Just in case you thought that Living as Form is the only large-scale social practice pageant in town… I’m here to tell you that Flux Factory’s Congress of Collectives is exploding this October!

Do you want to be edified by insightful panels, screenings, talks and performances that illuminate the nature of collaboration? Do you want to rub shoulders with real live collaborative artists at dinners and actions? Of course you do. Check out the schedule and fill your calendar.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sw-rx6JqQIE
An action by Voina, who will be presenting at Congress of Collectives October 6 at Union Docs

The Creative Time Summit and subsequent Living As Form extravaganza, which is still unfolding and which you must make time for, have left me with so much to say that on Sunday I had a hard time nailing down any one thing to focus on. This morning my desk is all scraps of paper and my screen is a jumble of questions and notes to myself and I am still confused. Up early. Staring into space and wondering what I saw, and what I am to do with all this mental byproduct.

I want art to mess with me like this. I want to wrestle with art and I want it to infect me, so I consider this weekend a smashing success. I feel sufficiently art-ed upon.

And I am interested in how I acquired the feeling that art happened to me, because the biggest problems with social practice are ...

There’s a lot going on this week, beautiful people.

Tonight I’m looking forward to the first Public Art Fund Talk at the New School. Michael Sailstorfer will discuss sculpture’s ability to transcend physical form, and I’m looking forward to finding out what that means!

Friday belongs to the Creative Time Summit, and then the always astounding variety show at House of Yes! The last time I went, a guy swallowed a 3-foot balloon-animal balloon and never took it out. Seriously.

http://vimeo.com/28065306
Living as Form: Socially Engaged Art from the Last 20 Years

Saturday and Sunday Living As Form will be in full effect! I am looking particularly forward to Reflections on the Economy Inspired by an Elegant Toilet, not only because it contextualizes the economic crisis in terms of toilets but because they are going to serve economic-crisis-inspired food. I’m also thinking ...

There’s a funny conversation going on at Real Clear Arts right now about what constitutes radical art.

Filippo Tommaso Marinetti - Futurist Manifesto, published in Italian newspaper Gazzetta dell'Emilia, 1909

I’ll sidestep the nitty gritty because it’s terribly predictable. Judith Dobrzynski finds an artist asserting that he is radical because he’s making landscape paintings, and this unleashes a small flurry of art clichés ranging from the notion that avant garde art shocks because it’s really truly original, to the basic impossibility of learning art in school.

I know, it’s boring. But can anything be squeezed out of this ancient argument? Can it get us anywhere new? Just because this argument is old… does it necessarily follow that we shouldn’t have it?

I think arguments continue until everyone has reached a satisfied state, and there is no satisfaction here yet. The search for ...

What with the Creative Time Summit coming up, it makes sense to reach back to June for Robin Cembalest's thoughts about Useful Art.

Mel Chin, Revival Field

Her essay lays out a handful of projects, like Tania Bruguera's Immigrant Movement International and Rick Lowe's Project Row Houses in Houston, and a handful of protests like Walid Raad and Emily Jacir's actions against Guggenheim Abu Dhabi. And it winds up nowhere specific. Cembalest stays in description mode and never really forms an opinion beyond well, you know, artists have been activists for centuries and these are tough questions and nobody has a real answer.

This is both understandable and unfortunate. We are at an interesting moment that demands strong opinions! Art wants to be useful for specific reasons, and faces a unique kind of resistance. Can art be truly useful? If so, how?

I don't know ...