« Art Critics' Reading List
JULIA DRAGANOVIC
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Julia Draganović is a curator and art critic whose interest is focused on new artistic practices, especially regarding the relation between artist and audience, art in public space, social practices and new media. Draganović is founding member of the curatorial collective LaRete Art Projects, a member of the Board of Directors of the non-profit organization No Longer Empty (New York), board member of Outdoor Gallery of the City of Gdansk, Poland, and scientific committee member of Mudam, Luxembourg. She developed and is curating the International Award for Participatory Art launched by the Legislative Assembly of the Italian region of Emilia-Romagna. |
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East Art Map. Contemporary Art and Eastern Europe. Edited by IRWIN. London: Afterall Books, 2006. A great resource not only for readers, like me, who grew up in the so-called Western World, but also, as the book unravels, for those who watched the Iron Curtain from the other side. The Slovenian collective IRWIN, which edited East Art Map, had the goal to write a history that has never been written before—a dense patchwork that reflects a great variety of points of view from this huge territory, which until now has too easily been summed up under the term “the East.” Geo-political isolation, not only towards the Western World but also within the Eastern Block, fostered multiple, autochthon activities that mostly took place in underground scenes, with limited possibilities of promotion. “East Art Map” is full of amazing stories, but also of intriguing theoretical insights that could only have been triggered by writers who have “lived through a revolution of paradigm” like the impressive group of authors of this survey.
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Grant H. Kester, Conversation Pieces. Community + Communication in Modern Art. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004. The questions “What distinguishes certain social practices as artistic interventions?” and “Where is the line between social work and art?” are always a challenge for me—and since we created the international Award for Participatory Art, I constantly have to deal with these issues. For anybody interested in a thorough research on the impact that artistic practices can have on society and the historiography of the relation between artist, art work and audience, this book is a treasure. Minimalism and conceptualism, as well as feminist performance art of the ’60s and ’70s, are the base of the historical framework that Kester creates. He declines the concept of “conversation,” reflecting upon a whole range of possible connotations in art theory. Kester provides criteria to analyze artistic social practices by presenting some extraordinary case studies on interventions by The Art of Change, Suzanne Lacy, Stephen Willats and WochenKlausur, among others.
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Lucy Lippard, The Lure of the Local. Senses of Place in a Multicentered Society. New York: New Press 1998. Lucy Lippard’s stories and thoughts, readings and photos called my “senses of place,” clearly defined terms like “center,” “periphery” and “nature,” into question. I read this book as a remedy for the increasing restlessness of that rootless art crowd, of which I’m—nolens volens—part of.
Lippard draws unexpected connections between cultural studies and landscape, history, geography, contemporary art and the people of her chosen homes in the extreme North and the extreme South of the United States: Maine and New Mexico. Far beyond contemporary art issues, she illustrates how the use and perception of land changes the landscape, and how landscape influences cultural habits and, in the end, the everyday life of its inhabitants. The thoughtful and beautiful layout of this book reveals the many layers of interrelation between emotional, scientific, aesthetic and economical approaches to certain territories in the U.S.
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