art as social wormhole*

* . . . an “artificial M.F.A.” course/reading group in texts on aesthetic issues relating directly or indirectly to art's potential to speak to or influence reality (or not). The group’s home base was The Reading Room, 3715 Parry Ave., Dallas; we also met at other venues exhibiting art works relevant to the readings. The course was free and open to the public. The group was inaugurated on Oct. 27, 2013, and met regularly every three to five weeks thereafter for two years. For posts regarding readings and meetings, see the OccuLibrary tumblr or contact carolyn at c-cyte dot com; more background at the bottom of this page.


Below are links to our texts for 2015; note, some may include notes by other people, or my notes from several years ago, which may not reflect my current thinking).
For texts for earlier meetings, please see art as social wormhole 2013-14.

Partial background for the course (optional):
  Nicolas Bourriaud, excerpts from Relational Aesthetics (1998; trans. 2002)
  Gene Ray, Art Schools Burning & Other Songs of Love and War (1997)
  Bruce High Quality Foundation, Explaining Pictures to a Dead Bull (undated; found 2010)
  Communiqué from an Absent Future, Research and Destroy (2009)
  Video just for fun: Alex Bag, Untitled Fall '95, 57 min. ("Bag, at the time an art student, 'plays' Bag the art student . . . the eight diaristic segments trace a woman's struggle to make sense of her experience at art school.")
   

For class #15, at 3pm on Sun., Jan. 25, at The Reading Room:

  Walter Benjamin, "Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," found 2013-01-19 at http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/benjamin.htm, evidently transcribed from elsewhere, first published in 1936.
  Seth Price, "Dispersion" (2008), found 2014-07-14 on Distributed History.
   
  Optional:
  Hito Steyerl, “Too Much World: Is the Internet Dead?,” e-flux journal #49, 2013-11.
   
Surveillance

For class #16, at 3pm on Sun., Mar. 1, at The Dallas Contemporary:

  Seth Price, "Dispersion" (2008), found 2014-07-14 on Distributed History.
  Hito Steyerl, “Too Much World: Is the Internet Dead?,” e-flux journal #49, 2013-11.
   
  Optional:
  Boris Groys, Art Power (2008), MIT Press, "Art in the Age of "Digitalization."
   

For class #17, at 3pm on Sun., April 19, at The Reading Room:

  Hito Steyerl, “Too Much World: Is the Internet Dead?,” e-flux journal #49, 2013-11.
   
  Optional:
  Boris Groys, Art Power (2008), MIT Press, "Art in the Age of "Digitalization."
  Artspace Editors, "Chris Kraus on the Ambiguous Virtues of Art School," Mar. 2, 2015.
  Andrew Berardini, "How to Start an Art School,” Momus, Feb. 10, 2015.
   
Torus

For class #18, at 3pm on Sun., May 31, at the Dallas Museum of Art, in the atrium cafe:

  Boris Groys, Art Power (2008), MIT Press; but please read JUST the intro PLUS one essay of your choice out of those included in the PDF; and please prepare to summarize that essay (as briefly/informally as you please) for your fellow worms (who may or may not have read the same one).
   
  Optional: Your choice of another of the included essays.
  Artspace Editors, "Chris Kraus on the Ambiguous Virtues of Art School," Mar. 2, 2015.
  Andrew Berardini, "How to Start an Art School,” Momus, Feb. 10, 2015.
  Studs Terkel with Mike Gecan, "The Discovery of Power,” from Hope Dies Last (The New Press, 2003).
   

art as social wormhole is an incarnation of the OccuLibrary project and was initiated as part of the MAP 2013 exhibition.

The OccuLibrary was instigated in 2011 in response to the destruction of the Occupy camp libraries when camps across the U.S. were evicted (over 3,000 books were destroyed in New York City alone). The OccuLibrary project is a rolling collaboration in which the libraries are reincarnated in various forms, "using aesthetically-informed strategies to lure awareness toward empowering info." The forms taken by the project are determined by the artists creating them, and the project has involved many artists, including Carolyn Sortor, Lizzy Wetzel, Karen Weiner, Celia Eberle, Danette Dufilho, Anne Lawrence, Oil and Cotton, Michael A. Morris, Greg Metz, Kristin Cochran, Cassandra Emswiler, Jeremy Massey, and more. More info here.

MAP 2013 is a project of Make Art with Purpose, an innovative organization founded by Janeil Engelstad that produces international projects and partners with artists and organizations who are making work that leads to or creates positive environmental and social change. For more on MAP 2013, see the MAP website or facebook page.

MAP 2013 logo