Grant Kester: Practices

My research interests in Public Culture are based primarily on my efforts over the past twenty years to develop a critical and theoretical framework for the interpretation of socially engaged and collaborative art practices, with a specific emphasis on performance-based work. This research is presented in the publications Art, Activism and Oppositionality: Essays from Afterimage (Duke University Press, 1997), Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art (University of California Press, 2004, Chinese translation 2007) and my forthcoming book The One and the Many: Agency and Identity in Contemporary Collaborative Art, along with the exhibition and catalog for Groundworks: Environmental Collaboration in Contemporary Art (Carnegie Mellon University, 2005). I’m currently researching collaborative projects in Senegal, Myanmar, Germany, Peru, Brazil, and India. My research overlaps with issues and methodologies in theater studies, sociology, urban studies, anthropology and communications (I’m speaking at the Yale School of Drama this spring and have been invited to next year’s Community Theater Festival in Amsterdam). As part of the Public Culture initiative I would suggest making contact with the UCSD Theater and Communications departments in particular (and possibly sociology). I have a long-term interest in bringing the Public Culture emphasis into the Ph.D. program more fully, possibly through the creation of a special concentration devoted to the development of new methodologies for the analysis of collaborative, collective and activist art practices. It’s one of my long-standing contentions that existing theoretical approaches in art and media history are ill equipped to address collaborative and participatory practice. I’d like to eventually establish a more formal framework for this investigation in the Ph.D. program in order to attract graduate students, develop off-campus opportunities for field work and mentorships, and to attract extramural support for publications, symposia and fellowships.