Critical Spatial Practice: Art / Architecture / Landscape / Urbanism

3 units

Critical Spatial Practice reads the history of art, architecture, landscape, and urbanism across the grain in an effort to tease out latent affinities and to heighten meaningful antagonisms. In particular, this class takes a critical look at the ways in which creative practice has situated itself in relation to politics, power, society, and space, while maintaining a certain autonomy from each of these registers. Themes such as historic and collective memory; empire and war; publics and counterpublics; city and countryside; institutions and the everyday; will all be central tropes as we ask questions of what, exactly, provokes one to make. Each of these disciplines shares a certain projective and critical orientation to the world-but what is it that makes their methods so distinct? What might we learn from knowledge of these differences? Where do shared passions break down? As critical practitioners, we look to make sense of the world-while our search for meaning may take radically different forms.Throughout the term, we will be focusing on a range of projects, movements, artists/practitioners, and groups that take seriously the situatedness of their work. We will cover practices that might fall under more recognized categories, such as performance, land art, ecology, social practice, everyday urbanism, pedagogy, curation, and installation. We will interrogate the modes of production as well as modes of distribution that creative practitioners work within and against. We will look at the history of artists and designers engaging the built and natural worlds in ways that exceed the disciplinary frameworks of their time. From the Dada excursions to the Situationist Derives, from the urban representation of the CIAM grille to the urban choreography of Daniel Buren, and from the Romantic geography of Humboldt to the displaced geography of the Atlas Group. Throughout, we will be reading foundational texts-theoretical, historical, and methodological-that help situate these projects and movements within their contemporary milieu. By focusing on the context of these practices, this course has its eye on the many conceptual elisions and canonical lacunas that emerge in disciplinary-specific histories from the early 20th century to the present-while also operating as a retroactive genealogy of the aspirations of the Sam Fox School. Weekly meetings will be structured around an organizing theme with related readings, screenings, and viewings. Each class will consist of a short lecture by the instructor framing the topic, a student presentation weaving a network of thought around a single specific work/project and subsequent discussion. Final projects will critically engage the themes of the course as students produce a publication, installation, video, or performance that takes a position.