Session Information
06 SES 04, Virtual Communities
Paper Session
Contribution
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Reflection and memory can have a particular resonance with the city environment, and certainly has a place in the history of cultural modernism. In the case of the city of Liverpool in England, the city’s Biennial Festival of contemporary art highlights this every alternate year, where international artists are commissioned to create new works in sites and venues across the city, often in formerly derelict or abandoned buildings. The economic impoverishment of some areas of the city, for which it has become infamous, has resulted in a cultural and temporal problem, in which the past is often more attractive as an area of artistic investigation than the present. Yet the Biennial has managed to revivify aspects of the cultural life of Liverpool, often in surprising ways; its focus on the specificities of the city seems to demonstrate a willingness to address social, cultural and infrastructure dilemmas directly. The commissioning process of the Biennial forces artists to work with the city as they find it, often in public sites, with distinctive results; we are reminded that our locality is always part of the global stage.
The explicit social relationship of the Biennial festival with the people of Liverpool enables an opening-out of the question of what art is and can be, and what it might mean to its audience. The combined qualities of art as a fundamentally social activity with the prevailing identity of the place in all its specificities, mean that all artists producing artwork that purports to be site-specific cannot help but be caught in the larger historical and political position: the here and now of this particular space, international in a multicultural, multi-ethnic sense – Liverpool formerly being a major port for the slave trade and, originally because of this, home to a black community established in the eighteenth century (Liverpool Black Heritage, 2010). Liverpool’s rich ethnic diversity (it also has one of the oldest Chinese communities in the Europe) its past great wealth from trading overseas, substantially from slavery, and its present social inequalities, all pervade the visual discourse of the city, and therefore of any art that is produced within it.
This paper investigates the part that education plays in this dynamic cultural process of remembering and reflecting, and asks how we might understand the ways that these works create meaning for us, and encourage us to imagine other ways of social being, situated by history and site specificity. Learning through memories that are triggered and conditioned by cultural artefacts that intervene into the fabric of the city may facilitate our engagement with these burgeoning social and historical issues, and perhaps enable their contextualisation within our lives.
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
Adams, J. (2010) ‘Risky choices: the dilemmas of introducing contemporary art practices into schools’, in the British Journal of Sociology of Education, 31.6, pp. 683-701. Dash, P. (2005) Cultural demarcation, the African diaspora and art education, in D. Atkinson & P. Dash [Eds] Social and Critical Practices in Art Education. Stoke-on-Trent, UK, Trentham pp. 117–25 Dash, P. (2007). Black History Month and African Caribbean Student Learning in Art International Journal of Art & Design Education, 26 (3). pp. 345-353. Davies. T. (Dir.) (2008) Of Time and the City. Film, British Film Institute. Duncan, C. (1995) Civilizing Rituals: Inside Public Art Museums. London and New York: Routledge. Fast, A. (2010) (En)counter the White Cube: Regimes and Experiences of Viewing at the Vancouver Art Gallery .WRECK 3 (1), http://www.ahva.ubc.ca/wreckBackIssue.cfm?IssueID=3 (accessed 28 June 2010). Fusco, C. (1995). The Other History of Intercultural Performance. In Jones, A. (2003). The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader, (pp. 205-217). USA and Canada: Routledge. Gilroy, P. (2004). After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture? Oxford: Routledge Gilroy, P. (2010). Darker than Blue: On the moral economies of Black Atlantic Culture. Belknap Press, Harvard University. hooks, b. (1994) Teaching to transgress: education as the practice of freedom. New York & London: Routledge. Liverpool Biennial (2010) http://Biennial.com/content/LiverpoolBiennial2008/International10Touched/Overview.aspx (accessed June 14, 2010). Liverpool Black Heritage (2010) http://www.visitliverpool.com/blackheritage/history (accessed 24 June 2010)
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