Documents 

People and societies thrive on a versatile and imaginative awareness. Yet the critical debate on arts education is still too often about the qualities of artefacts and technical skills, and tends to neglect issues such as the critical function of the arts in society, artistic cognition and cognitive development, changing artistic and cultural practices, and research into arts participation.

Therefore it seems time for a change in perspective, shifting the focus from the qualities of artefacts to those of embodied cognitive and social processes. Arts Education Beyond Art argues that education of the arts, both for children and adults, should focus on the qualities of the processes generated by the artistic artefacts, and on these artefacts as means to an end. Instead of teaching how to look at art, we should teach how to look at life – through art.

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]

Neoliberalism has taken autonomous professional values and labour firmly in its grasp. Traditional forms of employment are replaced with post-Fordist conditions in which work has become freelance, mobile, projectbased, and temporary. This way of working is not new to artists. They have seen themselves confronted with these precarious conditions since many years. Mobile Autonomy detects what modes of economy and different innovative working modalities artists and other artistic professionals have developed in order to create their work in today’s social, economic and political conditions. Theoretical insights are alternated with hands-on practices, in order to learn from and reflect on contemporary artists’ working conditions. ‘We need to stay mobile to keep our autonomy alive, and we need to develop new autonomous practices to keep our mobility alive. [editor summary]

There is a new growing ethical consciousness within the arts, both in the way it relates to the larger social, political and economic challenges and in how it reflects on its own production and distribution mechanisms. The Ethics of Art attempts to describe how artistic imagination can produce new situations, based on the potentials and limits of the singular ‘body’ within its environment. It addresses performance and dance in Europe, but embeds this in the larger context of eco-art practices by also providing striking examples from the USA and Canada.
The first section Ecosophy, discusses eco-art practices and how the ethical turn in the arts implies a greater receptivity for the environment we live in. The second section, Caring for the Body, focuses on dance and the renewed interest in ‘the body’, body politics and collaboration. This structure allows the specificity of an art-inspired ethics to emerge.