Contemporary art/ globalisation
Description: A short video essay (up to 7 minutes long) responding to Liam Gillick’s statement “Contemporary art does not account for that which is taking place.”

“Theory is nothing until historically realised in a concrete practice such as this, that at once destabilises both aesthetic and political propriety. Diametrically opposed to quotation, which attempts to preserve a text by abstracting it from its historical existence yet keeping it essentially at a distance, detournement – as a sort of subset of plagiarism – brings new, indeterminate meaning to cultural artefacts by juxtaposing them in violent and deliberately incoherent ways.”
Crano, R.D. 2007.“Guy Debord and the Aesthetics of Cine-Sabotage” Senses of Cinema. Issue 42, February. http://sensesofcinema.com/2007/great-directors/debord/
make a 7 minute Video Essay and upload it to vimeo or youtube. A link to the upload must be submitted before class in Week 13. The Video Essay is to be supported by an annotated bibliography that details the sources used and for what purpose. The annotated bibliography should be submitted in hard copy in class and formatted in Harvard style.

The Video Essay can take any suitable format : voxpop, powerpoint with subtitles or voice over, animation, claymation, iphone video, cineroman, blackboard drawing, real, surreal, documentary, pseudo-documentary, etc. as long as the method and ideas clearly articulate a response to Gillick, and at some point the video includes a selection of at least 5 artworks discussed within the course.

A Video Essay is a video work that explores a topic using various sources of information and that experiments with form and content. Video essays are a particular format useful for the presentation of theoretical and critical ideas.

In order to respond to the statement from Liam Gillick, the video essay needs to make a claim and support it (in other words, this work should have a thesis and support that thesis just like a written essay). The claim should demonstrate the student’s learning within this course, and use notions drawn from our studies in globalisation to address the inadequacy of the notion of ‘contemporary’.

“Theory is nothing until historically realised in a concrete practice such as this, that at once destabilises both aesthetic and political propriety. Diametrically opposed to quotation, which attempts to preserve a text by abstracting it from its historical existence yet keeping it essentially at a distance,detournement – as a sort of subset of plagiarism – brings new, indeterminate meaning to cultural artefacts by juxtaposing them in violent and deliberately incoherent ways.”