This course is for activists, artists, and thinkers who wish to better understand and participate in social change. We will focus on the prolific and exciting overlap between socially engaged art and cultural practices generated by recent social movements around the world. Rather than assess the political efficacy of activities like mourning, listening, organizing, dancing, or partying, the lectures examine such cultural activities next to, and within, contemporary art practice. Included in the course are guest presentations by key artists, activists, and scholars, like: Rebecca Gomperts, Chido Govera, Gulf Labor, Hans Haacke, Sharon Hayes, Jolene Rickard, Gregory Sholette, Joshua Wong, and many more. Designed by artist and Duke professor, Pedro Lasch and co-taught by Creative Time artistic director, Nato Thompson, the course challenges learners to treat the MOOC itself as a social and artistic form. This happens mostly through the practical components, local project productions, global exchanges, and critical feedback. While no prior art making or activist experience is required, projects also offer challenging options for advanced learners. For other course offerings or language versions in this series, just search 'ART of the MOOC' inside the Coursera course catalogue.
Beka Economopoulos
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From the course by Duke University
ART of the MOOC: Activism and Social Movements
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From the lesson
Activism and Social Movements: Lectures, Guest Presentations, and Quiz
This opening segment is dedicated to the prolific and exciting overlap between socially engaged art and cultural practices generated by recent social movements around the world. Environmentalism, AIDS activism, Queer movements, Zapatismo, immigrant rallies, alter-globalization, the World Social Forum, Occupy, the Hong Kong Umbrella Movement, museum boycotts, and democratic uprisings in the Middle East will be seen in dialogue with cultural producers who participate in these movements or are inspired by them. Rather than assess the political efficacy of such cultural activities, we will examine their place within contemporary art practices. Based on Listening, Organizing, Dancing, or Partying, each student’s contribution will respond to a particular social movement of their choosing.
Meet the Instructors
Nato ThompsonChief Curator
Creative Time
Pedro LaschVisual Artist and Associate Research Professor
Duke Art, Art History & Visual Studies
I should take a step back and tell you a little bit about not an alternative.
We're an arts class that got formed
in 2004 with people with a very wide mix of backgrounds.
So I come out of activism and organizing.
My partner and co-founder comes out of art.
>> Jason Jones, right.
>> Jason Jones, that's right.
And we work with a theorist, we work with public relations people,
art historians, designers, a wide range.
And we are interested in sort of cross pollinating our worlds and
blurring those boundaries between those disciplines.
But ultimately have a pretty consstant orientation of our practice.
And that is the occupation of existing symbols, stories, events, institutions.
>> Yeah. >> In order to effect what they mean.
>> Yeah.
>> It's our assessment that every symbol, every subject is fundamentally split,
so it's defined as much by its positive characteristics
as it is by that which it excludes, or that which it isn't.
So if you were to use the analogy of a room, it's definited as much by its
ceilings and floors and walls as the negative space in between.
And so it's inhabiting that space, activating that split within a subject.
Bringing in that exclusion or thing that it refuses
that we can ultimately effect and transform
the very understanding or the very definition of a particular thing.
>> Yeah, in fact, the question I had about Not an Alternative had to do with is,
you have a very interesting mission statement, which you partly described now,
this idea of symbols right.
Very few institutions or organizations have, have in their mission
statement a core place for symbols and how we deal with symbols.
>> It was hard for us to avoid.
That was a challenge, it's not a very traditional mission statement.
Yet the world of the immaterial world, symbols and semiotics and stories,
has a very direct palpable impact on the material world, right.
>> Right. And that's where our working occupy
is legible, I think There we wre really interested in a number of, for
a number of years, in particular after the 2008 economic crash.
Where it felt like the crisis was most visible
in the collapse of the housing bubble and the insuing foreclosure crisis
We started to collaborate with a group called, Picture the Homeless.
Based here in New York, they're a homeless organization.
And we occupied, or hijacked the visual language
of the symbols and signs that govern our use of space.
So, we're thinking of that as a vocabulary, as a language that exists
in the world that you recognize, maybe take for granted.
Yellow and black, or high visibility orange, or caution tape, or road signs.
So, yeah, it was in these collaborations with pictures of homeless they had just
done a several year survey of vacant properties throughout Manhattan.
It was a survey that hadn't been performed since the thirties in this city.
They really wanted to demonstrate that homelessness and
the foreclosure crisis is not as much issue of space,
as it is an issue of political will.
In conducting this survey of volunteer canvasers over the course of
a couple of years.
They compiled a report.
And demonstrated that there's more amazing properties in Manhattan alone
than the entire homeless population of all five boroughs of New York City.
Yet that was gonna be a blip on the radar screen when they
issued this report, right.
The media's maybe gonna mention, make a quick mention of it.
So we teamed up so that we can bring our skills as visual artists and
cultural producers to help to create more sort of media
around that and we don't, in our collaborations with community groups or
activist organizations, necessarily always have the same ends.
>> Mm-hm.
>> Our goals are symbiotic,
yet for us it was really about destabilizing the symbolic terrain
such that we can affect a broader transformation.
>> Yeah.
>> In the narrative discourse around spatial politics,
in our understanding of the world around us, iun particular with sort of occupying
this particular visual language of spatial politics.
We were questioning a city built for who, right.
>> Right.
>> And this tug between public and private.
And who gets to determine who uses the city and how.
>> Yeah.
Well you're right, I come out as an activist with a background,
over 20 years of organizing.
So that's the lens I apply to this work.
And for me I went through organizing school and
not once in that entire year were the words culture or aesthetics mentions.
>> And where was that, the- >> It seemed like a big blind spot.
It was a program called Green Corps, which teaches you the fundamentals, and
you're running campaigns across the country and working with communities,
but yeah, that seemed like a blind spot.
In particular, activists and NGOs are always talking about how to get their
content for their campaigns to go viral.
>> Yeah.
>> Yet, popular culture is already that.
Can we occupy it and redirect it or point it in a new direction.
>> It's about getting a message across,
not about transforming a general culture or something.
>> Yeah, and it's like a lot of activitists have traditionally
avoided public relations as like the purview of the The enemy right.
That's manipulation, it's like its capitalist sign for something.
Yet the right has whole hardedly embraced it.
And some are really interested in sort of yeah can you use the tools of persuasion
on two different ends That's my perspective yet I think there
are others within the collective that come from an art background.
That understand our work within the cannon of art history
having a relationship to instution of critique.
Artists like and Andrea Fraser and Fred Wilson.
Being a sort of iteration upon that.
But then also having a sort of fundamental relationship to
a particular understanding or definition of art that is not necessarily
shared across the board by social artists, right.
We reject the idea of the instrumentalization of art.
Useful art is not.
Yet we're doing activism with our art, but at it's core if we were
to define it as art it would be more about sort of occupying this gap.
Or what's invisible within a particular subject.
Yeah, David Koch is the one would argue
the sort of linchpin of the climate and machine.
He and his brother Charles made their money in Koch Industries,
the second largest privately-held fossil fuel company.
They profit from the burning of fossil fuels.
They also have spent since 1997,
the spent $79 million funding climate.
>> Mm-hm got it.
>> Lobby groups and indoctrines.
>> [CROSSTALK} [LAUGH] >> We'll take it all.
>> Yeah. >> Yeah.
>> So, there's this great contradiction.
And this is, this is something we're always interested in,
is the gap between the ideals of the institution and its practice.
Where, again, that gap in any particular subject between what it is but
it says it is.
And then what it sweeps under the rug.
>> Mm-hm.
>> And in this case, David Koch, the biggest climate deniers out there,
sits on the board of our country's two largest natural history museums.
So why do you have climate denier sitting on the board of science institution.
It doesn't make sense and that points to a larger systemic issue of
the coorporatization of our cultural institutions,
the privatization of these spaces.
The embedding of the fossil fuel industry
in cultural institutions as a public relations or
green washing move in particular places that communicate science to the public.
>> Yeah. >> So that was big.
>> In the over arching implants,
that's all these individuals have, in cultural and scientific institutions.
>> And that they sort of are increasingly consolidating influence while they,
within these institutions, while they then fund lobbying for
budget cuts, to those very same institutions.
>> And so how does this project work on a day to day basis.
You have a truck, right.
You have bears, do you have, what do you do.
You did that letter, you wrote a letter to a in New York, a museum, right.
>> We teamed up with, to kick it off, we did, we do exhibitions,
we do, that happen within existing institutions So, we,
our first one was at the Queens Museum.
Over the next few years we are teaming up with natural history museums that
are affiliated with universities to do pop up exhibits.
>> Mm hm. >> We have a 15 passenger
natural history museum bus- >> Mm hm.
>> That travels our exhibitions but is also used for tours and
for expeditions with scientists.
>> Mm hm.
>> And members of the public, to sort of contested areas.
And we do educational workshops and panels, and so on.
So everything that traditional natural history museums do, we do as well.
With this project we're adopting the authoritative vocabulary of the generic
natural history museum in order to get inside the museums faster and
transform it from within.
So we're interested in identifying and creating space for
allies on the inside of these institutions to make change, to push agenda.
And so for us, we're not necessarily romanticizing the smallest,
beautiful, alternative education that we're doing when we host a workshop.
We're thinking about the symbolic power of doing that within a container
That accures all this sorta force and influence over time.
So that's something that we've sorta leaned infrastructure and
it's our goal and occupy anddeveloping occupy team and this visual language.
To knit together various manifestations of the movement around the world so
that they were visible as a movement,
as a force more powerful as counter power infrastructure.
We're trying to do the same thing with the Natural History Museum project so that
we're not just activating our alterntive institution as a pedagogical one.
But we're trying to activate the entire museum sector.
And recognizing that while there are privatizing forces that are trying
to direct these institutions to their ends, we can as well.
>> Yeah, >> who gets to speak on behalf
of these institutions, is it just people who have to get a paycheck.
Is it the donors.
Is it the visitors.
Can we blur the boundaries In all of our projects,
we deal with how politics are mediated through representation.
And so looking at natural history museums, through dioramas, through visual display,
etc., they educate people about science Yet
there's no culture of criticism within these spaces,
as there is when an art exhibit opens, and you've got critics who write about it.
We know how to deconstruct newspaper articles or
what you see on television But, there is nothing like that.
>> Do you already have a science show critic in residence, in your museum.
>> We have, yeah, we built an advisory board
of upper echelon museum center professionals, scientists, etc.
We've teamed up with dozens of the world's top scientsts and
several Nobel Laureates To release a letter calling on science museums to
cut ties to the fossil fuel industry.
>> Mm hm. >> So for
us it is like, it is not just about us coming in to these institutions and
saying you should kick David Koch off your board.
>> Mm hm. >> It is really more about creating
a container, creating counter power infrastructure.
For scientists to speak politically.
>> Yeah, yeah.
>> And for museums after professionals who really believe in
the ideals of their institutions to find ways and foremost,
sort of collectively that can have a power to shape this spectre's future.
I would just say that we have a ton more agency than we give ourselves credit for.
And so, just finding those opportunities, and start small.
When we've released that scientist letter,
it There were probably about 100 press
hits around the world in the largest media outlets and it just kept going.
>> Yeah, yeah.
>> And kicked off, it set in motion a chain of events
that was beyond our expectations.
>> Yeah.
Well, and start small is great advice for
our students because they will often be sitting, reviewing these materials and
reading and listening to the lectures and guest presentations and think, how can I
possibly do that, their assignments or projects are in one week, two weeks.
Six weeks at the most.
And so they may think, this is impossible, right.
But as you said, you start small and then you'll get somewhere.
>> That's [INAUDIBLE] The learning process.
>> Yeah yeah. >> [INAUDIBLE] To success.
And then you build upon them and
get more success [INAUDIBLE] >> Yeah.
Well thanks so much Becca, and it was great talking to you.
>> Thank you.
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