Site-Specific Performance: Art, Activism & Public Space

Catalog description

This course looks at the development of site-specific performance with a special emphasis on projects that engage with social issues 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 and associated communities. As site artists confront the matrix of social forces, changing political policies and overlapping communities that relate 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 real life? This arts workshop will emphasize making site work by completing a progressive series of studies, using various artistic mediums. We will also be reading about and viewing site work by seminal artists in this field. This course is recommended to adventurous 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 texts by Maaike Bleeker; Jan Cohen Cruz; Bertie Ferdman, among others.