FOREWORD
Dick Hebdige and Kim Yasuda
Co-Directors, UCIRA
The first annual State of the Arts conference
took place on May 19-20, 2006 at
UC Santa Barbara, the home since the preceding July of
the University of
California Institute for Research in the Arts (UCIRA),
the Multi-campus Research
Unit which sponsored and organized the event. In two
days of back-to-back
presentations, panel discussions, performances, exhibitions
and receptions, more
than 200 artists, arts administrators, arts-centered
scholars, students and community
members met to engage in prolonged and passionate dialogue
on topics as diverse
as performativity and social action, the impact of digitization
on traditional art
practices, the functions of the university art museum,
arts funding beyond the crisis
mode, art-as-interrogation and art-as-research and the
role of consultation, systemic
analysis and improvisation in community-centered ‘scavenge’ architecture.
One of the unifying emphases involved a willingness
on the part of those
present to reflect upon and test out new models of collaborative
and thematically
focused arts practice, pedagogy and programming. The
collaborative turn in
contemporary arts practice and arts teaching served as
the explicit focus for the
panels on local, regional and international partnerships
and residencies. But the arc
projecting outwards from the studio, the classroom and
proscenium into the larger
world was also inscribed across many of the joint initiatives
and individual projects
showcased at the conference – from UC San Diego’s
engagement in Border Arts
through the ‘inclusive’ architecture of DesignCorps
and Rural Studio to UCSB’s
“Open Container” class and Rancho California, John Caldwell’s
film about
Mixteco migrant workers. The collaborative ethos informed
everything from the
work respectively on the politics of provocation-in-performance
(Larry Bogad,
UCD, Anna Scott, UCR) and arts practice-as-pedagogy-and-empowerment
(David
Gere, UCLA, Victoria Marks, UCLA) through the digitally
mediated public art
projects designed by Christian Möeller (UCLA), Jane
Mulfinger (UCSB) and
Graham Budgett (UCSB) to the use of animals as (presumably)
unwitting
collaborators in the production of art works (Beatriz
da Costa, UCI, Laurel
Beckman, UCSB, Lisa Jevbratt, UCSB).
By mixing together, sometimes on the same panel, scholars
and practicing
artists, faculty members, grad students and arts administrators,
we sought to place
pressure on the institutional division of labor: to shake
up the hierarchies that
organize our conventional understandings of ‘expertise, ‘authority’, ‘seniority’,
‘knowledge’, ‘making’, ‘thinking’,‘ ‘theory’ and ‘practice’.
To exert further
pressure on the mutual opposition still stubbornly inhering
in that last pair,
participants were asked to steer clear of general questions
on “the state of the arts”
and to use their time instead to make short content-rich
presentations showcasing
specific projects. Our objective was to demonstrate the
specificity and power of the
visual, media and performing arts by programming an event
that was immersive as
well as discursive. Screenings, performances,
studio and exhibition visits and a
UCSB Arts Showcase incorporating contributions from UCSB’s
Art Studio, Dance,
Media and Digital Arts departments were integrated fully
into the schedule. The
conference ended with a reception catered in part by
the agit-prop/dance-music
broadcasting Mobile Tactical Ice Cream Unit and a performance
by Drama grad
students in the Makrolab, a sustainable art-science
laboratory/habitation built by
Marko Peljhan (Art, UCSB) and a team of Slovenian architects,
designed for
ambient research in remote environments and installed
for the duration of the
conference on campus on the environmentally protected
bluffs overlooking the
Pacific.
While the rhythms of the event itself – the
switching back and forth between
demonstration, discussion and direct encounter with art
works of one kind or
another – are necessarily lost to the printed record,
we believe that the papers
published in this volume collectively capture the spirit
and the range of State of the
Arts 1. Kim and I would like to thank again the more than 40 panelists
who made
this such a lively and stimulating event, to extend a
special thank you to the people
who submitted their words for publication here, to thank
again the UCIRA
administrative team without whom absolutely none of what
happened last May
would have been possible and to single out for special
thanks and praise Holly
Unruh, our indefatigable and multi-talented Assistant
Director and editor
extraordinaire.
We hope you enjoy this inaugural volume.
Dick Hebdige (May 2007)
