HAA1906 Contemporary art and critical writing

Friday, March 03, 2006

Your blogs

Wednesday, February 22, 2006

Upcoming Schedule for HAA1906

HAA1906 - Contemporary Art and Critical Writing
Upcoming schedule.

1. On Friday 24th Feb.,
(a) some of you have signed up for tutorials, which are variously taking place between 12:00 and 1:30 p.m. Information will be posted on this notice-board and the door of room 98 as to where to go for these on the day.

(b) Aside from these, this week is an ‘independent study’ week.

2. On Friday 3rd March,
(a) some of you have also signed up for tutorials, which are variously taking place between 12:00 and 1:30 p.m. Information will be posted on this notice-board and the door of room 98 as to where to go for these on the day.

(b) You will also all have ‘group tutorials’ (in groups of approx 25). Meet at 2:00p.m. in room 98, where you will be split into tutorial groups.

Still confused? If you are not sure where to be when, or if you've forgotten when your sign-up tutorial is, please feel free to email me (my email is lukewhite@mac.com)

Friday, February 10, 2006

Week 2: Materials, resources, paradigms part 2

click here to download the module outline

Note: the next two weeks are independent study weeks.
The next meeting en masse is for the 'group tutorials', we will meet in room 98 at 2 p.m., 03/03/06, where we will divide into smaller tutorial groups.

Saturday, February 04, 2006

concepts and critique

In yesterday's lecture, I discussed a couple of 'concepts' which seem to me to be key to the kind of work that we are asking you to develop during the module - the concept of a 'concept' and that of the 'critical'. I said I'd write up some of these thoughts and post them here, but what's probably more important is that you do some active research yourselves into what they might mean... I've attached a few notes as a comment to this post, but a few places to start looking are:

concepts:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concept
(see especially the entries on Locke, William Jamesand Gilles Deleuze)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deleuze#Epistemology

- try to think in particualr about how you were doing conceptual work in your last assignment by bringing artists together, irrespective of whether this work was done in writing...
- in what sense is 'conceptual' art conceptual?

the critical

a few websites to look at regarding the 'critical':
http://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/c/r.htm#critique
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critique
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_thinking
http://www.uta.edu/huma/illuminations/

Also, think about what kind of 'critical' thought art can be. Look up the notion of institutional critique' in the Art Since 1900 book. Has institutional critique, one way or another been a primary strategy of avant-garde art throughout the twentieth century, in its constant testing of the boundaries of what art is?

a few artists to chase up:

* Marcel Broodthaers
* Daniel Buren
* Judy Chicago
* The Guerrilla Girls
* Jimmie Durham
* Mark Dion.

Friday, February 03, 2006

Materials, resources, paradigms part 1: introduction to the resources and research methods of the course. Blogging and cultural value.

Hans Haacke, Freedom Is Now Just Going to Be Sponsored - From Petty Cash (1990) Berlin.

Hello, my name is Luke White, and I am a lecturer at Middlesex University, London, England. This blog (or “weblog”) is set up in conjunction with a course I am teaching on, entitled ‘Contemporary Art and Critical Writing’, which is taught to all first year BA Fine Art students. The module is focused not on a series of lectures and readings for the students to passively accept, but instead on the research activity of the students themselves, finding out about the artistic personas and institutions of the contemporary art-world (museums, galleries, forms of critical writing, markets, academia, art fairs, biennials, commissioning agencies, and so on), and on the critical reflections that they produce in response to these.

The emphasis of the course is on students mapping and finding a position within this world - on finding ‘attachments’ within it, but also critically traversing these attachments so that they are not absolute, exclusive, immutable, ones. The process of research might also be one of losing attachments, and of reforming and remaking new ones…

As part of the first week’s lecture I am setting up this weblog in class in order to demonstrate how to do this, and to encourage the students to do the same. These weblogs can stand as a collection point for the students' work – both their writing and the material they collect – and a site of exchange of ideas between us all.

During the lecture this week, I will be introducing the course, some key ideas, and some of the kinds of methods and resources for research that the students have available to them, and which we wish them to use. I will centrally be discussing the key notions of the ‘concept’ (or, rather, of the sort of conceptual ‘work’ which we wish students to do) and of the ‘critical’. What is this thing ‘critical thinking’ that we always ask of students in higher education? What is ‘critique’? What is ‘critical writing’? and what does it have to do with being an artist? Is art itself (or can art be) a ‘critical’ activity? I will largely examine this question with reference to the development of ‘institutional critique’ as an artistic strategy in the 1960s and 1970s.

We will also discuss the ‘blog’ as a site for critical writing and exchange.