- How to make challenging artwork, art which elicits reactions that are strong and nuanced
- How to own up your bias, your insensitivity, your power + positionality
"All art invites social interaction; yet in the case of SEA is it the process itself - the fabrication of the work - that is social" (pg. 11)
- Owning up is part of the process itself. An acknowledgement and analysis of power (imbalance)
- Recognizing agency (to create work and make statements, exposing, sharing) and accountability (of your creation, positionality, 'you are never outside of the context of your creation')
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"As artists and cultural workers we might stop externalizing this right-wing conservatism and instead observe it with awareness: How is it actually symptomatic of, and more often than not, replicated in art and the art world(s) we inhabit?
The daily grind of resistance includes a profound and often painful awareness of the deeply contradictory realities we inhabit, of one’s complicity or indirect involvement, in even the smallest of ways, in maintaining the status quo.”
Observing with Awareness; Coco Fusco on Dana Schultz
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"While elite art schools deploy tokenist inclusion strategies to create the impression of diversity, they actively avoid revising curricula and discourses of critique; the end result is that they produce artists and curators who lack formal opportunities to engage with critical race discourses and histories of anti-racist cultural production. In the absence of informed discussion, we get unadulterated rage."
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"However, the argument that any attempt by a white cultural producer to engage with racism via the expression of black pain is inherently unacceptable forecloses the effort to achieve interracial cooperation, mutual understanding, or universal anti-racist consciousness. There are better ways to arrive at cultural equity than policing art production and resorting to moralistic pieties in order to intimidate individuals into silence."
"Like the political and activist art inspired by 1970s feminism and identity politics, SEA usually has an overt agenda, but its emphasis is less on the act of protest than on becoming a platform or a network for the participation of others, so that the effects of the project may outlast its ephemeral presentation." (Pablo Helguera, pg. 12)
- Art is Medicine Artforum Article
- Free People's Medical Clinic as a lived, transformative experience. In contrast to Schutz's work which operates as a monumetal gesture within a Bienniel
- Clinic's relationship to lineage and history: Black Panther Party's free clinics, United Order of Tents - secret society of Black nurses - Stuyvesant Mansion
- Form of the artwork itself part of the medicine. Offers HIV testing, health screenings, wellness practices like yoga and dance. Also includes things like Waiting Room Magazine, which publishes artists and scholars
"Currently, perhaps the most accepted description of the community SEA creates is ‘emancipated’; that is, to use Jacques Ranciere’s oft-quoted words, ‘a community of narrators and translators.’ This means that its participants willingly engage in a dialogue from which they extract enough critical and experiential wealth to walk away feeling enriched, perhaps even claiming some ownership of the experience or ability to reproduce it with other" (Pablo Helguera)