'Institutional critique' is best known through the critical practice that developed in the late 1960s and early 1970s by artists who presented radical challenges to the museum and gallery system. Since then it has been pushed in new directions by new generations of artists registering and responding to the global transformations of contemporary life. The essays collected in this volume explore this legacy and develop the models of institutional critique in ways that go well beyond the field of art. Interrogating the shifting relations between 'institutions' and 'critique', the contributors to this volume analyze the past and present of institutional critique and propose lines of future development. Engaging with the work of philosophers and political theorists such as Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, Gilles Deleuze, Antonio Negri, Paolo Virno and others, these essays reflect on the mutual enrichments between critical art practices and social movements and elaborate the conditions for politicized critical practice in the twenty-first century.

Cover -- Title -- Copyright -- Dedication -- Contents -- List of figures -- List of plates -- Acknowledgements -- 1 Critical practice as reconciliation -- 2 Changing hands: ethical stewardship of collections -- 3 'Temple swapping': hybridity and social justice -- 4 Platforms: negotiating and renegotiating the terms of democracy -- 5 Reconciliation and the discursive museum -- Bibliography -- Index

This book takes a new, exciting and important approach to art. It shows how children and older students can use art to explore personal, social and cultural issues that touch their lives. The book covers new ground, responding as it does to the increasingly diverse nature of cities and to recent government initiatives worldwide to foster social inclusion and equality of opportunity and support active citizenship. The contributors are art educators. They write about their ways of engaging with contemporary art practice in their particular fields so as to encourage young people to acquire critical understanding. They also challenge the pedagogies that perpetuate long-established forms of art practice. Tim Rollins writes about his work with disaffected youths in the Bronx and John Johnston describes work in art to bring communities together in Northern Ireland. Other contributors include Toby Jackson, head of interpretation at Tate Modern, Diedre Prinz, curator of the Robben Island museum in South Africa, the 198 Gallery in south London, and Viv Golding who works in museums and gallery education. Sinath Bannerjee explores socio-cultural issues in comic novels in India and Sue Lok explores identities through art practices. Educators at each level also contribute to this groundbreaking book. Andy Gower describes his innovative art practice in a secondary school, and children of Room 13 - in a Scottish primary school - report on their organization of their own focus for art. Lesley Burgess and Nick Addison give an account of their development of critical and social practices in art education at London''s Institute of Education. The book is for all those working in art education, in museums and galleries, schools and communities. Contributor information : Tim Rollins work in New York with Kids of Survival (KOS) has achieved world-wide acclaim. Beginning in the 1980s Rollins taught a highly disaffected group of teenagers in the Bronx and together they established an art workshop where members of the group produced challenging conceptual art work. Subsequently work was sold and is now held in major galleries around the world. Through their visual practices many members of the group overcame feelings of rejection and alienation and developed self assurance and confidence. John Johnston works with the Protestant communities in Belfast and through the use of visual practices he has been working with young people in a variety of community sites to explore issues of identity. This is a difficult educational challenge given the history of Northern Ireland. Recently he has been invited to work in Lebanon at a human rights summer school. He has been working with young people there to explore themes of ''home'' and ''belonging'' through visual practices. Room 13 consists of a highly creative group of children at Caol Primary School near Fort William in Scotland. The children are producing contemporary art which has received much interest and acclaim nationally and internationally. The children run Room 13 as an entirely self-funding business, independent from the school. Rob Fairley and Claire Gibb are the only adults involved, they offer advice but they are not the children''s teachers. An elected committee of children makes all decisions about the work and the business. Viv Golding is a lecturer in museum studies at Leicester University. She uses the concept of ''museum clearing'' to counter the discourses of lack, often a self-fulfilling prophecy that frequently permeates much discussion of Black children and their under-achievement in UK schools today. The practical value of her critique is illustrated through a fieldwork project involving imaginative art and literacy school and museum work in south London with early years children. Deidre Prins and her team work as education officers at Robben Island Museum in South Africa. They provide some background to the work of the museum and introduce readers briefly to the legacy of creative forms used in the maximum security prison between 1960s and 1991 and the role it played in creating a process of ''normalization'' under conditions that were repressive and alienating. A large part of the audiences of Robben Island Museum are children and youth. All of them have no memory or experience of the colonial period in RSA history and very few of them have a memory or experience of apartheid. These are two defining periods in the lives of all South Africans, with the scars, benefits and joys of a new democracy. To create a dynamic learning environment in which children and youth can engage with a legacy which is at once painful and liberatory, requires a process of ''making memory'', speaking about the past, doing the past and understanding the past. Their engagement with this past in turn creates their own memories and leaves its mark on Robben Island, which is a living museum. The theme of ''memory making'' will be described through the production of a photographic collage which is part of the annual Spring School activities. 198 Gallery :The team at the 198 Gallery write about their work on he Urban Visions scheme which is an outreach programme that deals with disaffected youth in south London. Lucy Davies the chief administrator and other gallery staff will write about how their program has impacted on the learning experience of children from this diverse urban environmen. Many are excluded from schools or have learning difficulties which schools find difficult to address. The gallery in its work across a range of media, but more especially electronic media, has earned the respect of many in educational and fine art circles both in this country and in mainland Europe. Sue Lok is a an artist and lecturer at Middlesex University. She has a particular interest in the experience of Chinese British artists and young people. Her work will explore themes central to their experience alongside issues emanating from her own experience as an artist and researcher. Lesley Burgess and Nick Addison are art educators at the Institute of Education in London. They have a nation-wide reputation for their seminal publication Learning to Teach Art and Design in the Secondary School. They have carried out further research in the arena of teacher education for this book. Andy Gower is head of art at a north London comprehensive school. He and his team have devised a way of teaching which is unique but very successful within the state system. Their issues-based approach extends across the year groups and encourages responses which address issues of personal, social, cultural and political concern. The idea is not to focus greatly on the development of traditional skills in making art but in fostering a creative thinking environment in which children respond imaginatively and personally to issues which impact on their lives. Sarnath is a comic artist: he address issues through the graphic medium of comic imagery. His work explores relationships and issues of exclusion, both physical and psychological. The ways in which his pieces unfurl encourage different interpretations and readings of what is being said. It is an extraordinarily intense and challenging comic style which demands constant revisiting and re-reading. His chapter invites us to enter the world of a south Asian man whose thoughts drift in and out of different points of experience. It takes us on a physical and psychological journey and depositis us in a space that begs more questions about identity and belonging. Sarnath Banerjee has initiated a scheme in the south Asian community of Tower Hamlets in east London which will see Bengali women make comics about their lives and thoughts. He is developing a similar scheme among a number of minority ethnic communities in the Brixton area of south London. He is shortl

The "other" is a topic of great interest within and across contemporary photographic practice and theory, yet it remains neglected outside the now well-established field of postcolonial studies. This volume brings together photography and written essays that relate to aspects of otherness and visual work. Presented together, the images and critical writings work in concert to construct a new social perspective on questions of otherness and alterity and to highlight photography as a form of critical practice. In a departure from existing conceptions of otherness in postcolonial discourse, 'Photography as Critical Practice' places emphasis on the human condition not as a liberal concept, but as something formed and framed by a broader dimension of social, sexual, and cultural otherness. In this way, the book provides a fascinating new vista on the otherness of photography.

Alternative Iran offers a unique contribution to the field of contemporary art, investigating how Iranian artists engage with space and site amid the pressures of the art market and the state's regulatory regimes. Since the 1980s, political, economic, and intellectual forces have driven Iran's creative class toward increasingly original forms of artmaking not meant for official venues. Instead, these art forms appear in private homes with "trusted" audiences, derelict buildings, leftover urban zones, and remote natural sites. While many of these venues operate independently, others are fully sanctioned by the state. Drawing on interviews with over a hundred artists, gallerists, theater experts, musicians, and designers, Pamela Karimi throws into sharp relief the extraordinary art and performance activities that have received little attention outside Iran. Attending to nonconforming curatorial projects, independent guerrilla installations, escapist practices, and tacitly subversive performances, Karimi discloses the push-and-pull between the art community and the authorities, and discusses myriad instances of tentative coalition as opposed to outright partnership or uncompromising resistance. Illustrated with more than 120 full-color images, this book provides entry into unique artistic experiences without catering to voyeuristic curiosity around Iran's often-perceived "underground" culture.

Practice' is one of the key words of contemporary art, used in contexts ranging from artists? descriptions of their practice to curatorial practice, from social practice to practice-based research. This is the first anthology to investigate what contemporary notions of practice mean for art, tracing their development and speculating on where this leads. Reframing the question of practice offers new ways of reading the history of art and of evaluating particular forms of practice-based art.

Outgrowth of a panel discussion at the 2013 conference of the College Art Association in New York.

Jean-François Lyotard (1924-1998) was one of the previous century's most provocative thinkers. Can his work help us address the crisis currently facing the humanities? The dominant economic discourse sees the humanities as “low-value,” an irritation at best. Lyotard helps us to think against this pervasive dismissal of creative activity, not by defending the honor of the humanities, but by inviting critical practices which aggravate this irritation. Critical practices trouble what counts as critique, embrace incertitude, and listen for silenced voices. Twelve essays by artists and researchers take up Lyotard's invitation and begin to develop the idea of critical practice in the contemporary context. Three sections titled “What resists thinking;” “Long views and distances” and “Why art practice?” address contemporary concerns like affectivity, aesthetics, economic imperatives, militarism, pedagogy, posthumanism, and the closure of what in Lyotard's time was called "the West." Four short pieces by Lyotard intervene in and buttress the discussion: “Apathy in Theory” and “Interview with Art Présent,” here published in English for the first time, and “Affect-phrase” and “The Other's Rights” republished here to highlight his prescient concern for that which cannot be articulated.

To stay relevant, art curators must keep up with the rapid pace of technological innovation as well as the aesthetic tastes of fickle critics and an ever-expanding circle of cultural arbiters. Issues in Curating Contemporary Art and Performance argues that, despite these daily pressures, good curating work also requires more theoretical attention. In four thematic sections, a distinguished group of contributors consider curation in light of interdisciplinary and emerging practices, examine conceptions of curation as intervention and contestation, and explore curation's potential to act as a reconsideration of conventional museum spaces. Against the backdrop of cutting-edge developments in electronic art, art/science collaboration, nongallery spaces, and virtual fields, contributors propose new approaches to curating and new ways of fostering critical inquiry. Now in paperback, this volume is an essential read for scholars, curators, and art enthusiasts alike.

Audience participation has polarized recent debates about contemporary art. This collection of essays sheds new light on the political, ethical and aesthetic potential of participatory artworks and tests the very latest theoretical approaches to this subject. Internationally renowned art historians, curators and artists analyze the impact of collaborative aesthetics on personal and social identity, concepts of the artist, the ontology of art and the role of museums in contemporary society. Essential reading for students and specialists, Interactive Contemporary Art offers a vital critical evaluation of interactivity in contemporary art.