Movement Matters: Blurring Art & Life
Blurring Art & Life: The Critical Role of the Radical Imagination in Movement Making is a Movement Matters symposium organized to discuss the role of the radical imagination in the construction of both social movements and movement-based works of dance and performance art.
SYMPOSIUM PARTICIPANTS
John Burtle, editor, Propositional Attitudes, L.A.-based artist,
Lane Hall, Professor, Creative Writing, Media, Cinema and Digital Studies, the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee & Member, Overpass Light Brigade,
Elana Mann, editor, Propositional Attitudes, L.A.-based artist,
Lisa Moline, Associate Professor, Design & Visual Communication, the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee & Member, Overpass Light Brigade,
January Parkos Arnall, Curator, The Commons at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago,
Moderator: Michael Workman.
ABOUT THE SYMPOSIUM
Blurring Art & Life: The Critical Role of the Radical Imagination in Movement Making is a symposium organized to discuss the role of the radical imagination in the construction of both social movements and movement-based works of dance and performance art. Much of current national and international crises surrounding social (or "public engagement") practices have to do precisely with the suffering of individuals targeted for oppression, erasure and violence merely on account of superficial “difference.” Taking the variegated meaning of the notion of “movement” as a matter of linguistic convention, we intend to stage a ranging interrogation of these subjects.
As the foundation out of which socio-political revolutions are built, social and cultural movements are the necessary foundations for organizing coalitions around issue-related interests across demographics and cultures. Blurring Art & Life takes the dance and performance art worlds as a microcosm study of the larger movement-building processes, and as a historical proving ground influential on the scale of international cultural relations. At the same time, operating outside the corrupting influence of structural classism inherent to other art forms, including the current outsized neoliberal subversion, for instance, of contemporary visual art industries, movement studies retains the infrastructural integrity and capability to operate on a level closer to that of literature and poetics. This proximity to historically recognized social practice fields continue today, following its integration with performance art throughout the 1960's-90's avant-garde period, when practitioners were specifically targeted by the policies of disenfranchisement and active attempts to silence dissent in the arts--and specifically works by performance artists--by moving federal definitions of obscenity in an arch-conservative, rightward direction. All of which, of course, began with Reagan's Special Presidential Task Force on the Arts and Humanities, which set the groundwork for these conservatively ideological obscenity laws, and led, for instance, to the NEA's decision to cut off federal funding for individual artists and prohibited works in the agency's grant agreements that included depictions of, for example, “homoeroticism.”
Specifically organized to provide a much-needed forum for discourse on the past and present of this specific, under-represented intersection of art and political concerns, Blurring Art & Life will investigate and expurgate the socio-political history of current artistic engagement practices across intersections of instruction, writing, poetics, choreography, architecture, movement, interaction, politics, and personal danger, to name a few.
ABOUT MOVEMENT MATTERS
A column at Art Intercepts, seasonal symposia series and periodic performance initiative, Movement Matters investigates work at the intersection of dance, performance, politics, policy and issues related to the body.
Co-sponsored by SITE/less, and supported in part by a grant from the Illinois Humanities' Illinois Speaks program.
A program of Movement Matters and Bridge, a 501(c)(3) organization.