Site-Specific Performance: Art, Activism and Public Space

Semester and Year	FA 2010
Course Number	ARTS-UG1080
Section	001
Instructor	Martha Bowers
Days	Thu
Time	9:30 AM - 12:15 PM
Units	4.0
Level	U
Foundation Requirement

Description

This course looks at the development of site-specific performance with a special emphasis on projects that directly involve specific communities and include activist agendas. “Site-specific” is a term frequently associated with the visual arts but since the Happenings of the ’60s and ’70s, a body of work termed “site-specific performance” has evolved as highly structured works of art that are designed around, for or because of place. In the streets, in fields, deserts, forests, garbage dumps, abandoned buildings, on the border, aboard boats, in virtual space and outer space, this genre has unleashed the power of performance to indelibly mark our sense of locational identity. As site artists confront the matrix of social forces and overlapping communities that relates to a given site, their aesthetics, creative process and goals have shifted. How are they blurring the lines between art and activism, art and urban renewal, art and spirituality, art and real life? This course will emphasize making site work by completing a progressive series of site studies, using various artistic mediums, designed to build skills as students work towards creating a final site project in teams. We will also be reading about and viewing documentation of site work by seminal artists in this field. As this field is highly interdisciplinary, this course is recommended to students with interests and some training in at least one of the following mediums: dance, theatre, spoken word poetry, media, photography and/or visual art. Readings include excerpts from The Lure of the Local, Lucy Lippard; Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art , ed. Suzanne Lacy; Local Acts , Jan Cohen Cruz; Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life , Allan Kaprow; Re-Framing the Theatrical , Alison Oddey among others.

Course Type

Arts Workshops (ARTS-UG)