Preliminary Questions

The AAG is still weeks away, but we are writing to touch base about logistics and to initiate an email-based discussion before our panel convenes in April. Anyone should, of course, feel free to circulate ideas, questions, announcements, suggested readings/links, etc. to the group in the coming weeks on this blog.

A handful of the preliminary issues/questions we’d like to pose to the group (please delve in, glide past, run with, recraft, or boomerang back as you see fit):
• What is our working definition of “activism”, and more specifically “geographical activism”? Is the latter tied primarily to geography that concerns the political, or to where geography itself happens/is enacted? For instance, does it necessarily imply a move out of the academy and into “the field,” or onto the ground?
• How do contemporary discussions about “activism” coincide/diverge within the fields of art (history) and geography? Which thinkers/practitioners within each field offer productive terms and models for discussions about contemporary art and geographical activism?
• What aspects of creative practice do discussions of "politics" or "activism" tend to elide? And, what aspects of “political art,” “activist art,” or even community-based art tend to fall outside the frame of discussions of art and aesthetics?
• Art and geography have long intersected via a shared interest in maps, where graphics are a principal mode of representing geographical knowledge. Recently, artists have played a key role in critiquing/subverting the authority of maps, while at the same time often appropriating geographic tools and strategies, such as mapping, to interventionist ends. How might we articulate the role of the artist-activist in producing such interventions, or asserting process over stable fact and/or form?
• In a recent contribution to the *Journal of Aesthetics and Protest*, curator Nato Thompson argued that rather than addressing politically-/socially-engaged work with the tired question “is it art?” we should rather ask “what does it do?” Other questions for approaching this work and thereby building a vocabulary for “resistant aesthetics,” include (in his words): What type of transformative effect do these projects have? What are their material consequences? How do they translate into radical action, or assist in the broadening of social justice?
• What are the implications of new technologies (e.g. GPS, GIS, remote sensing, spatial referencing) and the ease with which they can be accessed/manipulated for both geography and art (e.g. the rise of tactical media practices)?
• Many of the projects under discussion are, in some sense, ephemeral and performance-based, yet the scope of their publics is often determined by their image-/text-based components. What is the status of documentation for these projects, given its role in defining them as works of art and/or linking them to the creative vision of the author/artist? To what other ends might such documentation be used?
• What audiences does this work address or constitute?
• To what extent is “institutional critique” a useful category for examining these practices?
• How do you understand the relationships between political life, creative production, and research pursuits in your own practice? Do they change as you move between or participate in different communities? How do your commitments, obligations, and opportunities within professional arenas figure into this?