Risa Question: What specific readings do you plan to do in this week and next (in advance of our next meeting)? What have you prioritized, and why?

The past two weeks have flown by, and to be honest, I haven’t done as much reading as I’d planned to. I graded my first batch of 80 English 100 essays in one week, but that meant that the week was pretty much a write-off for me.

This is what I’ve been reading when I’ve had the chance to read, usually from around 10pm to midnight:

1. Websites! I’ve done work updating a Google Doc with a list of websites that are relevant to my work for this stage of my MFA. I’ve read a few online articles and artists’ websites, and I’ve been amazed by the climate change-related work being done right now. I’ve also been bumping into potentially useful terms for me to know, such as: reception theory; The Society of the Spectacle/Situationists; affect theory.

2. Similarly, I’m trying to figure out what type of practice I wish to develop at this time, and so I’ve done a bit of reading to try and disambiguate the following terms: social practice (art); participatory art; interactive art; collaborative practice; socially engaged art; community art.

3. In addition, I read an incredibly relevant article (the kind where you’re tempted to highlight every single sentence): “Does Activist Art Have the Capacity to Raise Awareness in Audiences?—A Study on Climate Change Art at the ArtCOP21 Event in Paris.”

4. I also reread an article I discovered via the class I took with Sarah Abbott last winter, Engaging Climate Change: “Climate Change and the Imagination.”

5. To start getting a sense of conceptual art, I’ve been reading from Daniel Marzona’s Conceptual Art.

6. To brush up on my history of art and art theory/criticism, I’ve read a couple chapter introductions in Art and Interpretation: An Anthology of Readings in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art.

7. And finally, because of a quotation Mike (husband) remembered about how “the artist has no alibi,” I read “The Flight of Form: Auden, Bruegel, and the Turn to Abstraction in the 1940s.” It wouldn’t be clear how this essay is relevant to my work, but trust me, it is.

I am in the processes of typing out notes from the above works, and I hope to have a new page on this blog where I can place these quotations.

I’m having a hard time deciding how to prioritize my readings for this class/term. Honestly, the amount of reading I want to get done is overwhelming to the point of near paralysis. Where to begin?!? I believe that by reading the above, I’m covering a few bases: stuff about artistic work and climate change; stuff about conceptual art (as it’s clear I wish to produce some); about the history of art; theoretical stuff. Perhaps Risa will be able to help me sort out the best way to prioritize my reading for the upcoming weeks.

Bibliography

Art and Interpretation: An Anthology of Readings in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art. Edited by Eric Dayton. Broadview, 1998.

Marzona, Daniel. Conceptual Art. Taschen, 2005.

Nemerov, Alexander. “The Flight of Form: Auden, Bruegel, and the Turn to Abstraction in the 1940s.” Critical Inquiry. Vol. 31. No. 4, Summer 2005, pp 780-810.

Sommer, L. K., & Klöckner, C. A. (2019, July 1). Does Activist Art Have the Capacity to Raise Awareness in Audiences?—A Study on Climate Change Art at the ArtCOP21 Event in Paris. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts. Advance online publication. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/aca0000247

Yusoff, Kathryn, and Jennifer Gabrys. “Climate Change and the Imagination.” Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change, vol. 2, no. 4, 2011, pp. 516–534.