gif by the audio visual violence club, 2011
This notion of art as practice was influenced by the rise of conceptual art in the early sixties, with its political overtones and close ties to the history of the avant-garde (e.g., Dadaism, Surrealism, as Hal Foster points out in The Return of the Real). In this light, art making becomes process- rather than object-based. Marxist, structuralist, anthropological and semiotic thought now permeate what had been defined as a strictly material realm. The requisite academic training for artists has taken on theoretical rather than practical aspects. An artist engaged in a practice is conscious of the many social dimensions of his or her activity, which ostensibly bridges gaps between, artistic, curatorial, critical, research and conceptual study. It is temporal, experiential and contextual rather than medium-specific…
Jennifer Roberts