bring it

wow its taken me almost a whole week to get back to this...i've been churning away on this thing called an "art plan" which i had a review for yesterday...which was the culmination of the class that inspired this blog.  i had never heard of an "art plan" or an "art planner".  Apparently, an "art planner" gets hired by a body ( municipality, organization etc.) to come up with an overarching "plan" for the integration of art in a certain area. for instance, carolyn law, who works here locally and nationally, was hired as an 'art planner' for the city of seattle to come up with a plan  for the parks system here. she also developed another plan for the community centers here which essentially involved artists programming the volume of space through which one passes (threshold) from outside to inside for all the community centers in seattle.   so interestingly enough  art plans do not involve creating any art. rather they are about setting parameters and purpose which artists then come along and either fit in b/c their work is in line with those purpose or parameters or, they apply them to their work.  Maybe its most akin to curating.

"antyway"...my plan had to do with placing artists in residence  at select south eastern sites on the national register of historic places and commisioning them to produce ephemeral work (sound installations primarily) which provided critical commentary, and richer historical perspectives about those places (e.g. address complexities of human use, race, gender, labor/economy then and now, agricultural/environmental issues.  general overriding themes were: the politics of historic preservation, memory and the idea of critical tourism. the review went well. ..not as intense as an architecture review but the art plan was about 20 pages, with site analysis, and background, history, vision, goals and all that. we had outside reviewers, predominantly public artists.

though i am bummed that the class is over, i am so pumped that i took it.  i totally needed some inspiration, particularly the interdisciplinary kind that helps me, despite the pedagogical approach of my department, remember and affirm the connections i saw in architecture, art and the social realm. year two archictecture school? BRING IT ON! hopefully i can get it together this next year, and not get quite so muddled in  how many treads my stairs have, or be so self conscious about how precise my drawing and modelling is/isn't, but rather really tackle my conceptual approach and personal aesthetic and cultivate a consistency and rigor to applying that to every project.