The Work of Art in the World Civic Agency and Public Humanities
Celebrating art and estimation that take on social challenges, Doris Sommer looks to steer the humanities dorsum to engagement with the world. Amidst the cases that she covers are top-down initiatives of political leaders, such equally those launched by Antanas Mockus, former mayor of Bogotá, Republic of colombia, and also bottom-upward movements like the Theatre of the Oppressed created by the Brazilian managing director, writer, and educator Augusto Boal. This inspiring volume is filled with models, sources, and ideas that tin can be adapted and adopted to inform teaching and research almost activist art and creativity, findsAnna Upchurch.
T he Piece of work of Art in the Earth: Civic Agency and Public Humanities. Doris Sommer. Duke Academy Press. February 2014.
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Recent years have seen a number of new books published past senior academics responding to the electric current budget-cutting tensions that arts and humanities disciplines face in higher education, acquired by economic recessions in Western Europe and the Usa. Notable examples include Not for Profit: Why Commonwealth Needs the Humanities past Martha C. Nussbaum (2010), The Humanities and the Dream of America past Geoffrey Galt Harpham (2011), Accident Up the Humanities past Toby Miller (2012), and The Value of the Humanities by Helen Modest (2013). Stefan Collini's What are Universities For? (2012) answers the big question expressed in its provocative title and includes a chapter, 'The Graphic symbol of the Humanities'. While each makes a distinctive contribution to the current debate, broadly speaking these books historicize and re-state arguments about the value of arts and humanities subjects, enquiry, and instruction to gimmicky societies.
Doris Sommer's The Piece of work of Art in the World: Civic Agency and the Public Humanities is a fresh and welcome addition that explores projects from the programme she founded at Harvard University, the Cultural Agents Initiative, inside the context of socially engaged art and estimation. Sommer is Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures and of African and African American Studies at Harvard and also author of Bilingual Aesthetics: A New Sentimental Education. Established in 2000, the Cultural Agents Initiative 'has sought to increment the impact of artistic and scholarly practices past identifying artists, educators, and community leaders who take adult socially productive artistic practices, by reflecting on the role of art in building ceremonious society, and by disseminating best practices through workshops and public forums'. Sommer recalls in the volume's introduction that a motivation to start the programme were very existent fears near the future of the humanities in corporatized universities.
The Work of Art in the Earth looks back over more than a decade of collaboration between artists and academics and 'takes inspiration from arts projects that merit more than sustained reflection than they take gotten. These are artistic works on grand and small-scale scales that morph into institutional innovation. Reflecting on them is a humanistic consignment insofar as the humanities teach interpretation of fine art (to place points of view, attend to technique, to context, to competing messages, and evaluate aesthetic effects)' (p. 3). This aesthetic training by humanists 'tin fulfil a special mission by keeping aesthetics in focus, lingering with students and readers over the overjoyed moments of freely felt pleasure that enable fresh perceptions and foster new agreements' (p. 3). Drawing upon intellectual sources that include Kant, Schiller, Dewey, and Ranciére, among others, Sommer argues that the aesthetic grooming that fosters individual judgement underpins civic life in democracies. Her concern is not to teach pessimism and retreat from the world: 'Didactics despair to young people seemed to me not but tiresome just irresponsible compared to making a case for cultural agents' (p. 6). And no doubt her students, like mine, are far more interested in her chance-taking cultural agents and models of practice that they tin can analyse, interpret, and potentially accommodate.
The volume opens with two capacity that explore these projects and models. Chapter one, 'From the Pinnacle', examines government-sponsored inventiveness in projects as various as the troupe of traffic-directing mimes in Bogotá, Republic of colombia, conceived by then-Mayor Antanas Mockus, to the Piece of work Progress Administration's Federal Art Project in the The states from 1935 to 1939 during President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal. The importance of play and pleasure in irresolute public attitudes was illustrated by the mimes, who drew attention in fun means to traffic and pedestrian condom, helping to reduce deaths and accidents. This programme was one of many artistic initiatives in the public space in Bogotá that Mockus was invited to Harvard to share in the Cultural Agents program.
Affiliate ii, 'Press Here', concerns 'lesser upwardly' initiatives by artists and cultural agents who are catalysts and organizers. Sommer recalls the international artistic and political career of Augusto Boal, who adult Forum Theatre and other interactive theatre techniques and games that encouraged 'spect-actors' to explore moral and ethical challenges of everyday life. Like Mockus, Boal was invited to Harvard to pb workshops and teach his techniques to participants and students. The workshops had ripple effects such as a summer theatre production at the local high school, which led to a Forum Theatre approach to AIDS prevention and treatment for youth in Tanzania, among other offshoots. Other modify-agent projects include an exhibition about ACT UP, the gay rights campaign in the tardily 1980s and early 1990s in New York that resulted in lower prices and shorter approval times for AIDS treatments.
Affiliate four describes 'Pre-Texts', a program in Boston, Mass., that integrates literacy, sustainable arts and materials, and civic values, using the arts to teach literacy and literary criticism to young people ranging in age from kindergarten to graduate studies. Part of the Cultural Agents Initiative, Pre-Texts trains artists and teachers to facilitate workshops at schools, summertime programmes, and other settings, inviting young people to interpret classic literary texts through their own art fabricated from recycled materials.
Few of u.s.a. have admission to the resources that Sommer has at Harvard, just this inspiring book is filled with models, sources, and ideas that can be adapted and adopted to inform teaching and research about activist art and inventiveness.
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Anna Upchurch is Lecturer in Cultural Industries at the University of Leeds. She specializes in cultural policy and the history of ideas about the arts and humanities in society. She co-edited Humanities in the Twenty-Get-go Century: Beyond Utility and Markets (2013) with Dr Eleonora Belfiore. Read more reviews past Anna.
Source: https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsereviewofbooks/2014/03/21/book-review-the-work-of-art-in-the-world-civic-agency-and-public-humanities-by-doris-sommer/
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