ARC Blog Archive

This an archive from the ARC website blog that was active from 2010-2024. Most of the posts coincided with an event – the ARC staff is in the process of updating the information below, cross referencing to events, and including appropriate dates. We have about 500 to still add. Please check back!

News

March 6, 2024

What makes a memory? Is it a fixed thing, or part of one’s imagination? Can history be considered a collective memory? Writer Deborah Miranda set out to explore these questions on January 29, 2024, through a reading of her work and a conversation with Professor Estelle Tarica. Tarica’s class, titled “Indigenous and Latinx Pathways of Memory in California” was in attendance, filling the room. She modeled her class after the concept of the “memory path,” a term revitalized in a contemporary anti-colonial context by the Bolivian indigenous scholar Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui.

February 29, 2024

Alutiiq artist and scholar Tanya Lukin Linklater’s 2023 residency with the Arts Research Center was a gift. Tanya traveled to Berkeley with dance artists Ceinwen Gobert and Ivanie Aubin-Malo to explore her current choreographic work in progress, Ewako ôma askiy: This then is the earth. Open rehearsals were held at the Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive between November 1-4, 2023. It was an honor to bear witness to Tanya’s practice, which is intricate and intentional.

February 21, 2024

What’s in a word? On October 5, poet dg okpik visited the Arts Research Center to give a craft talk following her Lunch Poems reading earlier in the day. Interested in getting to the very core of a word, parsing it apart, and unfurling its layers, okpik described her process, background, and current life as a storyteller for her Inupiaq lineage.

January 30, 2024

What does it mean to be a Latinx poet? How is one’s identity at play in their artwork? Is a poem a static artifact, or a living thing? On September 28, poets J. Michael Martinez and Aracelis Girmay set out to explore these questions through readings of their work and a conversation facilitated by Professor John Alba Cutler. The room, busy and bright, was filled with Professor Cutler’s students who had recently read the poets’ work. Their attentiveness held Martinez and Girmay’s work tightly. 

April 11, 2023

When learning the Novel, you learn that the first novel emerged in the late 17th century. Such novels recorded voyages to strange new lands and evenstranger bodies who peopled the land. On their return, there grew a complete market to consume the literature that was the spectacle of difference. With the innovation of photographs at the turn of the century, every voyage was reserved with at least two weapons: the pen and the camera.

April 5, 2023

Poet Claire (Meuschke) Hong visited the Arts Research Center on March 2, 2023 for a craft talk following her reading through the Lunch Poems series. The full recording of the craft talk is available for viewing on ARC’s YouTube channel, here, and the Lunch Poems reading is available for viewing here.

March 23, 2023

How is nature poetic? How can Indigenous languages create a new sense of intimacy with one’s environment? On Thursday, March 23rd, three Hawaiian poets came together with author and professor Dr. Craig Santos Perez to explore these questions through a reading of their work. Featuring D. Kealiʻi Mackenzie, Donovan Kūhiō Colleps, and Noʻu Revilla, the three poets drew from similar wells of experience but imbued their poems with distinct styles and voices.

March 22, 2023

What does it mean to be a diasporic Indigenous writer? Is there such a category as trans-pacific Indigenous writing? How does an Indigenous poet write while living apart from their homeland? On March 8, poets Michael Wasson & Alice Te Punga Somerville came together virtually with Arts Research Center director Beth Piatote to address these questions through readings of their work and a Q&A.

February 22, 2023

How important is historical accuracy, and who determines an “accurate” account of the past? How does art allow us to access history in a more time-forward way? Dillon Chitto’s Indigifuturisitic play, Pueblo Revolt, sets out to answer these questions, reframing the 1680 Santa Fe Pueblo Revolt—the only successful Native uprising against colonial power in North America—through a modern lens. Following two orphaned brothers, Feem and Ba’homa, Pueblo Revolt watches what ordinary people do in the face of calamity.

October 6, 2022

Fall 2022 Poetry Reading and Craft Talk, held on October 6th 2022 (event info here). The full recording of the event is available for viewing on our YouTube channel, here.

February 28, 2022

Fall 2021 ARC Poetry Fellows Reading, held on December 08th 2021 (event info here). The full recording of the event is available for viewing on our YouTube channel, here.


I write to keep a question alive (even if I walk away from it).–Lindsay Choi


Say:

February 14, 2022

Camille Dungy & Ross Gay: Black Nature, Poetry, & Coexistence, in conversation with Aya de León and Maurya Kerr (event info here), held on Oct 20, 2021. The full recording of the event is available for viewing on our YouTube channel, here.


The imagination can accommodate whoever might come along.

December 8, 2021

Process notes for Heliotrope (manuscript in progress)

"Document titled 'Process notes for Heliotrope (manuscript in progress),' with a quote by Ludwig Wittgenstein. Includes a Korean poem '문둥이' with English translation notes and a commentary."

To return | a persimmon | fanned in sunset | in the driveway


This year I gave up the idea of maps. Otherwise known as the net cast over the body of the earth for conquest. 

~~~

Horror/ified


When approaching this idea of coexistence, I found my thoughts being magnetized towards nature. Ecological doom. Water wars. Resource scarcity/ hoarding. Anthropocentrism at its finest. After being in cohort with folks and after being given some space to pick through the ways coexistence exists…I started thinking about horror.

Multitudes in Coexistence

TW: Abuse and Violence


As I write and delete this page for the 100th time, I keep coming back to the Arts Research Center’s definition of Coexistence:

And I try to dissect every word. Try to align it with my thoughts and create poetry. 

Yet, I begin to think about my childhood which did not embrace coexistence with open arms. 

Instead, it forced comfortability in disillusionments that my life was accidental and worthless. 

Confounded in cycles of abuse and abandonment. 

My Marred Tongue


To live in one language
to live long enough to live 
in another,
to remember things 
you lived in one
but now inscribe in the other,
traces left 
on the rim 
of the glass of memory
now color your lips
as you kiss
your enemy

Coexisting with the Brutality of History

Time of Death


A black is born with a time of death. 

Benjamin button’s origin story 
Strip(p)ed black life of its truth
And paraded itself as unique. 

Black longevity is a progression to birth
Misread as a sidestep of death

A sacrificial man teleported 
3 days later than death had planned 
For whiteness this was mere teleportation 
For many others, alien abduction of time and space
A repatriation of life forced into the rhetoric of conquest 

November 29, 2021

Why not start at the darkest place?

Morgan Parker, before reciting any poetry from the page, speaks it naturally. Imagine her words: yourself, to begin with darkness. If we can see Darkness as a beginning, an end is not an end but a shift. Darkness is a transitory space that allows for a reposition, for an/other way or possibility. This returns to an earlier line of Cameron Awkward-Rich’s: “Some days I am the darkest thing I’ll see”. Imagine again: to see oneself darkly. And particularly, to know it is only a beginning opens deep relief. 

August 1, 2021

ARC is thrilled that our partnership with Engaging the Senses Foundation and our Poetry & the Senses initiative is a feature in California Arts Council’s premier new arts & culture magazine, DREAM!

May 20, 2021

You listened well – Ramona Naddaff
to witness the miracle of your heart on the outside. – Ken Ueno
I have never known myself any other way – reelaviolette botts-ward
What does it feel like to stretch without longing? – Vethea Cerna Cole
Fire makes a bad lover, the rumor goes – Sara Mumolo
and yet, you are still here – Elizabeth Zhiying Feng
I experience grief in space – Maw Shein Win
I put you down in the poem. – Noah Warren*

April 12, 2021

“You are getting dressed. You stand in front
of a mirror. And your peers are that mirror
telling you: You’re not wearing pants.
Why aren’t you wearing pants?”

How does my body make room for
another who perceives my senses?
—Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge

“What would I do if this was a momentwhere somebody cared?”

April 6, 2021

Yes, there is art that sits on canvas or the page but there is also art that sits on bodies. We know this because we feel. We feel because we want to live. And though it may seem at times an impossible task, it is one completely worthy of you. From here, we create.

December 15, 2020

Danez Smith and Patricia Smith, who were meant to read together on campus this past March, graciously joined us online instead. This past December, they spent nearly a half an hour each reading their poetry for our virtual audience, and afterwards, spoke with one another as well as some folks from ARC. Our Program Director, Laurie Macfee, as well as one of our 2020 Poetry & the Senses Fellows, Menat El Attamah, engaged them in a range of topics from the pandemic to the poetic imagination.

December 1, 2020

Ajuan Mance, a local artist and professor at Mills College, graced ARC with her virtual presence near the end of this past November. Her talk was focused on a project that she completed over the course of six years, from 2010 to 2016, called 1001 Black Men. Just as is implied in its title, the project is made up of 1001 portraits drawn of Black men whom Mance encountered personally, mostly in the Bay Area, but throughout the United States as well.

November 15, 2020

In spite of the many moments lost to the global upheaval this year, the Arts Research Center made an attempt to virtually celebrate an exhibit that has yet to make its date. On November 12, our director Julia Bryan-Wilson was joined by her co-curator Olivia Ardui to present the exhibition catalog for their show “Histories of Dance,” which was scheduled to take place in 2020 at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo but was drastically reduced due to the pandemic.

November 5, 2020

On this last and very tense election day, the Arts Research Center had the pleasure of virtually hosting Erin McElory of the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, whose talk was a welcome distraction to us all. Topically, they began their talk by recounting the current president’s roots in the realm of private property and capital accumulation, noting that his father Fred Trump accrued his wealth in his role as a New York City landlord.

November 3, 2020

This semester, our director Julia Bryan-Wilson is teaching a class intertwined with our Visual Activism series, also called “Visual Activism.” Instead of generating our own account of Michael Rakowitz’s recent ARC talk, we’ve decided to feature five unique responses from students in the course.

October 8, 2020

This semester, our director Julia Bryan-Wilson is teaching a class intertwined with our Visual Activism series, also called “Visual Activism.” Instead of generating our own account of Alfredo Jaar’s recent ARC talk “When the Music Stops,” we’ve decided to feature four unique responses from the students in the course.


Tess Futterman:

October 5, 2020

All of us at the Arts Research Center were fortunate enough to kick off our Fall 2020 programming with a virtual visit from Favianna Rodriguez, a local Bay area visual artist whose work is inextricable from her aims as an activist. Her talk was the first in a series called Visual Activism, which was programmed in conjunction with our director Julia Bryan-Wilson’s art history course by the same name. 

May 5, 2020

In celebration of Earth Day’s 50th anniversary, U.S. Poet Laureate Joy Harjo joined Beth Piatote and the Arts Research Center on April 22nd for a virtual poetry reading and conversation. Born in Tusla, Oklahoma and of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, Harjo is the first Native American to serve as the U.S. Poet Laureate. She was reappointed to a second term shortly after her ARC reading. Harjo shared her work that Wednesday evening with over 1200 attendees on YouTube Live; she read from collections old and new, even singing from what she said is an upcoming album. 

On April 16th, the Arts’ Research Center collaborated with UC Berkeley’s College of Letters and Science course titled “Public Art and Belonging” to host Cannupa Hanska Luger “on” campus—though, in light of the pandemic, this event occurred virtually on Zoom. Luger was kind enough to join us from the comfort of his New Mexico home and, with the aid of his website, tell us about his artistic processes and the projects which he has helped to facilitate as of late.

April 28, 2020

You are allowed to laugh today. You are allowed more than a hidden giggled breath. Let this be a reminder that laughter that does not have to replace heaviness. You are allowed whatever joy knocks at your heart. For whatever length.

(These days, I laugh in short, quick bursts. My brother’s always sending me dad jokes: I be preaching on Amazon, call me Prime Minister)

April 27, 2020

anna’s mother began the day in her own bed in san diego a long way away from her birthbed in india. i began the day leaning over and remembering this marriage. i also recalled renee gladman beginning her day inside the world trying to look at it, but it was lying on her face making it hard to see. the light was shimmying and dull in the middle. our bed is not a front line and if not on the front line what do you do with these mounds of safety |

April 2, 2020

March 31st marked the eleventh annual Trans Day of Visibility, perfectly cuing this reflection on our most recent event held on campus. Trans artists and activists Tourmaline and Chris Vargas came together to present their film work, followed by a conversation with Eric Stanley of the Gender and Women’s Studies department, on the fifth of March.

At the end of February, curator Horace Ballad, Ph.D. visited us from WIlliams College to speak on his recent exhibit “possible selves: queer foto vernaculars.” Ballard is the Lead Curator of American Art at the Williams College Museum of Art (WCMA), and thus began his talk with a brief description of his perspective concerning art history and the canon. He admitted that though he does not believe that the discipline will open itself up to change at any point in his lifetime, “we don’t need Americanness anymore, just great humanness.” 

February 26, 2020

Northwestern University’s Shanya Silverstein came to campus on February 19 to present a specific component of her current research: the traditional dance of dabke and its relationship to the contemporary political turmoil surrounding the Syrian civil war. This form of performance, which is deeply tied to individual localities within and across Syria, has in recent years emerged more and more frequently through video footage posted to social media sites such as Facebook.

February 5, 2020

Poetry & the Senses has launched! | Our celebration of the launch of Poetry & the Senses was a joyous combination of indulgence in the arts and critical concern for this year’s theme. Participating readers—Indira Allegra, Chiyuma Elliot, and Lyn Hejinian—were introduced by our director Julia Bryan-Wilson, and further lauded by the director of the Arts + Design department on campus, Anthony Cascardi, Dean of Arts & Humanities.

February 1, 2020

Poetry and the Senses has launched! This program has been in development since October of 2019 following the most generous grant in ARC’s history, courtesy of the Engaging the Senses Foundation. The two-year initiative kicked off this January and will continue throughout the year. 

January 27, 2020

On November 12 of this past year, ARC celebrated the completion of the upcoming issue of Third Text, a journal of critical perspectives on contemporary art and culture, guest edited in part by our director Julia Bryan-Wilson. We hosted a small get-together at the Beta Lounge in Berkeley to collect our community around the concept of amateurism, and its many intrigues and merits.

January 9, 2020

December 1st is World AIDS Day, dedicated to a crisis which is still in its deepest throes. ARC co-sponsored a special film screening to commemorate the day with the California College of the Arts—this being the 30th Annual Day With(out) Arts film “Still Beginning.” Composed of seven contemporary short films solicited by the film’s producer, Visual AIDS, “Still Beginning” screened in over 115 venues on that same day all over the world.

January 8, 2020

Thursday, November 7th of 2019 was marked by a conversation between Mark Godfrey and Kenyatta Hinkle, hosted by ARC at the David Brower Center. The two—Godfrey of the Tate Modern and Hinkle of UC Berkeley’s Art Practice Department—came together to discuss the opening of Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power at the de Young Museum the night prior. By the time the collection reached the de Young it had travelled to five different locations throughout the United States.

October 22, 2019

Julie Mehretu has already entered the canon as a contemporary painter and artist, despite having just begun curating her mid-career exhibition. She took a brief hiatus from this work in Los Angeles to fly to Berkeley and engage in conversation with our director, Julia Bryan-Wilson. The two traversed a variety of topics concerning Mehretu’s lifetime of work, including her inspirations, her processes, her negotiations of history, and living in the present time.

October 7, 2019

Arts Research Center Partners with Engaging the Senses Foundation

to Fund Poetry Program at UC Berkeley


September 12, 2019

“Colonialism is not a thinking machine, nor a body endowed with reasoning faculties. It is violence in its natural state, and it will only yield when confronted with greater violence.”Frantz Fanon

June 15, 2019

AW: Claudia La Rocco’s And What’s More is the third installment of her science-fiction Olivia Trilogy, a literary, performance, art, and sound project that plays with traditional audience/maker/doer relationships. I was one of four artists commissioned by La Rocco to “read” And What’s More in and through their respective art forms.

May 22, 2019

When we talk of the reproduction of sound, or of music, we usually mean either a musical score–perhaps in the Western script of five-line staffs, clefs and bars–or a sound recording, whether analogue (on an external support like a disc, cylinder, tape) or digital recording. We don’t usually consider sound “reproduction” in relation to biological reproduction–the sort involving, for example, sex, embryos, mothers, fathers, to say nothing of the asexual reproduction of cells, bacteria, and viruses.

May 15, 2019

ARC Fellows: The Archaeologist and the Replica: 3D printing at Aidonia (Greece)

Submitted by our 2019 ARC Fellow Team:

Kim Shelton (Classics/Ancient History and Mediterranean Archaeology) and David Wheeler (Ancient History and Mediterranean Archaeology)

May 1, 2019

If We Must Die: Conversations about Grieving, Social Justice, Healing & Creating is a proposal initiated by Department of Art Practice faculty Kenyatta A.C Hinkle and Ree Botts an African Diaspora PhD student researching Black feminist spatial imaginaries and artistic curation as praxis in terms of self and communal care.

On the 12th of February, 2019, Kevin Kelly – the editor of WIRED Magazine – published an article called “Mirrorworld”. The piece, revolving around the future of the Augmented Reality technologies, describes a constructed reality of contextualized objects, images mediated by machines and pure information overload – where everything has its own virtual double and immersion is achieved through the merging of the physical with the digital. “The mirror world does not yet fully exist, but it is coming” he writes.

March 1, 2019

The Art as Critique Conference that took place on Friday, March 1st 2019, arose out of a series of collaborative discussions on the project of maintaining, claiming, and mobilizing art as political critique, as something wrapped up with ongoing global struggle and crisis. The day long symposium was concluded by a joint lecture and discussion with Koyo Kouoh, co-founder of the Senegalese RAW Material Company and recently appointed director of the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa, and Vìctor Albarracin, Artistic Director of lugar a dudas.

December 1, 2018

The ARC Fellows Program advances interdisciplinary research in the arts at UC Berkeley by supporting self-nominated pairs of graduate students and faculty members as they pursue semester-long collaborative projects of their own design.

The goals of this program are:

  • to encourage collaboration across disciplines, departments, and colleges;

  • to cultivate a community of artists and arts scholars with interdisciplinary interests;

November 7, 2018

How do we address the divided histories that define who we are?

September 21, 2018

After completing her masters and Ph.D in art history at New York University Aruna D’Souza began what would become an acclaimed career as a writer. In conversation with Allan deSouza the two talked about Aruna’s thoughts on art historical practice and where it has led her as a writer. “I didn’t want to write in footnotes” D’Souza said, “I wanted my intuitions to coalesce into thinking”. D’Souza spoke of feeling confined by art historical practice, and frustrated when she was unable follow her own trajectory of thinking using art history’s typical methodology.

September 13, 2018

Concerned with the way in which a white epistemology breeds a racial, capitalist consciousness, SA Smythe — writer, translator, performer, and scholar — began their presentation with a performance of their poems “Some Call it a Comeback” and “Languish”, a small selection of their greater body of poetic works that speaks to the Black diaspora, Black Mediterranean epistemology, cultural memory, and trans embodiment.

September 10, 2018

Susan Meiselas’ latest exhibition Mediations, on display at SFMOMA until October 31st, is a summation of her most important work from the past several decades. In conversation with Natalia Brizuela, Interim Director of the Arts Research Center, and Leigh Raiford, associate professor and chair of the African American Studies department, Meiselas discussed the curation of her exhibition, revealing the importance of her artistic hand in constructing transitional narratives.

May 1, 2018

In March 2018, Asma Kazmi and Gabriella Willenz went to Las Vegas for artistic research utilizing the ARC Fellowship funds. For Kazmi, this trip was an expansion of the ideas she has been pursuing in her work called Cranes and Cube, which maps the radically changing sites and topographies of various cities of the Persian Gulf region. For Willenz, an interest in locating systems of power and studying a city steeped in the binarily oppositional forces of the religious and the secular became an impetus for this trip.

At the start of the semester, we sought to explore inter-medial artistic representations of toxic ecologies that complicated the legibility of scientific data about radiation and chemical exposures. While Dan approached the topic from critical media ecologies focusing on the connection between media infrastructures, biopolitics and human life, Natalia drew from theoretical biology bringing together theories of embodiment and “new” crip materialisms to collectively consider how art contributed to visual models of anthropogenic change.

Biosensory data, and the data-driven categorizations it supports, are increasingly present in daily life, measuring our behavior, physiology, and the environment. Data-driven categorizations of safe/criminal, healthy/unhealthy, or normal/pathological often masquerade as scientific and objective, and biosensing technologies often promote a particular normative vision of the good life. Biosensing tracks not only individuals but also cities, with smart city sensing promising efficiency, safety, and happiness–but for whom and by what norms?

The oldest surviving comprehensive Greek botanical work was written by Dioscorides around the first century AD. Other technical authors from around the same time were Galen on medicine, Ptolemy on the mathematical sciences, and Artemidorus on dream interpretation. All four emphasize that their writings incorporate both received tradition and experience acquired through practical application. All four were extremely successful in communicating technical knowledge, as their wide medieval reception in Greek, Latin, and Arabic proves.

April 24, 2018

Trevor Paglen’s work and interpretation of space are great examples of the association between art and research. Blending photography, installation, investigative journalism and science, Paglen’s approach reveals that there is always more to an image than what we anticipate, and that these perceptions announce strong political meanings as well.

April 23, 2018

Eric McDougall, designer and advisor for tech companies and artists across the Bay Area, adopts the term “Social Architecture” trying to make connections between design strategies and their interactions with the world around them. After graduating from the College of Environmental Design at UC Berkeley, McDougall’s experience with music and set design brought him to work closer with this industry. As he explains, eventually video took over much of the space of live stage concerts, and that was when the designer started pursuing graphic works more intensively.

April 18, 2018

Porpentine Charity Heartscape’s works show us how open and collaborative video games can be. Their role as a designer, programmer, curator, and writer is an example of the broad spectrum of reach the game media has, and that the creative process comes both from the idealizers but the users as well.

April 2, 2018

Acclaimed Spanish architect and recent Berkeley-Rupp Prize recipient Carme Pinós shared some of her work and thoughts on architecture with a packed audience that Monday night at BAMPFA. “The first part of this talk, I will talk about the city. The second part will be about structures.” Pinós explained how she approached her projects, and the selections she had made for that talk.

March 26, 2018

Until recently, Silicon Valley was known as a diffuse agglomeration of unprepossessing office parks stretched out along the freeways extending some 100 miles down the peninsula between San Francisco and San Jose. This amorphous place began to take a decisive form following WWII, when land rich but cash poor Stanford University sought new means of generating much needed income—they could not sell any of the 6000 acres they owned.

March 21, 2018

Lynn Hershman Leeson’s work as a new media experimental artist was always ahead of its time. “My work is waiting for your generation to be born, because it is your generation that actually understands it”, Hershman Leeson says when reflecting on the repercussion her pieces had. The artist’s provocative works discussing the relationships between humans and technology pioneered the fields of net-based media art as well as video, film, sculpture, performance, amongst others.

March 17, 2018

By the end of the performance, the stage of Zellerbach Playhouse was strewn with costumes, toys, and vegetables. Five white squares that had served as platforms and pedestals for dancing were empty. The microphones the performers used to address us, to sing, and to provoke “historical impossibilities” lay silent on a table.

March 9, 2018

“We are all experts in amateurism”, stated ARC Director Julia Bryan-Wilson during her introductory remarks for the “Amateurism Across the Arts” Conference. The events were hosted at the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology, and that was a special addition to the day’s atmosphere, because the museum’s current exhibition “Face to Face: Looking at Objects That Look at You” was itself within the context of the conference, co-curated by the Hearst staff and 14 UC Berkeley first-year students.

March 5, 2018

“Perennial is a neologism, a new term, and I am here to present this new term for you today”, started the lecturer Gina Pell. One important characteristic of “Perennial” is that it is, on top of everything else, a mindset. Pell explained how the term in a sense is a response to generational divisions or groups, such as millennials, but that it also tries to break off with the idea of categorizing each generation in the first place.

February 26, 2018

Nowadays a very effective way of understanding and calling attention to some absurdities happening in our world is to address them with a hint of sarcasm. That is precisely the way the “Natural History Museum”, their project, was idealized. Co-founder Beka Economopoulos shared with the audience how this project came to be, and some of the actions performed over the last few years. The museum’s “Trojan Horse” strategy is not only an approach to surprise the “enemy”, but to recognize that once being an insider, there is space for conversation.

February 21, 2018

In this week’s lecture, Jacob Gaboury, assistant professor of new media history and theory at UC Berkeley presented the connections between experimentations in Computer Sciences and Art. Focusing on the period of the 1960’s to the 1980’s, Gaboury organized the talk in three parts: First presenting two case studies on experimental computer sciences, second exposing the relationship between public and private funding in experimental research, and third, focusing on the Bay-Area scene and its specificities.

February 13, 2018

The idea of translation can give a lot of room for interpretation. To translate is in itself already an action that can have multiple meanings. Presenters Ahmad Diab, Anneka Lenssen, and Kathy Zarur interpreted some of the outcomes related to this discussion through an informal roundtable around one particular piece of writing that broadened the idea of translation beyond words.

February 12, 2018

Invited to UC Berkeley through the Art Practice 2018 Regents’ Fellowship program, Emily Jacir’s lecture at BAMPFA was the very first activity on the artists’ agenda while spending time in the Bay Area for the next ten days.

February 5, 2018

“Is this a required lecture for a class?” Asked the person seating next to me in a packed auditorium. Seeing Nicholas Negroponte’s talk was definitely an event not to be missed. Founder of MIT’s Media Lab, and the One Laptop per Child Association, Negroponte’s visionary thinking is inspirational and encouraging, and also shows us the importance of timing, collaborative works and, mainly, to think one step ahead, “visiting the future”, as he says.

January 31, 2018

“I am a lesbian feminist filmmaker”, Barbara Hammer emphasized as the lecture started. Her production of over eighty iconic films and videos touches upon topics that were just starting to be discussed almost fifty years ago, when her career started. Hammer is one of the most important names when it comes to woman directors working on experimental film and performances, thinking about cinema beyond the big screen.

January 24, 2018

Craig Baldwin’s pace and excitement as a presenter directly reflects on his professional production. Media artist, filmmaker, instigator, provocateur… For the past thirty years Baldwin’s work is a great example of San Francisco’s alternative arts community. Known as an experimental filmmaker, Baldwin is also the main person behind the “Other Cinema”, an independent art house/ movie theater that works as a venue for counter-culture film and events located at Mission District, promoting and supporting alternative forms of film-making.

January 22, 2018

UC Berkeley’s Journalism school started off the Arts + Design lectures this semester by showcasing their understanding of assemblage through the various works and projects their students have been involved in the past few years. Journalism today is one of the key professions that has been learning how to reinvent the way they communicate with this fast changing world we live in. But one thing seems to remain the same: the focus of the discussion is not about the medium they use, but it will always be about the story they produce.

January 1, 2018

We hear a great deal these days about the importance of “creativity.” City planners tout the importance of attracting it; education leaders try to figure out how to cultivate it, and industry employers lament the dearth of employees who have it.  Meanwhile, those of us with long-term allegiances to the arts and design keep making, playing, fabricating, composing, and re-composing available materials into new combinations, ready to welcome new friends and new fields to the process.

ARC’s 2018-19 programs had a special focus on the critical potential of arts from the Global South. During the past year we asked questions about the relationship between art and critique from the standpoint of social and political exigencies of our times, by thinking with contemporary artists, writers, scholars and activists practicing in the global margins and zones of acute transition often called the Global South – from Africa, Latin America, South East Asia and the Middle East, to U.S.

November 20, 2017

Assembling through music happens all the time, but often we fail to notice how powerful this can be. Writer, curator and professor Josh Kun make this statement evident through his work “Hit Parade: Live in San Francisco”, that combines research, performance and curatorial works while discussing topics of gentrification in the Bay Area.

November 15, 2017

It might seem hard to believe for some of the younger generation today, but video and electronic art was not always a popular form of expression. “Today this kind of media is progressively being used by contemporary artists somehow through their work,” reflected Aebhric Coleman, director of the Kramlich Collection, the most influential private collection of new media/time based art in the world.

November 6, 2017

As an architect myself, I could hear the buzz amongst the students from the College of Environmental Design about that Monday’s lecture. Michael Rock’s reputation in the design community is very high, and the slideshow presentation in itself was already causing excitement. Rock’s current work as a creative director clearly builds on from his background as a designer, as he explains: “being a creative director – and no one really knows what that is- is taking different things and making them work together […] Creative directors structure stories”.

November 2, 2017

Artist Angie Wilson inspired the audience with her approach to textile art and the idea of “making” as a tool of empowerment. From “introspection rugs” to “protest curtains”, everyday objects are transformed through their materiality and meanings. Questions of tactility and texture intertwine with representation, individuality and resistance forming interactive pieces that are in conversation with numerous audiences, including our introspective selves.

October 18, 2017

Will Rawls’ strong and remarkable presence on stage is not limited to dance. In order to tell the audience about his experience, he decided to share a piece that he wrote about his life and its connections to movement and performance, that were represented through some of his inspiring anecdotes. “Rawls’ work addresses what it is to be black in performance and art”, introduced Julia Bryan-Wilson, Director of the Arts Research Center and Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art at UC Berkeley.

October 16, 2017

It was hard to find an empty seat that evening in the auditorium. Kimberly Drew was the guest speaker and Berkeley was excited to hear how outspoken she probably would be in person, as she is online. Kimberly Drew represents an important voice for black artists and the arts community. Creator of the Tumblr blog “Black Contemporary Art”, Kimberly Drew gained a lot of space on social media while still in Smith College, where she graduated with a B.A. in Art History and Africana Studies, and a concentration in Museum Studies.

October 9, 2017

Tony Abeyta and Corrina Gould’s presentation had a special connotation as it was held during Indigenous People’s day. While many parts of the country celebrate Columbus Day, Berkeley was actually the first city to, alternatively, establish Indigenous People’s Day, challenging the idea that Christopher Columbus “discovered” America. Although there is an effort towards the recognition of these debates, this is only one step towards change. And that resonates on the importance of the works of people such as Abeyta and Gould.

October 4, 2017

October 2, 2017

Tania Bruguera calls herself an “initiator”. Known for her political art and performance, Bruguera explains how her works create opportunities for reflection and conversation through the experiences they allow people to have. Born and trained in Cuba, from an early stage in her carrier Bruguera had to deal with repression and political implications related to her art. She believes those reactions actually tend to help “feed” her work and broaden the discussions she is trying to raise.

September 27, 2017

“Performance is happening everywhere today”, began Shannon Jackson, Associate Vice Chancellor for Arts + Design, UC Berkeley. Even though many would connect this term with theater, music or dance, it is easy to recognize how it can be related to several different practices and disciplines. From the practices of every-day-life, to speech and protests, we are constantly encountering examples of what performance means in our contemporary settings.

September 19, 2017

The work of a curator is one of great responsibility, but often in different ways. Not only does the curator construct stories and introduce different topics to the audience through creative approaches, but also, and mainly, they start a conversation.

September 13, 2017

About The 2017-18 Critical Theory Working Group “Collaborations, Co-Operatives, Coalition-Building”: Composer, historian, and civil rights activist Dr. Bernice Johnson Reagon once asserted, “if you’re in a coalition and you’re comfortable, you know it’s not a broad enough coalition.” Echoing Reagon’s sentiment, Judith Butler asserted in a recent public discussion at the BAMPFA that we do not have to have breakfast together, but we must try to find common interests across our divisionary lines.

September 11, 2017

As I was walking down the hallway at the Berkeley Arts Museum and Pacific Film Archive, I overheard: “This is where all the arts, curators and creative people in Berkeley will be tonight.” What a promising event! And I did not expect anything different.

September 6, 2017

It is always a great pleasure to have the opportunity to participate in a lecture with a curator that has a show on view.

July 1, 2017

Download the Arts + Design Access App and Claim Free tickets to Experiences!

Claim FREE tickets to arts and design experiences, performances, events, exhibits and more on Campus and in the bay area!

June 1, 2017

It’s been quite a year—for our country, for UC Berkeley, and for the Arts + Design Initiative.  We have navigated changes in our political landscape and confronted the challenge of maintaining free speech and freedom of assembly.

We are a university committed to sustaining the depth and breadth of our shared cultural life—across all creative fields, across a range of historical eras, and representing local, national, and global regions of the world.

May 12, 2017

This semester the Arts + Design Initiative presented a Spring 2017 season of lectures as part of our program Arts + Design Mondays @ BAMPFA. Lectures were organized with multiple units on campus including the Art, Technology, and Culture Colloquium, Arts Research Center, and The Future of Cultural Criticism.  Leaders and educators in arts and design from around the world spoke on Monday evenings at BAMPFA’s Theater.

May 1, 2017

In the coming years, the cities we live and breathe in will begin to become more connected and ‘smart’. Street lights will detect us walking down the street and turn on in our presence. Sound intensity and vibration sensors will sense pedestrian and car traffic and alter traffic lights to create safer streets. Cameras combined with image recognition will be able to detect when there is flooding, helping cities better plan road infrastructure.

Over the last few years, we have witnessed xenophobic, nationalist and autocratic regimes ascend to power in many parts of the world, with the exuberant support of large portions of their citizenries. In many cases, these regimes have endangered the lives of millions of people, and yet riff from popular vernaculars and style in ways that appeal to an ethos of anti-establishment and change.

Why do pictures made in different places and at different times look different? This question might sound so naïve as to not be worth addressing – after all, why wouldn’t our styles and techniques for depicting change over time, and vary across cultures? But this semester, Professor Whitney Davis and I have allowed ourselves to wonder about the answer to this question.

Our project, “Augmented Reality for the Public Good: Urban Engagement and Sustainability,” is a weekend-long workshop and “ideathon” scheduled for September 29 to October 1, 2017. The purpose of our event is to generate applications for mixed-media mobile technologies on the field of urban design and sustainability.

April 30, 2017

This spring 2017 semester at UC Berkeley featured an engaging and informative lecture series Thinking Through the Arts and Design at Berkeley: California Countercultures, organized by Big Ideas Courses and the Arts + Design Initiative. The course and embedded lecture series, which will occur again in Fall 2017, is open to the public each Wednesday at noon in BAMPFA’s Theater.

April 25, 2017

Cinema can be useful for landscape architects and other designers of the built environment. Over the course of the Spring semester, Professor Chip Sullivan and I have been exploring this proposition. We have delved into the body of previous theory on the intersection between architectural design and the art of filmmaking.

April 14, 2017

What do classes in costume design, product development, solar powered vehicles and needfinding in the wild all have in common? All four courses — along with dozens of others across departments and disciplines on campus — will be offered to UC Berkeley undergraduate students as part of a new certificate program that introduces design thinking as the critical and creative means to innovate, imagine and advance a globally just future.

April 3, 2017

UC Berkeley’s Spring Arts and Design Showcase:

Experience what’s being “Made at Berkeley”

 

February 27, 2017

Through this series my peers and I have been given chance to think together with some of the sharpest commentators on contemporary culture.  We glimpsed the dizzying possibilities of new genres of performance and cultural expression made possible by new media platforms.  The February  27th edition of the series was especially delightful. The evening featured two award-winning young black women on stage in conversation with each other. Against the fuschia backdrop a visor-clad, blue-black Alek Weck bursts forward as if from some sartorial future.

January 30, 2017

It was January 30th. By 6:30 pm the queue was already wrapped around the railing of the Berkeley Arts Museum and Pacific Film Archive. It was starting to feel like a bit of a party. Like a good Aquarian I am prone to read auspiciousness into the fact of sharing my 40th year with the inauguration of the Spring 2017 Arts and Design Mondays series by Judith Butler and Maggie Nelson’s talk. 

January 13, 2017

As Chancellor Dirks announced to the UC Berkeley community in November, our campus remains steadfast in our values, committed to the safety, growth, and well-being of all of our students, faculty, and staff.  The first week of our new semester (January 13-20, 2017) coincides with the Inauguration of a new President of the United States.  Recognizing that our campus is brimming with activities and events that address the timely issues of our shared political landscape, the offices for Equity & Inclusion and of Arts + Design have collaborated with Campus Public Affairs to 

December 7, 2016

From sculptures made of found wood stacked like a Rube Goldberg machine to wheeled robots that navigated obstacle courses, craft and creativity were on display across UC Berkeley’s campus at the end of the Fall 2016 as students across disciplines presented their final projects of the semester. The student creators were on hand to discuss their work, and most of the events were free and open to the public, giving the community an in-depth look at their projects.

December 1, 2016

Dear Campus Community,

We are thrilled to announce the creation of a new faculty leadership position, the Associate Vice Chancellor of Arts and Design, and equally delighted to inform you that Professor Shannon Jackson has agreed to take on this role.  As the current Director of the Arts Research Center, and the Richard and Rhoda Goldman Professor of Rhetoric and of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies, Shannon is uniquely qualified and positioned to develop and advance our aspirations in the realm of the Arts and Design.

November 1, 2016

UC Berkeley’s Fall Arts and Design Showcase: Bringing Talent into Focus


September 12, 2016

Dream of the Red Chamber, written by Cao Xueqin in the mid-18th century, is one of the four works known as China’s “Four Great Classical Novels.” More than 1,500 pages long, the novel is an epic tale of two wealthy, aristocratic clans in the Qing dynasty, believed to be based on the author’s own family history. The world premiere of the operatic adaptation of the book staged at the San Francisco Opera in September.

UC Berkeley recently welcomed a distinguished alumnus, playwright and director Stan Lai, to campus for a series of special events in honor of his directorial work on the San Francisco Opera’s premiere of Dream of the Red Chamber.

September 1, 2016

At a time when many tout the importance of “creativity,” Berkeley’s arts and design landscape offers a uniquely bracing context for creative experimentation, one enriched by the scientific and cultural wealth of a world-class research university, one propelled by our historic commitment to public access and social impact.  The Arts + Design Initiative supports faculty artists and scholars in a shared effort to identify the broad and distinctive strengths of UC Berkeley’s arts and design profile.

August 22, 2016

Welcome Back! We are all getting ready for a new academic year filled to the brim with exciting courses, exhibitions, performances, and a range of public events that feature UC Berkeley’s rich and bracing creative culture. After reviewing our first start-up year of the Arts+Design Initiative, it is a thrill to anticipate a new one.

May 1, 2016

The ARC Fellowship has enabled us to expand our understanding of poetry and performance across disparate zones of incarceration, statelessness, and occupation. Maria Faini has focused on a selection of her dissertation, tentatively titled “Relational Poetics.” She centers an ethical sensibility of the occupying subject to analyze collaborative arts projects that render both impenetrable and porous the affective and experiential divide between military guard and occupied prisoner.

“What Is This ‘Trans’ in Transmedia?” investigates two recent media trends that are occurring simultaneously. The first is a surge in “transmedia” – which refers to studios’ and networks’ franchise-building properties across multiple platforms (so that a text that originates as a comic book is transformed into movies, video games, toys, television programs, etc.), and also the proliferation of fan productions that rework or revise mass media texts online in many genres (fans create fictional stories, art, videos, costumes, .gifs, etc. in response to the media texts they consume).

Against the backdrop of dominant medical characterization of autism as disease and increasingly alarmist discourses on autism as a crisis and an epidemic, our project advances a view of autism as neurodiversity.

April 1, 2016

April always brings many flowers to Berkeley, and this month is no exception. As our faculty and students head into the last month before commencement, the campus is positively brimming with exhibitions, performances, lectures, workshops, and lab demonstrations. It is bound to be an inspiring ‘capstone’ to a year of creativity.

April always brings many flowers to Berkeley, and this month is no exception. As our faculty and students head into the last month before commencement, the campus is positively brimming with exhibitions, performances, lectures, workshops, and lab demonstrations. It is bound to be an inspiring ‘capstone’ to a year of creativity.

March 15, 2016

The past haunts us. It drives our need to recover archives; to activate fragments of a time lived before (by one or by others) into a new experience. Memory is one of the most recurrent themes in contemporary art. It is considered to be characteristic of Latin American art, but it is not. European cities (particularly Berlin) as well as those of Latin America (especially Buenos Aires) have become huge memorials. Centotaph cities.

March 10, 2016

Seniors Brenda Romero and Andrew Wong will graduate from UC Berkeley in May, but not until this semester had they set foot in the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) or attended a dance, theater or musical performance in Zellerbach Hall.

March 4, 2016

Chavez Ravine is a play about people, politics, and change. More specifically, it’s the story of residents displaced from their homes in Los Angeles on land that eventually became Dodger Stadium. Yet to summarize these events into one simple sentence is impossible: the production honors multiple histories, gives visibility to people who have been marginalized, and sparks insights into our current political and economic crises.

March 2, 2016

How do bodies construct and inhabit public space?

In the past week I had the opportunity to participate in three transformative workshops—two sponsored by the Global Urban Humanities Initiative–that used dance, movement, and mindfulness to explore public space.

February 10, 2016

Meaningful connections between realist literature and verismo opera are surprisingly elusive. As a term of opera criticism, verismo describes a style of opera popular during the 1880s, 1890s, and early 1900s, which saw French, Italian, and German composers emulating literature by incorporating more ‘realistic’ subjects, dramatic strategies, and musical materials – all to make opera as arresting as the contemporary novel. By all estimations, verismo opera would seem an ideal topic for fostering interdisciplinary discourse.

January 25, 2016

On the occasion of our campus opening the new Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley News featured the upcoming celebrations and the Arts + Design Initiative.

The new Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive — with its fresh design, expanded programs and prime town-and-gown location — is about to be celebrated with a four-day grand opening that starts this Thursday, Jan. 28, and culminates in a free public open house on Sunday, Jan. 31.

December 15, 2015

“Where would our society be,” asks Chancellor Nicholas Dirks, “without the aesthetic dimension of life centering on form, image, language, movement, narrative, and expression? Without art, we would cease to be human.” Read on. How poignant to have this reminder from our campus leader – and our boss –  about the importance of creative imagining for our students and throughout public life.

December 10, 2015

Here in Paris, international leaders wrangle about how to address the effects of climate change in ways that are both globally expansive and equitably conceived; the debate often focuses on measures that would stall the rising temperature of the earth’s core. Those ‘measures’ are of course complex, ambiguous, and under-felt for many of the world’s leaders and the world’s citizens, a fact that makes the hope of deploying new science to instill new behavior uncertain as well.

November 20, 2015

In his monthly op-ed for the Daily Cal, Chancellor Dirk highlights exposure to the arts as central to the undergraduate experience.

Academic study and practice in arts and design fields can have an incredible impact on our work…as well as in our lives. These disciplines encourage creativity and imagination, expose people to new ideas, bring different cultures and viewpoints into dialogue, provide opportunities for performance and self-expression and much more.

November 14, 2015

At an Artist Talk on November 14, Janet Cardiff and her partner, George Miller, spoke about their ongoing interest in projects that merge live and recorded moments, and how these two worlds merge to create a third realm. In Cardiff’s The Forty Part Motet, the acoustic landscape carries a tangible effect, like a blanket that wraps around a listener, and shifts according to where a person stands and moves.

September 22, 2015

114 countries, 29 guest speakers, 2 teachers, 4,000+ enrolled participants: These are some of the elements of the Art of the MOOC, a Massive Open Online Course or MOOC, designed by artist and Duke University professor, Pedro Lasch, and co-taught with Creative Time chief curator, Nato Thompson. The course is available from October 19 to December 6, 2015 and offered on a Coursera landing page.

August 24, 2015

It’s an exciting start to the fall semester, and already our many departments, centers, museums, labs, and theaters are mobilizing the creativity of our campus with new classes, exhibits, performances, lectures, and social events. It is also an exciting time for the Arts Research Center (ARC) as we reimagine ourselves in relation to the ambitious goals of our Chancellor’s Arts + Design Initiative at Berkeley.

July 1, 2015

What inspired you to write The Builders Association: Performance and Media in Contemporary Theater?

April 16, 2015

Dear Campus Community,

We are thrilled to announce the creation of a new faculty leadership position, the Associate Vice Chancellor of Arts and Design, and equally delighted to inform you that Professor Shannon Jackson has agreed to take on this role.  As the current Director of the Arts Research Center, and the Richard and Rhoda Goldman Professor of Rhetoric and of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies, Shannon is uniquely qualified and positioned to develop and advance our aspirations in the realm of the Arts and Design.

March 13, 2015

On Friday March 13, ARC hosted the Questioning Aesthetics Symposium, where we invited a range of scholars and artists to help us think through three unique yet connected frames of “aesthetics,” asking: When is art participatory? When is computing aesthetic?

January 13, 2015

On Tuesday, January 13, The Arts Research Center was delighted to welcome Laura Callanan, the newly appointed Senior Deputy Chairman at the National Endowment for the Arts, for a salon conversation on Innovation, Entrepreneurship and the Arts with ARC Director Shannon Jackson.

December 31, 2014

In addition to public conferences and symposia, the Arts Research Center organizes other, small-scale gatherings meant to advance and celebrate faculty research in the arts:

November 24, 2014

The Arts Research Center would like to thank our community’s support of ARC’s 10-day whirlwind residency with artist Rick Lowe! Rick’s stay with us was jam-packed with a range of activities, from lectures, symposia, tours and studio visits, and we are so grateful for his unceasing energy and inspiration throughout.  

November 1, 2014

When I learned of the tour to International Boulevard, I was working on a paper about Eastmont, a declining neighborhood in East Oakland, and was impressed by the scarred history of the boulevard. It was an amazing experience to join the tour with Rick and see the artists’ efforts to turn the long-neglected community into a dynamic neighborhood.

I’m still “feeding” off the highlights from Rick Lowe’s residency — experiencing trickle-down nuggets from his lectures, the reception, the symposia, and the amazing community conversation at the end of the Tour of the Richmond Greenway. We were elated to be able to host the tour  of Elm Street Playlot, Scientific Art Studio, and biking with Rick along the Greenway to view the public art and gardens there, and talk about plans for more community engagement and new additions under a Prop 84 Parks grant. What an amazing residency!!

I was very impressed by the dense program and variety of events during the residency. Also it made me aware of the Arts Research Center and the Global Urban Humanities Initiative at UC Berkeley. I enjoyed the talks and trips I was able to take part in. As a foreign visiting researcher it was very interesting to hear about both Ricks’ work, and related projects and issues in the Bay Area.

October 11, 2014

In a double bill traversing earthy African blues and hypnotic ancient grooves, the Afropop Spectacular features performances by virtuoso ngoni player Bassekou Kouyate and the Ethiopian trio Krar Collective. Kouyate descends from a long line of Malian griots and combines generations of tradition with innovative rock-inflected techniques on the banjo-like ngoni.

September 27, 2014

At ARC, we have begun a series of “salons” in which we celebrate work of UCB’s artists and scholars on the Bay Area cultural scene.  Our first gathering coalesced this summer around the work of choreographer Joe Goode whose extraordinary piece, “Traveling Light,” animated the historic Mint Building of San Francisco.  Colleagues and Bay Area arts supporters gathered afterward to share some wine and speak with Joe about his process.  The decision to make a precariously balanced piece of choreography in the Mint obviously had incredible resonance during a precarious economic time.

August 25, 2014

The Arts Research Center kicked off the fall season of programs and events with a “birthday party” celebration in honor of its 15th anniversary on campus, held at the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive on August 25, 2014. Below is the short synopsis, and a welcome to the fall arts season, written by ARC Director Shannon Jackson:

July 2, 2014

In 1960 Hans Hofmann (1880–1966) described the just-completed painting Summer Bliss as one of his finest. At the suggestion of Erle Loran, then chair of the UC Berkeley Art Department, Hofmann offered Summer Bliss to the University in honor of professor Worth Ryder, who had passed away earlier that year. Ryder, who like Loran had studied with Hofmann years earlier in Germany, had invited Hofmann to teach at Berkeley in 1930, initiating what Hofmann later identified as his “start in America as a teacher and artist.”1

May 1, 2014

It’s that time of year again! Our annual ARC WORKS is now online.

The Arts Research Center would like to congratulate its director, Shannon Jackson (Professor of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies) and ARC Affiliate Faculty member Stephanie Syjuco (Assistant Professor of Art Practice) who were awarded prestigious Guggenheim Fellowships this year. The Guggenheim Fellowship is given to those who have “demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts.”Jackson’s research and public service focus primarily on facilitating cross-arts dialogue and experimentati

ARC is excited to announce that Reid Hoffman and Michelle Yee have made a generous gift to support the research and programming of the Arts Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley.  “I am absolutely stunned and thrilled to have this vote of confidence in our work,” says ARC Director Shannon Jackson, who notes that this generous gift will propel ARC’s ongoing exploration of the arts in a wider social ecology.

April 23, 2014

Let’s Ask Ourselves…

[A Dance-based Addendum to the “Grey Matter” Quiz]

April 19, 2014

Well, it is a sunny May Day today and I sit here at my computer and I am filled with thoughts and excitement for the possibilities for the future of labor and the arts. It is especially appropriate to think of these issues today, as May 1st…is the international day for Labor Awareness.  I have always considered the delicate dance between Art and Commerce to be a fine art in itself.

I wanted to send along some information about a group, an allied project, I am a part of that is in line with conversations, content, initiatives, movements, and questions related to the weekends events. 

www.bayareaartworkersalliance.org

We are also participating as an organization in this summers Bay Area Now 7 at YBCA, in July. 

“Making” as labor and revolution           

I appreciated that this conference had plenty of artists leading the workshops….and I trust that they were all paid, well. I know how much work it is to prepare for these workshops. I appreciated and enjoyed that Cassie Thornton used her persona for parts of our workshop, Big Soft (BS) Contract, and I think it gave people some space to get in touch with their feelings about debt. 

When is it okay to work for free? Is it acceptable as long as you’re working with—or for—another artist? What is an artistic service?

These are just a few of the hundreds of questions circulating for artists working in the 21st-century economy, and the central theme of the special two-part issue of Art Practical curated by the Arts Research Center in the spring of 2014. 

I came to this event hoping to be part of a Marxist revolution and though that definitely was not what happened, I was not disappointed. I found out about this practicum on W.A.G.E.’s website, so naturally I signed up for the workshop on Defining Value, Labor, and the Arts, hosted by W.A.G.E.’s Lise Soskolne. W.A.G.E. had a summit earlier this year to work out their certification program, which is a program to certify that non-profit arts exhibition spaces are fairly compensating their artists.

The work I’m doing now (by facilitating the start of associations http://bfamfaphd.com and http://nyctbd.com/resources) is focused on creating longterm community livelihoods where shared decision-making and shared profit are possible.

Thank you for a delightful and energizing conference; the positive effects of considering common difficulties in community should not be underestimated, and I wonder how to translate some of the exercises into accessible, ongoing form. Where could I find a dozen practitioners to reflect together on professional dilemmas? How often, in a year, in a career, would such a gathering be useful? Who are my ideal respondents?

I attended Lise Soskolne’s session on “Defining Value, Labor and the Arts”. W.A.G.E. was founded 2008 in New York to research artists fees, or lack thereof, and to create a minimum fee schedule for artistic services provided to non-profit organizations. The whole area is so complex that I found the restricted scope very useful.

What is a fee in this context and what is it not a fee?

  • The fee is a price or the remuneration for services to a non-profit organization.

March 5, 2014

London-based performance scholars and overall rainmakers Adrian Heathfield, Gavin Butt, and Lois Keidan of the Live Art Agency received a generous grant from the U.K.’s arts and humanities research council to fund a wide-ranging three-year research project.    It was inspiring to be a part of their first symposium on why PerformanceMatters, though it was also poignant to be with a wide network of U.K.

February 20, 2014

The point of departure are a few problems – conditions and terms, as well – that surface in the accounts of the experimental praxis in performance and visual arts in former Yugoslavia.

“Art and Violence in Latin America Today”

I would argue that the most interesting artistic practices coming out of Latin America today dealing with the interplay of art and life address harsh aspects of reality by reenacting and even exaggerating them. The artistic outcomes can reasonably be labeled perverse, as they, in many instances, cross the line between what is acceptable and what is intolerable. These artists overstress the violence embedded in everyday life in major cities in Latin America, creating a kind of hyperrealism.

My aim is to investigate how the works and writings of Hélio Oiticia and Lygia Clark re-articulate the problem of temporality and the problem of “life.” I am proposing that there is both a rigor and a novelty in their definitions of both terms, one that bypasses accepted notions that the privileged temporality of performance and dance is the ephemeral, and that the life element in performance and dance is the living presence of bodies in participation.

Arctic Conditions for the Arts: Landscapes of Non-Orientable Surfaces – Ecology and Gender

On February 20 and 21, the Arts Research Center was delighted to welcome over 200 attendees to the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive Gund Theater as our ARC community debated and discussed the connections surrounding and between the boundaries separating “art” and “life.” We were equally delighted to host 15 celebrated international, national and Bay Area artists, curators, and scholars from a variety of art fields who presented on historical and contemporary, visual and performance based iterations of the distinctly 20th century cultural phenomenon of ‘art-into-life

At Living Time, I want to contemplate recent questions raised by museum theorists about permanency and the perils of musealization by considering the use of a particular and rather mundane substance: ice.  How does this transient material function in the form of sculpture? Can institutional walls regulate the fickleness of Ice Art? Can Ice Art be placed somewhere between museumphobia and museumania?

January 1, 2014

Read ARC Director Shannon Jackson’s summary of the 2012-14 academic years, highlighting ARC’s many accomplishments (Reimagining the Urban: Bay Area Connections Across the Arts and Public Space, Impact in the Arts Think Tank, Living Time: Art and Life After ‘Art-Into-Life’, Bruce Beasley: The Rondo Series in Context, Nordic Time Zones: Time-based art across disciplines in the Northern Landscape, and Valuing Labor in the Arts: A Practicum) and plans for the coming year.  To download the full report, click

November 1, 2013

World-renowned filmmaker, artist, and critical theorist and ARC Affiliate Trịnh Thị Minh Hà (Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies and Rhetoric) will read from her new book D-Passage in San Francisco on November 14 and Berkeley on December 4. “D-Passage is a nuanced and original intervention in new media and digital arts.

October 25, 2013

In this list of terms, I’m particularly interested in dislocation. Unlike “art” and “place,” which I think of as solid nouns and things in the world, “dislocation” invokes the action of dislocating. I wonder about the obscured verb’s subject, object, and their relation. Is what I experience as urban flux, mobility and vibrancy always also the cause of dislocation for someone else?  Can there be movement without displacement? 

Keyword: Placemaking | In his 2012 article, “Placemaking and the Politics of Belonging and Dis-Belonging,” Robert Bedoya writes: “What I’ve witness [sic] in the discussions and practices associated with Creative Placemaking is that they are tethered to a meaning of ‘place’ manifest in the built environment….” Further, Bedoya asserts, “its insufficiency lies in a lack of understanding that before you have places of belonging, you must feel you

Keyword: demonstrate | Listening to speakers during the Creative Time Summit today, a keyword emerged that was not so much repeated throughout the afternoon (like “vibrant” or “grassroots,” both of which deserve more attention and analysis) but present through the presentations’ modes and priorities: demonstrate.

Two words that I hate: placemaking and vibrant. Yet I constantly hear these buzzwords in urban planning and design, public art and arts funding, often paired, implying that the first invariably leads to the second. Although I would be happy to blame Richard Florida’s “Creative Class” thesis (see my previous ARC keyword) for popularizing them, this definition of “successful” urban spaces has a much longer history. Both words can be traced back to the 1960s, a key moment in American urbanism, when a new set of values appeared that inverted the dominant view of cities.

I think it is so interesting to see Creative Time take questions of artistic social engagement to issues of place and creativity in urban and regional planning.  In my own work, I find that these streams of thinking and making are strangely un-aligned, often talking past each other.  Socially-engaged art expands the parameters of visual and performing art practice.  Sometimes this work seeks to explore relationality as such; sometimes this work is connected to a fairly explicit social justice mission.  Meanwhile, urban arts planning and placemaking uses a language that sounds fami

“An artist organizes a political rally about a local issue. The project, which is supported by a local arts center in a medium-size city, fails to attract many local residents; only a couple dozen people show up, most of whom work at the arts center. The event is documented on video and presented as part of an exhibition.

Two Eiffel Towers stand in nearly identical proportions in vastly different locales. Their embodied histories and the meanings they signify are highly divergent. So are the symbolic and material relations to those who live in their vicinity. What does the Tianducheng’s Eiffel Tower replica connote?

October 12, 2013

Keyword: Inequities | “Can inequities be a path to equity in the society?” is a question on my mind when I think of the movement among some of the most affluent people in the world, allocating large portions of their personal funds toward philanthropic works and businesses. 

Keyword: Occupations | What is an Occupation? The word’s connotations are phenomenological, political and cultural in their scope. The Occupy movement has come to symbolize widespread dissatisfaction with the corporatization of democracy throughout the Western World. This dissatisfaction is no doubt shared by many in the Global South, particularly in the large democracies of Brazil and India.

Keyword: Equity | Choosing a term buried within one of the summit themes, inequity, I choose to isolate part of that word for the keyword “equity.” In light of the current massive world debt bomb, preceded and/or partially precipitated by the financial meltdown, derivatives explosion and off budget U.S. war spending, the term equity creates an association first with financial equities (stock equities,) home equity (depleted,) and secondarily to the concept of equity in human terms: fairness.

Keyword: Expectations | I have been thinking a lot about expectations lately- as a mutable, sliding scale barometer for how things are going. They seem to be an ever present but difficult to acknowledge measuring device used by all on a daily basis. Are they being met, exceeded, upended or not met at all. What can we expect as a public?

Keyword: Creativity| I recently read an interesting paper that included a short description of an experiment.  People who were asked to recall three recent creative experiences before participating showed a reduced tendency to view others stereotypically versus those that were not asked to recall recent creative experiences.  I found this very interesting especially compared with other possibilities presented in the experiment including ones designed to shift attitudes, i.e. when I think about smoking I will chew gum.

On October 12, the Arts Research Center at UC Berkeley and the Graduate Program in Curatorial Practice at the California College of the Arts partnered to host a live-streaming of the Creative Time Summit. This annual conference in New York brings together cultural producers–including artists, critics, writers, and curators–to discuss how their work engages pressing issues affecting our world. Summit themes this year included Inequities, Occupations, Making, and Tactics.

Keyword: Occupation | Occupation connotes not only space, but also work.  The Occupy “Movement” reminds us of the former, where groups enter a public space and live, exist, eat, celebrate, agitate, and protest.  Occupation also reminds us of work, vocation, and an identity – what’s your occupation? what do you do?  I’m curious how these two connotations intertwine.  Of course, class disparities between different vocations or the have/have nots of an occupation lead to the current iterations of the Occupation of space.  However, how does the movement itself become an occupation itself?

Keyword: Tactics | I propose that we consider the work of Donna Haraway on interspecies relations as a viable theoretical framework from which to elaborate strategies. Haraway defines “the world as a knot in motion” in which the interactions between species at all levels shape the world. I find that this perspective can provide a great tactical advantage: we can see ourselves within a pattern of relation. This calibrates our perception of our role in this planet.

Keyword: Making | This word– MAKING — appears to be the most neutral of Creative Time’s keywords this year.  But I think I want to use it to reflect upon the not entirely neutral factors that prompt some artists, critics, art administrators, and activist citizens to feel hailed by the Creative Time Summit while others barely know that it exists.  The requisite quips and critiques aside, this 800-person gathering–one that reaches a global viewing audience in the tens of thousands– is an achievement for those who happen to believe that art has something to do with social engagement.

Keyword: Making | Sweet etymology reveals that the root of Poet is a Maker. In the historical sweep of what we say and do, this linguistic link from the practical to the lyrical, embraces our survival, management, creativity, resourcefulness, connections, communications and all that jazz broadly labeled “culture”.  Art, as everyday ecstasy, ingenuity, occupation and pre-occupation, is a basic activity that, like language, belongs to all, but alas exercised in a inexhaustible variety of ways, delicious to disruptive, dismal to dynamic.

On Inequities, Occupations, Making, or Tactic | As the anniversary of the start of the Occupy movement rolls around and becomes historicized in exhibitions (at least at YBCA, San Francisco) a feeling of overwhelm overcomes me, which is almost, but not quite hopelessness. There is something overwhelming about the idea of shifting past the initial enthusiasm of utopian possibilities, the desires to increase freedoms. And I start to wonder as a good idea gets older how do we push on through inertia, the uphill struggle to sustain, establish and forge possibilities?

October 8, 2013

Keyword: Restoration | In the Bay Area and beyond, ambitious creek and wetland restoration projects aim to return landscapes to an earlier, more “natural” condition. The scientists designing the projects know that it is impossible to restore a landscape to a pre-human condition when the entire watershed has been radically altered, and they make many nuanced choices in order to enhance habitats.  But the public often believes the goal is to put a site back to “the way it was.”

Keyword: Urban | In mainstream US media, “urban” is a pervasive euphemism for black, a way to register but not directly point at African-American culture within the post-racial political paradigm of colorblindness.

Keyword: Street Art | “Street art” is the umbrella expression to refer to several forms of intervention that use the streets as their domain.  It covers not only visual productions such as graffiti and tagging, but also performances like skateboarding, parkour, and break dance.  The literature on street art is extensive and framed by a reference to mainstream artistic production.  “Is graffiti (or tagging, or skateboarding) art?”  seems to be an unavoidable question addressed again and again and consistently answered affirmatively.  In my research, this approach is secondary.  Instead, I am

Keyword: Site-specific | That’s Not My BART Stop: One of the Triangle Lab projects we’re producing right now is called Love Balm for My Spirit Child.  It’s a series of performances sharing testimony from mothers who have lost children to violence.  We’re calling this series “site-specific” because they’re performed on the spots where each murder took place.  Site-specific in its strictest definition means a performance created specifically for a non-traditional space, often using physical characteristics of that space, or of the community who gathers there, to influence what the p

Keyword: Thoughts on Creativity | 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.

Keyword: Layered landscapes | How will the baylands be used?  And who will use them? 

Keyword: Temporality | In my experience, one of the most unique and profound joys of working site-specifically is developing an intimate relationship with the elemental forces of the environment. While striving to build a coherent world and intricate structure (and to clearly tell the story of the play), within the sweeping scale of massive outdoor sites is challenging enough.

Keyword: Creative class | In 2002 economist Richard Florida published the Rise of the Creative Class. In it he argued that the best way for cities to revive their ailing urban economies was to remake themselves in order to attract a social category he called “the creative class.”  At the core of this group were innovative and creative workers whose importance in the new knowledge-based economy could produce new companies, attract jobs and residents, and expand consumption.

Keyword: Everyday Urbanism | In the early 1990s, I started working with scholars, urban designers, photographers, and writers on a project exploring everyday urban life in Los Angeles.  In 1999, we published Everyday Urbanism as a guide to investigating the “as-found” character of the city.

Keyword: Stratification | ruminations on the question of what preoccupies me

how to bring art groups together with affordable housing groups together with social service groups together with youth groups together with parks groups together with community health groups and now, most recently tech companies, preoccupies me.  the Tenderloin loses the struggle for equitable development because we are fragmented and undermine each other.

Keywords: Museum as Urban Incubator | Several years ago at a public forum at the Oakland Museum of California, Open Restaurantcollaborator Jerome Waag asked, “How does a museum become an incubator generating new forms of civic engagement?”

Keyword: Bridges | Raquel Gutiérrez invites us to map the room around us: who is here and how long did it take us all to get to 2150 Allston Way. For a moment, we acknowledged the morning’s journey that brought us to this place, and maybe even the bridges we had to cross to get here.

Keyword: Community | One of the themes that we’re exploring in our seminar—entitled “The City, Arts, and Public Spaces,” and planned in conjunction with Reimagining the Urban—is that of publics and publicness.  (See Shannon Jackson’s post for an overview of these many-sided concepts.)  As a budding geographer, and a scholar of urban public space, I began the semester with the view that public space is public in the sense that it is, in theory, open to universal use, and that, to that effect, it is also a space in the sense that it is inhabitable.  Of course, in practice, public sp

Keyword: Layers of Reciprocity | Throughout the daylong symposium, “Reimaging the Urban,” two particular keywords continued to jump out at me – reciprocity and layers. As I thought about these as individual concepts I realized that in fact layers of reciprocity was a much more appropriate way in which to understand the complexity of collaboration and exchange necessary in order for the projects discussed to succeed.

Keyword: Public Nature? | The last session of the day, What is the “Bay” in the Bay Area? Creating Nature, acknowledged the elephant in the room—the Bay—but it also revealed the ambiguity of ownership surrounding this, “our” Bay. From Brad McCrea’s mention of changing legal rights (“Most things you can do on land, you can’t do in the Bay.”) to Louise Pubols’ historical account of the Emeryville shoreline as a “junky throw-away space” where artists/students/people were not afraid of “messing up,” we caught a glimpse of an immensely complex puzzle: public nature.

Keyword: Spontaneous | What is spontaneity if not serendipity—a surprisingly pleasant encounter, saying yes to adventure, walking up the steeper street on a whim and being rewarded with the better view? Spontaneity, perhaps because of its association with creativity and positive action, popped up throughout the conference as a human potential that urban art projects and development plans should tap into.

Keyword: Gentrification | 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.

Keyword: (In)equity, Inevitable? | Dr. Shannon Jackson, who co-organized Reimagining the Urban, opened the symposium with questions including, in summary: What kinds of creativity are valued and for whom? And how can collaborating across sectors create solutions rather than obstacles? Another question to ask here would be: solutions for whom?

Keyword: Collaboration | The complexity of the discourses about the city, arts, and public spaces has prompted me to reflect upon the merits, necessities, and challenges of interdisciplinary work.

Keyword: Long-term | The long-term is a durational temporality. If I set this against the continuous present of the participle, ‘re-imagining’–the keyword which leads the title of the symposium–what kind of time do I find myself in? The call for the long-term engagement is a particularly fraught one for the field of visual art practice forcing the surface a series of questions, like: how long is enough for an artist to engage a community? How long should the dialogue be? How long does the project go? How long should the artist *be* in that space, or need she be there at all?

September 30, 2013

Keyword: Revitalization (=Gentrification?) | Kicking off the Reimagining the Urban symposium, Margaret Crawford spoke of a real estate development boom in San Francisco that has contributed to an exodus of roughly 10,000 artists from the city.

Keyword: Connectedness | Before the symposium began, a cluster of people on the waitlist stood next to the balcony. Their view of the floor below looked something like this. Threads held tiny pieces that resembled straws or mini-bones and were constantly waving, but at first glance, the mobile appeared motionless. It took a moment to notice these pieces were in motion, and even closer inspection showed that tiny weights (visible in the picture below) ascended and descended just below the ceiling, mapping the mini-bones’ movement in vertical axes.

Keyword: “We?” | When Linda Rugg spoke of how “we” define ourselves in relation to the bay, who are the “we” to whom she refers? When Brad McCrea said that the bay is different for “us” as it was then compared to now, are these generations of people in the past and in the present even the same entity?

Keyword: A Vision of Site-Responsive Arts Collaborations in Communities | It had been a blue Monday for me before I arrived at the symposium, Reimagining the Urban: Bay Area Connections Across the Arts and Public Space, at noon. I had just finished a class in the morning and was still suffering from the flu. In the crowded auditorium, there weren’t many seats left, but I found one next to a stranger. After brief introductions, I lapsed into silence and wished the symposium end soon that I could go home to recover from my virus.

June 26, 2013

 Keyword: Public | In cross-disciplinary gatherings at ARC, we have found it worth going over territory that we all think we know, to review the staples, the bread and butter of our fields, in order to expose blindspots and to jostle ourselves into new perspectives on the heretofore obvious. But should I really reflect on the term “public”?

March 30, 2013

Last week offered the chance to experience two important time-based art initiatives in one evening.  The Performance Art Institute, initially conceived with Marina Abramovic and now led entirely by her co-founder Stephen Tourrell, has an absolutely incredible space (I should say spaces) on Sutter Street.

March 15, 2013

The Spiraling Time symposium opened on Friday, March 15, 2013 at the Berkeley Art Museum, with the keynote address by Andrea Giunta, Chair of Latin American Art History & Criticism of the department of Art and Art History at the University of Texas at Austin. One of the world’s leading authorities on modern and contemporary Latin American art, Giunta provided a compelling lecture about the recurring themes in the art of South America – violence, memory, and scars from the past.

A Sequence of Photographs. A work consisting of photograph taken through an analytical process that concentrates on the same sight, recording the passing of natural events in their relation to historical ones.    

 The work is thought as

1) Nature as an analogue of history and against the classical idea of nature as renewal, but of dominated nature: nature as ruins.

Leandro Katz and Paola Santoscoy in conversation at Spiraling Time. | After Jeffery Skoller introduced Leandro Katz and Paola Santoscoy to the audience, he explained his interest in bridging the gaps between intergenerational perspectives with conversation in conjunction with the artistic themes and approaches that have transformed over time. Paola and Leandro are both interested in photography’s translation of time and place. Each are especially interested in the fantastic and surreal.

On Friday, as I walked up to the Berkeley Arts Museum and Pacific Film Archive to attend the event Spiraling Time, I felt a sense of excitement in the air. People were buzzing with chatter about the first hour and a half of the symposium including some of my classmates who I ran into at the front door. They expressed to me how moving and extremely emotional the first event was, increasing my excitement and anticipation.

Encountering the Spiraling Time symposium exposed just how steeped in restrictive ideologies about the linear progression of time I was.  My conceptions about how time works have been transformed.  I have discovered that time and memory are nuanced and complex, and do not neatly conform to any systematic grid like a calendar.  Blurring the lines even further are the political and economic forces invested in the way we remember.

In her address, Leda Martins asked us to consider the varying aspects of time in Brazilian performance art.  Her lecture was different than most I have ever attended in its degree of participation.  Leda focused on experience rather than recounting events.  She did not just tell us about these great dances, she showed them, had us sing along, and even utilized three different performers throughout her lecture to draw us into the realm as the original viewer and not a listener of a secondhand account. 

In my country, Brazil, the issue of time is an odd one. It’s clear that we live in a sort of perpetual disconnect between the past and the future, in the sense that we assimilate little of what the present has to offer. The present moment seems to commit joyful suicide at every instant. And yet this euphoric feeling of nowness, as if we did not in fact come from no place and were forever headed nowhere, also exists side by side with the opposite feeling – that things never truly change and that we remain in the same absurdly unequal and unjust place as always.

As Nuno Ramos, Brazilian sculptor and author stated, “In Sao Paulo, there is an intense sense of urgency—life wants you, and life asks you to do everything…you are required every minute…you are necessary.” This sense of urgency and immediacy is reflected directly in his work, which embodies the very humanistic quality of the work being dead after its work is done, of being finished at its conclusion.

In my talk, I will analyze how some choreographic-sculptural propositions by Brazilian artists Hélio Oiticia and Lygia Pape, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, not only blur the line between action and object, body and image, but also disrupt the “time-zone” of historical narratives about the relations between visual arts and dance. Following Didi-Huberman’s assertion that art history is constantly re-beginning with every new work, I am interested in inflecting his insight with the specificity of Brazil in its particular geo-political context.

February 8, 2013

The Arts Research Center saw a whirlwind of activity in recent weeks, when Taiwanese playwright/director extraordinaire (and UC Berkeley alum) Stan Lai came to campus as an ARC artist-in-residence and Avenali Resident Fellow January 28 through February 8, 2013.  A photo album capturing some of his activities can now be viewed on the ARC Facebook page

January 29, 2013

Our colleague Wen-hsin Yeh helped to engineer an incredible memorandum of agreement between UC-Berkeley and Taiwan’s educational ministry.  To celebrate, the university organized the Berkeley-Taipei Forum in which two distinguished alums and Taiwanese citizens—Stan Lai and Kris Yao—were invited to speak about their work in theatre and architecture respectively. Along the way, they chronicled the impact of what they referred to as “the Berkeley Spirit” on their art practice.

October 25, 2012

On October 25, 2012, the Maude Fife Room in Wheeler Hall filled to capacity for the Arts Research Center program Studio Time: Process/Production, featuring a talk titled Goodbye Craft by Glenn Adamson, Head of Research at the Victoria and Albert Museum. 

On October 25, the Arts Research Center will present Studio Time: Process/Production, featuring “Goodbye to Craft” a talk by Glenn Adamson, Head of Research at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Dr. Adamson is the author of Thinking through Craft, editor of The Craft Reader, co-editor of The Journal of Modern Craft, and one of the leading thinkers on the concept of craft in our contemporary world. Responses will follow from local artist Stephanie Syjuco and Professor Ron Rael (Architecture).

October 12, 2012

Keywords: Tactics, Strategy | Until recently, strategies have always been debated upon and there has never been a “best” strategy. With the aid of computer simulation, a computer can now determine the best possible path to reach the highest percent chances of winning. In a sense, with the aid of computers, people are finding out the most optimal way to play a game. But some strategies can never be determined, this comes into play in complicated player versus player games such as chess. Constantly, the strategies change and the best possible path becomes different.

Keyword: Making | I believe that making is an important part of a person’s identity. Whether it’s making coffee in the morning, making art, or making up a story. The act of creating applies an essential part of yourself into the product. This is why I love art — it is the very unique essence of an individual and has life in itself. It validates existence. Whether you think the product turns out horrible or if it’s your best masterpiece yet, just keep creating.

Keyword: Inequities | United States faces many health issues, from insurance plans to forty-four percent of adults becoming obese by 2030. These problems, unknowingly to many people, have some roots in the political and economical world. For example, the problem with trying to get many middle class families insured starts with the problem that insurance plans are too expensive and a lot of people cannot afford them.

Keyword: Inequities | As a Korean American, I would have to say that I did not experience much racism growing up. However, there are some stereotypical judgments associated with my gender and looks that cause inequalities. For example, I am 5 foot 5 inches tall, and I only weigh 95 pounds. Because I am skinny, people assume that I do not eat, that I am not healthy, and that I am weak. Yes, I am skinny but I eat as much as any college boy would eat.

Keyword: Tactics | Tactic.

Tak-tik.

Noun. 

“A plan, procedure, or expedient for promoting a desired end or result.” – Dictionary.com

Keywords:  racial inequity, occupy whiteness | One of the keyword statements for ARC’s “Occupy as Form” last February, “Occupy the Hood — We are the 99%” by Gina Acebo, eloquently spoke to the need to center a racial analysis within the narrative of the Occupy movement because people of color are disproportionately affected by the issues that the Occupy movement raised.  In response, one commenter expressed thanks while at the same time questioning how this focus on race could pot

Keyword: Occupations | Occupation is a word whose meaning has changed in many people’s minds this past year. It’s connotation, at least for many people of a certain political persuasion, now suggests a consensual, intentional gathering of people. It now evokes a sense of community-building and collective striving. But we should not forget the historical meaning of the word–and not delude ourselves into thinking that we are really occupiers. Historically, the occupation of land connoted raw force and the despair of the occupied.

Keyword: Inequities | The first thing that comes to mind when most people hear the word “inequalities” is the growth income gap between rich and poor in our society. In the last three decades, the economy has been growing very slowly. However, income growth happened mostly at the top of the income scale. The share of total income of the top 1% jumped from 8.9% in 1976 to 23.5% in 2007. Yet in the same period, the real hourly wage declined by over 7%.

Keyword: Tactics | Tactics is such a vague concept. When hearing the word, I’d get confused with multiple interpretations because tactics could have a double meaning. I believe that the use of tactics have especially been used in the topic, subversion. Art can be a tool for subversion. Kony 2012 at first glance seemed like an emotionally compelling video that succeeded in getting support from the US citizens. However, it was later revealed that the video was mostly a tactical ploy for the US to occupy the oil-rich land.  

Keywords: Inequity, Making, Occupation, and Tactics | My thoughts on inequity, making, occupation, and tactics are currently entangled. I am thinking through a recent paper by Daphne Plessner published online via Art & Education. At the moment, I cannot say anything better than she, so please forgive the cheap trick of supplying a quote and a link as my application into the Summit viewing party.

Keyword: Inequities | Gender inequality still exists because society conditions women to believe that “having it all” requires complete success in their professional and personal lives. “Having it all” refers to women’s ability to attain an interpersonal relationship, raise children, and have a successful career.  However, “having it all” is currently out of reach because women are disadvantaged by the ideal-worker norm, the stresses of having to choose between having a career or family, and the unequal distribution of housework and childcare.

Keyword: Inequities | in·eq·ui·ty [in-ek-wi-tee] noun, plural in·eq·ui·ties.

1. lack of equity;  unfairness; favoritism or bias.

2. an unfair circumstance or proceeding.

Keyword: Inequities | Speaking of inequities, there are already some unfair things happening in this world: the status of gender, race, and age. These categories are relatively in large range and maybe the range is already too broad, so people have been accustomed to those classifications. In terms of race, it has been arbitrarily classified by different kind of people in the past and the current time, according to this point, we, the people have already been treated unfairly.

Keyword: Tactics – Publicizing Private Space | In response to rampant privatization of public space, cultural producers in the Bay Area increasingly publicize private spaces (apartments, marginalized real estate, etc) and, in doing so, radicalize notions of public space, even when these spaces aren’t conventionally “public.” While these largely DIY actions underscore autonomy in the face of bureaucracy and increased corporate interests in the public realm, these gestures also represent a shift in the cultural landscape that coincides with the decline of conventional n

Keyword: Inequities | Justice is a concept that plagued the early Greek philosophers, Plato and Aristotle. Justice, virtue, and fairness are all ideas that are difficult to define and thus, the lack of those concepts is even harder to imagine. For example, the Bill of Rights declares that every American should have the right to a fair trial. In this case, justice means the defendant is able to present his claims in a nonpartisan environment.

Keyword: Making | I used to be a passive player; eyes glazed over as my thumbs twitched over red buttons. Other times were spent with family and friends, playing competitively and exchanging playful banter. Things really shifted when dial-up entered my household. Anonymous, I could interact with people around the globe, play a different role, and participate in digital fantasy. Everything changed. I was participating in yet another community taking on any chance to ‘mod‘ I could.

Keyword: Tactics | Tactics are like algorithms–processes for making things, ultimately everything, happen. Tactics are sometimes visible or the may just as easily be hidden from sight, operating without knowledge. Yet, still, they influence everything we do. Some are conscious, like our techniques for finding a good parking spot, and others we barely realize exist, like what Google results show up first. These tactics may be simple, but they can just as easily be responsible for transferring billions of dollars per second around the world.

Keyword: Making | On September 12th I woke up to the news that hundreds had died in a factory fire in Pakistan. It took me a moment to realize that the report was not about the all-too-similar tragedy that took place 101 years earlier in New York.  The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire killed 146 workers, mostly young women from immigrant families who either burned or jumped to their death from the 8th floor of the building since the workers had otherwise been locked in.

Keyword: Occupations | The word “occupation,” for me, had always been synonymous with “career” or “job.” More recently, I began to see people’s occupations as roles, from both professional and social perspectives. In a group of friends, each member has his or her specific role. For example, one likes to plan things, another likes to joke around, another is crowned the “smart one,” and each person brings his or her own dynamics into the group. Similarly, in a stereotypical high school cafeteria, students sit according to their “occupations”: Freshmen, ROTC guys, preps, J.V.

Keywords: Inequities, Translation | While it is no secret that the United States, and many nations throughout the world, face various inequities, it is interesting how inequalities in wealth, income, economic opportunities (as well as opportunities in general), and many other issues are dealt with. One such example is the Occupy movement, which not only demonstrates a method of combatting issues, but also demonstrates the evolution of the method of protests.

Keyword: Making | 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. What I mean by that is that I think that a creative piece of art stands as a representation of some part of the person who created it.

Keyword: Inequities | Energy consumption has tripled in the US from 1970-2010; we  have less than 5% of the worlds population but use more than 20% of global energy resources. This unequal usage is well embedded in our glutinous consumption habits which capital markets & strives to replicate world wide.

Keyword: Memory | With the one year anniversary of the birth of the Occupy Movement this fall, I have been contemplating how the movement’s legacy will continue to grow and how its memory will eventually come to be passed down to the next generation of activists that follow.

Keyword: Inequities | I have just ordered 400 Trick-or-Treat boxes from the UNICEF website for an upcoming Halloween event that UNICEF@Cal, a campus initiative of UNICEF at Berkeley, is planning for. As part of the worldwide Trick-or-Treat for UNICEF Project, members of the campus initiative will distribute the donation boxes to local elementary school students and demonstrate them, with skits, how the project works. Trick-or-Treat for UNICEF has a simple yet powerful idea: believing in kid helping kids.

Keyword: Occupations | Preceding the autumn of 2011, an occupation was one’s job. Even then the implications were different from say a career or “calling.” An occupation was something you did five to seven days a week. It paid bills and supported homes. It is not shiny or romantic. The events over a year ago – most notably in New York City and Oakland – reframed occupation. The term, occupy was newly politicized. The Occupy Movement literally sat in spaces of corporate industry, disrupting commerce with the hope of dismantling global markets and redistributing power.

Keyword: Making | On making objects.  For me that begins sometimes with an impulse, sometimes with an idea.  But usually the impulse turns into something because ideas are like dreams – they come and they go.  And then, after a while that impulse turns into an established behavior.  I think then, after a while, can one learn about what it is really about, the deepening process happens, the connection of dots.

Keyword: Inequities | It seems to me that one of the ways inequities stay in place is through our ability to separate ourselves from the Other. Powerful stories erode that ability. I recently watched a video interview with Edward Saïd in which he referred to Gramsci’s “The Prison Notebooks,” specifically the idea that history deposits in us an infinity of traces and that we should try to understand our own history in terms of other people’s histories.

Keyword: Tactics | Tactics can be interesting things. They can be used to progress through a society and built upon almost anything. Tactics are a method of understanding and then either building upon or tearing down. In order to develop this so called tactic, one must first understand. A tactic to build or tear a system cannot be created without a deep level of understanding of the inner workings of the said system. Tactics themselves can employ various sub-tactics such as subversion.

Keyword: Provisionalism | I believe that provisionalism is a tactic utilized in many occasions such as rhetorical speeches, political campaigns and religious protests. 

Keyword: Making | Artists, writers, and technologists are expected to create with certain parameters before bending and breaking the rules. With new media art, programming, creative coding, and open source culture seem to be exploring new ways that are redefining contemporary art. The interactive and immersive works prevalent in new media works offer an entirely different experience of art. Yet, what happens when the body performs and serves as the catalyst for the production and creation of an artwork?

Keyword: Tactics | Can the concept of tactics itself still serve a tactical purpose? One answer to this question would start by considering the extent to which “tactics” has become overdetermined in our present conjuncture. A genealogy of the term in its current sense would trace back through Michel de Certeau’s well-known appropriations of military theory to its usage in France circa 1968 around the Situationist International (as in Raoul Vaneigem’s Revolution of Everyday Life).

Keyword: Making | Not many people think about making. That is, the act of creation; both intentional and unintentional. While most people prioritize that which they create with willful agency, they often overlook what is created as a side effect of their actions. This has environmental implications (i.e., the 4.6 pounds of garbage every person contributes to landfills every day) as well as personal and social implications. While the former is tangible and is able to be measured, the latter is unseen and sometimes written off as less important. 

Keyword: Tactics | Where does the art cut into the possibility for engagement? And where does engagement lose its art? At the core is another question about art and activism, whether we will consider them as commensurate. And when we talk about tactics- about employing available means towards and end, we do ultimately have to ask what the end is, how far towards it a particular project should take us, and who the “us” at stake is.

Keywords: Inequities, Occupations | Asian-Americans are notorious for doing well academically. According to a report published by the Pew Research Center this past June, the rapid rise in Asian immigrants along with a high cultural value placed upon education and academic success, it is of no surprise that the growing influx of Asian-Americans into the high-skilled workforce is occurring (and arguably, has already occurred). Asians represent only five percent of the U.S. population,  yet represent three to five times that in Ivy League universities.

Keyword: Inequity | During a panel presentation at a recent conference in Los Angeles, Andrea Fraser presented video stills from Official Welcome first performed by the artist in 2001. The images on display showed Fraser standing at a podium, reciting selections by notable critics, intellectuals and collectors who warmly praised and introduced well-known artists. Being somewhat familiar with this piece I was not shocked by images of Fraser removing her clothes in front of an audience, unabashedly bending over in a Gucci thong, or mimicking the shenanigans of well-known critics.

Keyword: Translation | As someone rooted in the world of policy rather than art, I am struck by the question, posed in a post below by Dee Hibbert-Jones, of “how exactly do gestures of resistance so powerful and empowering translate into ideas of universal healthcare, social equality, fair-minded tax policies and equitable banking polices”?  The inequitable distribution of wealth, income, and access to public goods like education are (were?) central concerns of the Occupy movement.  Perhaps because of where I am situated, it seems to me that achieving any large-scale and sustainab

Keyword: Exploitation | US epitomizes a “champagne glass” distribution of wealth in which the wealthiest 1% control almost 45% of the nation’s wealth. The concept of exploitation is evident in this pattern in that wealth is produced at the expense of other socioeconomic levels. For example, by exploiting cheap labor, paying low wages, depending on political patronage, utilizing tax loopholes, and by lobbying for unjustifiable deregulation the wealthy continue their trajectory of wealth accumulation.

Keyword: Inequities | How we individually or collectively think about inequality has a huge effect on our political views, but it also implicitly affects so many other aspects of our lives as members of society. It shapes our understanding of our social circles, our jobs, our schools, and countless other things, and it penetrates each of those institutions so deeply that it affects assumptions about how societies work that are so fundamental that we aren’t usually aware that they’re even assumptions.

Keyword: Tactics | Tactics are to move in relation to another, to design movement towards response. A strait forward version of a tactical action might be to act in a way that plays into an expectation, and elicits a predicted response. I want to think about tactics in terms of making art. When thinking about objects and words as being interesting, worth pursuing as signs or signifiers one can ask; where am I placed by these things. What are my predictable responses to these objects or words, and who or what structure is asking this of me?

Keyword: Making | I just returned from a wild working weekend with Sojourn Theater  at an unlikely location in St. Louis. We were invited to the Catholic Charities Annual Conference as their artists-in-residence – this is a convening of about 100 local chapter organizations who all share a social justice mission. For my nine colleagues and I, our goal was to interview as many of the attendees as we could and then create a 30 minute performance for their closing session that would reflect back the biggest questions and tensions of the conference. 

Keyword: Tactics | Tactics. The word brings to mind images of military regalia, strict formations, dim rooms with maps. Strategy, a plan, what to do, where to go. Tactics are a road map to success. Every person out there is striving for some kind of success whether it is something defined such as career success, or something more abstract like personal fulfillment. Rarely, however do we think about creating “tactics for life.” Tactics also, to many, feels removed from creativity.

Keyword: Occupations | When it comes to Occupation topic there are many questions come to my mind. How one becomes interested in what one does throughout one’s life? Why one chooses a particular occupation in one’s life? Does occupation driven by one’s personality?

Keywords: Making, Tactics | For me, tactics consist of making. Tactics take one thing and make it into something new. Tactics make things available in a different way. Michel De Certeau is interested in identifying tactics as the poetic “making” that works within systems of production such as “television, urban development, commerce, etc.” where consumers are otherwise left unable to “indicate what they make or do with the products in these systems”.* Here, the tactical is precisely the practice and process of making.

Keyword: Inequities | Associated most frequently with the growing wealth disparity in the US and the world. It’s interesting to see this especially with the spotlight recently on the US presidential elections, with a lot of flak on Mitt Romney for being a ‘disenchanted’ political candidate. It seems as though there are two different types of groups within the wealthy here in America. One group that focuses on continuing the elevated social status of the wealthy, distancing themselves from the rest of society.

Keyword: Making | We are constantly making to survive, learn, earn, and experience. Making is one of the fundamental activities for us which happens every second. We make our own food daily; we make friends; we make notes to study; we make art and music to enjoy; we make mistakes; we make achievements, and we make thoughts and perspectives. People today tend to think that we simply make crafts or money. However, countless tangible or non-tangibles we have made in our lives have built who we are today, our identity.

Keywords: Occupations, Tactics, Making, Inequities | I am frustrated by ‘Occupation,’ I am frustrated by ‘Tactics,’ and I am angered daily by Inequity.  The Occupation feels like it is in the postcolonial throes of agony, the artist’s ‘Tactics’ outmaneuvered, and Inequity rises beneath us, the very foundation of our social fabric.  ‘Making’ feels like the only way to take this unwieldy world and craft it into the stuff of dreams. But then whose dreams? What to make? Or more importantly how to make it?

Keyword: Inequalities | When thinking about the growing inequalities affecting our global society, my mind inevitably goes to cities. Cities have been the engines of development since industrialization; they have been a fertile ground for the “society of spectacle” and the world of commodities (Debord: 1967) and, most importantly, they represent the habitat and modus vivendi of more than half of the human population.

Keyword: Making | I have made and given away 14,000+ ceramic cups since 2001. All of the cups have something to do with war, violence and the places military and civilian cultures collude and collide. The cups started as autobiographical but now have overlapped with past and current stories connected to war. I have very little hope that my small cups will affect any real change but nothing relives me of my obligation to try. A cup (hand to hand, hand to lip) seems the correct scale to discuss war.

Keyword: Occupations | Occupation has always been and will continue to be a controversial word.  At its most innocuous, it refers to a person’s job or calling – the way someone occupies their time.  Arguably the more common use, is in referral to a military occupation or occupation of a space by protesters.  The latter here, is what I wish to write about.  Occupation is a derivative of occupy: a term put to use quite recently by the Wall Street protesters to give a name to their cause.  The Occupy Protest emerged (to some extent) in response to the financial collapse of 2008 and t

Keyword: Inequities | One of the most talked about issues in America today is the widening income gap.  The difference between the top and bottom levels of income has widened more than any other rich country.  Many think that the largest gap is between the middle class and the poor, which has widened in the past two decades.  In reality, the gap has grown the most between the middle class and the top earners of the country.

Keyword: Making | What does the process of making mean for artists and other cultural producers today? Artist and activist Paul Chan offers one response to this question in an essay titled “What art is and where it belongs” where he discusses his expectations of himself as an artist and his experience making art in the following way:

Keyword: Inequities | Inequity is a growing problem both here in the United States and abroad at the global level. This trend of a widening gap between the rich and the poor is extremely concerning to me because it belies growing instability in world political systems. We have observed these symptoms in the past and in the present: in the decline of old empires, in troubled countries such as Greece, even in our own United States.

Keyword: Occupations | The word sincerely brings me fear as a student with two more years left of university. Despite the economy improving over the last four years since the housing crisis, jobs hunting are a dire process for every upcoming graduates. Especially for graduates with “low-income” majors such as :Liberal Arts and Languages, which has often been looked down upon due to their abstract tendencies.

Keyword: Making | Growing up, I thought Barbie was stupid. I enjoyed building small motor race cars from scratch and making robot toys that moved. In a world of hackers, programmers, and technologists, I enjoy being a maker. In my free time, I take on DLY projects. I make blinky light boxes, race cars, jewelry, and self-print wrapping paper. Making is an art-fo  rm. It allows me to combine my interests in science, art, and technology and craft cool gadgets and devices that I can play with. Even at 21 years old, I am never too old to play with toys.

Keyword: Making | Humans have invented more things than we can count throughout our history, but none has had so much impact on life as one of our first inventions – the plan. Manifesting as business plans, battle tactics, essay outlines, and who knows what else, the concept of a plan has more or less defined the progression of human civilization since its invention, for better and worse. On one hand, plans have given us some of my favorite things in life: video games, science, space exploration, and more of the like.

Keyword: Inequities | Like most children growing up, I was constantly told that, “life isn’t fair.” Sometimes, this meant my older sister got two more dollars of allowance a month and that I would have to wait until I become older. Other times, it meant that the cake was divided, and I had to deal with the smallest piece. The inequity in life was continually engrained within my mind until there eventually came a neglectful acceptance of this truth.

Keyword: Making | To make something is to extend oneself. The making of things contradicts man’s ever-present fascination with death and transience. The Flemish Renaissance theme of vanitas warns that our life is transient, but the paintings, with their brilliant bouquets and subtle symbols of death and decay, outlive its warning. The decadent seventeenth-century paintings are still here today and preserved in our museums. They remind us of the fleeting nature of our lives, yet they also indirectly offer an escape from transience, and that is through art.

Keyword: Making | The term I would like to explore is “Making”. What does is it mean to make and to be made? Creation is very subtle because every action induces or “makes” another reaction. Essentially, our universe is a dynamic system of action/reaction processes that lend to the creation of each other. Another way to explore the sense of the word “making” is to glance at its relative antonym, “destructing”. To destruct something, we essentially assume it was structured, constructed, or made in the first place but have adequate incentive to reverse the process.

Keyword: Inequities | There is so much inequity across the globe that needs to be confronted, which is why it is so difficult to face head on. Thus, in order to fix the lack of fairness in the world we have to fix the issues one step at a time, in each country. For instance instead of attacking the globe, we need to address the inequalities of each nation starting from the smallness of injustice. Each country has its own problems and it is not all going to be related to just wealth.

Keyword: Inequities | Gutter punks act as both an ideal and a marginalized group within the consistently paradoxical subculture that is punk. They exemplify the values of punk by living as a physical marker of anti-authority and are considered part of the vagabond, vagrant, homeless population by the Main Street eye. “Vagabonds throughout history have been seen as ‘indeterminate’ in the sense that they do not exist in fixed social or spatial locations” but are constantly somewhere in the visual public regions of and between cities (Amster, pp. 3).

Keyword: Inequities | There is inequality entrenched in our society, even in places such as Berkeley where we would like to believe that we are more accepting and open than other parts of the world. My good friend Tom is currently fighting for the rights of the homeless in his opposition to the Sit/Lie bill. It seems against the spirit of this liberal city that we would attempt to pass a bill that disenfranchises such a significant number of the population.

Keyword: Inequities | Education: The Great Inequalizer

Keyword: Inequities | The word inequity, to me, means a lack of fairness, equality, and justice. There are several examples of inequity throughout the history of mankind, including slavery in Alexander the Great’s kingdom, civil rights of African Americans, and gender disparities in wages. Because of this long history of inequities that continues to this very day, it is likely that there will always be inequities in one form or another in human society. It is one of the many factors that make a utopian society (i.e. ideal and perfect) virtually impossible.

Keyword: Inequities | Inequity differs from the term inequality, which are the differences and social disparities amongst one another that characterize one as unequal to another or the condition of being unequal. Inequity is the lack of being unbiased and unfair as equities are the fair and justness of said thing. For example, although society today may promote the concept of equality amongst all, equity is not mentioned or practiced in conjunction to the promotion of equality.

September 19, 2012

I’d like to share this short text written by artist Ben Kimont: Passing On— “From musical compositions to recipes to instruction pieces, people have been sharing their making, meaning, and authorship with others. When a pianist follows a score, a chef cooks a dish, or a person follows an instruction piece, variations and interpretations are made and shared. In this way a sound, a taste, or an idea is passed on, appreciated, and yet also changed by this new maker, perhaps with new instruments and ingredients and within a new context.

In 2004, a small wing of the House of the People in Bucharest was rudimentarily converted into a National Museum of Contemporary Art, and I began work as a curator under circumstances that were an apotheosis of the local. Built during the ‘80s, the edifice was to converge the archaic strata of the collective psyche and the political destiny of the Romanian nation, in other words to bring a propagandistically deformed past into an unlikely future of anonymous collectivism and amputated souls. The House of the People was (is?
A few years ago the Center for Art and Public Life facilitated a collaboration between a ceramics course and the design group Rebar to create nesting modules for a species of concern on an island off the coast of Santa Cruz, California. The project was very specific in nature. The birds: Rhinoceros Auklet. The concern: nests being crushed by large elephant seals and sea lions. The material of choice: the pliant and durable medium of ceramics. The location: Ana Neuvo Island.
When I first moved to San Francisco, over six years ago, for a job at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the recurring refrain I often heard from people living here and working in the field of contemporary art was that the region’s art scene tended to be rather “provincial.” I found this pejorative qualifier highly problematic, and in many ways it remains a perception artists living in the Bay Area struggle to overcome.  For example, an artist I know recently appeared in a major national exhibition, and on his wall label in the exhibition he had been described as a “San Francisco-bas

July 16, 2012

Ralph Lemon, choreographer
Introduced by Julia Bryan-Wilson, History of Art, UC Berkeley
Response by Joe Goode, Theater, Dance & Performance Studies, UC Berkeley

Watch the video here!

June 21, 2012

The Arts Research Center recently participated in a convening at YBCA organized by Emerging Arts Professionals / SF Bay Area which, among other goals, allowed participants to connect, share knowledge, and examine opportunities and pitfalls when working with hybrid arts and neighborhood revitalization projects.

April 21, 2012

Making Time: Art Across Gallery, Screen and Stage

Closing Remarks

Watch the video here!

Jonah Bokaer, choreographer and media artist
Judy Hussie-Taylor, Danspace
Mark Franko, Theater Arts, UC Santa Cruz
Response by Ralph Lemon
Moderated by Kate Mattingly, Theater, Dance & Performance Studies, UC Berkeley

Watch the video here!

April 20, 2012

A symposium focusing on thinking across media across a range of histories and also across a range of theoretical paradigms, watching what happens when  different kinds of temporal forms are joined— what it means for certain forms that didn't understand themselves to be durational to be made.

Featuring:

Rebecca Schneider, Theater Arts & Performance Studies, Brown University

Peter Taub, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago

April 19, 2012

For me, it’s hard to imagine a work that does not include time as material. Perhaps timeless masterworks once existed? Of course, to say that they used to exist would imply that they existed, once, in time. It was the claim of “ruin value” that a work would endure to such an extent that it could be, or at least seem, timeless. But this claim is clearly, itself, time-based.

Time based art is when the artist has the control of a certain choreography of a sequence of images and/or live events and determines how the audience is encountering it. It usually also involves a number of media and is rather organized cross-media or inter-media.

The debate over Michael Fried’s “Art and Objecthood” some time ago raised an awareness that sculpture could be a time-based art, and that the time of art belonged principally to the beholder in a situation of viewing that Fried characterized negatively as “theatrical” but that was also reclaimed positively by others. Since then I think the term “theatricality” has given way to the term interdisciplinarity.

Visual art and performance are in a classic bad relationship.  Art stays for the sex, the good times, the feeling of being alive.  But art will belittle performance in public, will call it late at night but won’t let it stay over, doesn’t really believe what performance does is valuable.  Art’s esteemed family only barely tolerates the relationship.  Performance stays with its more powerful partner for the money, for the stature, the trips to Europe, for feeling like it belongs to something, for fear of having to go back to that old senile boyfriend, the Theater.  How else can it support
I’m not sure how useful the concept of “time-based art” is. It lumps together things that have nothing in common, and artificially separates things that do.
As a description, “time-based art” has always struck me as a bit off. But not so much because its baggy scope enables a sometimes arbitrary and lazy lacing together of dizzyingly disparate works across media. In fact, this ruled but unruly interdisciplinarity seems mostly a virtue, the whole point: to think through dance, film, visual art, music, theater and performance adjacently and synchronically.

“Such an engaging conference”… “A really rich event”…“Thank you for inviting me to be part of your extraordinary ‘Making Time’ symposium. It was a real pleasure to hear from all those brilliant thinkers….”

Don Delillo’s 2010 novelPoint Omega opens and closes with a lengthy meditation by a nameless character on Douglas Gordon’s 24-Hour Psycho, 1993. The first section plunges the reader into a detailed observation of Gordon’s video-sculpture as it was installed on the sixth floor of New York’s Museum of Modern Art in September 2006.

To me, time-based art could be anything that is art and takes time. Time-based art could include video, film, performance, net art, etc. These are a diverse array of practices and I’m not sure that they have anything particularly meaningful in common. Time itself is not a clear differentiator since even static works take time to view. So time as part of any art experience is inescapable.

Dance has been traditionally perceived as a time based form. The conventional wisdom is that a dance should have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Merce Cunningham disrupted this to some great degree by corrupting the linearity of sequence in his dances. Chance processes allowed shards of the dance to appear and disappear at different times. He also went a great distance to getting dance out of the proscenium box and into spaces that were more level with the viewer (museums, warehouses, studios).
In April 2012, the Arts Research Center presented Making Time: Art Across Gallery, Screen, and Stage, a three-day symposium that featured keynotes by curators Sabine Breitwieser (MOMA) and Jens Hoffmann (CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art) and choreographer Ralph Lemon, and conversations with the artists Daniel Joseph Martinez and Allan de Souza.
I come to the questions of Making Time from the field of performance–and before that, the field of theatre.  This is to say that, for a long time, the term “time-based art” did not mean that much to me.  It sounded confusing, or maybe even redundant.
I have been using the concept expanded event for some years as a way to refer to time-based art. With this concept I have referred to those works, mostly shown in exhibitions, which experiment with some kind of change during the time they stay on view to the public.
 

The phrase “time-based art” suggests a bygone era when ephemerality, duration, and process were the attributes of a radical new art that found its outlet through performance and its documentation through the camera. “Time-based” conjures the live experience attempting to find a permanent form in something tangible (and also, preferably, “time-based”) like a photograph or raw video footage.

I would like to offer another mode of thinking about performance and the exhibition that is less involved with the various structures of the art world and more in consideration of the experience of the exhibition and the artwork itself. This is to say my thinking around the subject of the conference is informed by a set of parameters located quite specifically within the exhibition itself and my practice has very much developed in consideration of what kind of experiences can be made possible within that space.

The Greek language refers to choreography as “dance writing” from the words χορεία (circular dance) and γραφή (writing). I have come to understand that choreographers practice the art of designing movements, in some specified form, through time. 

April 16, 2012

The Arts Research Center is pleased to welcome Sabine Breitwieser, Chief Curator of Media and Performance Art at the Museum of Modern Art, for a week-long residency at UC Berkeley as a 2012 Regents Lecturer.

April 12, 2012

Jens Hoffmann, Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, California College of the Arts
Introduced by Christina Linden, independent curator
Response by Rebecca Schneider, Theater Arts & Performance Studies, Brown University

Watch the video here!

March 16, 2012

In relation to the arts and civic life, the question I am wrestling with right now is how to balance support for the organic growth of a grassroots art culture and arts organizations with traditional institutional art venues, offerings, management and support.We are currently conducting a study for the William Penn Foundation that investigates the impact that a contemporary performing arts festival has had on neighborhood revitalization in Philadelphia.  The Philadelphia Live Arts and Fringe Festival have been successful over the past 15 years in helping to create an identity for Philadel
In relation to the arts and civic life, the question I am wrestling with right now is whether it’s possible for arts organizations and artists to willfully create the conditions for long-term civic redevelopment and permanent social change on a large scale.
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.

What is the role of the university in a city? Are we, as an institution, cultural producers providing the city with content such as exhibitions, lectures, or public projects? Are we organizers, facilitators or interpreters of civic life? Or is our primary role to train students to be cultural practitioners that can either act as cultural workers in our city or elsewhere? This last question can often become a significant choice between encouraging students to stay and act locally within Dallas or to travel to major global cultural centers such as New York, Los Angeles, London or Berlin.

 “In relation to the arts and civic life, the question I am wrestling with right now is…”  how can smaller organizations like Berkeley Art Center continue to play an important role in the civic dialouge in connection with and collaboration with larger arts organizations and other multi-disciplinary organizations, in a way that encourages collaborative and community input and a sense of belonging in one’s own community–our city being one that is highly unique, educated, and creative.
“In relation to the arts and civic life, the question I am wrestling with right now is…” what is the future of ‘place based’ arts when the concept of community is being to radically redefined. So much artistic creation has, historically, been informed by a specific location, a relationship with a specific geographic community, and a very real sense of presence and live engagement.

As an artist whose work primarily consists of engaging people in participatory collaborative events, how can I best use public places in my work? One form my work takes is engaging the public in collaboratively creating ephemeral sculpture using natural materials. I’ve carried out many local public events in a diversity of settings: in Berkeley parks, on pavement  (street festivals), on private property bordering sidewalks, and even on the lawn in front of Berkeley’s Old City Hall.

In relationship to arts and civic life, what I am struggling with is how to create a more mutually cooperative relationship between all stakeholders of the city, university, citizens, youth, government, schools, etc. regarding arts and culture. We have a rich area, that is unmatched in intellectual and creative individuals and organizations. Arts and culture can provide a more nuanced and long lasting education and economic benefit to all citizens in our area.

This effort you are spearheading is one that is very important and, as we see in Berkeley to date, a real change agent. First: PARKING.  PARKING.  PARKING.  I have taken classes at the Crucible, Albany Adult School, Richmond Art Center and exhibited at Richmond Art Center.  All have ample free parking.  On the rare occasions I decide to go to Zellerbach, PARKING is my first and main concern.  It is easier for me to go to SF on BART than to the UCB art gallery on Bancroft.  I only live at Spruce and Eunice (approximately), but am 70 and will not walk the distance and certainly not at night w

BAM/PFA has just completed a new five-year strategic plan. The plan’s goals are meant to define who we will be a year after moving to our new downtown Berkeley location—on Oxford Street between Center and Addison Streets–in 2015. The very first goal reads as follows: 
“BAM/PFA is a uniquely dynamic, diverse, and engaging cultural ‘town square.’”
“In relation to the arts and civic life, the question I am wrestling with right now is…” is connections between city committees and city officials.  There is a disconnect between information channels, also raising awareness of the Public Art Committee’s role in the community at both city and citizen levels is necessary.  Also, I am interested in how the energy for interesting/innovative projects can be maintained once a program becomes mainstreamed…
The Arts Research Center at UC Berkeley is sponsoring the symposium “ART/CITY” on March 16, 2012.
Reading the blogposts of ART/CITY’s incredible interlocutors, I am struck both by the investment in broadly resonant macro-issues about the conjoined future of the arts and cities and by participants’ willingness to share highly local stories of the puzzles that they are encountering at their own institutions.
We are working with a group of citizens and the Mayor’s office, to examine an area in town called the Funk Zone. It has been designated an arts, marine and tourist district and is one block from the beach and our main tourist area, the wharf and State Street. Developers are buying up huge plots of land and are raising the cost of living in an area traditionally known for being a cheap rent arts neighborhood. While the developers would also like to keep the funk in the zone, it must pencil out for them and their investors.
How to create more vibrant downtown districts in light of retail jumping to the Internet and leaving vacant storefronts?  Bring in the arts!  Fill those empty spaces with visual and performing artists who are clamoring for space.  The landlords need to become involved in creating a simple process to allow this to occur.
The Arts Research Center at UC Berkeley is sponsoring the symposium “ART/CITY” on March 16, 2012.
In relation to the arts and civic life, the question I am wrestling with right now is how best to generate the next generation of funding for emerging arts projects around the City – and how best to leverage that funding for maximum impact.
 “In relation to the arts and civic life, the question I am wrestling with right now is…” …how to continue to move artistic inquiry into a central position as an essential component of civic investigation and discourse in Riverside California, a city where 17% of the population have less than a high school education, only 22% have a Bachelor’s degree, where the medium income is $31,000, and where 59% of the freshman class at University of California, Riverside, are the first in their family to attend college.
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. Through a cross sector partnership (civic, private and community based) as well as a rebranding and marketing plan for the neighborhood and groups of stores, popuphood has become one of Oakland’s homegrown jewels.
“In relation to the arts and civic life, the question I am wrestling with right now is…” leveraging funding due to the budget problems currently in place with local governments. The silver lining in this money challenge is the new partnerships we have been able to forge with community agencies that are not the “usual suspects.”
Can an institution expand upon its current, more traditional, institutional structure – a structure in which community members must physically enter its doors to engage – to create a new vision that breaks down the barriers, creating an institution that considers its entire community as its activation space.

February 22, 2012

My collaborative practice with Brennan Gerard has centered around   the production of live performances informed by dance and engaged in a dialogue with the histories and legacies of Minimalism.  In recent work we have interrogated the couple as the hegemonic formation of intimacy.  We approached this problem through a programmatic score-based performance that  produced, over the course of it, new representations of intimacy determined by the logic of the system and not by our individual desires or authorial urges.

TWO WORKS I’m thinking about:

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.

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.
Since 2008 I have been working with a team of colleagues at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA) to design and organize the museum’s performative/social practice program, Engagement Party. Engagement Party’s statement is below:
I’ve been thinking and teaching a lot lately on the question of what is critique.  Basing my understanding of critique on Foucault has been helpful in resituating the discursive frame of critique, exploding what it is that we do as teacher who lead group critiques, as well as opening the question of criticality for students in a way that understands critique as a practice rather than an object.

We (Laurie Beth Clarkand Michael Peterson) are artists and scholars who make work independently and collaboratively.

1) 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. We swapped literature for text somewhere in the mid 1980s.

Out of the six exhibitions my students curated since I began heading the Museum and Curatorial Studies program at Cal State Long Beach, two have taken the issue of exhibiting performance as their primary concern. In 2008 Un-figuring the Body (lead by Megan Hoetger) investigated the posthumous representation of performance-related objects in the gallery space, tackling the problem of how to represent the (intensely) physical work of performance after the event took place, and the theoretical implication of how the human body becomes “figured” in representation.

Several issues emerged from my work on Allan Kaprow and happenings and have been taking up headroom for some time now.

1)  “Strips of behavior” and the repertoire and how these two concepts do or don’t map onto advanced art practice.

2)  Deskilling and its self-conscious institutionalizing as “resistant” practice.

3)  Institutional critique as necessary decoy.

4)  The fetishizing of collective and/or participatory practice v. the problematics of solo work.

Coinciding with the annual meeting of the College Art Association in Los Angeles, The Arts Research Center at UC Berkeley is hosting the offsite working session “Making Time at Human Resources” on February 22, 2012. Participants have been invited to post some brief thoughts on the topic in advance of the event. This guest posting is by ARC Director Shannon Jackson.

I have been mulling the historical and political contexts and consequence of our present fixation with “participation” — as the art world calls it — or “participatory culture” as it is referred to in media and cultural studies. In a well-known essay, Claire Bishop teased out one key assumption: that between participation and democracy. Indeed, participatory democracy, a cherished value of the new left, has received renewed attention due to its presence within the Occupy movement.

I have been thinking about the time/frame bracket of “the performative” with the general proposition that it defies the usual spatial and temporal brackets that is put around “a piece”–be it a dance performance or am event, or a “work of art.” Last fall, I posted a note on Facebook called “Protest is a Performative” which was spurred by the controversy that surrounded Rainer’s letter of protest against the MOCA Gala as directed by Marina Abramovic.

Sometimes (most times), I act on irrational impulses. Several nights ago as I was driving home from my studio in Culver City to my apartment in Koreatown, I realized that I had never counted out loud to 1,000. As soon as the thought occurred, I began counting: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 . . . 246, 247, 248, 249 . . . I had parked my car somewhere between 487 and 518. It was then that I decided I would either continue counting until I reached 1,000 or until I lost count. I ended up losing count around 860-something.

Most awareness of the arts focuses on the final product and the outcome of artistic process: objects, productions, performances, publications and presentations.  Mostly, the outcomes are observation based, with audience/community invited to view the end result of creative process, not the development or actual creation of such work.  When “creative outreach” programs are devised to address such issues, they are most often developed and are guided by an institution’s education department and programs.  While participatory, the implemented programs are often hands-on projects for which a grou

The past five years have witnessed the explosion of dance in an art context.

February 10, 2012

Keyword:  Labor / Occupational Realism | I am currently working on a research project involving what I have termed “occupational realism,” in which artists perform labor – or more specifically, go about their normal jobs—under the rubric of art.  This phrase resonates not only within long-standing debates about art in everyday life, but also evokes questions of value, embodiment, and “realism” as an art historical and economic strategy.  Though I began this project well before the Occupy movement, with an article in Artforum about British artist Carey Young, the lexical overlap has prompted

Keyword: Consensus / Consentio, Agreement / Feel better | Defined as “first, general agreement, and second, group solidarity of belief or sentiment.”, consensus has taken on a new, confounded meaning since August. An often times difficult, frustrating, and time-consuming act has produced renewed faith in a participatory system. Every opinion counts, every voice heard. Everyone feels better.We have been activated, informed, enraged.

Keyword: Speech | As direct, physical evidence of citizen personhood, the Occupy movement brings together human bodies in a symbol of speech made in stark contrast to the 2010 Citizens United ruling upholding the rights of corporations to make political expenditures under the First Amendment. There is no place for corporate personhood in this vision of democracy, as muddy, dynamic and diverse as the protest sites themselves.

Keyword: Time | Paul Virilio wrote “history progresses at the speed of its weapons systems” and The Invisible Committee has declared, “the world would not be moving so fast if it didn’t have to constantly outrun its own collapse.” The workings of a society ridden with the manifestations of capital are caught between seemingly opposing polarities of conception of time.

Keyword: Architecture | Defined as a way of making visible, of bringing people and structures into relation with one another and with particular landscapes. Different from keywords that may refer to specific environments — settlement, place —  architecture encompasses the design, dissemination, and evolution of structures. It also acknowledges interactions between people and spaces, reciprocal relations and flows. The Occupy movement animates spaces. Bodies and places produce architectural forms that are flexible, generative, and resistant.

Keyword: Consensus | The actions of occupiers this autumn were centered around the general assembly, which functioned symbolically as almost the embodiment of collectivity itself.  This immediately deteriorated.  All who camped at occupations realized this quickly; others took longer to see the deterioration.  By this winter, occupations nationwide find themselves embrioled in arguments about autonomous actions.  But consensus and autonomy are both understood mythically.  People view consensus as if it was the ur-democracy, the continual suspension of the moment of contract which was suppos

Keyword: Publics | Publics act historically. They are said to rise up, to speak, to reject false promises, to demand answers, to change sovereigns, to support troops, to give mandates for change, to be satisfied, to scrutinize public conduct, to take role models, to deride counterfeits. — Michael Warner
  

After reading Christoph Spehr’s “Free Cooperation” in The Art of Free Cooperation, though initially inspired by the general political model proposed by Spehr, I then found myself wondering what might be the “art” in this, and how could I possibly relate his vision to my initial research into the work of the net.art artists.  I want to use these pages to begin to explore at least the second of these two questions.

Keyword: Share | There is this parable, which for the life of me I can’t find on the Internet. It’s pretty much “The Tragedy of the Commons,” but I think I heard it first at summer camp. It goes like this:

Keyword: Movement | What constitutes a movement? It does not seem to be a question of scale (a large united group does not necessarily make a movement), but one of organization, or, to be more precise, a lack of organization. A movement can encompass any number of organizations, fronts, or parties, but even as it binds them together, it reaches beyond them.

Although the word occupy has experienced new use since the September 2011 occupation of Liberty Park, the real evolution of Occupy does not lie in its political usage but its movement from a transitive to an intransitive verb, in which it now acts as a macro-term encompassing/suggesting many keywords (encampment, occupation, sit-in, protest, etc) without a qualifying place/object.  Occupy today is rapidly moving away from its connections to physical space and is no longer limited to a specific political action but functions as an ideology.  In this way, the word “occupy” creates a visual cu

Keyword: Direct Action | Since the start of Occupy, “direct action” has gone from being a term hardly spoken to a pair of words on everyone’s tongue. Accompanying the term’s discursive proliferation, however, has been a proliferation of what direct action signifies—a development that threatens to make direct action as a term essentially meaningless. 

On February 10, 2012, the Arts Research Center hosted Occupy as Form: A Working Session, an event which explored questions of “formal” concepts related to Occupation, reflecting on the movement’s significance, techniques, and future. We would like to thank all participants for their thoughtful contributions to a stimulating discussion.

The Occupy movement is a virus.  That is obvious.  But the metaphor veers disturbingly into the real—exhibiting the virus’ trademark capacity for metalepsis and contagion—when we think of the lurid stories that broke out in November:  “Zucotti lung” at OWS, the deadly canine parvovirus over the bridge at OccupySF.

Occupy movements bring to mind two distinct and interrelated thoughts, first is the nature and role of the state, and second is the self-organizing capacity of groups outside the context of the state and its organizational forms and resources.

Keyword: Reactivism|Reactivism – processes of transforming and politicizing space that use sensory-kinesthetic techniques to activate radical intertextualities. Reactivism presumes space to be an arena of contest, difference and struggle, and uses complex processes of cultural referencing to address what and who are passed from tell-able history.

Keyword: Autonomy | Among the numerous memes, tropes, and forms associated with the Occupy movement is that of a concerted, public refusal to make specific demands. Although advocates of this tactic have seen it as a potent way to argue that the existing political system must be overhauled, rather than accomodated, many liberals have criticized such a position as impractical, while conservative pundits tout this apparent irrationality as proof that Occupy can’t be trusted. So how might we understand the singular demands made by the rhetoric of “no demands”?

Keyword: Demands | Ever since the Occupy Movement emerged onto the political landscape, critics and skeptics have both asked, “so, what are the demands?” And in more recent months, skeptics have asked whether the movement has lost momentum since many of public sites occupied have been cleared by state-ordered police power.  Let us consider first the question of demands, and then turn to the question of where the occupy movement moves now.

“The central framing device for the working session was to try to consider the overlapping roles of activism, art, and scholarship. There were several activities that were designed to cultivate discussion about these overlapping concerns including a lively “speed dating” session in which the participants were set up in pairs and given the opportunity to quickly exchange insights about the personal meaning and significance of the movement.”

Keyword: Radical | The word “radical” has more or less become a pejorative in the mainstream, narrowly associated with (senseless?) acts of violence, and consistently applied in this way to marginalize actions, actors, and ideas which would otherwise call into question structures of dominance. It’s become so deeply ingrained that one wonders if truly radical thought itself isn’t on the verge of becoming unthinkable, even among cultural workers.

For those of us engaged in community-based art practice (via scholarship and/or via practice), what does the occupy movement have to offer our understanding of the term “community?” Miranda Joseph’s theorizing of community has asked us to think carefully about our tendency to hold up “community” as always and only a liberatory category. Other scholars have joined Joseph in questioning the use of “community” as an organizing concept for certain modes of socially engaged theater, performance, and art practice.

Gregory Levine, Associate Professor of History of Art at UC Berkeley, recently posted his own reflections on the art of Occupy Cal: http://ucsota.wordpress.com/2011/11/28/art-occupies-at-occupy-cal/

Occupy the Hood — We are the 99% | As the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement mushroomed city by city in states across the country, the need to make room to expand a vision of racial equity through the participation and leadership of communities of color came to the fore. In early October, OWS participant New Yorker Malik Rahsaan launched Occupy the Hood in order to involve more people of color in the OWS movement.

Keyword: Tactics | I am curious about how we have come to use the word tactic, a word which is distinctly military in form, but which is also at play in contemporary art practice through the use of phrases such as tactical aesthetics and tactical media. It seems to me that many of the gestures we make in everyday life may slip in and out of the frame of tactics, depending on their context.

The horizontal governance and DIY aesthetic politics of Occupy foster a visual culture of creative diversity–letting “a thousand flowers bloom.”  Occuprint, a website showcasing donated graphic designs of protest from all over the world, makes this case visually. As part of the creative commons, the graphics can be freely downloaded for noncommercial use.

I am interested in the ways in which the burgeoning Occupy movement inhabits an affective, social temporality of permanence that forcefully breaches the already available time-slots of reified, rationalized administration of public space.

Keyword: Class | Having grown up in class-conscious Britain of the ‘70’s and 80’s (a country I like to describe as a former social democracy) it is with a growing sense of excitement that I have witnessed the rise of discussions around class within the Occupy movement.

How does the consensus decision-making process function on an embodied level? Moving through downtown Oakland the night after the police raid, I am struck by the heightened kinesthetic awareness evident in the hundreds of bodies that fill the streets.  True to the Occupy ethos, there is no top-down leadership, and yet the group is certainly moving together, en masse, with implicit nonverbal agreements about directionality, pauses, speed, and – in particular – a highly attuned empathetic response mechanism that kicks in as we encounter the blockades of riot police.  I am reminded of Susan Fo

Keyword: Solidarity | “We are the 99%.”  The catchy tagline resonates with a diversity of protesters and spectators, calling for solidarity across lines of difference.  But how solid is that solidarity?

I am interested in researching and creating work around the idea of care in sites of protest. Social practice artists and contemporary artists working around issues of protest engage different value systems than traditional, market-based production, often leading to alternate systems of exchange around needs and care, both in society and on a personal level. Which social practices are being employed at Occupy by a wide range of participants to address gaps in services provided by governments, institutional structures? How effectively are these practices filling these gaps?

Keyword: Occupation | “Love and work…work and love, that’s all there is.” – Freud. I’m curious about the resonance of the word “occupation” which connotes both non-violent strategy and employment.  The Occupy Movement is fueled by frustration over unemployment: many of its participants are out of work.  The movement provides a daily set of roles and duties that provide a form of employment with its associated benefits (outside of salary). I’d like to explore possible associations with Frederick Froebel’s “Gifts and Occupations” concept which was the foundation for kindergarden (1837).

Keyword: Reversal | With the rise and fall of corporate greed, the 99% collectivize in order to protest social and economic inequality and demand a shift in the distribution of wealth and systems regulating it. The very reversal that they insist upon can also be seen in the form they use to insist. Where the individual who stands, and who obtains the highest physical level, assumes the traditional position of power, in situations of group demonstrations the sit-in becomes a powerful tool of resistance.

Keyword: Horizontal | Taking an axis as a keystone, the Occupy groups utilize an organizing form that is diametrically perpendicular to, if not opposed to the vertical hierarchies employed by corporations, institutions, the academy, the church, and the patriarchal nuclear family. As an artist that has worked in a variety of collectives and collaborations, coming up against the embedded habit of top-down hierarchy has always worn me down. What happens to the discontent that remains from not being heard under majority rule?

Keyword: Desire | “We know that people often desire something but do not really want it,” said Slovoj Zizek, in closing remarks to the Zuccotti Park Occupiers on Oct 25 2011, “Don’t be afraid to really want what you desire.” Adbusters Magazine, and its co-founder Kalle Lasn are arguably the first to call for an occupation of Wall Street, and despite the current multitudinous voices, it is worth examining the desires of this demographic. Adbusters lived between fashion and car racing, on the shelves of a corporate bookseller where I, and its demographic were too.

Keyword: Health | After news of the initial eviction and arrests at Occupy Oakland spread, thousands of people gathered for a general assembly outside the Oakland Public Library.  After 5PM that day, some two thousand people marched from the library toward the jail to demand the release of the protesters.  Marchers held signs regarding economic justice, racial justice, and re-funding education and health care.  Close to 6PM, my colleagues and I witnessed dozens of police and sheriffs in riot gear throwing tear gas and shooting projectiles into the marching crowd.  Later that night, we witne

Keyword: Crisis | Every crisis is an opportunity to sell something. You can buy yourself out of environmental crisis by purchasing organic, local, naturally raised, eco-friendly, free-range, zero-waste, green, green, green. If the economy is the catastrophe that is bringing you down, you are obviously looking at this from the wrong angle. Interest rates are so low, you can’t afford NOT to buy! What about starving children? What about girls who can’t go to school? What about endangered animals? Donate to a charity, you will feel better! You can spend yourself out of this situation.

Keyword: Mic Check (The Human Microphone) | In participating with Occupy Oakland (OO), I became most profoundly inspired by the power of the human microphone, also known as mic check.  Mic Check works by a single individual reciting few words at a time, followed by an echo created by the larger group. Beyond its practicality of amplifying a single voice (often for emergency transmission information), mic check has an inherent quality that promotes solidarity. The human microphone is also a demonstration of resistance that cannot be confiscated or detained.

Assembly/Assemblage
1) A bringing or coming together;
2) A gathering of persons for the purposes of deliberation and decision;
3) A work of art consisting of miscellaneous objects fastened together;
4) A group of artifacts found at the same archaeological site;
5) In literature, a text built primarily from existing texts in order to solve a writing or communication problem in a new context

Keyword: Content | The current question is what comes next for occupy? As the squares and parks have been swept by brutal police repression, as winter makes tents significantly less attractive, occupiers ask how to escalate. If occupying is itself a form—tents, general assemblies, cardboard signs with personal stories attesting hardship—the question of content remains. Occupy is form, but what is its content? This question is all the more essential now that the question of changing the form is more important. In other words, to play with Marx, how do we move from formal to real occupation?

November 28, 2011

Someone sent me an email recently asking “where are the artists” in the Occupy Cal movement.  My short answer would be: everywhere.  From my perch on the sidelines, I have observed arts embedded in the protests and demonstrations in a number of ways and on a number of levels.  Some echo long-standing traditions of protest.  Folk singers and gospel choirs have sung from the steps of Sproul Hall.

November 7, 2011

We had the opportunity to hold another ARC Salon to celebrate the work of UCB faculty composer, Ed Campion, when Cal Performances featured the performance of his work by the stunning Paris-based group Ensemble Zellig.

November 1, 2011

It gives us great pleasure to introduce you to Susan Miller, our new Director of Organizational Strategy for the Arts + Design Initiative!

Susan Miller is a seasoned arts and academic professional who has held key posts in numerous presenting institutions, universities, and non-profit cultural centers. She brings deep experience in organizational development, planning, fiscal management and community engagement, and a commitment to public education in her new appointment with us at the Arts + Design Initiative.

October 24, 2011

Michael Roth's lecture was co-sponsored by the Arts Research Center and the Townsend Center for the Humanities at UC Berkeley. Currently President of Wesleyan University, Roth has served as President of the California College of the Arts, Associate Director of the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, and Director of European Studies at Claremont Graduate University. He was also H.B. Professor of Humanities at Scripps College, where he founded and directed the Scripps College Humanities Institute.

October 10, 2011

1) What are you most looking forward to from this gathering?
I am most looking forward to seeing the same set of things using a different set of lenses.
2) What are the top five lessons you want to share to fellow artists and community leaders about the kind of work you do?
Most likely no one will encourage you to do the most important work, because it hasn’t been done yet and is literally unthinkable. If your idea feels awkward at first, it may mean that it is especially worth pursuing.
The Arts Research Center at UC Berkeley is sponsoring the symposium “SITUATED: Time-Based Art and Neighborhood Ecologies” on October 10, 2011, organized in part around the premier at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts of red, black & GREEN: a blues, a collaboration between Marc Bamuthi Joseph, Theaster Gates, and Michael John Garces. ARC Director Shannon Jackson was commissioned by YBCA to write an essay on the piece, in which she explores many of the issues that will be taken up at the SITUATED symposium:
The Arts Research Center at UC Berkeley is sponsoring the symposium “SITUATED: Time-Based Art and Neighborhood Ecologies” on October 10, 2011.  ARC Director Shannon Jackson discusses the event and the research projects it grows out of on the SOTA (State of the Art) blog:
Like so many others who attended SITUATED on Monday, I returned to the mayhem of other responsibilities, but I found myself returning again and again to the ideas shared and questions explored.Here are some of my reflections, and I would love to hear what is preoccupying you.

Expanded Art Inside Artistic Silos or “How many people can you make love you” (Theaster Gates)

September 19, 2011

Hello Friends,
While campus was calmer during the summer months, we have been hard at work planning a number of research projects, retreats, and public symposia for the upcoming academic year.  Check out a preview of Fall events in the works so far.

September 12, 2011

This coming Monday, September 12, we will be hosting a retreat and working session devoted to Sustaining the Arts in the Central Market district of San Francisco.  With seed funding from UCIRA, ARC is working to build artistic partnerships between the UC system and arts organizations of Northern California.  One of our tasks is to think long-term about the role of the arts in Bay Area neighborhoods—as a means for building community, as a force in local economies, and as vehicles for provoking critical and imaginative reflection.
Market Street was once a glamorous destination for the western world, boasting of such landmarks as the Palace Hotel, the most expensive and luxurious hotel of its time, the Chronicle building’s clock, the largest ever built, the Call building- one of the tallest in the world, and City Hall, a splendid monument to the city.  People came to Market Street for shopping, entertainment and business.
With the assistance from the Mayor’s Office of Economic and Workforce Development, the Northern California Community Loan Fund and NEA/SFAC ARTery Project grant last year, we were able to temporarily relocate to Mid-Market while our Leavenworth building undergoes renovations.

April 29, 2011

The first panel of the daylong symposium "Curating People," presented by the Arts Research Center at UC Berkeley (arts.berkeley.edu) on April 29, 2011, this discussion of "When Presenters Become Curators/When Curators Become Presenters" is introduced by Shannon Jackson (UC Berkeley), moderated by Leigh Markopoulos (California College of the Arts), and features Betti-Sue Hertz and Angela Mattox (Yerba Buena Center for the Arts), Erin Doughton and Kristan Kennedy (Portland Institute for Contemporary Art), and David Henry (Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston).

April 28, 2011

Keyword: Urban | In mainstream US media, “urban” is a pervasive euphemism for black, a way to register but not directly point at African-American culture within the post-racial political paradigm of colorblindness.

Confessions of a Social Reform and Theater Scholar Turned Social Practice and Performance Scholar | Alright, this a broad-stroked exercise that reduces the terms that precede and follow both sides of the “turn.” And of course, I would not want to say that I have concretely left one kind of position and concretely entered another kind of position. But the exercise does allow me to say a bit more about what it means to come to the question of Curating People as someone who first studied theater and wrote a first book on social reform history.

Keyword: Event Landscape | The arts and the city are mutually recomposing one another – conceptually, physically, operationally.

Somewhere along the way in the late 1980s things shifted. I was a young visual artist living in a loft in downtown Manhattan where I made my paintings and sculptures, mostly highly charged abstract works. I kept myself on a rather rigorous art-making schedule. During the day, I was curating exhibitions in the South Bronx at a small alternative exhibition space as well as cemeteries and industrial parks. It was this combination that caused the crisis.

Keyword: Innovation | In an attempt to attend to the particular urban and cultural ecosystem of the Bay Area I’d like to contribute a second term – innovation – and loosely suggest its relevance to the discussion.

As the national discourse around innovation expands, we see hundreds of thousands of square feet of urban space mobilized and repurposed under the term: municipal innovation districts, public and private innovation incubators for entrepreneurial ventures, etc.

Keyword: Domestic Festivals | Barcelona 2010. In a scenario characterized by the financial crisis and emerging social fracture appears the first domestic festival called ‘La estrategia doméstica’ (the domestic strategy). The presentation of pieces and artworks takes place in private homes. Friends, neighbours and acquaintances offer a room or a space in their house for artists to perform there. The festival tries to challenge the concepts of cultural enterprise and institution by proposing homes as legitimate spaces for the artistic experience.

Keyword: Restoration | In the Bay Area and beyond, ambitious creek and wetland restoration projects aim to return landscapes to an earlier, more “natural” condition. The scientists designing the projects know that it is impossible to restore a landscape to a pre-human condition when the entire watershed has been radically altered, and they make many nuanced choices in order to enhance habitats.  But the public often believes the goal is to put a site back to “the way it was.”

Keyword: Environmental Humanities | (Cribbed from the co-authored Background Report, The Emergence of the Environmental Humanities, Swedish Foundation for Strategic Environmental Research/MISTRA, Stockholm, 2013, co-authors David Nye (Chair), Robert Emmett, James Fleming, and Linda Haverty Rugg)

Confessions of an experimental artist who has also become an academic and a dance/performance educator and mentor | Like many who are part of this symposium, I wear multiple hats in one day. I am both an administrator of a dance program within a university and an artist who manages, runs, and creates for my own dance company. My choice to make artistic work within an academic institution has provided me with distinct types of support and opportunity.

Keyword: Geohumanities | Framing

The ‘geohumanities’ is a transdisciplinary and multi-methodological inquiry that begins with the human meanings of place and proceeds to reconstruct those meanings in ways that produce new knowledge as well as the promise of a better-informed scholarly and political practice. The term is meant to encompass (but not supersede or replace) related but more specific constructs such as the ‘digital humanities.’ 

Place

I came to PICA through a performance background in theatre, dance and music. Starting on the ground floor of a new organization I was part of a small team working with artists in both visual art and performance. With each project I learned a new set of skills, generally related to connecting artists with the human and/or physical resources they needed to make their work happen, teaming them with designers, technicians and thinkers in our community as well as spaces, materials, and tools.

Keyword: “Arts” | I’ve started to note what happens when “art” goes plural to become “arts,” as it has in the title “City, Arts, and Public Spaces”:  how, and in what contexts, does this multiplicity matter?  Art historians often assume that the definition of art in its singular form defaults to the realm of the visual, as if the concerns of, say, painting, photography, and sculpture are distinct from those of literature, music, or dance.  “The arts” is a convenient way to signal a more inclusive or multidisciplinary approach, one that widens out from a narrow understanding to inc

Confessions of an Artist/Artist-Curator/Curator of Artists | I do not come to this symposium with a pedigree.  Somehow through hard work and the investigation of ideas, I have gotten to where I am today.  I am an artist who also calls herself a curator. I sit within an institution working on behalf of artists. I also attempt to teach, to write, to arrange objects and humans  –  in rooms and in theaters and in storefronts and on the street. In my role at PICA I have often said yes. I have rarely had to say no. This feels like a privilege.

Keyword: Co-Production | Especially when we talk about the specificity of city, we think of something, that is somehow close to a lived situation (with a specific narration, setting, dramaturgy, time-structure) than a fixed place. And this situation is somehow more than „only“ the place. It also seems clear to me that we (as visitors or inhabitants of that city) are producing (or at least co-producing) that situation.

Why I want to be in on this conversation…I am excited to be involved in organizing the “Curating People” symposium because it allows me to re-visit issues that I explored when I was a practicing artist—or to be more accurate, a student artist. 

Keyword: Editing the City | Recently New York City’s official adoption of a new disability accessibility icon has gotten a lot of press: a dynamic figure in a wheelchair zooming through blue space, in sharp contrast to the familiar poky, static handicapped parking-lot sign.

Keyword: Public | As much of my work as a writer, curator and educator focuses on the ways artists work in public space, I am drawn to dialog that parses the meaning of public space in civic life.  Recently I have been thinking about two (seemingly) unrelated articles by New York Times critic Michael Kimmelman that explore the value of public spaces in an urban context.

I joined the Hayward Gallery’s exhibition department in 1991, becoming one of a staff of around 70 in the visual arts arm of London’s multi-disciplinary South Bank Center (SBC). At the time there was a very clear-cut distinction between our remit and that of the SBC’s other cultural, mainly music, programs. This distinction was based not solely on different media, but on the assumption that art audiences would never equal concert goers in their numbers, or paying power, and that the Hayward Gallery’s role consequently might not be as vital or valuable.

Keyword: Public Spaces|I’d like to start by echoing the questions that Shannon and others have already begun framing in prior posts. Part of the excitement in joining a cross-disciplinary group like this lies in seeing the precision and inventiveness with which scholars from other fields are able to engage concepts that sometimes seem to lose their edge through overuse.

Performance emerged as a new genre in contemporary art at the end of the 1960s. Alongside other new forms, such as video and installation, which developed contemporaneously as aspects or off shoots of Conceptual art and concurrent with the radical politics of the time, it was conceived as oppositional to the increasing commercialism of art and a way to break down boundaries between artist and audience, art and life, and to de-emphasize the art object in favor of the process of creation.

Keyword: Dwelling and Beyond | In the early stages of thought about what we have come to call “global urban humanities,” the term mega-city was suggested to us as the type of site where an exploration of the potential connections between the humanities and fields including environmental design, architecture, and urban planning might be especially fruitful.  The suggestion, implicit or explicit, was that the mega-city was especially representative of contemporary conditions and that it presented a unique set of problems, ones that had yet to be thoroughly explored by a

Top Ten Things Every Curator Should Know about Supporting Experimental Work
1) Being a good curator is more than having good taste or knowing how to arrange things.
2) If supporting experimental work ONLY requires facilitating the production of it, the title of curator is probably overstated. Facilitator, coordinator, producer is probably more like it. (See next.)

Keyword: Biennial | Recently, I have become involved in devising contemporary art biennials, at a time when the debate about these events has slowed.  Like so many of the dozens of biennials around the world, the two I am now working on – the Mercosul Biennial in Porto Alegre and the Liverpool Biennial – date from the 1990s.  Istanbul (1987) and Havana (1984) are among the older contemporary biennials (excluding Venice and São Paulo, which belong to a different time).  Before it is anything else, a biennial is an ongoing series of temporary exhibitions supported by a

A hybrid inside the gates: confessions of an artist/curator/educator/administrator/curator/artist
Over the past 30 years I have worked in five different art museums including one photography museum, two encyclopedic museums, and two modern/contemporary museums.I came to the field through the back door—a government grant to better engage visitors gave me and three fellow MFA students our first museum jobs – – leading tours and creating public programs.When the grant ended I went behind the scenes in a different museum as a preparator and curatorial assistant.

Keyword: Carbon Hoofprint | Cities are centers of consumption, and especially in the west, their ecological footprints however measured are enormous. Buildings energy use and the fuel use of transportation systems are typically the focus of urban sustainability studies, along with urban form and the conservation of habitat within and beyond urban limits. Far less attention is paid to ‘stuff’ and the cultural detritus of modern life, and even less attention is paid to the role of food in the carbon economy.

My own notes are my personal interpretations of points raised by our speakers, but here is an attempt to share a few paraphrases of some of the things that made me do some extra scribbling.  Others should feel free to add phrases and paraphrases that they remember—or correct mine.
Angela Mattox: how can different organizations make use of each others’ resources to support an artist?…there is an art to the practical…

Keyword: PARIS versus SAN FRANCISCO : SDF versus Homeless | The homeless people are very present in the public spaces of the city of San Francisco. Mélanie and myself have been noticing this presence as a certain way to occupying the public space by way of performance art and methods of exhibition. Above all, we have been noticing a split between the American homeless and the French S.DF. A certain number of differences can be drawn. Above all, the terminology.

My research focuses on how and why the projected image has emerged as a major feature of artistic production over the past two decades. In addition to the analysis of key artworks, a significant component of this project has involved examining the various strategies curators and artists have used to display moving images in a gallery/museum space. These can range from the innovative to the exploitative, from the refreshing to the careless.

March 31, 2011

Continuing our practice of providing UCB faculty with an opportunity to share work-in-progress, ARC hosted a Charrette for Ken Goldberg who is preparing a new work to open at the San Francisco Contemporary Jewish Museum in the spring.

ARTS ELSEWHERE: The School of Social Work at the University of Washington recently reconnected with the historical formation of the field, that is, with what we would now call its nascent “interdisciplinarity” in the arts.

January 18, 2011

As noted in another post, in September, I finally had the chance to meet Stan Lai—the great Taiwanese playwright, theatre director and Berkeley grad— as part of a Berkeley-Taipei celebration.

October 29, 2010

This fall, three Bay Area theatres joined forces—and resources—to co-produce the incredible Brother/Sister trilogy of plays written by the incredibly gifted Tarell Alvin McCraney.

The ARC Blog captures arts announcements, research and events supported by ARC on the UC Berkeley campus.