FINAR604 FAS: Public Strategies

As the boundaries between studio art practice and the practice of everyday life fade, we are faced with the challenge of creating fresh relationships with art institutions, aesthetics, pedagogy, community, audience, and social change. In this seminar we will look at social art practice and cultural resistance models including Tactical Media, Relational Aesthetics, film and media interventions, utopia, failure, and dystopic frameworks in order to provide a forum to focus and develop work through self-reflective projects, discussion and research. Intensive group critiques and readings will focus on strategies, tactics, and effectiveness of art practice outside of the gallery/exhibitionary complex and engaged in variety of 'public' discursive arenas. The course is intended to sharpen students' analytic, written and verbal skills in relation to both their individual practices and the work of their peers. Critiques will focus on individual research and exploration with an emphasis on the formation of discourse(s) as points of entry into one's work, how the work might be interacted with, and what role the work might play in the larger social and cultural field.