Online Course by Node Center with Daniela Labra

Duration: Sep 17 – Oct 8, 2019
Fee: 154€
Max seats: 30
Enroll before: Sep 13, 2019
Dedication: 3 hrs/week

This course addresses the critical potential, ambivalences and contradictions of contemporary artistic projects that deal with socio-political content in different formats, both inside and outside the cultural institution.

Over four weeks, we will trace how artists have addressed such diverse issues as civil rights, humanitarian affairs, critique of capitalism, gender and sexuality discussions, historical revisionism, and more. We will take a historical-critical approach to a wide variety of case studies from Modernism, to the second half of the twentieth century to today, where works with political content are widely exhibited in museums, cultural centers, biennials, fairs, galleries and other spaces that make up contemporary art economics, creating sometimes contradictory panoramas of insertion and effectiveness.

Accompanied by rich visual material and recommended readings, this course is for curators, writers, artists and anyone interested in gaining a deeper understanding of the relations between art and politics in contemporary visual art production.

Program

Session 1. Art & politics: an introduction

• Avant-garde and Revolution in the early 1900
• Re-configuring the international art system after 1950s
• New art forms as political attitudes: the beginning of the contemporary art era

Session 2. Institutional critique and the economy of participatory art from the 1960s onwards

• The emergence of happenings and environmental art
• Participatory art and the critical role of the spectator
• Performance and body art: the value of non-object-based art

Session 3. The personal is political

• Art, identity politics and civil rights movements since the 1970s
• Activism and social engagement in context-oriented projects
• Gender theories and artistic proposals since the 1990s

Session 4. The contemporary art system and “otherness”

• Multiculturalism, post-colonial & decolonial theories through artistic approaches
• The global art scene and politics of institutional inclusion: the contemporary biennial phenomena
• Concluding debate with the participants: on the effectiveness (or not) of political art

Authors quoted: Bertolt Brecht, Walter Benjamin, Aquille Mbembe, Walter Mignolo, Claire Bishop, Hito Steyerl, Marta Traba, Judith Butler, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Ranciére, others.