Lecture and Seminar notes

18th February 2022

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Week 1 Practice, Theory, Praxis

Notes

• Praxis definition: practice as distinguished from theory/accepted practice or custom

• Contextualise, evaluate and locate your own practice

• The relationship between theory and practice

• Questions and problems that this

• Practice: the application or use of an idea, belief or method as opposed to theories relating to it

• It is deliberate; an activity that endures and is addressed to other people

• Theory: A supposition or a system of ideas intended to explain something

• Praxis: The process of using a theory or something that you have learned in a practical way

• Art as a practice: thinking through making

• From making to meaning

• Art and ideas, the 'idea of what art is

• Theory as a 'guarantee' of art, theory as the condition of art itself

• Ideas, concepts, systems as practice

• Envisioning the invisible or conceptual

• Art as exploring/testing existing theories and ideas

• Art as a generator of original theories/ideas

• Negotiation: travelling between theory and practice

Week 2 Aesthetics and Anti Aesthetics

Notes

• Pure beauty vs the Cult of the ugly

• Examining g the tensions/relationship between the concept of beauty and the concept of something being ugly

• Beauty is based more on context in contemporary art

• Aesthetics is a branch of philosophy; more than just how something looks

• Aesthetics is a philosophical approach to beauty

• Art was previously making things that were pleasing to the eye

• From the 19th century onwards the idea of what is beautiful shifted

• Notions of beauty tend to be inherited from ancient world

• Links to own personal taste

• Beauty, the body, perfection

• correlation between beauty and form and function

• The notion of the sublime

• Idea of beauty is part of a binary pair

• Art as aesthetic enquiry

• DADA

• Representations of the body

• Abjections; the monstrous, the grotesque

Week 4 Freud, psychoanalysis and gender

Notes

• What is pyschoanalysis?

• How can we challenge it through gender?

• Paleolythic art

• Image & dream

• Psychoanalysis has always been around - critical tool - a way of understanding creative practice

• Archaeology

• Key concepts of psychoanalysis: The unconscious and structures of the mind: The mind as a dynamic interplay of forces, ego, superego, and the unconscious as a space of conflict, anxiety and desire

• Dream: the 'dream work' express latent content as manifest content: dreams as "phantasy" - the expression of a wish

• Trauma, mental illness and the 'talking cure', trauma as a result of conflict, of blocked satisfaction and "forgotten" memory. Psychoanalysis attempts to release these by getting the patient to express them so as to be free of their burden.

• Hysteria

• Sexuality, festishism and desire

• Childhood origins of sexuality and trauma: the 'primal scene'

• 'everyday' psychopathology: Jokes; slips of the tongue and pen, repeated gestures, forgetting and 'bungled actions'

• Late theories: the origins of religions

Week 7 In and Beyond the studio

• A space which is naturally pertinent to all artists

• Issues that are less theoretically driven

• The notion of our practice as production and consumption

• The studio is a traditional environment; a space you would overlook and take for granted

• Needs of the environment we are in and how it affects production fo work

• Thinking about the studio as a place of possibilities

• Defining a studio

• Studios: Kara Walker vs Martin Creed

• Martin Creed's studio doubles as a living space

• Kara Walker's studio is more traditional

• The studio has a sense of openness and possibility

• White cube gallery spacesiist does in the studio' Bruce Nauman

• White cube gallery spaces

• Picasso's studios would fill up and then he'd move on

• The studio becomes layers of memories and experimentation

• A studio without an artists is no longer a working space; it is a museum