Greg Sholette

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From the course by Duke University

ART of the MOOC: Public Art and Pedagogy

26 ratings

Duke University

ART of the MOOC: Public Art and Pedagogy

26 ratings

Students of this course may try their hand at their own public art interventions, or simply focus on learning from the theory of public practice and its recent history. Designed by artist and Duke professor, Pedro Lasch, and co-taught by Creative Time artistic director, Nato Thompson, this course presents public culture and art in their radically reinenvented contemporary forms. The lectures link major developments of recent decades to wider topics like spatial politics, everyday social structures, and experimental education. Also included are guest presentations from key thinkers and practitioners, like: Tania Bruguera, Claire Doherty, Tom Finkelpearl, Hans Haacke, Shannon Jackson, Suzanne Lacy, Rick Lowe, and many more. As the ‘ART of the MOOC’ title implies, learners and participants are encouraged to treat the MOOC itself as a public art medium. This happens mostly through the course’s practical components, local project productions, global exchanges, and critical feedback. While no prior art making 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' in the Coursera catalog.

From the lesson

Fictions, Alternative Structures, and Mock-Institutions: Lectures, Guest Presentations, and Quiz

By definition, social art is a collective endeavor. It might seek to transform larger social structures and economies. Perhaps more modestly, it might offer some alternatives or simply confront immediate challenges. The production of an unusual, creative, or engaged collective body can be its final goal. In this lesson we will learn how socially engaged artists have used the guise or actual form of organizations and institutions such as churches, corporations, banks, government offices, and other social units as the very media of their work. This lesson’s practical components will ask students to invent their own alternative social structures or fictional interventions.

Cesare Pietroiusti11:33

Greg Sholette7:05

Caroline Woolard6:37

Meet the Instructors

Pedro Lasch
Visual Artist and Associate Research Professor
Duke Art, Art History & Visual Studies
Nato Thompson
Chief Curator
Creative Time

[BLANK

AUDIO].

I stole the term from astrophysics.

And essentially the concept of dark matter in physics is the standard theory

of the origin of the universe is that it started with a singularity and

then there was an explosion, and

in microseconds this enormous amount of energy was released into whatever.

We don't really know what that whatever is, into a void let's say.

And as it expanded, the question was, why it just didn't dissipate?

Since there was no limits on time or space, it could've just gone on.

It would've just been one big, even cold energyless nothing at a certain point.

So what stopped that?

And physicists theorized that there had to be a certain amount of mass,

that acted as a kind of gravitational anchor to stuff.

Okay, problem is, when physicists try to find the amount of gravity,

the amount of matter that would allow this gravity to happen, it can't find it.

It's not there.

What we see, the material around us, this bathroom,

these sinks, this washing machine I'm looking at over here on the side.

I'm just about 6% of the entire universe.

So the problem is, where's the rest of it?

Where's most of the universe?

That is the problem of dark matter.

And some physicists feel it's the biggest problem to solve.

And they're eager to try to find out what it is.

What is it that's held the universe together?

What's created these kind of gravitational pulls and

allowed planets to form, galaxies to form, etc.

So, what if the art world, what if the world of actual,

let's say creative work, was made up of something similar?

What if most of it was invisible?

That was the question I started with when I began thinking about dark matter.

>> And, at the same time, had a force, right, an essential force.

>> Absolute force, because it is the bulk of what's being produced,

if the metaphor works.

But, it's not reflective, it's not visible.

Okay, so you have to stretch and

pull this metaphor a little, but you can get it to sort of do something for you.

Which is to say, okay, well,

if scientists really want to know what dark matter is, and let's assume that

there is a kind of creative dark matter that is the bulk of what's being produced.

Why aren't most of the people in the creative field looking for it?

In fact, why do they seem to want to ignore it?

So then you have this kind of interesting difference, right?

And then, of course, this leads you to certain questions about, well,

whatever constitutes creative dark matter or artistic dark matter,

must have a very problematic relationship to those who might be in a position to

bring it to light.

>> What would you say are kind of the most common groups and

types of artists who are included in this dark matter?

>> So I sort of came up with the idea that there are three, let's say,

species of dark matter.

One would be, the largest amount would be the informal artistic production.

And that would include people who do LARPs for example,

live action role playing or people who make arts and crafts at home.

Does it matter that the- >> Yeah,

in fact our students will be making that type of work every week.

>> But these might be people who have no real artistic training,

they're people outside the scope of the art world.

>> That's right.

>> So that could be, lets say one species of dark matter, and

probably the largest species.

Let's say its people who really make a kind of creative thing in their surplus

time, in their extra time, because they really love to do it.

But they don't think of themselves in any way as artists.

>> Knitting circles.

>> Knitting circles it goes the whole way.

The second category would be all the artists who are trained through

the academy but who just sort of vanish into the machinery of the art world.

It's probably the most important category, I would say,

at the moment, especially since the crash took place.

When a lot of these people,

I think, began to recognize that they were dark matter people.

So those would be people with BFAs, but MFAs, of course.

Probably several million in the United States alone who have been created since

the MFA was founded in like 1945, 46, something like that.

And you have to ask yourself, where did they go?

>> Right.

>> If you go back and look at art magazines,

I always tell my students to do this.

Go back and get say Art Forum, Art America from probably 20 years ago.

You'll find all of these small reviews of many many many artists.

And you'll see two or

three maybe in one month that you'll recognize the name and the rest are gone.

And yet the work doesn't appear that different.

So, that's a question and so there’s a mass of people and

those are just the people who did get some kind of review.

So think about all the artists, so what did they do?

They end up being maybe the fabricators of other people's art,

installers, haulers, arts administrators, etc, etc.

They, in a sense- >> Educators.

>> And educators.

They make up the adjunct force.

And they train the next generation of dark matter.

The third species of dark matter, the smallest of all, are the ones who

actually sort of grasp this problem to some degree, either intuitively or

because they've actually done some theoretical thinking or work.

And they create the wrong sort of independent space,

whether these are art collectives,

whether these are sort of alternative spaces of a certain type in formal spaces.

Because they see that they are indeed a kind of,

let's say redundant labor power, within the art world.

And so one thesis that comes out of dark matter, one,

let's say it's more of a sort of a slogan, is artists embrace your redundancy.

Artists embrace your redundancy, instead of pretending that it doesn't exist.

You can think of it in terms of queer theory,

where the term queer was really a negative connotation.

And queer activists said, well, let's grab that.

So if artists who have over-produced, are being over-produced all the time,

grasped their own labor conditions within the art world and

said, we're redundant labor power.

And then used that as a way to push back against a situation.

It seems to me that's one possible way, instead of thinking okay, we're going to

like go right over the barricade and jump in, that's probably not so possible.

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