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.

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.