Traces: The Event, Intent and Its Document

Catalog description

Historically, artists have utilized the documentarian strategy for carrying the life of an artwork beyond the "moment of a performance event or exhibition. While many contemporary artists routinely follow this tradition, many others have strategically blurred the boundaries of when the artistic gesture ends and the documentation begins. For these practitioners, the artwork is recorded and relayed not just for posterity but also as an artifact, or even where the documentation itself is the final resulting artwork. What defines the intent behind such modes of documentation? When does the record of an artistic gesture become an artwork in its own right, and are they mutually exclusive? Through investigations of historical instances and in person examples, students will develop a series of projects that question the autonomy of the documentation from that which is being documented. The course will engage the work of artists like Trisha Donelly, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Michael Greaves, Carrie Mae Weems, Tino Sehgal, Ana Mendieta and Tania Bruguera, and include texts by artists and scholars such as Claire Bishop, Forensic Architecture, Miwon Kwon, Hito Steyerl, Boris Groys and W.E.B. Du Bois. Students will respond in media appropriate to their concepts, whether through text, sculpture, installation, image, performance, or time-based media. Throughout the course particular attention will be given to challenging the supremacy of image as the dominant form of documentation. Students will develop projects that utilize less predictable approaches in considering the artistic gesture and its documentation as simultaneous processes in the making of artworks.