Proposal for a Public Culture Major

by Louise Hock

April 25, 2006

OVERVIEW: The Visual Arts Department proposes a new major within its undergraduate degree program. This area of specialization in public culture will add to the Department’s existing Majors in media, studio, computing, and art history. While not offering a distinct course of study at the graduate level at this time, public culture as a topic will be emphasized through its regular course offerings at the MFA and PhD levels.

This specialization in public culture is intended to address a growing need in two particular areas. A number of artists and critics are interested in public space, or urban space, as a site of investigation. Another group is interested in addressing the culture of unbuilt space or the natural environment as location for investigation utilizing an aesthetic methodology. The thrust of the latter’s work is often centered on human incursion into the unbuilt environment, using historic, contemporary, and future time frames. These two distinct but complementary engagements with public space form the two areas of Emphasis within the proposed Public Culture Major.

The artists and scholars interested in the built environment seek to develop new kinds of interventions in the physical space of the city, and in the social networks and media pathways through which people communicate and build communities. They often do not orient their work toward the traditional venues for art presentation, such as the gallery/museum system or the film and video circuit. Rather, they are interested in working in social and environmental settings, moving across the divides between public and private space. They are interested in developing new forms of public engagement, new communications infrastructures, and new contexts for public intervention.

Both of the Emphasis share an interest in developing collaborative working methods as process of both investigation and production. They also both tend to work outside of the traditional modes for artistic production and exhibition, often working directly at and within the investigative site rather than abstracting the information and presenting it within an institutionalized setting. Both of the Emphasis often work with people from other disciplines such as architecture, literature, engineering, and the social and natural sciences.

This area of specialization in public culture is also intended to allow entry into current debates on globalization, urban visual culture, and translocality, which in many ways are helping to shape new historical and critical contexts for art practice. Many of these debates derive from a non-Western perspective and offer a challenge to Western narratives of modernity.

This area of specialization is also intended to build on historical discourses dealing with public art, activism, and the politics of the public sphere. It therefore re-activates and extends these historical traditions. This area of specialization is highly resonant given the unique history of the Visual Arts Department. The faculty and emeritus faculty of the Department have a strong history in pioneering new forms of art practice along with new critical and theoretical contexts for such work, which include the engagement of new audiences outside of traditional art contexts. Often, as is the case with founders such as Alan Kaprow and Helen and Newton Harrison, this has included movement into social and environmental space. The Department is dedicated to the facilitation of cross-genre and cross-disciplinary working methods, which is extremely important given the hybrid nature of contemporary urban and environmental forms. It is uniquely positioned to offer this specialization.

RESOURCES: There are numerous current faculty in the Department now active in the area of public culture in their research. This vital group with their broad interests creates the foundation for the Major. They include Ricardo Domiguez’s collaborative internet incursions into the political sphere, Amy Alexander and Adriene Jenik’s work engagement with internet culture, Brett Stalbaum’s environmental re-mapping, Jordon Crandall’s internet salons, Ruben Ortiz-Torres’s cultural reflections of Latin America in the southern California, Louis Hock’s collaborative public art interventions, and Natalie Jeremijenko’s technological/ environmental demonstration projects. The group also includes two art historians/theoreticians: Grant Kester, whose recent scholarship has been keenly centered on artistic political and environmental art collaborations and Lesley Stern who has been working in the area of both collaborative theater in Zimbabwe and the culture of urban gardening. In 2005 we hired architect and urbanist Teddy Cruz, whose tactical intervention into the local infrastructure and practice of public space, were internationally recognized. As a theorist/practitioner, his area of his research was unique to our program and critical to compliment the existing faculty in the development of the Public Culture Major. We plan to use him to teach the keystone lower division introductory course. Additionally, our next departmental hire will be a historian/theorist in public culture whose research focuses on architecture, urban space, and globalization. Our current faculty with the addition of these two new hires will form a critical mass in terms of faculty number and coverage of the public culture topic. Additionally, the Major will not only use the faculty and courses within the Visual Arts Department, rather, the curriculum will draw on relevant concentrations of study in other disciplines across the academic spectrum at UCSD. A distinct characteristic of the Major for both Emphasis will be an off-campus research component as part of their senior thesis project work. In this way the Major will engage the community as an educational resource.