Encountering Art Live

Catalog description

How is artistic work transformed through its encounter with an audience, and how can we create art in innovative forms with the audience's journey in mind? Live Art, an umbrella term for various art mediums centered on the live encounter with the audience, originated with working-class artists of color who found themselves unrepresented in the predominantly white, gallery-based performance art world. This innovative art form resists definition, functioning as a research engine that constantly reinvents itself and operates outside mainstream aesthetics and the art economy. This course explores Live Art in the UK - a key center for its development and recognition - introducing students through site visits and artists meetings to iconic spaces such as Shunt, BAC, and Forest Fringe, as well as influential works in one-on-one performance, instruction-based pieces, auto-teatro, sound walks, and more. Students will create their own live art works (in small groups) experimenting with unusual forms and spaces, while interacting with "liveness." Thinking with Live Art leads us to consider the political responsibility inherent in inviting people to bear witness to an artistic or political action. This course will be offered in January-Term 2026. This course is taught by Tania El Khoury. This course will be taught at NYU London and will count as an Away J-Term course.