Art and Politics

Duration

Sept. 17 - Oct. 08, 2019

Enroll before

Sept. 16, 2019

One-time Payment

154.00 € (incl. VAT)

Live sessions

3 hrs/week

This course addresses the critical potential, ambivalences and contradictions of contemporary artistic projects that deal with socio-political content in different formats, both inside and outside the cultural institution.

Over four weeks, we will trace how artists have addressed such diverse issues as civil rights, humanitarian affairs, critique of capitalism, gender and sexuality discussions, historical revisionism, and more. We will take a historical-critical approach to a wide variety of case studies from Modernism, to the second half of the twentieth century to today, where works with political content are widely exhibited in museums, cultural centers, biennials, fairs, galleries and other spaces that make up contemporary art economics, creating sometimes contradictory panoramas of insertion and effectiveness.

Accompanied by rich visual material and recommended readings, this course is for curators, writers, artists and anyone interested in gaining a deeper understanding of the relations between art and politics in contemporary visual art production.

Course image: Pierre Le Vaillant

*Prices include VAT

Session 1. Art & politics: an introduction

Avant-garde and Revolution in the early 1900 
Re-configuring the international art system after 1950s 
New art forms as political attitudes: the beginning of the contemporary art era

Session 2. Institutional critique and the economy of participatory art from the 1960s onwards

The emergence of happenings and environmental art  
Participatory art and the critical role of the spectator 
Performance and body art: the value of non-object-based art

Session 3. The personal is political

Art, identity politics and civil rights movements since the 1970s 
Activism and social engagement in context-oriented projects 
Gender theories and artistic proposals since the 1990s

Session 4. The contemporary art system and "otherness"

Multiculturalism, post-colonial & decolonial theories through artistic approaches
 The global art scene and politics of institutional inclusion: the contemporary biennial phenomena 
Concluding debate with the participants: on the effectiveness (or not) of political art

Authors quoted: Bertolt Brecht, Walter Benjamin, Aquille Mbembe, Walter Mignolo, Claire Bishop, Hito Steyerl, Marta Traba, Judith Butler, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Ranciére, others.

System requirements for the live video conferences: Google Chrome or Mac OS x 10.11 or higher or Windows 7 or higher.

Art and Politics

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