Street Art and Performance

URBAN ART: CREATING THE URBAN WITH ART
14-16 July 2016 – Humboldt University Berlin
Keynote: Prof. Dr. Frank Eckardt (Bauhaus-Universität Weimar)

The conference deals with Urban Art, a new form of art and activism, that occurs in urban areas worldwide. First known under the label of "Street Art", the term has expanded to include diverse artistic and visual interventions in the exterior space. In contrast to the traditional term ‘public art’ Urban Art is very inclusive. Thus, it is both part of and reflective of current processes of global urbanization.
The extremely heterogeneous manifestations of Urban Art range from large-scale wall paintings to tiny stickers, performative interventions to alternative forms of urban planning; they accompany multiple forms of urban and global criticism and try to encourage participation through low artistic techniques.They are seen in passing, often by chance, on the street or by the discovery of images and locations online and in social media. Finally, the ambivalent areas of upvaluation and reinterpretation of urban spaces (gentrification), advertising and city marketing (commoditization) and attacks on private property (vandalism) are topics of Urban Art.

Works of Urban Art tend not to emerge from the art establishment, but come from anonymous players who make use of simple techniques and materials. Therefore, Urban Art is a phenomenon of the 'Low', which indeed evolved from a subculture, but clearly has features of mass culture: it is easily accessible to a wide audience on the street and online, works of Urban Art are often produced in series and at a low price.Urban Art messages are striking, comparable to advertising, and serve as entertainment or express site-specific criticism of urban surroundings. At the same time, the implicit notion of the urban provides the opportunity to reflect on the present development of the city and its medialization or aestheticism. This includes processes of virtualization, which participants test in a playful artistic environment or also concerning the monitoring in public space.

Topics of interest for submission may include, but are not limited to:

• Urban or Public Art?
• New Media (Internet and social media in the production and reception of urbanity)
• Performativity (Action and reception by moving in the urban space)
• Politics (Processes of participation and gentrification)
• Tourism and Vandalism (Strategies of production and denial of urbanity)
• Global-Local (Site-specific significance - global expansion)
• Architecture and City Planning (Medialization of architecture and alternative forms of urban design/city planning)
• Urban Art Research (Terminology, history of the core concepts)
• Historicizing and Conservation of Urban Art
• The Urban Pedestrian
• Discussion of the concept of work (Werkbegriff) at Urban Art (What is the work of art in Urban Art?)
• Urban Planning and Philosophy
• Applied Ethics and the City
• Race in Urban Affairs
• Aesthetics and Urbanity
• Humans, Animals, and Environment and the City
• Feminism and the City
• The City in the History of Philosophy
• Urbanity and Justice
• Urban Technology: Architecture, Engineering and Smart Cities

Abstracts of no more than 1500 characters (including spaces) are invited for papers, panels and workshop presentations and should be suitable for presentations of approximately 30 minutes.

Conference language is English.

Proposals should include name, contact information (address, phone number, e-mail), title of the paper, short CV in English (max. 200 words). In the case of an unconventional presentation, please inquire.

Please send submissions and questions to Ilaria Hoppe, [email protected] and Ulrich Blanché, [email protected].
All submissions should be prepared for anonymous review. Notice of application results will be given by 1st May, 2016.

Deadline: April 1, 2016.

Partial reimbursement for travel expenses may be available for participants.

Contact
Prof. Dr. Ilaria Hoppe
Institut für Kunst- und Bildgeschichte
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
Georgenstr. 47
10117 Berlin, Germany
Tel.: +4930-2093-66235

Dr. Ulrich Blanché
ZEGK - Institut für Europäische Kunstgeschichte
Universität Heidelberg
Seminarstraße 4
69117 Heidelberg
Tel.: +496221-54-3544

FOR THE FORMATTED VERSION WITH KENTRIDGE'S DRAWINGS GO TO: https://eternaltiber.net/triumphs-and-laments-research/

This is a guide to the iconography of William Kentridge’s Triumphs & Laments, the 500-meter-long frieze of colossal figures traced into the black accretions on the Tiber Embankments between Ponte Sisto and Ponte Mazzini in Rome in early Spring 2016:  http://www.tevereterno.it/arts/triumphs-and-laments/. The guide was compiled at the request of Kristin Jones, artistic director of the project, and was initially part of a Guidebook cell phone app, which has since been discontinued.

Prior to compiling the guide texts, with generous help from dozens of colleagues and students, I had the immense pleasure of serving as Curator of Historical Research for Triumphs & Laments, overseeing the research group at John Cabot University which formulated the chronological database ('timeline') of images from the history of art, cinema, and journalism provided to William Kentridge to inspire his drawings for the frieze. Our research continued and augmented that of Andrea Biagioni and Sara Spizzichino of Tevereterno.

Please share these texts with friends, colleagues, and students. Writing the guide was our labor of love for Rome, for William Kentridge and his work, and for the joy of collective creativity that made Triumphs & Laments a reality.

NOTE: In the pdf version available online before May 20, 2017, the hyperlinks were inoperative. In the current Word document, they work.

APRESENTAÇÃO:

As cidades são, por natureza, lugares que estão em constante movimento. No Brasil temos acompanhado, especialmente nos últimos anos, transformações de várias ordens: gentrificação, especulação imobiliária, grandes investimentos, falta respeito ao patrimônio histórico e simbólico. Ações que muitas vezes distorcem o caráter público do espaço urbano, transformando-o em mero local de exploração financeira e impedindo a construção de locais de encontro, convivência coletiva e pública. Paralelo a isso, podemos perceber também, uma retomada dos espaços públicos como lugar de convívio, de política, de realização pública e coletiva de projetos. Essa retomada em grande medida é também uma resposta aos processos políticos envolvendo a esfera pública no Brasil e no mundo.

Neste contexto, uma série de projetos artísticos vem sendo realizados no espaço público/urbano, sob os mais diversos nomes, como intervenção urbana, arte participativa, colaborativa, relacional, contextual, etc. Estes trabalhos existem dentro de uma perspectiva que envolve um ideal de dissolução da arte nas esferas públicas e o redesenho político das práticas artísticas. Fazem a arte circular por outras espaços, senão os espaços institucionais tradicionalmente dedicados a ela, criando assim o surgimento de uma prática cultural, onde os processos de trabalho são visivelmente contaminados por outros campos do conhecimento – tais como a antropologia, sociologia, história, arquitetura e o urbanismo.

São obras que ativam o potencial transformador da arte, na medida em que estas práticas e estratégias buscam explorar a cidade como campo de atuação em contato direto com contextos específicos. Sugerem, assim, através de um processo de ressignificação dos espaços, a presença de outros fluxos contidos no interior do ambiente urbano. São ações que procuram atuar em uma linha limite entre o estar e o não estar na condição de arte; e são realizadas sem que as pessoas saibam que o que ali se apresenta deriva de uma prática artística.

O objetivo deste livro é refletir sobre como estes trabalhos se relacionam com as cidades e seus imaginários urbanos para pensar os desdobramentos destas obras no campo simbólico, nos quais eles estão inseridos. A pesquisa busca, colocar em contato, percepções a cerca do espaço urbano vindas de diversas áreas do conhecimento; da geografia, da história, da comunicação etc, para alimentar de referências o processo da pesquisa e ampliar a compreensão do papel da arte no imaginário da cidade e na formação da sensibilidade urbana.

O livro faz parte da pesquisa de Doutorado em andamendo, que a autora está cursando na Escola de Comunicações e Artes da USP e teve o patrocínio da Funarte – Ministério da Cultura, através do prêmio “Bolsa de Produção em Artes Visuais – categoria produção crítica – 2014” e traz trabalhos de diversos artistas que desenvolvem seus trabalhos nos espaços públicos brasileiros.

We have come to the realization that the Earth is not invincible; we must preserve our habitat for it to remain hospitable. So how can we, as teachers, educate future generations about specific environmental topics such as pollution and sustainability and their effects on the Earth? One exciting way we found to incorporate science into the art curriculum is through the use of ecological art, more specifically a process of reverse pollution. Reverse pollution attempts to change a contaminated environment back to its original unsoiled state. Over the last decade artists have begun to experiment with reverse pollution techniques, such as reverse graffiti, which focuses on cleaning environmental surfaces. Having recently been introduced to the works of Moose,' the artist known for inventing the reverse graffiti technique, we decided to design a curriculum to increase student awareness of ecological issues. Hoping to inspire students to become agents of change through art, the activity encourages students to investigate the adverse effects of pollution, reflect upon how their actions impact the Earth, and engage in ecologically friendly artmaking practices. This article examines ecological art and reverse pollution, and presents a lesson idea that expands upon the traditional reductive art process by using reverse graffiti to "clean" dirty surfaces such as cars, sidewalks, windows, or walls, transforming them into public pieces of ecological art.