Tag Archives: public art

A Melbourne Engagement

This coming weekend I’ll be in Melbourne for Next Wave Festival. I’m speaking in a forum entitled “Taking it to the Streets” (!).

All the Details are here.

Come along to help me celebrate an early Bob Dylan’s Birthday!

2010 Next Wave Festival Club, 1000 £ Bend, 361
Sunday 23 May, 2pm-3:30pm
Little Lonsdale Street, Melbourne

This forum will explore the potential for publically-sited art to meaningfully engage with social issues beyond the art world. If one accepts that art can and should be marshalled towards social justice, then what are the specific artistic competencies that are best deployed towards these ends? What have been some of the successes and failures of socially and politically charged art in the public realm? And can art enact social change and still be good art?

speakers:

Deborah Kelly (Chair)
George Egerton-Warburton
Lucas Ihlein
Iain McIntyre

Augusto Boal and Theater of the Oppressed

A short while ago I went to Adelaide to run part of a workshop on experimental public art practices. I tried some exercises from Augusto Boal’s book “Games for Actors and Non-Actors”.
Here are a few links I noted about Boal from around the net…

http://www.theatrelinks.com/oppressed.htm

http://www.theatreoftheoppressed.org/en/index.php?nodeID=162

http://www.hno.harvard.edu/gazette/2003/12.11/15-boal.html

http://ctoatala.org/maps.html#australia

http://www.northernvisions.org/boal.htm

Participation, Experience, Public Art, Radio

…what I’ve been up to lately…

– – –

Together with Eve Vincent, presenting at this conference at COFA:

http://www.cofa.unsw.edu.au/newsevents/news/news_0115.html

our abstract:

Participation and Experience: Redfern Waterloo Tour of Beauty

The desire for an active spectator-participant was a key goal of avant-garde art during the twentieth century. Rhetoric surrounding such art practice often connected “aesthetic interactivity” with the ideal of a wider participatory democracy. During the 1960s, in an attempt to overcome the separation between “art and life” which characterised the museum-based practice of much modernist art, artists like Allan Kaprow developed “Happenings” which occurred in the everyday places and rhythms of city life. Utilising the tools bequeathed by Kaprow’s Happenings, artist group SquatSpace now runs the Redfern Waterloo Tour of Beauty — wherein the “work of art” is to facilitate discussion about neighborhood life and community organising in inner-urbanSydney. This paper moves through the perennial question “but is it art?” in order to examine the Tour of Beauty as a case study of “Art as Experience” (John Dewey). This co-presentation engages two perspectives — SquatSpace collective member Lucas Ihlein talks about the making of “the tour as art”, and Eve Vincent speaks from the perspective of a participant-audience member.

– – –
Continue reading