Relational Aesthetics/Performance
Successful curation involves insight, persistence, and judgment. For a show to realize its curatorial intentions, judicious selection, meticulous research, public and often private persuasion, as well as dynamic installation strategies all come into play. The class considers these pragmatic aspects of curating alongside an array of theoretical issues.
More and more artists have multiple identities as critics, curators, and makers. Artists curate their own work for solo exhibitions and they curate their friends' work for group shows. Artists may curate shows of their peers as a way of building a creative community, thereby providing logical contexts for their work. Artists serve in curatorial roles in biennials and festivals. Artists are sometimes invited to play with collections (e.g. Fred Wilson and Sophie Calle). And artists use curation as an artmaking strategy, building works from collections of objects. Increasingly, there are practices of virtual curation, where art works are assembled conceptually as lectures or electronic galleries.
This is a course for anyone interested in curating as a creative practice. This is a studio class with curatorial projects as art-making assignments, but there is also substantial reading exploring a range of perspectives within contemporary curatorial activity. The course is useful to students of theory and history who are considering curatorial careers, but it has a special focus on artists as curators.
Dominique Haller
HomeAway
'HomeAway' is a project born out of the insight that relational art is concerned with relationships both as a result and as a material. Having immigrated to the United States recently, I wanted to capture the absence of some of my most important relationships that have become redefined by the geographical distance separating us and are now marked by physical absence, time zone differences, missed phone calls, and moments of loneliness and longing. I called my closest friends and family and left them a phone message, describing the parts of our relationships that I don’t get to experience anymore due to the distance, and asked them to do the same. The intention of the project is to describe these relationships through their absences. I’ve recorded all the messages – theirs and mine – and compiled them in a CD with a booklet, which I’ve sent to all the participants as a token of our newly configured relationship, hoping that it contributes to a renewed emotional connection between us.
Nic Bitting
WaterBlessing.net
'WaterBlessing.net' is an interactive ecological mapping project. Participants receive a hand-turned individually numbered wooden water droplet for which they create a blessing. The droplet is then released into a flowing body of water to be discovered by a future recipient. The blessings created for each droplet are compiled on the website WaterBlessing.net. This project is a study of flow, reverence and serendipitous connections.
Jeff Casey and Cecilla Eloisa Leon
'Mourning and Melancholy: the Interview Project' was developed by Jeff Casey and Cecilia Eloisa Leon. Quite simply this is a performance piece in which individuals are asked questions about death, grieving and related subjects. Individual audience members are invited to set opposite the interviewer and answer questions, usually one. Each interviewee is asked a different question and are given the opportunity to ask the interviewer questions as well. The Interview Project was performed as part of the Univ. of Wisconsin-Madison 4D Art Show on Nov. 4, 2011. The performance was abruptly, and comically, cut short by a fire alarm. No one was hurt.
Jen Rocheleau
Kimmy Tran
Giving people moments of happiness defined my relational aesthetics works this Fall. I first used personalized feel-good stickers and distributed them to random strangers. The interactions of the recipients with the givers defined the goals of this small project. For the larger project, the goal was to use the easily accessible YouTube to create more personal, individual relationships. Each person was to send a video to someone along with a paragraph explaining why they chose that particular video or why that video reminded them of that person. Both of these projects developed relationships on different levels.
Jamie Landry
'Words Unspoken Seem To Leave A Hollow Sound', a relational project by Jamie Landry that centers around the unspoken words between family members.