QUESTION CAMERON WEEKS

When producing art in the public sphere, the relationship between space, artist, and audience directly impacts the way in which the art is received and represented. In “An art for whom? The public art of Any Given Sunday in post-apartheid South Africa,” Tony Bogues identifies the curatorial concerns of producing art for the general public, especially when that public may have little to no prior exposure, experience, or knowledge of art.

The ethical urgencies faced by curators, especially those outside of dominant Western theoretical and ideological models, heighten the necessity for a philosophical or methodological approach to curation. The presentation of socially engaged art, in particular, demands a critical curatorial intervention that centers how the public can, will, or should interact with art. The word “curator” itself derives from the Latin cura, meaning to care. With this in mind, must curators then adopt an ethos of care when presenting socially engaged art to the public? Again, try to articulate what is at stake here, for example, you might say what some of the pitfalls and issues there are if we consider art to be didactic or instrumental ? What is direct engagement? Is direct engagement a matter of being their physically with people, or communicating a message that is very direct and not ambiguous? It would be good to know more about what you have in mind so take a moment here to explain what you are referring to. Can a performer be ambiguous? Are you placing value on the need for direct engagement but also seeing that it goes against some of the principles that Bogues was valuing? What does Bogues say in this matter, so perhaps you could say. “In the text you say X and X, and you also say that political engagement is needed, so what kind of aesthetics are at work here? If the artwork is more open to interpretation can it fulfill these political ends?

If you can describe more fully what you mean by your terms and relate more directly to Bogue’s work this will work itself out!

QUESTION C. BAIN

I’m thinking of vodou as i think you describe it, as a symbolic system and system of belief which leads to political and aesthetic as well as theological impacts on the social. i’m thinking about symbols and images, and the proliferation of image-production and distribution, and what some refer to as a resultant globalization of western culture. i wonder what the theological impacts are, of this globalization. If the Haitian revolution relied in part on the meaning-making achieved by the symbolic system of vodou, is there any possibility that there is an equivalent meaning-making that could take hold in contemporary culture? (i guess inside my question there’s a fear that the relationship between image-symbol and meaning becomes more superficial as the quantity of imagesymbols increase, as structures of communication bring everything into a kind of loose conversation, assimilated through globalization into one plurality of difference. Is there a relationship between spiritual or religious symbolic systems and the mechanisms of overtly political image making, (propaganda, memes) that are synonymous with western capitalist cultural practices? Reading this in 2022, in the United States, i wonder whether americans are without symbols that are denotative of that kind of spiritual-political potency, symbols that hold the possibility of a rupture in the extant socio-political order? Or if we have arrived at symbols that we fail to understand as symbols; that we take as reality as given? Does a culture ever question their symbolic system, or understand their system as symbolic?