Art and The Public Sphere

(4 Credits)

Art and the Public Sphere: Other Architectures What is a public sphere and how is it activated and delineated? By and for whom? And how is private domestic life structured? And what forms of social life cannot be accommodated in either? We will consider the way such social spaces are articulated by, among other things: physical architecture and infrastructure; media and communication technologies; the economic instruments of colonial and racial capitalism; state policies and policing; and cis-heteropatriarchal and ableist moralisms. We will look at the ongoing reorganization of these spaces (through, for example, land appropriation, domicide, “slum” clearance, redlining, predatory loans, moral panics, rezoning, sacrifice zones, and the risks and restrictions accompanying the recent pandemic). At the same time, we will look at alternative formations, some found in different building traditions, some created by artists or imagined by poets, and some defined through irregular forms of movement and/or gathering that the planners did not plan for. Authors and artists studied may include Jürgen Habermas, Kristin Ross, Leon Battista Alberti, Angela Mitroupolous, Denise Ferreira da Silva and Paula Chakrabarty, Veronica Gago and Luci Cavallero, Jun'ichirō Tanizaki, Kengo Kuma, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, AbdouMaliq Simone, Michel de Certeau, Maria Lugones, Sara Ahmed, Fernand Deligny, Claudio Medeiros and Victor Galdino, Hélio Oiticica, Gordon Matta-Clark, Lygia Clark, Park MacArthur and Constantina Zavitsanos, Erica Gressman, Italo Calvino, Renee Gladman, Natalie Diaz and Zoe Leonard.