Starting in the Middle: NGOs and Emergent Forms For Cultural Institutions

How should we understand the purpose of publicly engaged art in the twenty-first century, when the very term "public art" is largely insufficient to describe such practices? Concepts such as "new genre public art," "social practice," or "socially engaged art" may imply a synergy between the role of art and the role of government in providing social services. Yet the arts and social services differ crucially in terms of their methods and metrics. Socially engaged artists need not be aligned (and may often be opposed) to the public sector and to institutionalized systems. In many countries, structures of democratic governance and public responsibility are shifting, eroding, and being remade in profound ways -- driven by radical economic, political, and global forces. According to what terms and through what means can art engage with these changes? This volume gathers essays, dialogues, and art projects -- some previously published and some newly commissioned -- to illuminate the ways the arts shape and reshape a rapidly changing social and governmental landscape. An artist portfolio section presents original statements and projects by some of the key figures grappling with these ideas

Practicing Research: Singularising Knowledge

In Practicing Research: Singularising Knowledge, Irit Rogoff critically interrogates the academy as location for the dissemination of an artistic knowledge production particularly in the light of protocols of current cognitive capitalism

Who do WE face?

FORMER WEST is a long-term, transnational research, education, publishing, and exhibition project in the field of contemporary art and theory. The project grapples with the repercussions of the political, cultural, and economic events of 1989 for the contemporary condition. It does so in the search for ways of formerizing the persistently hegemonic conjuncture that is “the West”; to be able instead to simply refer to “the west,” and with it, suggest the possibility of producing new constellations, another world, other worldings. Through the propositional imaginary “former West,” the project brings forth a means by which to assess the contemporary at the intersection of two temporal constructions of “the West”: one equated with the “first world” of a post-WWII, tripartite Cold War arrangement; the other, synonymous with the notion of Western ultramodernity

Terra Infirma: Geography's Visual Culture

In an age of 'ethnic cleansing' and forced migration, of contested borders and nations in turmoil, how have issues of place and identity, and of belonging and exclusion, been represented in visual culture? In Terra Infirma, Irit Rogoff examines geography's truth claims and signifying practices, arguing that geography is a language in crisis, unable to represent the immense changes that have taken place in a post-colonial, post-communist, post-migratory world. She uses the work of international contemporary artists to explore how art in the twentieth century has confronted and challenged issues of identity and belonging. Rogoff's dazzling and richly-illustrated study takes in painting, installation art, film and video by a wide range of artists including Charlotte Salomon, Ana Mendieta, Joshua Neustein, Yehoshua Glotman, Mona Hatoum, Hans Haacke, Ashley Bickerton, Alfredo Jaar and Guillermo Gomez-Pena. Structuring her argument through themes of luggage, mapping, borders and bodies, Rogoff explores how artists have confronted twentieth century phenomena such as the horror of the Holocaust, the experience of diaspora at New York's Ellis Island, and, in the present day, disputed and fraught boundaries in the Middle East, the two Germanies, the Balkan states and the US-Mexican border

FREE

At some point last year I proposed within my institution, Goldsmiths, University of London, that we develop a free academy adjacent to our institution and call it “Goldsmiths Free.” The reactions to this proposal, when not amused smirks at the apparently adolescent nature of the proposal, were largely either puzzled—“What would we get out of it? Why would we want to do it?”—or horrified—“How would it finance itself?” No one asked what might be taught or discussed within it and how that might differ from the intellectual work that is done within our conventional fee-charging, degree-giving, research-driven institution. And that of course was the point, that it would be different, not just in terms of redefining the point of entry into the structure (free of fees and previous qualifications) or the modus operandi of the work (not degree-based, unexamined, not subject to the state’s mechanisms of monitoring and assessment), but also that the actual knowledge would be differently situated within it. And that is what I want to think about here, about the difference in the knowledge itself, its nature, its status, and its affect

Geo-cultures

Irit Rogoff’s project 'Geo-Cultures' examines the biennial as a site where local knowledge is exchanged with conditions elsewhere