Is it any wonder? On commissioning an ‘uncommissioned’ atmosphere: a reply to Hillary and Sumartojo

This article is a reply to Fiona Hillary and Shanti Sumartojo’s “Empty-Nursery Blue: On Atmosphere, Meaning and Methodology in Melbourne Street Art”, published in Public Art Dialogue in October 2014.1 Hillary and Sumartojo present a welcome addition to the literature on street art and graffiti in their sustained analytic focus on a particular work of street art and its place-based reception. However, their analysis of Adrian Doyle’s Empty Nursery Blue is compromised by their largely unacknowledged investment and involvement as commissioners and curators of the work. Further, Hillary and Sumartojo’s adoption of the concept of affective atmosphere and a positive sense of enchantment operates to discount viewers’ contradictory social-emotional responses to the work. While the authors’ attempt to incorporate authoethnographic methods appears promising, in practice this bears little in common with the critically reflexive practice of autoethnography, and is rather used as a circular rhetorical device to demonstrate the presence of the very notion of enchantment so central to the authors’ interpretation of Empty Nursery Blue. The liminal status of Empty Nursery Blue as apparently uncommissioned street art and as commissioned public art presents an unacknowledged tension at the core of this partial interpretation that may yet be ultimately productive of the very notion of wonder and enchantment. A critical expansion of the notion of enchantment to encompass a variety of affective responses and forms of material and ethical engagement is suggested

Bodies Moving and Being Moved: Mapping affect in Christian Nold's Bio Mapping

In A History of Spaces (2004), John Pickles observes that one of the less well-known representational norms of mapping is its focus on ‘natural and physical objects rather than developing universal conventions dealing with symbol, affect and movement.’ New media artist Christian Nold's work has dealt explicitly with two of these cartographic blindspots, grafting new and old technologies that both, in different ways, create bodily traces – the GPS trace of movement and the GSR (galvanic skin response) trace of arousal, often taken as an index of emotional response. Although Nold's socially engaged practice can be placed within the ‘locative media’ genre it also taps into the technological imaginaries around physiological sensors and intimate data. This paper considers Nold's Bio Mapping (2004-) projects in the context of his longstanding concern with social collectives and public space as a field of social relations. Looking at particular maps from Nold's Bio Mapping project, it considers the implications of blending the traces of the body's internal states with the traces produced by locomotive movement, and the relationship between the individuals thus traced and the collectives that Nold seeks to represent. Concurrent with Nold's practice there has been a wave of interest in affect and emotion (and the distinction between them) within the humanities. This paper brings Nold's work into contact with the Deleuzian/Spinozan concept of affect employed in one strand of this writing, drawing in particular on the work of Brian Massumi. Rather than using theory to simply illustrate Nold's practice, it follows the implications of Deleuze's cartographic model of individuation, the logic of which ultimately problematises the very distinction between the two bodily phenomena traced by Nold's device

Contemporary Art: From Studio to Situation

Funded by Arts Council England and AHRC. Doherty is editor of this collection and wrote the introductory chapter. The book describes and analyses the shift from studio-based to situated art practices. Unlike the exhibition catalogue or monograph which promotes a particular artist or a curatorial thesis, the book gives insights into the range of strategies artists and curators have used to approach given contexts. Ranging from relational aesthetics to the concerns of site-specificity, it examines the value of context in the commissioning and production of temporary art works, drawing upon case studies and commissioned essays.As a result, Doherty received invitations to: Interface: Art and Contested Spaces, University of Ulster (2004); Experimental Communities, ARCO, Madrid (2005); Protections, Kunsthaus Graz (2006); Beyond the Studio, National College of Art and Design, Dublin (2007); Art in the Public Realm, Universities Venice, Milan (2007); New models of cooperation between the curator and the artist, Ludwig Museum, Budapest (2005); Contemporary Art, Fundacio La Caixa Barcelona. Doherty was invited to be inaugural Curatorial Fellow, Massey University, Wellington, 2006-09.Book reviewed in Flash Art magazine (2005), Gordon Dalton. Citations include "Architecture: Mouth Wide Open? Intervention by Invention", George Lovett, University of Sheffield, Rita L. Irwin, Kit Grauer, Ruth Beer, Gu Xiong, Barbara Bickel, "The Rhizomatic Relations of A/r/tography" University British Columbia, Stephanie Springgay, Penn State University; "Taking place: some reflections on site, performance and community", Research in Drama Education, 12:1, 1:14; Arts Council England, The power of art visual arts: evidence of impact (2006); Lizzie Muller, Ernest Edmonds, "Living Laboratories: Making and Curating Interactive Art Creativity and Cognition Studios", University Technology, Sydney; UKArtivistic, an international transdisciplinary event interPlay between art, information and activism (2005), Montreal QC (Canada). Book has become set text on curation and commissioning courses at Goldsmiths College, City University, New York