Art and the Social Production of Space

Art and the Social Production of Space
This course examines the ways art and artists participate in the social production of space. The focus is on contemporary artistic practices and projects. We consider the conceptual gestures and practical interventions made by artists as well as the specific spatial conditions into which their work responds, is embedded, or is enacted. To support our understanding and analysis of different case studies, we draw on a multi-disciplinary range of visual and performance art. We also look to historical precedents that help to situate our study in relation to critical developments in the field of art pertaining to space and spatial practice.

Some of the topics we will address include material displacements, institutional critique, language and the discursive production of space, settler-colonial contexts, re-occupying modern psychogeographies, new mediation and techniques of representation.

Two questions underpin the learning objectives for this course. In what ways does art participate in or reinforce the normative spatial conditions under which it is made? What capacity does art have to contest or unsettle these conditions, instead effecting a differential relationality in the social relations of spatial production.

Lygia Clark, Rede de elástico (Elastic net), 1973. Elastic bands. Courtesy “The World of Lygia Clark” Cultural Association, Rio de Janeiro.