Public Culture Program Initiative

by Grant Kester

2006

The Visual Arts Department proposes a new area of specialization for its degree programs. This area of specialization in “public culture” will add to the Department’s existing degree programs in media, studio, computing, and art history. It will include course offerings at the undergraduate, graduate, and PhD levels.

This specialization in public culture is intended to address a growing need. A growing number of artists and critics are interested in public space, or urban space, as a site of investigation. These individuals are interested in developing 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. These individuals are often interested in developing collaborative working methods. They often work with people from other disciplines such as architecture, literature, and the social 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 forms. It is uniquely positioned to offer this specialization. New faculty hires for the specialization in public culture are anticipated to include a theorist/practitioner who works across visual art, architecture, and urban studies; a historian/theorist whose research focuses on architecture and urban space; and an artist who works within the genre of “tactical media” (a combination of visual art, media, networking, and politics). A range of taught courses will be added to the curriculum whose topics will include urban visual studies, new social and spatial theories, critical geography, network architectures, globalism, public art, independent media strategy, urban theory, visual anthropology, and critical network cultures.