Art and Ideas 2009
From David Darts Wiki
Welcome to Art and Ideas: Theory and Research in Contemporary Art. This course examines critical theory and research as an intellectual foundation for the production of contemporary art. Students will analyze key texts and artworks, focusing especially on conceptual, performative, and interventionist works, as they develop a conceptual framework for their own artistic practice. Special emphasis will be placed on examining contemporary art and artists in cultural, socio-political, economic, and pedagogical contexts.
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Course Instructor
Assignments
1. Para-functional Design
(Due: TBA) Students will conceptualize and create a prototype for a para-functional object. More details and project criteria will be provided in class.
2. Critical Public Intervention
(Due: TBA) Working individually, students will design, conceptualize, undertake and document a critical public space art intervention. Students will submit a project proposal that includes a succinct description (200 words) that outlines all conceptual and logistical considerations (participants, location, time frame, documentation strategy, safety and legal dimensions, etc.).
Students must also write a 250 word artist statement outlining the nature and goals of their public space art intervention and must present video and/or photographic documentation of their project in class.
3. Critical Catalogue Essay
(Due: August 22nd) The critical catalogue essay (1250-1500 words) offers you the opportunity to theorize your artistic practice and to create an extended artist statement about your work. As such, you are expected to critically engage with the concepts and ideas you've been exploring through your studio practice over the summer and articulate them through writing.
Contemporary art cannot be created in social, cultural, political, economic, philosophical, or historical isolation. The romantic ideal of the heroic artist working alone in her studio waiting for inspiration is essentially a modernist myth (this is one of the concepts Ragnar Kjartansson is exploring through his video projection and daily painting ritual in the Icelandic pavilion). You may wish to also consider the Situationist International's concept of unitary urbanism which included an ongoing campaign to remove the artificial separation between art and life.
As such, your work as an artist is always situated within the time, place, culture, historical moment, etc that you live in. By producing and showing work, you as an artist are engaging in, building upon, and contributing to an ongoing dialogue with past artworks, cultural symbols and signs, cultural movements, historical narratives, social issues and movements, etc. Part of your job for this assignment then is to identify and highlight the connections between these phenomena and your own artistic practice.
Some questions you may want to consider as you develop your essay: What is your work about? What ideas/concepts are you exploring through your studio practice? What questions are your raising? What feelings, memories or responses are you trying to evoke? What argument(s) are you making through your work? What message(s) are you attempting to convey? What ideas are you attempting to articulate? What theories and theorists are you drawing upon? What historical movements/moments does your work speak to? What past artworks or artists are you responding to and/or drawing upon for inspiration? How does your chosen medium and/or mode of expression achieve your intended goals?
Submission Procedure: Please email completed papers by or before August 22nd to: darts[at]nyu[dot]edu
4. Daily Assignments and Personal Engagement
Students are expected to regularly attend class and actively engage in ALL discussions, exercises, and activities. The course carries a heavy load and students are expected to complete all of the daily readings and homework assignments before the beginning of each class.
Course Readings
- Invisible Theatre (Boal) (pdf)
- Relational Form (Bourriaud) (pdf)
- Contingent Objects (Buskirk) (pdf)
- Toward a Situationist International (Debord) (pdf)
- Theory of the Derive (Debord) (pdf)
- Para-functionality (Dunne) (pdf)
- Art of Ideas (Goldberg) (pdf)
- Conceptual Art (Harrison) (pdf)
- Just Doing (Kaprow) (pdf)
- Luggage (Rogoff) (pdf)
Books
- Relational Aesthetics (1998) by Nicolas Bourriaud
- One Place after Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity (2004) by Miwon Kwon
- What We Want is Free (2005) by Ted Purves
Course Viewings
- The Best of Speed Levitch
- Improv Everywhere: Selected missions
- Yes Men: Bhopal Disaster: BBC World
- Reverend Billy
Supplemental Resources
Contemporary Art Blogs
