Participatory and Relational Arts

The Taste of Art offers a sample of scholarly essays that examine the use of food in Western contemporary art practices. The contributors are scholars from a range of disciplines, such as art history and philosophy, film studies and history. As a whole, the volume shows how artists engage with food as matter and process, in order to explore alternative aesthetic strategies and indicate countercultural shifts in society.
In the first section, the reader will find papers that explore the theoretical intersections of art and food, Food art’s historical root of Futurism, and the ways in which food carries gendered meaning in popular film. The following sections analyze how artists challenge mainstream ideas through food in a variety of scenarios. Starting from a focus on the body and subjectivity, the authors zoom out to look at the domestic sphere, and finally examine the role of the public sphere.
The papers included in The Taste of Art consider numerous case studies, by devoting particular attention to artists like, among others: Daniel Spoerri, Dieter Roth, Joseph Beuys, Al Ruppersberg, Alison Knowles, Martha Rosler, Paul McCarthy, Luciano Fabro, Carries Mae Weems, Peter Fischli and David Weiss, Janine Antoni, Liza Lou, and Natalie Jeremijenko.

The overall aim of this evaluation is to examine the role of arts and culture in climate change conversations. Using the case study of Refuge 2016, the evaluation focuses on how communities like North Melbourne can build resilience and prepare for acute weather shocks.  The Research Unit in Public Cultures evaluated the exercise, based on three measures:
1. how arts organisations can contribute to the planning and creation of Emergency Relief Centres;
2. how arts pedagogy can communicate resilience, and;
3. how arts participation can foster community
resilience.

Call for Papers: After the Turn: New Directions in Socially Engaged Art Research

We are currently inviting abstracts for a special issue proposal to Third Text journal, edited by Danielle Child (Manchester School of Art) and Mor Cohen (Manchester School of Art).

" Creativity isn't the monopoly of artists. This is the crucial fact I've come to realize, and this broader concept of creativity is my concept of art. When I say everybody is an artist, I mean everybody can determine the content of life in his particular sphere, whether in painting, music, engineering, caring for the sick, the economy or whatever. " – Joseph Beuys, in an interview with Frans Hak, 1979, (Beck 2004, p.7) In 2012, we, Lott Alfreds and Charlotte Åberg, co-founded the artistic collective ArtAgent based in Stockholm, Sweden, focusing on participatory and situation-specific art. Through art practices in the public realm, we aim to develop an increased awareness of the potential and capacity of art to impact society and we have created artistic projects at various locations such as neighbourhoods, schools, social institutions, workplaces, public squares and art institutions, both in Sweden and internationally. The works include different international contexts such as social sculpture, (Beuys, Harlan 2004) participatory art, (Milevska 2006) and situation specific and new genre public art. (Lacy 1994) In addition to these concepts we have used a stream of questions and experiments undertaken by thinkers and art practitioners that have influenced the condition of local communities in a global change. Referring to Arjun Appadurais belief, we now live in globally imagined worlds and not simply in locally imagined communities. We also live in a world in which deterritorialisation, the breaking-down of existing territorial connections affect us on a daily basis as well as a parallel vision were we are moving towards a more comprehensive and internationally including approach. (Appadurai 2000) In this shift we see the enhanced possibility of sharing thoughts, feelings and imagination through art. One strength that we possess as artists is that we continuously work with the unspoken, with tacit knowledge that cannot be easily described with words and therefore needs other means in order to be expressed. (Harry Collins 2010). To allow for also imaginary worlds to take part for example in the often dull and repetitive actions at a workplace, we create a possibility of exchange based on thoughts. As artists we have a long experience to work collaboratively with communities by engaging them in artistic actions aiming towards social change. We wish to contribute to this section on methodological reshaping and spatial transgression in glocalised social work by introducing strategies that we have been using in our artistic practice with marginalized communities in Albania, Macedonia, Croatia and Sweden. In particular we wish to describe the interplay between practice and theory in our projects, to discuss theory by way of practice, and in so doing highlight how artistic practice embodies and modifies theory. This will be demonstrated by bringing to attention different situations and conditions for art projects in Sweden and in the Western Balkans. We will begin by introducing a theoretical framework to our methodology building on Joseph Beuys ideas of social sculpture (Sacks 2016) and Grant Kester's notions of the potentiality of conversations in art practices. (ed. Kucor, Leung 2004) We then present examples of our interpretation of what a " social sculpture " can be as the basis of our artistic and social practice. We have heterogeneous artistic backgrounds as visual artists working with sculpture, graphic art, textile design, video and photography. <FIGURE 10.1 HERE> The figure attempts to describe in a simple form the journey that both the artists and participants can take. The timescale can vary from days to months and the creative inputs and outcomes are hugely variable. What we have tried to make clear is that process and product are entangled and must be understood as a whole. While a final presentation or event must be artistically credible it is also informed by the process that created it. (Dix, Gregory 2010). Graphics: Lott Alfreds 2014