080058 VO Contemporary Art: The Social Turn, Sociability, and The Socius (2014W)

Framed by the Revolutions of 1989 and the current economic crises, this course offers a conceptually driven analysis of contemporary artistic practices and their critical theories in a global perspective with a particular focus on the emergence of the ‘social’ as the central currency of aesthetic production and consumption. With the ‘social turn’ marking a paradigm shift, our goal is to examine a wide range of practices that privilege acts, gestures, and transactions of ‘sociability’ and that attempt to critically engage with the ‘socius.’

The historical and theoretical scope of this course focuses on a few central questions: First, how does aesthetic production after the fall of communism position itself in relationship to the legacy of the historical and neo-avant-gardes and, given the changed historical conditions, can we still use the same criteria to assess contemporary production or do we need to develop new measures and write different narratives? Second, what models of identity and subjectivity does contemporary artistic production offer and how do these relate to the increasingly powerful structures of globalization and the forces of neoliberal global capitalism? Third, how does artistic production of the last twenty-five years engage with the intensification of media culture, channels of marketing, advertising and publicity, and pervasiveness of ‘social media’?

The approach is genealogical. As such, we will not seek some true, unchanging meaning of ‘sociability’ or the ‘socius’ but, rather, examine diverse, even opposing, ideological uses of the concept and ongoing contests over its meanings. This course does not claim to provide an exhaustive catalogue of every important artistic activity under this rubric, but will examine specific artists, collectives, and exhibitions as case studies.