At the start of the year, the first and second year MFA students collaborated in a weeklong workshop Politics of Installation (in artistic practice and program) with Jack Segbars. What are the topics and questions at stake in the workshop?
Where in the model of contemporary arts: a hybrid and joint undertaking between artists, institutions, curators, theory and critique is the actual ‘object’ of art located and generated?
The artistic practice is an interconnected mode of production, not solely defined by the artist. The legacies of Conceptual Art, Minimal Art and Institutional Critique demonstrate that the conditions and parameters of art production are essential elements in establishing the content and mode of operation of the artwork.
The Curatorial, Educational, Historiographical and Discursive Turns, that have ex- panded the scope of context and layerings of conditions, that have become part of artistic strategies and content, can be seen as further examples of this development. Es- pecially now in what is called the Post-Conceptual condition, in which the dominance of the conceptual as quality, frame of evaluation and as institutional framework, governs artistic production (Peter Osborne), it is crucial to re-evaluate artistic methodology in order to (re-) gain critical agency.
The aim of the workshop is to explore the individual take to this topic. How is ones work situated and operational concerning the expanded notion and set-up of production? The central issue, through which we will explore this, is through the notion of the ‘Installation’. As Boris Groys has stipulated in his essay: Politics of Installation: no- wadays the manner in which art is mediated and presented, its context of production, is an integral part of content, that artist need to negotiate. According to Groys this also provides for possibilities of agency.
The installation is a key concept to define the context of art production including cu- ratorial, institutional, issues of authorship and discursive/theoretical aspects of pro- duction. The term ‘installation’ can serve as instrument to see the production of art as a constellation involving all these components.
We will research this topic through group discussion and group work on location, and will work towards an end presentation at the end of the week.
Jack Segbars is an artist, writer, curator amongst others living and working in Rotterdam, NL.
akv st.joost mfa 