Studio Art 02: Art and Non-Art

Studio brief

Allan Kaprow described non-art as “whatever has not yet been accepted as art but has caught an artist’s attention with that possibility in mind.” From the readymade onwards, artists have been drawing on non-artistic materials and images to expand the field of art. At the same time, many types of cultural production are excluded from the category of art. This studio considers the boundaries of art and non-art, exploring appropriation as artistic tactic, outsider art, conceptual and immaterial art, anti-art and un-art. It investigates the possibility of working outside the institutions that define the artworld and the mechanisms by which attempts to do this get co-opted and recuperated by the art establishment. To do this, it maps the contexts in which art operates and looks at examples of institutional critique that seek to challenge these.

Through studio discussions, workshops and exhibitions, reading seminars, group crits, gallery visits, screenings and individual tutorials, we will consider the relationship of sites to non-sites and think about the way art operates within and beyond gallery walls. We will introduce key artists and texts and test different methods of making and curating work in light of these practices and ideas.

This multidisciplinary studio welcomes the broadest range of approaches and media. Students may use painting, sculpture, film and video, art writing or performance to ask where art positions itself in relation to non-art, whether that is the larger field of culture that includes film, music and fashion or beyond this to everyday life and other modes of experience and knowledge. The studio will give students a shared frame of reference, but it is there to facilitate independent individual practice in dialogue with tutors and peers.

Reading

• Alberro, Alexander and Stimson, Blake [eds.], Institutional Critique: an Anthology of Artists' Writings, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011
• Danilova, Alexandra and Lyakhovich, Elena Kuprina [eds.], Field of Action. The Moscow Conceptualist School in Context 1970s-1980s, Moscow: Ekaterina Cultural Foundation, 2010
• De Duve, Thierry, Kant After Duchamp, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998
• Evans, David, Appropriation, Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2009
• Kaprow, Allan, Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life [Jeff Kelley], Berkley, CA: University of California Press, 2003
• Kelley, Mike, Mike Kelley: Minor Histories – statements, Conversations, Proposals, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004
• Knabb, Ken, Situationist International Anthology, Berkley, CA: Bureau of Public Secrets, 2007
• Lippard, Lucy, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972, University of California Press: Berkeley, 1997
• Osborne, Peter, Conceptual Art, London: Phaidon, 2002
• Rhodes, Colin, Outsider Art: Spontaneous Alternatives, London: Thames and Hudson, 2000

Image: Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, God, 1917 / Portrait of the Artist