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!

L'engagement dans le domaine de la création renvoie à deux aspects. Le premier est inhérent à la création en tant que telle dans la mesure où le créateur s'investit, s'implique dans son projet et dans sa pratique. Créer, c'est donner naissance à quelque chose qui n'existait pas avant. Pour cela s'exerce une double action : de la pensée et du corps. La création est souvent présentée comme un combat dans lequel l'artiste se confronte au matériau, au support, aux composants, à l'espace, etc. L'inattendu, le hasard, l'accident perturbent parfois le projet et l'intention du créateur qui est alors amené à prendre en compte ce qu'il n'avait pas prévu. La création résulte d'un engagement total de celui qui donne forme à cette « chose » nouvelle.

Par ailleurs, l'engagement se retrouve également dans la forme et dans le contenu de l'oeuvre. Une oeuvre est généralement qualifiée d'engagée lorsqu'elle transmet un message, exprime une prise de position, possède une dimension critique, rompt avec une tradition, témoigne d'une prise de risque. Elle peut parfois exprimer un message social, politique, idéologique. Il convient toutefois de distinguer une oeuvre engagée d'une oeuvre politique. En effet, si une oeuvre politique est de fait considérée comme engagée, une oeuvre engagée ne véhicule pas nécessairement un message politique. [résumé de l'éditeur]

A secret history of craft told through lost and overlooked texts that illuminate our understanding of current art practice.

“Craft” is a contested concept in art history and a vital category through which to understand contemporary art. Through craft, materials, techniques, and tools are investigated and their histories explored in order to reflect on the politics of labor and on the extraordinary complexity of the made world around us. This anthology offers an ethnography of craft, surveying its shape-shifting identities in the context of progressive art and design through writings by artists and makers as well as poetry, fiction, anthropology, and sociology. It maps a secret history of craft through lost and overlooked texts that consider pedagogy, design, folk art, the factory, and new media in ways that illuminate our understanding of current art practice.

Recently, the idea of craft has been employed strategically: to confront issues of gender or global development, to make a stand against artistic academicism, or to engage with making processes—some distinctly archaic—employed to suggest the abject and the everyday. Craft activism, or craftivism, suggests a new political purpose for the handmade. Deep anxieties drive today's technophilia, and artists, designers, and makers turn such anxieties into a variety of dynamic engagements. The contributors' reflections on new technologies and materials, lost and found worlds of handwork, and the politics of work all throw light on craft as process, product, and ideology. Craft will serve as a vital resource for understanding technologies, materials, techniques, and tools through the lens of craft in contemporary art. [editor summary]

‘Practice’ is one of the key words of contemporary art, ranging from artists’ descriptions of their practice to curatorial practice, from social practice to practice-based research. Once used to denote ‘doing’, as distinct from thinking and making, today the term can convey associations of political action (praxis), professional activity, discipline or rehearsal, as well as a shift away from the self-enclosed artwork or medium to open-ended actions, series, processes and projects. This is the first anthology to investigate what contemporary notions of practice mean for art, to trace their development and speculate on where this leads. [editor summary]

In contemporary art, boredom is no longer viewed as a singular experience; rather, it is contingent on diverse social identifications and cultural positions, and extends from a malign condition to be struggled against, to an experience to be embraced, or explored as a site of resistance. This anthology explores this history: from the political critique of boredom in 1960s France; silence, repetition or indifference in Fluxus, Pop, Minimalism and conceptual art; the development of feminist diagnoses of malaise in art, performance and film; Punk’s social critique and its influence on theories of the postmodern; and the recognition from the end of the 1980s of a specific form of ennui experienced in former communist states. Today, with the emergence of new forms of labour alienation and personal intrusion, deadening forces extend even further into subjective experience, making the divide between a critical and an aesthetic use of boredom ever more tenuous.

Le public est dans le cercle parce que nous vivons en cercle. [?] L'art nous apprend a? vivre dans le cercle ? expliquait, en 1967, John Cage dans un entretien.0Et c'est bien la voie que l'art entreprend avec les expe?rimentations des avant-gardes du de?but du sie?cle dernier, avec les pratiques de l'installation, de la participation ou de la relation des anne?es 1960 et 1970, et plus re?cemment, avec les recherches technologiques des anne?es 1990.0Les artistes se de?tournent des objets pour explorer l'installation, la participation, la relation, l'interaction.0Analysant ces transformations dans une perspective interdisciplinaire, ou? les arts plastiques croisent la musique, les arts de la sce?ne ou la performance, les essais re?unis dans ce volume, e?crits ± sur le terrain ?, se de?ploient en parcours et convergent sur la de?finition d'un art sans objet, qui, comme un cercle invisible, entoure le public ? tout a? la fois environnement, syste?me, dispositif. [résumé de l'éditeur]

The effects and meanings of destruction are central in the work of many of our most influential artists. Since the early 1960s, artists have cut, sliced, burned, blurred, erased, daubed-over, pulled down, ripped, sawn, shot, acid-bombed, exploded, smashed, crushed, compressed or even masticated their material to explore the meaning of their artistic processes. Here destruction changes from a negative state or passive condition to a highly productive category. Artists focussed on in this unique anthology use destructive subversion of media imagery to release us from its controlling effects; destruction of artwork to extinguish its fixity; destruction to disrupt the perceived integrity of built structures; and destructional risk to the self to raise consciousness of oppression. [editor summary]

Discours, réflexions et documents sur l'art performatif et chorégraphique contemporain.
Avec l'enjeu d'œuvrer le multiple, l'ouvert et le fragile, ce livre s'avance comme les gestes, les corps et les performances en arts qu'il travaille. Protéiforme, éclaté, intense, il prolonge les processus d'expérimentations, de débats, de réflexions et de découvertes qu'ont menés entre 2011 et 2014 plus de cent-cinquante artistes, chercheurs, critiques et acteurs culturels au sein du Diplôme universitaire Art, danse et performance, formation continue expérimentale de l'université de Franche-Comté.
Agencé dans une «carte» de quarante «mots» surgissant des gestes, des corps, des espaces et des temps à l'œuvre dans les performances en arts, l'ouvrage collectif rassemble plus de quarante artistes, théoriciens, critiques, curateurs, chorégraphes et performers, autant issus des arts plastiques, de l'art performance, de la poésie sonore, de la danse et du théâtre. S'y livre en éclats une hétérogénéité de discours, de réflexions et de documents: textes théoriques, textes d'artistes, essais, entretiens, carnets de recherche, transcriptions, traductions, scripts, partitions, schémas, images... Une mine où chacun est invité à puiser ses pépites jusque dans l'intervalle des pages.

Rather than a book of queer theory for artists, this is a book of artists’ queer tactics and infectious concepts. In the first such anthology to be centred on artists’ writings, numerous conversations about queer practice are brought together from diverse individual, social and cultural contexts. Together these texts describe and examine the ways in which artists have used the concept of queer as a site of political and institutional critique, as a framework to develop new families and histories, as a spur to action, and as a basis from which to declare inassimilable difference.[editor summary]

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]

While information science draws distinctions between ‘information’, signals and data, artists from the 1960s to the present have questioned the validity and value of such boundaries. Artists have investigated information’s materiality, in signs, records and traces; its immateriality, in hidden codes, structures and flows; its embodiment, in instructions, social interaction and political agency; its overload, or uncontrollable excess, challenging utopian notions of networked society; its potential for misinformation and disinformation, subliminally altering our perceptions; and its post-digital unruliness, unsettling fixed notions of history and place.

This anthology provides the first art-historical reassessment of information-based art in relation to data structures and exhibition curation, examining landmark exhibitions and re examining work by artists of the 1960s to early 1980s, from Les Levine and N.E.Thing Co. to General Idea and Jenny Holzer. [editor summary]

Imaginative Bodies contains a series of in-depth conversations with dancers and choreographers, composers, visual artists, hip hop artists, dramaturgs, a lighting designer, and a puppeteer. The overall theme is defined by the body, both in relation to the place it takes in the artist’s work, and in relation to wider debates on the body in philosophy, science, medicine, anthropology, and the arts. Depending on the affinities of the artist, a more specific theme has been defined for each dialogue, ranging from poetics to politics, from mythology to ecology, from intercultural studies to conflict management. The associative chains of thoughts of these talks give an intimate insight into the creative process, inspirations, sources, identity, and ways of collaborating. It is through the sentient body that we experience, know and imagine. Imaginative Bodies reaffirms the central position of the body in many artistic practices. [editor summary]

Animals have become the focus of much recent art, informing numerous works and projects featured at major exhibitions. Contemporary art has become a privileged terrain for exploring interspecies relationships, providing the conditions for diverse disciplines and theoretical positions to engage with animal behaviour and consciousness. Artists’ engagement with animals opens up new perspectives on the dynamics of dominance, oppression and exclusion, with parallels in human society; and animal nature is at the heart of debates on the ‘anthropocene’ era and the ecological concerns of scientists, thinkers and artists alike. Centred on contemporary artworks, this anthology attests to the trans-disciplinary nature of this subject, with art as one of its principal points of convergence.

Includes a newly commissioned poem by the artist Joan Jonas, especially for the volume. [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]

This anthology investigates materiality in art that attempts to expand notions of time, space, process or participation. It looks at materials that obstruct, disrupt or interfere with social norms, surfacing as impure formations and messy, unstable substances. It re-examines the notion of 'dematerialization'; addresses materialist critiques of artistic production; surveys the relationship between materiality and bodies; explores the vitality of substances, and the concepts of intermateriality and transmateriality that have emerged in the hybrid zones of digital experimentation. [editor summary]