Introduction

window for dialogue

Window for dialogue is the art from the front line. Avant-garde art has moved out into reality and has taken the surrounding objects, structures and human relationships as an artistic material. From Duchamp’s ready-mades, John Cage’s 4′33 “, Situationist International, Joseph Beuys Social Sculpture and the 90s relational art has evolved several parallel artistic tendencies. None of the contemporary art directions exist in a tabula rasa vacum but are based on the ’60s explosive expansion of the concept of art. Window For Dialogue is a natural consequence of contemporary cultural policy, globalization and the Internet as a network-forming public sphere. In semiotic terms the project is relational, with a Bathonian nature. It is inspired by and dependent on Web 2.0 technologies and the ideal called democracy serves as its driving force. This is political art, a reaction against “art as accessories for the party people”; the constant; de-politicizing, materialisation and idealization of art. The spectator’s role is highlighted intensively and perceived as the art work’s raison d’être. The work, which is nothing more than reality itself, becomes art at the moment it is experienced by the viewer as an aesthetic impression. The motif, is the expression of “the real” in lived space. It is not necessary with multiple layers of interpretation and illustration, instead the viewer is invited to look deeper into the raw and immediate thusness of reality.

The project’s core is concerned with the shifting notions of site-specific art production and “the emerging informal public sphere” both in Cyberspace and real space. It is the objective of Window for dialogue to experiment with public participation in the constructive process of public space and initiate a dialogue between communities. This will be achieved by inviting the general public ,in corporation with artists, academics and the authorities to partake in online discussions  prompted by a two way video installation in the two sites in question.  As such window for dialogue constitutes what Grant Kester in [Conversation Pieces] terms a Dialogical Practice; an artwork in it’s own right. [See appendix, Public & Site; academic context, Dialogical Practice]

The project will be made up of two parts: the physical video installation, and also a literary and documentary component that will constitute interviews, blog entries and critical writing. While the tangible art works are site-specific on a physical level, the texts will be featured online and will constitute a functional site [see appendix, Public & Site, academic context, Functional site]. The website will serve as a platform for online dialogue and also as a source of textual engagement: the artworks and topics can be debated interactively, turning viewers into participants; while critical writing on the core issues pertaining to the sites will also lay the ground for interpretation and content.

At the end of each  project, photographs and a selection of the texts, web dialogues and critical writings will be assembled into a printed publication.

Public & Site; academic context. (APPENDIX).

The project cleaves to the notion that culture is what shapes and constitutes society. In  nations with a shifting cultural constituency, it is a constant battle of opposing and merging forces.It is evident that the there has been a parallel development of the informal public sphere and site-oriented artwork towards a dissolution of static constructions and an unhinging of the traditional site of public debate.

Site-specificity:

“As “site” and space have become more central problems for artists within recent decades, it is important to draw a distinction between the physicality of a space (its appearance, the formal qualities of a “built environment”) and the meaning of a space as it is constituted discursively (how that physicality is the expression of specific network of social relations: power, economy, racialization, gender, sexuality). As this concerns artists, one must ask not only how does a work “appear” in relation to the formal qualities of a built environment, but how does it relate to, participate or intervene in the discourses which make it as such?”

[Ashley Hunt "Temporary public spaces" published in The Journal of Aesthetics and Protest, issue 4, vol 1, 2005.]

Functional Site:

James Mayer has distinguished this trend in recent site-oriented practice in terms of a “functional site”.”[The functional site] is a process, an operation occurring between sites, a mapping of institutional and discursive affiliations and the bodies that move between them (the artist’s above all). It is an informational site, a locus of overlap of text, photographs and video recordings, physical places and things……… It is a temporary thing; a movement; a chain of meanings devoid of a particular focus.”

Dialogical Practice:

Grant H. Kester has tried to develop a critical framework for recent community based art work which he has termed dialogical practices in his book Conversation pieces. “.. The artists I have discussed above begin their work not with the desire to express or articulate an already formed creative vision but rather, as Fiumara has suggested, to listen. Their sense of artistic identity is sufficiently coherent to speak as well as listen, but it remains contingent upon the insights to be derived from their interaction with others and with otherness. They define themselves as artists through their ability to catalyze understanding, to mediate exchange, and to sustain an ongoing process of emphatic identification and critical analysis.”

Informal Public Sphere:

The cultural critic Jürgen Habermas defines the public sphere as a space of contending opinions and interests, in which the clash of forceful argumentation results in a final wining position that can “compel” the assent of the other parites. He assumes that as rational subjects we respond only to the “illocutionary force” of the better argument, or good reason. [Jürgen Habermas, "Some Distinctions in Universal Pragmatics" Theory and Society 3 (1976)].

Contemporary critical theorists have contested the “traditional” idea of the public sphere; as a democratic space accessible to the public to express their views and partake in the political debate. They have shown that the public sphere even in the freest of liberal societies typically exclude and marginalize minority points of view and create, excluded individuals. And argued for the extension of the public sphere to include any site which serve to define what later may become public policy, such as cyberspace and grassroots organizations by introducing the concept of formal and informal public spheres.