Annual Mission Statements
CAAS Participants set an annual mission statement by majority vote and dovetail the goals of that annual mission with various activities at the local and national level. The annual mission organizes meetings around one central investigative question that serves as the basis of a year-long, working-group project. Each month, the group discusses short readings related to this investigative question. We hope that the group's annual activities will culminate in one or more of the following:
(a) a collaborative project document (written as a scholarly article, in either traditional or nontraditional form, for publication in a refereed journal);
(b) articles that are conversation with one another and would be published together or separately. The dialogic format could be an online format, a traditional written format, or a larger (traditional or online) format such as a special issue of a journal devoted to the CAAS project topic, guest edited by CAAS participants, and including our work among others';
(c) a symposium or workshop open to UT faculty and students.
Annual Mission for 2006-7, 2007-8
For its 2006-8 academic years, CAAS will organize all of its meetings around one central investigative question that serves as the basis of a year-long, working-group project: “Arts in Dialogue: Relational Aesthetics.”
In his influential theoretical work Relational Aesthetics (Les presses du réel, 2002), Nicolas Bourriaud writes, “The possibility of a relational art (an art taking as its theoretical horizon the realm of human interactions and its social context, rather than the assertion of an independent and private symbolic space), points to a radical upheaval of the aesthetic, cultural and political goals introduced by modern art” (14). Contemporary art within all arts disciplines worries the divide between art and audience, artist and viewer, active writer and passive reader. The post-1960s arts, and the theories that sometimes drive them, often seek to overcome alienation of both author and audience and create new forms of art that are active, interactive, populist, and politically charged. They explore the notion of dialogue rather than mastery: dialogue between artist and audience, between form and content, between arts and other arts. Doing so, they raise important questions about the ethics of artistic creation and how (and if) the arts can create new horizons of perception for their audiences. “Arts in Dialogue” thus encompasses interactivity within digital arts, “distributive aesthetics” of public performance art, gallery art that transgresses boundaries between viewer and artwork, interactive theater, spoken word art and poetry that incorporates vernacular forms, and hypertext forms of narrative—as well as the dialogue inherent in mixed-media art forms.
During the two academic years 2006-8, CAAS will explore new trends, movements, aesthetics, and debates in various arts fields that address this approach to "Arts in Dialogue." Referencing the logic of "relational aesthetics," we will explore how interrelationality, dialogue, and multimodality is configured as a central concern of contemporary arts. We will continue our reading project in relation to this annual mission topic:each month, the group will discuss one short reading related to this topic and discuss examples of new art trends in multiple fields. Readings will be selected by individual CAAS participants in consultation with the group; the participant choosing the reading will serve as discussion leader of it at our meeting and be responsible for bringing examples of the new art forms to the group in the form of electronic presentations, handouts, etc. The readings can be diverse (in keeping with our different research and disciplinary interests), but all should clearly relate to and add perspectives upon our central investigative question. Readings will be posted at the CAAS Blackboard site at least two weeks before each month's meeting.
In the second year of our mission focus, we will try to sponsor public lectures at UT on the theme "Arts in Dialogue."