Week 5 Multi-arts models

Art UK -Learning resources about street art-

Art UK provides a resource for classes to collaborate and celebrate their city with ideas for street art. This activity includes suggestions for street art format where students can create a piece of work on paper or board and stick it to a wall. The idea of working in groups to observe aspects of the town to be celebrated suggests the possibility of encouraging connections between local industries, culture and specific places and the curriculum with the history and geography themes they have recently studied (Art UK, n.d.). In addition, Art UK operates an online collection of predominantly British public art at the same time as proposing the programme. However, the digital connections that can expand this access and reach new audiences are not the same as the digital divide between online and non-online audiences (ATLAS Arts, 2022). However, I think that the learning programmes to the community that they offer, which I have mentioned, offer children of an age who do not have easy access to online material and students who are just starting to be exposed to it, diminish this digital boundary. By crossing both online collections and practical arts opportunities, they can contribute not only to the creation of an arts archive in a wider context, but also to more local networks.

Figure 1: Screenshot of learning resources page from Art UK, taken by author

 

The Google Street Art Project

The Google Street Art Project published a street art database in 2014 with approximately 260 virtual exhibitions in 34 countries (Riefe, 2015). It is not only about the artwork, but also about the history, some feature articles and a guided tour in collaboration with TED Talk. Preserving a collection of street art online is a benefit to fans of the medium, but it also has advantages for artists, as their work can be made available to the world at large. I recognise the greatest benefit of this preservation as being the ability to archive works that are in a temporary and difficult-to-preserve condition. For example, the project can virtually preserve objects that have been painted over or are not currently open to the public, such as the 5pointz space in New York, which was whitewashed before it was demolished. 5pointz in New York is a building owned by GM Realty in Queens, New York, where the owners had permission to create artworks on the exterior and interior walls of the building (Kramer, 2022). However, the building was demolished and replaced by a building, which led to a court case with artists seeking an injunction, but before the case could be concluded, the owner whitewashed and destroyed all the works (O’Connell, 2018). It is precisely because of this dependence of street art on the condition of the building for the existence of the work that catalogue archives online has the advantage of keeping the work alive not only for the audience, but also for the artists.

Figure 5 5Pointz before the whitewashing. (2013). Ezmosis [Photograph]. Wikimedia Commons. Available at  https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:View_of_5_Pointz,_January_20,_2013.jpg

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13 February 2024 Add Comment

Week 4 Curatorial Commitment

My curatorial commitment

  1. Critical thinking towards oneself so that unconscious prejudices can be reviewed
  2. Have a relationship with artists as equals and never use their power or influence to force them to associate with them
  3. Consider the impact on the environment as important
  4. Selecting artworks with an impartial perspective
  5. Eliminating dominant voices
  6. Being inclusive

    ・What specific issues would guide you? Why are these issues so pressing?

    Women and minorities, particularly non-white women and LGBTQI+, are underrepresented in museum collections and exhibitions (Brulon, 2019). Hence, all my principles of eliminating dominant views, being inclusive and acting in a community context, prioritise accessibility for all, including racial and gender equality. Moreover, it can be argued that there are not enough open resources within the museum community to address the challenges to minorities. The history of European museums cannot be separated from the history of European colonial planning based on assumptions of Western superiority, racial hegemony and nation-state building (Modest, 2012). There is a need for curation that can facilitate public discussion of these issues within the museum space, without separating these subjects from the public. To address this issue, I suggest that the overall experience in the space needs to be able to raise visitors’ awareness of the subject matter, through active discussion of topics such as colonialism and feminism in curatorial activities and self-criticism of their own prejudices.

    ・How would you actively encourage change?

    It is about actively curating spaces that highlight and lift up the artists’ experiences, histories and perspectives. For example, Soul of Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power at Tate Modern in 2017 focused on the works of black artists from the American Civil Rights Movement era, confronting the inevitable challenges by addressing marginalised voices.Whitley, the curator of the exhibition, states that ensuring a pathway to entry level for black and minority ethnic talent means that they are able to participate in the kind of system they desire (Whitley and Genesis, 2020). In order to bring marginalised racial groups onto a common stage through curation, I argue that curators have an ethical obligation to create opportunities for artistic practice in which they can participate.

    Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power, installation view, Tate Modern (2017)

    Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power, installation view, Tate Modern (2017)

     

    ・Who would you collaborate with to facilitate this change?

    To facilitate these changes, it is necessary to work together with diverse artists, writers and collectors, independent of context. Museums and gallery spaces as places of activity should be considered as ‘commons’, as platforms where all kinds of people can have their voices reverberate.

    ・How would you ensure that these changes had longevity?

    To be long-lasting, the declaration of this change as a norm needs to bring curation and ethics closer together. Chen (2023) states that curation can be viewed not simply as selection, design, interpretation and presentation, but as ‘caring’ and ‘care-taking’ revealed in intersubjective and intimate relationships, extending the domain of curation to ethics. (more…)

7 February 2024 2 Comments

Week 3 Artist-led culture/Artist-Curator

Lecture Reflection

According to Dan, Deborah & Mulholland (2018), ARIs have small steering committees that operate on a volunteer basis and are revitalised every few years. Regular personnel changes mean that new influences are constantly being replaced. This gives artists more freedom and encourages artistic experimentation. Moreover, it allows a move away from the traditional top-down approach to exhibition-making to a more collaborative and solidaristic approach. Alberta Whittle’s idea of ‘wayward curating’ uses heterodox, subversive and collaborative curatorial strategies, led by marginalised groups, to challenge mainstream curatorial practices and give space to overlooked voices and perspectives (Whittle, 2019). Such curation can be supported by ARIs’ free and equitable organisational culture and spaces that can support resistance to mainstream arts practice. It is possible to interconnect different communities of practice through common local and international networks. Open resources expand the commons through the gift bonding of interconnecting different communities of practice through local and transnational communities (Whittle, 2019). Being large and small, numerous enough and geographically diverse, ARIs can easily generate open and vast resources, unlike traditional arts organisations that are only accessible to a limited number of people.

My Curatorial Project

Street art, the topic of my project, has not yet been recognised by the public as art. Street art exploded after 1990 and has since become ‘a ubiquitous part of the urban landscape’, with people believing that street art belongs and should stay on the streets. (Frederick, 2016) Moreover, the different qualities of street art from the mainstream art world make it suitable for experimental, artist-based ARIs.

Open Close Dundee is a street art, wide city-wide project is underway. The scheme will interconnect communities across the city through a series of high-impact artworks across the city, linking them to cultural attractions and working with local artists and community groups to inform the location, content and design of the murals and foster pride and ownership in the work. (Open Close Dundee, n.d.) This serves the purpose of ARIs’, through its programme of exhibitions, promoting the work of its members and raising awareness of a particular medium.

 

References:

Alberta Whittle (2019) “Biting the Hand That Feeds You: A Strategy of Wayward Curating”, Critical Arts, 33:6, 110-123, DOI: 10.1080/02560046.2019.1688848, 116-122

Dan Brown, Deborah Jackson & Neil Mulholland (2018) “Artists Running: Fifty Years of Scottish Cultural Devolution,” Visual Culture in Britain, 19:2, 139-167

Frederick, E. (2016). From the Museum to the Street: a discussion of the tensions that arise when street art is institutionalized (Doctoral dissertation, Dissertação de Mestrado. https://www. academia. edu/30929594/From_the_Museum_to_the_Street_A_Discussion _of_the_Tensions_that_Arise_When_Street_Art_is_Institutionalized_Evelyn_Frederick _Art_History_and_Museum_Curating_with_Photography [consultado em 10-02-2018]).

Open Close Dundee. (n.d.). BRINGING STREET ART TO DUNDEE, OPEN CLOSE IS INJECTING LIFE TO THE ALLEYWAYS AND FORGOTTEN CORNERS OF THE CITY, WORKING WITH LOCAL ARTISTS. Open Close Dundee. Accessed on March 17th 2024. Retrieved from https://openclosedundee.co.uk/about

30 January 2024 Add Comment

Week 2 Platforms and organisations

Lecture Reflection

In this week’s reading on the Visual Arts Exhibitionary Complex (VAEC), Smith (2017) argues that mapping the wider institutional and conceptual context of curation provides a useful framework. He also concludes that mapping these grammatical patterns can clarify the fundamentals of curatorship as a practice. (Smith, 2017) In the reading, a diagram outlines the development of the role of the professional in VAEC, the types of exhibitions, formats, curatorial styles and modes of making sense of exhibitions. I think that such a toolkit of discourse can serve to facilitate curators’ understanding of their profession and its potential within the VAEC.

The lecture further introduced Counterspace, an independent curatorial platform. It functions as the first decolonial think tank mapping cultural activities around the world. It has the aim of creatively decolonising culture, connecting countercultural experiences with radical culture shapers while at the same time encouraging participation in collective mechanisms aimed at others. (Counterspace, 2021) I think that this platform will contribute by providing research material for artists and curators to use their creativity to address the theme of the current situation and future possibilities.

My Curatorial Project

Concerning this platform for expanding the possibilities of curatorial research, my curatorial project will propose a platform for the digital conversion of street art archives, enabling access and long-term preservation for audiences worldwide. The platform will allow any online viewer to contribute to the curation of street art, expanding the boundaries between artists, curators and viewers. Boscaino (2022) mentions the global nature of street art, which has grown in parallel with the development of the web, as a reason why street art is suited to digitisation. It has become equally distributed in this particular way. The popularity of Street Art among younger generations has been attributed to by its suitability for digital media (Irvine, 2012), suggesting the feasibility and growth potential of digitally storing Street Art archives on platforms. The interaction that occurs between Street Art and its audience, whereby the general audience can distribute large quantities of images, photographs, stories and other performances over the internet, can contribute to the value of the work.

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23 January 2024 Add Comment

Week 1 Curation of Street Art

Issues of curating street art (W2)
  • Context of street art
    Street art has a strong connection to the context of the town (social, political, cultural etc.) (like site-specific art?). Therefore, the identity of the work may be lost if it is separated from it.
  • belonging to street art
    If the wall is cut out, it is necessary to negotiate with the owner of the building.
  • Illegality of street art
What is the concept of ‘street’? (W3)

Street culture shares space with disciplines as diverse as anthropology, art (both art history and visual arts), community social work, criminology/criminal justice, cultural studies, fashion, film studies, human geography, popular music studies and sociology. (Ross et al., 2020). The ‘street’, the space occupying these disciplines, is an independent entity where people live, move and sometimes work, as it refers to a specific place as a living cultural collective, and within the street boundaries a myriad of economic, political and social activities and interactions can be seen.

A process-oriented approach to street culture releases the essentialised, unitary or static notion of spatialised culture into its place, and instead understands street culture as a spatialised connection point between a broader series of flows, which can be diverse and vision of culture as dynamic (Massey, 2005). In other words, if the street can be described as a fluid and open public space, then it can be conceptualised as a ‘place (stay)’, as a space where people can stay, interact and develop a range of activities.

 

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18 January 2024 1 Comment

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17 January 2024 Add Comment