Christian L. Frock
The emergence of alternative exhibition spaces in the 1970s subverted traditional exhibition formats and notions of public space. This shifting dynamic also resulted in an expanded conceptual framework for the definition of public art through the advent of site-specific interventions, performance, and new media, among other genres. My paper surveys recent artworks that expand on the early innovation of private space as a public platform with artworks that engage domestic environments, utilitarian spaces, and the internet. Invisible Venue (www.invisiblevenue.com), my independent curatorial enterprise founded in 2005 to collaborate with artists to present art in unexpected settings, has produced projects that include temporary site-specific installations, street projections, telephone-based audio work, guerilla billboard interventions, and web-based exhibitions, among other locative media. Through an overview of Invisible Venue, my paper examines how this contemporary alternative exhibition format investigates inherent politics of public space and challenges widely accepted notions of public art.
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Sasha Engelmann
As the conditions and paradigms of the global environmental crisis trans- form before our very eyes, a question emerges: How can environmental activism improve, when the conditions that challenge it are so new, vast, and abstract? How will the environmental movement change to meet the abstraction that is this crisis of human infrastructure, weather, and gas?
Sasha Engelmann answers these questions by turning our critical attention to the philosophical and cultural assumptions that have driven recent environmental protest groups such Greenpeace. If the environmentalist movement is to meet the crisis at hand, she argues, it must embrace a philosophy more amenable to the ‘new nature’ that is the world in warming. Instead of tailoring their rhetoric to the dark iconography of oil derricks, environmentalists might teach us to mark the experiential texture of living in a world of weather. —Scott Herndon
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