Art Action Et Participation

Depuis une vingtaine d'années, les arts d'avant-garde sont marqués par deux problèmes à la fois sociaux et esthétiques : l'Environnement, la participation du spectateur. De toutes parts s'est ainsi développé un art nouveau, assez affirmé pour faire l'objet d'un ouvrage d'ensemble. Les analyses de Frank Popper éclairent la fonction nouvelle de l'artiste dans les sociétés d'aujourd'hui. Arts plastiques et du spectacle, poésie, musique, multi-média : autant de domaines où le praticien se voit investi de responsabilités inédites à l'égard de ses camarades de travail et surtout du spectateur, qui intervient à divers degrés dans le processus de conception et de création. Mais le nouvel art " populaire " se situe à l'opposé de toute " simplicité " ou " naïveté " : il est lié aux sciences et aux techniques de notre temps, à la cybernétique et l'informatique par exemple. Art populaire que manifestent en outre les graffitis, la peinture murale, les arts " communautaires ", l'art dans le Tiers-Monde et en Chine. Partout se précisent des phénomènes de groupe, de masse, de création collective. Il était donc indispensable de redéfinir les relations entre l'artiste, le théoricien et le spectacteur, et de faire apparaître la formation d'une nouvelle pensée esthétique.

The study critically reclaims participatory art beyond its co-option as a fuzzword of neoliberal governance. It examines a range of artistic practices from community theatre, immersive performance and the visual arts in different sites around the world. It offers a refreshing theorisation of participatory art as gesture.

Arts of Engagement focuses on the role that music, film, visual art, and Indigenous cultural practices play in and beyond Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Indian Residential Schools. Contributors here examine the impact of aesthetic and sensory experience in residential school history, at TRC national and community events, and in artwork and exhibitions not affiliated with the TRC. Using the framework of “aesthetic action,” the essays expand the frame of aesthetics to include visual, aural, and kinetic sensory experience, and question the ways in which key components of reconciliation such as apology and witnessing have social and political effects for residential school survivors, intergenerational survivors, and settler publics. This volume makes an important contribution to the discourse on reconciliation in Canada by examining how aesthetic and sensory interventions offer alternative forms of political action and healing. These forms of aesthetic action encompass both sensory appeals to empathize and invitations to join together in alliance and new relationships as well as refusals to follow the normative scripts of reconciliation. Such refusals are important in their assertion of new terms for conciliation, terms that resist the imperatives of reconciliation as a form of resolution. This collection charts new ground by detailing the aesthetic grammars of reconciliation and conciliation. The authors document the efficacies of the TRC for the various Indigenous and settler publics it has addressed, and consider the future aesthetic actions that must be taken in order to move beyond what many have identified as the TRC’s political limitations.

This book explores the ways in which artists use technology to create different perceptions of time in art in order to reflect on contemporary relationships to technology. By considering the links between technology, movement and contemporary art, the book explores changing relationship between temporality in art, art history, media art theory, modernity, contemporary art, and digital art. This book challenges the dominant view that kinetic art is an antiquated artistic experiment and considers the changing perception of kinetic art by focusing on exhibitions and institutions that have recently challenged the notion of kinetic art as a marginalised and forgotten artistic experiment with mechanical media. This is achieved by deconstructing Frank Popper’s argument that kinetic art is a precursor to subsequent explorations in the intersections between art, science and technology. Rather than pandering to the prevailing art historical assumption that kinetic sculpture is merely a precursor to art in a digital culture, the book proposes that perhaps kineticism succeeded too well, where movement has become a ubiquitous element of the aesthetic of contemporary art. If, as Boris Groys has recently suggested, installation has become the dominant mode of art in the contemporary age, then movement in real time with the viewer is used to aestheticise and explore the facets of our peculiar time.

This book on Stephen Willats pulls together key strands of his practice and threads them through histories of British cybernetics, experimental art, and urban design. For Willats, a cluster of concepts about control and feedback within living and machine systems (cybernetics) offered a new means to make art relevant. For decades, Willats has built relationships through art with people in tower blocks, underground clubs, middle-class enclaves, and warehouses on the Isle of Dogs, to investigate their current conditions and future possibilities. Sharon Irish's study demonstrates the power of Willats's multi-media art to catalyze communication among participants and to upend ideas about “audience” and “art.” Here, Irish argues that it is artists like Willats who are now the instigators of social transformation.

This collection of original essays takes a multi-disciplinary approach to explore the theme of failure through the broad spectrum of public art and social practice. The anthology brings together practicing artists, curators, activists, art writers, administrators, planners, and educators from around the world to offer differing perspectives on the many facets of failure in commissioning, planning, producing, evaluating, and engaging communities in the continually evolving field of art in the public realm. As such, this book offers a survey of currently unexplored and interconnected thinking, and provides a much-needed critical voice to the commissioning of public and participatory arts. The volume includes case studies from the UK, the US, China, Cuba, and Denmark, as well as discussions of digital public art collections. The Failures of Public Art and Participation will be of interest for students and scholars of visual arts, design and architecture interested in how art in the public realm fits within social and political contexts.