Essays
Holly McLaren: Curating art and 'doing' geography: creative research methods in practice
AAG Annual Conference 7th Æ 11th March 2006, Chicago
Session Title: The geographies of contemporary art
Extract: In this presentation I want to think about different strategies for researching the cultural geographies of visual art, and related to this, different methods for doing cultural geography. To do this I'm going to consider my involvement in the development of Bordering, a programme of site responsive artwork that I have initiated as part of my phd and in which I assume something of a curatorial as well as collaborative role. By discussing some of the issues emerging from my practical work to date, I hope to demonstrate how this particular mode of action research, offers an interesting and productive route through the multiple geographies of visual art production and consumption, as well as providing an opportunity to expand the registers through which academic research is produced and consumed via the co-creation of three new public art works. Although today I'm going to concentrate on the former of these ideas, as the art projects themselves are still in the very early stages of development.
"Curating Art and 'doing' geography" : Download Paper PDF (90kb)
Holly McLaren: Recent geographical engagements with the visual arts
Geography and Art Part 1
The contemporary of disciplines of academic geography and visual art are bound together in a complex, multilayered network of associations. In this paper (the first in a series of three) I examine cultural geographical engagement with the visual arts over the last decade. I devote particular attention to recent disciplinary interest in the theoretical vocabulary of performance and bodily practices and how such concern has impacted upon in geographical writing about art. Following on from this discussion, I then consider the recent growth in collaborative projects between geographers and artists, exploring the varying ways that these collaborations have evolved. Through doing so, I begin to consider the implications of such differing approaches for the development of Bordering Art.
"Recent geographical engagements with the visual arts" : Download Paper PDF (139kb)