Matthew Bowman, Art, Knowledge Production, and Community

Описание: Abstract:

In the midst of the participatory turn that defined significant aspects of art in the beginning of the 21st century, a number of artists created spaces that sometimes took the form of small ad-hoc libraries alongside other spaces dedicated towards information retrieval. At the mammoth Documenta11 in Kassel (2002), for instance, Meschac Gaba, Thomas Hirschhorn, and the Raqs Media Collective all sought to distil the exhibition’s decolonial ethos and its fascination with knowledge produced at social peripheries by creating artworks that took the form of libraries. A few years later, the artist Martha Rosler exhibited a portion of her library as part of unitednationsplaza.

Such works sought to activate the audience’s participatory potential and agency. But in changing the spectator into a ‘spect-actor’ and researcher, what kind of agency is unleashed by these artworks? Moreover, there are also important questions about artworks that utilize or parallel post-Fordism’s emphasis upon knowledge and cognition as the drivers of the Western economy. Can the knowledge communities envisaged by these projects indicate an alternative to the Neoliberal regime of capitalism?

Speaker biography:

Matthew Bowman is an art critic and historian lecturing at the University of Suffolk, Ipswich. His research focuses on twentieth-century and contemporary art, criticism and philosophy in the United States and Europe. He has published widely, having produced a number of peer-reviewed essays on the philosophy of art criticism as well as the category of ‘Bad Painting’. He also regularly writes art criticism for Art Monthly.

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