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.