Constructing Interventions

CRN

14097

Course Number

336V

Credits

5

Course Description

Constructing Interventions is a practice-intensive art course that guides students through the use of live art as a form of direct action. While political art is often framed in terms of its symbolic power and discursive commentary on social-political conditions, the interdisciplinary genre of intervention weaponizes what art can do to structures of power in uncertain situations. In the art of intervention, symbolic power and grounded participation in political struggle flood equally into one artistic gesture, especially in live or performance-based constructions, tangibly interrupting oppressive, stagnant, corrupt, or otherwise urgent situations of political life. In the actions of the Madres de Plaza de Mayo and CADA (Colectivo Acciones de Arte) against the military dictatorships of Chile and Argentina in the 70s and 80s, Occupy Wall Street in 2011, and the ongoing ZAD occupation of 4,000 acres of wetlands in France, artists have helped form and sustain long-term rebellions and the attempted construction of new societies. Moreover, within such massive historical crucibles, some of the most beautiful and effective interventions originate and occur in artists' everyday conditions, and it is this particular kind of intervention, which straddles the personal and the political, that will be our focus. 

For instance, in the performance Triangle (1979), Sanja Ivekovic made masturbatory gestures while reading on her balcony, as Yugoslavian President Josip Tito’s motorcade passed her apartment building, knowing the space was being surveilled by a police network. The artist’s subversive action quickly prompted a face-to-face confrontation with the intimate and spectacular structures of patriarchal power on her own terms. In RETURN (2004-ongoing), at the onset of the US occupation of Iraq and wide-spread anti-Arab racism, artist Michael Rakowitz re-opened his Iraqi grandfather's import-export business by installing a temporary storefront in Brooklyn. Doing so, he defiantly claimed a cultural history in an environment trying to destroy it, while simultaneously inviting New Yorkers to participate in the impossible task of making an exchange with an economy under siege. 

Throughout the quarter, students will sketch out and attempt their own interventions (five in total) by integrating familiar, cultural-traditional, and otherwise mundane everyday acts with artistic mediums (performance, video, photography, writing, installation, participation) which we will conceive through weekly exercises, on-site collective experiments with materials, and the exploration of what is politically urgent. While outside of class, students' work will be primarily dedicated to constructing interventions, we will ground class time, each week, in a sustained encounter, on the one hand, with contemporary art interventions from around the world—in this version prioritizing projects directed by women in Eastern Europe—and, on the other hand, local struggles in Whatcom County. 

Students regardless of skill or experience in fine art are welcome to register and should be prepared to occasionally meet at different locations throughout campus, in Bellingham, and Whatcom County.
 

Prerequisites

FAIR 202a or equivalent

Required Texts

All materials will be available online or via PDFs in Canvas, though a revised listing of required texts might be announced at the start of the quarter.

Credit/Evaluation

Consistent attendance, informed and attentive participation in class discussions and exercises, the weekly submission of materials responses or intervention documentation.

Term

Winter 2023

Course Instructor(s)

Robert Yerachmiel Sniderman