Books – Three New Publications on Socially Engaged Art

Playing Public: Performing Participation with Pens, Planes, and People is an A5 format artist/research publication and project archive focusing on participatory game Flight Club and the years that preceded its creation. Charting my participatory art journey from prior experiments and involvement with community groups and public-facing, performative events leading up to the production of Flight Club and its iterations, written and photographic documentation combine to show how this game emerged and developed through participation, community and open-source collaboration.

Before we begin to practice self-design, we find ourselves already designed by the gaze of others. That is why the practice of self-design mostly takes a critical and confrontational turn. We want to bring others to see us in the way we want to be seen – not only during our earthly life but also after our death. This is a complicated struggle, and the aim of this book is to describe and analyze it.

Over three days in August 2007 Cardiff-based performance artist André Stitt undertook a major ‘akshun’ work at Artspace. Utilizing Joseph Beuys’ famous “I Like America and America Likes Me (or ‘Coyote’)” performance of 1974 as a template through which a performative engagement with acts of arrival and the attendant trauma of colonialism could be developed, Stitt shared a caged-in area of the gallery with a dingo, exploring forms of possible connection between the human figure and dog. This book provides extensive documentation and critical reflection upon one of the most significant and sustained performance works undertaken in Sydney in recent years.

Field Notes II documents the second Summer School on Cultural Diversity and Collaborative Practice, held in July 2019.

Chump Change was produced by Aislinn Evans and features contributions by Stephen Pritchard, Raju Rage, Harry Josephine Giles, and Maz Murray (therightlube).

Text and photographic documentation of the work of Jörg Köppl and Peter Začek.

Kindly donated as part of the Swiss Live Art Study Room Guide.

Text in German.

This book focuses on the possibility of rethinking the static model of installation and exhibition and exploring the way in which ‘performative’ approaches, adopted by artists and curators alike, can reframe the exhibition and its work as an environment subject to formal, temporal or relational transformation.

Documentation from the public screening of Adrian Howells’ works featuring presentations from Adrian’s collaborators and colleagues. The event launched LADA screens 13 and the publication It’s All Allowed: The Performances of Adrian Howells. Selected works of Adrian Howells were available online  18 July – 1 August 2016 on the LADA Screens Channel.

Follows two nurses, both named Jackie, who create biographical slideshows for patients as a tool for reflection on posthumous digital legacies, withdrawal, friendships, cultural and social loss, and memory as identity.

Part of LADA Screens 11. The film was available online 16-29 May 2016 on the LADA Screens Channel. Includes a  compilation of episodes 1 – 7, split into two files.

Part of the Library of Performing Rights (P3041).

The fourteen essays bringing together a unique gathering of artists, many of whome make works which arise out of responses to the situation or the environment in which they find themselves.

An invitation to encounter work and thinking that is in motion. Taking two years of projects and initiatives by Heart of Glass, a national agency for collaborative and social practice based in St Helens, as its starting point, the publication explores the interface between theory and practice.