Institution/Critique: Within, Against, Beyond

Undergraduate / Graduate

Students in this course will study creative applications to institutional engagement and institutional critique via material, social, scholarly, and embodied/movement research. This course will be scaffolded by conversation/debate with guest practitioners directly engaged with questions regarding art funding structures and alternative economies, ideological roadblocks, carceral culture in the contemporary landscape, and arts criticism. Students will study critical methods to making and presenting art vis-à-vis artist-run institutions of all kinds, particularly those emergent over the last sixty years. Students will leave class with an increased sense of artistic approaches to institutional engagement, refusal, and intervention as a series of tactics and strategies rooted in space, generosity, and research. We will play throughout the course with interpretations of work, production, and resolution, but students should be prepared to spend the quarter responding to readings, viewings, visits, and conversation, and eventually develop and complete a final collaborative project. This course will be of particular interest to students working collaboratively or in social practice, engaging in social or institutional critique, participating in the programming and administrative side of the arts, and those who generally find themselves feeling awkward in whatever they understand as The Art World.