project of 2016. It fits in the institution representing it into the global context of modernity, indicating the semantic split of its cultural and economic connections. For this reason, although Steyerl’s installation is not characterized highly technological solutions, plastic unity, or a connected narrative of the presented material, it may be considered a specimen of a successful artistic manifestation of this genre. The work of the artists of the post-internet is juxtaposed in the article to what is done by artists and media-theoreticians who make use of new technologies for the
creation of spectacular media products directed at engaging the viewer into play with highly technological contemporaneity. In particular, Lev Manovich’s project “On Broadway” from the years 2014-2016 is examined. Attention is drawn to the fact that notwithstanding all the technological perfection of this installation-based product and its spatial-plastic expressivity, it simplifies the perception of the space into which the universal artistic institution is fit in, and thereby brings discredit to it in reality. Thereby, the methodology of Groys makes it possible to describe and critically evaluate various types of installations laying claim to the status of art in contemporary artistic culture.

В современной культуре инсталляция стала ведущим жанром художественного творчества. В связи с этим принципиальным становится вопрос о критериальной базе для ее оценки. В статье он рассматривается на основе методологии, предложенной культурным теоретиком Борисом Гройсом, который критикует «реализм» инсталляционного творчества, характеризующий представление результатов своих тематических исследований художников, использующих открытые источники информации, в том числе Интернет, с позиций символического контекста музейной репрезентации. «Музей», в широком смысле этого слова, играет роль символической замены универсального государства, исторически придавшего суверенный статус искусству в современной культуре. Инсталляция, таким образом, должна не просто репрезентировать наиболее доступным образом некую информацию в пространственно развернутой форме, а проблематизировать саму структуру репрезентации как производное от глобальных исторических трансформаций. Искусство, характеризующееся понятием «постинтернет», как раз и дает примеры подобных инсталляционных решений. В статье подробно рассматривается инсталляция немецкой художницы Хито Штейерль в рамках Мюнстерского скульптурного проекта 2016 года. Она вписывает институцию, ее представляющую, в глобальный контекст современности, обозначая семантический раскол ее культурных и экономических связей. Поэтому, хотя инсталляция Штейерль и не характеризуется высокотехнологическими решениями, пластическим
единством или связным нарративом представленного материала, она может считаться образцом удачного художественного воплощения этого жанра. Работа в жанре инсталляции художников постинтернета противопоставляется в статье тому, что делают художники и медиатеоретики, использующие новые технологии для создания зрелищного и интерактивного медийного продукта, направленного на вовлечение зрителя в игру с высокотехнологической современностью. В частности,
рассматривается проект Льва Мановича «On Broadway» 2014–2016 годов. Отмечается, что при всем технологическом совершенстве этого инсталляционного продукта и его пространственно-пластической выразительности он упрощает представление о пространстве, в которое вписана универсалистская художественная институция, и таким образом подрывает к ней доверие в реальности. Методология же Гройса позволяет описывать и критически оценивать различные типы инсталляций, претендующих на статус искусства в современной художественной
культуре.

The so-called "social turn" in the arts has led to a stronger orientation towards action. But what does that mean for aesthetics as a category? The lecture presents artistic projects and works that consist solely or for the most part of social interactions. Following projects of Franz Erhard Walther, Suzanne Lacy and Marina Naprushkina, the contribution illuminates the break in the aesthetic dispositive which occurs when the recipient becomes an unimportant figure. From here I finally ask what therm aesthetics means when the recipient is no longer in the centre?

This artistic research reflection deals with what I call the “participatory
monument”, the intention of which is to bring members
of the public into the artwork and to openly share related experiences
with them, thus providing evidence of the existence and
potential transformative power of collective memory.

Con questo breve lavoro si è proposto di analizzare l’opera 7000 Querce del maestro tedesco Joseph Beuys e come questa sia stata una delle più alte e compiute realizzazioni della sua scultura sociale. Fu realizzata nel 1982 in occasione della settima Documenta a Kassel in Germania. Si tratta di un lavoro tardo (Beuys, infatti, aveva 62 anni all’epoca e morì dopo solo quattro anni) e come tale il linguaggio artistico del maestro era ormai compiuto. Si è cercato quindi di fare una breve riassunto della vita di Beuys concentrandosi in particolare sui momenti più rilevanti per la sua formazione; per poi passare a prendere in esame la scultura sociale e altri aspetti relativi alla sua visione artistica (quali il suo impegno politico e ambientalista, riportando delle opere esemplificative). Tutto questo per fornire una contestualizzazione e comprensione della ricerca del Maestro che, seppur breve, fosse il più esaustiva e completa possibile. Lo scritto si conclude con l’approfondimento sul lavoro 7000 Querce in cui prima viene spiegato il progetto nel concreto e poi analizzato alla luce dell’arte del Maestro e infine un’appendice fotografica.

An expanded conclusion, divided into two parts: MANOEUVRING SCULPTURE articulates the ways that sculpture has been manoeuvred towards becoming an event through a series of methodologies, thereby addressing the first research question, which is: how can sculpture be practised as a proliferating event? TOWARDS A PROLIFERATING EVENT is the second part of the expanded conclusion and addresses the remaining research questions, which are: How does engaging sculpture as event produce relations between modes of production, engagement and reception? And: In what ways does approaching sculpture as an event contribute to contemporary practice? The contributions of the PhD are also articulated. Chapter references and an overall bibliography

and yet you are called to represent your country in an international art exhibition? Los Angeles-based artist Mark Bradford tried to tackle this question in his presentation at the United States pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale.

Co-curated by Baltimore Museum of Art Director Christopher Bedford, and by Baltimore Museum of Art Senior Curator Katy Siegel, Mark Bradford’s Tomorrow Is Another Day explores questions of representation, feelings of marginalisation and disillusionment, and how it feels to be at the margins in today’s so-called democratic societies.