Documents 

The chapters in Art as an Agent for Social Change, presented as snapshots, focus on exploring the power of drama, dance, visual arts, media, music, poetry and film as educative, artistic, imaginative, embodied and relational art forms that are agents of personal and societal change. A range of methods and ontological views are used by the authors in this unique contribution to scholarship, illustrating the comprehensive methodologies and theories that ground arts-based research in Canada, the US, Norway, India, Hong Kong and South Africa. Weaving together a series of chapters (snapshots) under the themes of community building, collaboration and teaching and pedagogy, this book offers examples of how Art as an Agent for Social Change is of particular relevance for many different and often overlapping groups including community artists, K-university instructors, teachers, students, and arts-based educational researchers interested in using the arts to explore social justice in educative ways. This book provokes us to think critically and creatively about what really matters!

Le recueil d'essais de Michaël La Chance sur l'art performance, son éthique, ses relations avec la poésie et la littérature, ses stratégies et ses implications socio-culturelles.
Les inventeurs de vacarmes. Théorie et pratiques de la performance rassemble des observations et des réflexions sur l'art performance au Québec et sur la scène internationale. L'auteur a voulu comprendre cette forme d'art déroutante, la démarche de quelques performeurs importants, pénétrer leur univers d'un point de vue théorique, mais aussi les rejoindre dans une pratique qu'il m'a été donné d'enseigner.

La première partie examine l'éthique de la performance comme démarche pour se créer une expérience, se façonner à travers celle-ci (autodidaxie), l'enseigner et créer un contexte propice à sa réception.

Le deuxième chapitre propose quelques études sur Black Market, Tehching Hsieh, Marina Abramović, Mapa Teatro, Richard Martel, ORLAN, Boris Nieslony, John Boyle-Singfield, Jeff Huckleberry, Latifa Laâbissi, Rosy Simas, Emily Johnson et Piotr Pavlenski.

La troisième partie s'attarde spécifiquement aux rapports entre la poésie et la performance, la littérature et l'art, l'inscription du corps et des lieux par la parole et le geste.

Quant à la quatrième, elle examine les stratégies artistiques de transformation sociale, les réseaux culturels et les médias sociaux, questionnant les arts cosmodernes, la programmation technoculturelle, le microactivisme, l'action vectorielle et l'altermodernité.

Le dernier chapitre examine la pression sociale vers le consensus (l'orthodoxe culturelle régnante) et la déroute de la civilisation vers la fin (l'anthropocène) en considérant la poétique de l'exhortation, les pratiques de l'extrême et les formes de la contestation. Les nouvelles formes de la barbarie, l'appropriation culturelle et la censure morale sont également abordées.

Jetant un regard à la fois inquiet et amoureux sur notre société et notre fleuve, Hugo Latulippe réitère le rôle central de l’artiste dans la cité, et cherche la posture à adopter devant les menaces qui nous assaillent de toutes parts. Il prend le parti d’un art qui agit sur et dans le monde, solidaire de la vie que nous nous souhaitons. Convoquant tour à tour des amis cinéastes, dramaturges, peintres, écrivains et philosophes, il pose des questions urgentes, essentielles: comment nous mettre en mouvement pour refonder nos désirs? Comment retrouver le chemin du beau, du sacré et de la pensée? [résumé de l'éditeur]

Figuring explores the complexities of love and the human search for truth and meaning through the interconnected lives of several historical figures across four centuries—beginning with the astronomer Johannes Kepler, who discovered the laws of planetary motion, and ending with the marine biologist and author Rachel Carson, who catalyzed the environmental movement.

Stretching between these figures is a cast of artists, writers, and scientists—mostly women, mostly queer—whose public contribution have risen out of their unclassifiable and often heartbreaking private relationships to change the way we understand, experience, and appreciate the universe. Among them are the astronomer Maria Mitchell, who paved the way for women in science; the sculptor Harriet Hosmer, who did the same in art; the journalist and literary critic Margaret Fuller, who sparked the feminist movement; and the poet Emily Dickinson.

Emanating from these lives are larger questions about the measure of a good life and what it means to leave a lasting mark of betterment on an imperfect world: Are achievement and acclaim enough for happiness? Is genius? Is love? Weaving through the narrative is a set of peripheral figures—Ralph Waldo Emerson, Charles Darwin, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Herman Melville, Frederick Douglass, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Walt Whitman—and a tapestry of themes spanning music, feminism, the history of science, the rise and decline of religion, and how the intersection of astronomy, poetry, and Transcendentalist philosophy fomented the environmental movement. [editor summary]

Public art is on the urban agenda. Given recent claims about the importance of creativity to urban prosperity, opportunities for installing or performing art in the city have multiplied. As cities strive to appear culturally dynamic, the stakes of artistic production rise higher than ever.

Exploring the interaction between art and the public in Canadian cities, Urban Encounters features writing by artists, architects, curators, anthropologists, geographers, and urban studies specialists. They show how people and places affect the structure and content of public artworks, what kinds of urban spaces and socialities are generated through art, and how to investigate and interpret encounters between art and its viewers in the city. Discussing a variety of art forms, including mobile cinemas, street improvisation, audiovisual investigations, and assembled objects, the contributors treat public artworks not just as aesthetic installations, but as agents that participate in the social and cultural evolution of cities.

Théorisé par les situationnistes dans les années 1950, le détournement, c'est la créativité sous le signe du clin d'œil, voire du flirt avec l'absurde, mais aussi du soupçon permanent. Désormais, à l'ère du 2.0, chacun peut s'approprier les images cultes et jouer avec. Cet art de la subversion s'invite dans la vie quotidienne et ne cesse d'investir de nouveaux territoires comme de nouveaux supports. Entre fétichisme nostalgique et dézingage ironique, les chefs-d'œuvre du passé et les icônes pop sont revisités.

À travers 6 chapitres thématiques et une vingtaine de portraits, ce livre explore l'univers de ces créatifs qui ont l'art des rapprochements insolites, de la manipulation, de la métaphore. Ils bouleversent les codes et désacralisent les icônes de l'histoire de l'art ou de la pop culture, manipulent les mots, hackent l'espace public, chahutent avec le réel, revendiquent une incivilité salutaire, font naître une rêverie de nos objets ordinaires... [résumé de l'éditeur]

What do we learn by making art? What do we discover by discussing our art with other people? These are the questions at the heart of No New Kind of Duck, which documents an exchange between Jan Verwoert and artists, critics, and other researchers at the Graduate School at the Berlin University of the Arts, including artists Alex Martinis Roe, Jeremiah Day, Azin Feizabadi, Lizza May David, and Ralf Baecker and composers Nuria Núñez Hierro and Björn Erlach.

Creating art and coining the terms to explain and define one’s artistic practice, the contributors find, are two closely related yet distinct practices. The book begins with an introduction by Verwoert that discusses the politics of art as a form of knowledge production. Verwoert’s introduction is followed by contributions that turn the focus on the stakes of an art practice today. The book also presents a careful selection of art, in which each piece is presented without accompanying explanations or justification, highlighting the possibilities for artists to coin their own terms to describe the concerns of their practice. Beautifully designed by artist Nienke Terpsma, the book will be an equally welcome companion for established or aspiring artists. [editor summary]

Interrupting the City looks at how artistic practices and interventions constitute the public sphere. To interrupt the city means to arrest the flow or circulation of the urban system. The tactics by which this is achieved may vary, ranging from a media offensive to street riots, but each and every time these activities affect the public sphere, they make the public sphere. Thus, the public domain is constituted by a combination of social, political and media forces, in a continual flux that is constantly being interrupted. This book attempts to chart the conditions for developing a voice in the public sphere, and to ask in what way these conditions may be altered by means of artistic interventions. Its contributions delve into the relations between artistic practices and the public space, including the urban relations between art and politics. [Résumé de l'éditeur]

It has been argued, most notably in psychoanalytic and modernist art discourse, that the production of works of art is fundamentally driven by sexual desire. It has further been argued, particularly since the early 1970s, that sexual drives and desires also condition the distribution, display and reception of art. This anthology traces how and why this identification of art with sexual expression or repression arose and how the terms have shifted in tandem with artistic and theoretical debates, from the era of the rights movements to the present. Among the subjects it discusses are abjection and the ‘informe’, or formless; pornography and the obscene; the ‘performativity’ of gender and sexuality; and the role of sexuality in forging radical art or curatorial practices, in response to such issues as state-sponsored repression and anti-feminism in the broader social realm. [editor summary]

Artists increasingly refer to “post-object-based” work while theorists engage with material artifacts in culture. A focus on “object-based” learning treats objects as vectors for dialogue across disciplines. Virtual imaging enables the object to be abstracted or circumvented, while immaterial forms of labor challenge materialist theories. This anthology surveys such reappraisals of what constitutes the “objectness” of production, with art as its focus.

Among the topics it examines are the relation of the object to subjectivity; distinctions between objects and things; the significance of the object’s transition from inert mass to tool or artifact; and the meanings of the everyday in the found object, repetition in the replicated or multiple object, loss in the absent object, and abjection in the formless or degraded object. It also explores artistic positions that are anti-object; theories of the experimental, liminal or mental object; and the role of objects in performance. The object becomes a prism through which to reread contemporary art and better understand its recent past. [editor summary]

L'art peut être un moyen pour transformer le monde ! Qu'ils se mettent au service du pouvoir, de la révolution, des luttes ou de la dissidence, certains artistes ont fait de leur art un moyen de diffuser des messages au plus grand nombre, en s'appuyant sur la force des images et l'efficacité du graphisme. D'autres ont voulu faire de la politique par leurs propres moyens en créant un art d'avant-garde qui a souvent rejoint les avant-gardes politiques de leur époque. De la Révolution à la mondialisation, de l'art de propagande à l'art dissident, du réalisme de Courbet au street art en passant par les avant-gardes du XXe siècle (dada, futurisme, surréalisme, constructivisme...), ce livre se veut un vaste panorama d'artistes qui ont voulu "changer la vie" et "transformer le monde". [résumé de l'éditeur]

When artist Candy Chang painted the side of an abandoned building with chalkboard paint and the wrote the words, "Before I die, I want to___ ," she never expected it to become a worldwide phenomenon. Within a day of the wall's completion, however, it was covered in colorful chalk dreams as people stopped and reflected on their lives. Since then, more than two hundred walls have been created by people all over the world. This inspiring book is a celebration of these walls. Filled with our hopes, fears, humor, and heartbreak, it's a reminder of our shared connections and a chance to contemplate life's most important question. [editor summary]

L'acteur travesti vient du fond des âges. Il apparaît très tôt, dans toutes les cultures. Parce que l'homme a interdit l'espace public à la femme, il a été amené historiquement, en Occident comme en Orient, à prendre sa place. Chantal Aubry puise à des exemples particulièrement représentatifs au fil des siècles et des continents pour interroger les mécanismes de cette éviction et de cette sublimation, jusqu'à son renversement par une revendication transgenre généralisée dont le monde du spectacle vivant est, avec celui de la mode, l'une des pointes avancées. Du travesti contraint au travesti émancipateur, sur une riche iconographie rassemblée par Eve Zheim, c'est la condition des femmes dans des sociétés d'hommes faites pour les hommes qui est ici en question. [résumé de l'éditeur]

This book will be an resource for all who believe in the importance of art in the wider educational realm. Framing the recent "educational turn" in the arts within a broad historical and social context, this anthology raises fundamental questions about how and what should be taught in an era of distributive rather than media-based practices and questioned dominant notions of personal and institutional freedom as enacted through art teaching and practice.
These writings by artists, philosophers, educators, poets, and activists center on three recurring and interrelated themes: the notion of "indiscipline" in theories and practices that challenge boundaries of all kinds; the present and future role of the art school; and the turn to pedagogy as medium in a diverse range of recent projects.

Cet essai explore les transgressions, les luttes et les résistances de ces géants face à l’abus de pouvoir ; il explique comment leur génie peut ébranler les autorités ; il raconte aussi les châtiments qu’occasionnent leurs audaces. À travers le récit et l’analyse de nombreuses affaires, l’auteur nous conduit à la découverte de chefs-d’œuvre méconnus et parfois disparus, de tableaux scandaleux, de gravures condamnées, de films prohibés. Du procès de Véronèse aux photographies de Larry Clark en passant par l’iconoclasme de la Réforme, l’incarcération de Daumier ou l’exposition d’« art dégénéré » organisée par les nazis, il trace le portrait des sociétés, des états, des églises, évoquant leurs craintes et leurs fantasmes. Fort de documents, de commentaires détaillés, d’oppositions entre culture officielle et iconographie subversive, cet ouvrage est le témoin passionnant d’un combat sans fin pour la liberté artistique. [résumé de l'éditeur]

This book is a striking collection of the personal, often playful and thought-provoking installations in urban environments that use and react to walls, traffic signs, trees, ads, and any and all elements of the modern city. It is the first book to document these very current art projects – as well as their interplay with fine art, architecture, performance, installation, activism and urbanism – in a comprehensive way. This perceptive work brings art to the masses and helps us to rediscover our every day surroundings. It challenges us to question if the cities we have are the cities we need while adding a touch of magic to mundane places and situations. [editor summary]