Category Archives : Aesthetics

Reimagining the Urban: Raquel Gutiérrez

This entry was posted in Aesthetics Blog Reimagining the Urban - September 2013 and tagged Reimagining the Urban gentrification SOMA on by .

Arriving in San Francisco, I am reminded that this city in large part is designed to the scale of the average human being, with humane commuting strategies that put Los Angeles to shame. But what makes the space here different is that there is less of it. Space that accommodates a multiplicity of households has already been spoken for but that doesn’t stop a rightfully entitled newly moneyed class from coming in and taking it. It makes an object like the Google Bus an easy receptacle to fill with collective fear and loathing. Never mind the fact that our lives are that much better because Google exists. Admit it or you can just e-mail me from your gmail accounts quietly. No one has to know how much you enjoyed playing the Moog when Google honored Bob Moog’s 78th birthday last year.

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Reimagining the Urban: Judy Nemzoff

This entry was posted in Aesthetics Blog Reimagining the Urban - September 2013 and tagged Reimagining the Urban placemaking thoughts on creativity sustainable model on by .

I’m participating in an Americans for the Arts Creative Placemaking webinar series that defines creative placemaking as, “the intersection of when place making by design has art and creativity at the forefront.” This definition presumes that—by building partnerships and crafting policy that addresses defining places with outcomes that include creative, financial, and social success—you must also place creativity and art making in the hands of artists.

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City, Arts and Public Spaces: Nick Kaye

This entry was posted in Aesthetics Blog City Arts and Public Spaces - June 2013 and tagged City Arts and Public Spaces Site SiteWorks on by .

Contemporary notions of site and place emphasize experiences of instability, displacement and multiplicity. In the context of anthropological and performance theory addressing the performance of place and site, including Marc Auge’s influential Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity (1995), Miwon Kwon’s One Place After Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity (2004), and linked concepts of “theatre/archaeology,” the stability and continuity of site is called into question. In this work, a site is approached firstly as a construct that is a function of multiple aspects: sites are palimpsestual and simultaneous, embracing diverse material, historical, cultural, spatial, and personal aspects, for different visitors or occupants at different times.

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CREATIVE TIME: Colleen Killingsworth

This entry was posted in Aesthetics Blog CREATIVE TIME - October 2012 and tagged Creative Time making digital media communicate on by .

When I read the keyword “making” I was immediately struck with a handful of thoughts about what it means to make something in the artistic sense. I work mainly in the medium of digital media, and in watching my own processes as well as those of my peers, I have come to believe that making something is much more about giving than it is about objectively producing.

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ART/CITY: Kathleen Reinhardt

This entry was posted in Aesthetics Blog ART/CITY - March 2012 and tagged community civic life art city space-making social change on by .

In relation to the arts and civic life, the question I am wrestling with right now is… how engagement-based practices through an anchoring of the artist in the community and space-making through art can occur and why. I am focusing on several projects by black artists (Wangechi Mutu, Edgar Archeneaux, Rick Lowe, Theaster Gates) committed to creating sustainable cultural moments, and how these cultural moments can be of importance not only for the community they are created in, but also for an art audience.

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ART/CITY: Plinio Hernandez

This entry was posted in Aesthetics Blog ART/CITY - March 2012 and tagged art city grassroots popuphood on by .

In October of 2011, I was asked to come on board as the public relations manager for a urban renewal pilot project called popuphood. This project gave six months free rent to five local groups of people to start businesses in previously empty storefronts located in the historical Old Oakland neighborhood, a few blocks south of downtown Oakland.

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Making Time at Human Resources: Carol Stakenas

This entry was posted in Aesthetics Blog Making Time at Human Resources - February 2012 and tagged performance making time LACE on by .

LACE has been a crucial participant in Los Angeles artistic production for over three decades. One can argue that LACE’s existence emerged directly from the creative intensity generated in Los Angeles in the 1970’s. More specifically, performance art was a driving force behind the emergence of Los Angeles’s alternative spaces, including LACE. At the same time, performance-based activities provided a central platform for three new forms of contemporary practice to emerge: performance art, video art and public practices.

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Making Time at Human Resources: Alexandro Segade

This entry was posted in Aesthetics Blog Making Time at Human Resources - February 2012 and tagged making time human resources PoLAAT on by .

Central to the PoLAAT is a performance lab in which participants are trained in the tactics and techniques of the Post-Living Ante-Action Theater. Classes are comprised of exercises designed to educate the participants in the five principles: 1) Estrangement, 2) Indistinction, 3) Suspension of Beliefs, 4) Mandate to Participate and 5) Inspirational Critique. Songs based on these principles are taught to the group.

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Making Time at Human Resources: Suzanne Lacy

This entry was posted in Aesthetics Blog Making Time at Human Resources - February 2012 and tagged performance making time human resources on by .

TWO WORKS I’m thinking about:

1) Otis Public Practice at CAA: Radical pedagogy and educational critique are key concepts in current debates on artistic public practices. Pedagogical models are explored, re-imagined, and deployed by art practitioners in highly diverse projects comprising laboratories, discursive platforms, temporary schools, participatory workshops, and libraries.

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Making Time at Human Resources: Jennifer Doyle

This entry was posted in Aesthetics Blog Making Time at Human Resources - February 2012 and tagged making time visual human resources literary on by .

My work was never organized by a commitment to a disciplinary framework. I can talk at length about disciplinary formations, however. Like – what cultural studies enables for literary scholars – the disinterest many literary scholars have in a reified notion of “the literary,” our sense of happiness in jettisoning the canon, our glee in the discovery that unloading that dead discursive weight didn’t require abandoning our fondness for the formal, the textual.

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