Ox-Bow Summer School of Art and Artists Residency

FIBER 605 001
Written/Drawn/Stitched Narratives
June 20-June 26, 2010
1 credit hour
Instructor: Rebecca Ringquist
$50 Lab Fee

Students of any level are invited to participate in this one-week course exploring story telling. Drawing on both our own rich personal narratives and the rich visual and historical narrative of Ox-Bow, we will spend time working through generative writing and drawing activities and begin to develop our own stories and images into lively compositions. An examination of traditions in stitched narratives, including works from African American, Chilean, and Vietnamese traditions will inform as we proceed into embellishing these stories with embroidery using both traditional and inventive techniques. Appliqué, reverse appliqué, and other fabric manipulation techniques will be included as ways of developing images and text. Collaborative and individual projects will be supplemented by a survey of contemporary work in the genre as well as individual and group critiques.

WRITING 604 001
Writing Natural Histories
June 20-July 3, 2010
3 credit hours
Instructor: Surabhi Ghosh
$50 Lab Fee

Drawing from the observational method of scientific study conducted by naturalists like John James Audubon and David Attenborough, students in this multi-level class will generate and workshop new works by examining living things in their natural surroundings. Lectures and discussion will include the nature writing of Emerson and Thoreau, the art of Charles Harper and Michigan-based Richard Sweet (AKA Marushka), and the comics of John Porcellino and Kevin Huizenga. Inspired by these and other examples, fact, fiction, and personal reflection will turn into natural history essays, reflections on solitude, travel and adventure documentation, and wildlife narratives. We will begin by making simple hand-bound books to carry throughout the week. This class is designed for writers and artists who will be enthralled and inspired by the birds, deer, insects, plants, fungi, lake, sand dunes, and the Ox-Bow lagoon.

ART & TECH 601 001
Radio Cartographies: Spurious Landscapes
July 4-July 17, 2010
3 credit hours
Instructor: Brett Balogh
$100 Lab Fee

Superimposed upon our traditional notions of landscape is an invisible topography accessible only by turning on a radio. This radiophonic landscape exhibits features not unlike the physical one, with boundaries, obstacles, hills and valleys, but differs in its ability to distort scale, distance and time, affording an elastic mapping of physical space. This class will explore the notions of landscape and space, whether they be personal, public, or wholly imagined through the use of self-constructed, solar-powered, low-power FM transmitters and free, open-source cartographic software. Students will gain a basic understanding of electronic theory and construction and will use these skills to create site-specific radio installations and print/web-based maps that will suggest alternate ways of moving through and experiencing space.

SCULP 634 001
Sentient Objects (Cannibal, Ghost, Alien or Animal)
July 18-July 31, 2010
3 credit hours
Instructor: Mary Walling Blackburn
$100 Lab Fee

Alexander Rodchenko, the Soviet Constructivist, makes objects his friends but alternately, racializes them. With a guideline like this, how do we sort through messy, weird, dirty relations to objects: how me make them, receive them, destroy them, and conserve them, and additionally how we make people into objects, ourselves and others? Let’s make and unmake objects together, paying attention to how they are distributed and what is left in the wake of their production. Let’s investigate the fetish/counter fetish set up by capitalist/communist systems and perhaps determine another route. Finally, how do we make objects that are conceptually more akin to cannibals, ghosts or aliens than to dumb owned things. You will not only make fraught objects but think up new rules of ownership as part of that process. Part of this objective will include making things that people want to steal and are meant to be stolen, things that fall apart, float and disappear, queer objects whose centrifugal force is resistance to the norm. Our investigation is site specific. After you have made objects how will you determine their distribution within the abutting towns? We will examine the contours of the waterways that flank Ox-Bow (geographical feature as object); the Keewatin passenger ship (leisure as object), the remains of the Big Pavilion (disappeared object) and the birthplace of the first white child (race as object). Viewings will include the work of: Rodchenko, Regina Jose Galindo, William Pope L., Frances Glessner Lee, David Horvitz, Marie Lorenz, Gordon Matta Clark, Trevor Paglen, Mierle Ukeles Laderman, Pyjama Girl, Facial Reconstruction,, C.1938. Readings are not restricted to but will include: Michael Taussig, Jean-Luc Nancy, Chris Kraus, Theodor Adorno, the Cannibal Manifesto; Claude Cahun, Cristina Perris Rossi.

SCULP 635 001
Art in Social Contexts
July 18-July 31, 2010
3 credit hours
Instructor: Eric Steen
Visiting Faculty: Harrell Fletcher (week 1)
$100 Lab Fee

Many contemporary artists choose to contextualize their work in public arenas where social groups are invited to participate in dynamic, object-less projects with open-ended results. In this class we will explore multiple facets of socially engaged art with the towns of Saugatuck and Douglas as our backdrop. Students will be asked to conduct multiple forms of field research in town that engage them with the town`s history, communities, and landscape. Assignments will ask students to use their research and interests to create socially engaged projects with themes that many social artists utilize such as: service, intervention, participation, and dialog among others. An emphasis will be placed on the process rather than product or outcome as many important questions arise from the process of working with other people. We will also discuss the shift of the role from maker to facilitator along with the aesthetics of social practices. Selected readings will be from artist's such as Joseph Beuys, Allan Kaprow, Temporary Services, Ted Purves and critics such as Paul Willis and Randall Szott.

PERF 603 001
Performance Objects
August 1-August 14, 2010
3 credit hours
Instructor: Marisa Olson
$50 Lab Fee

This course is meant to explore the confines and boundaries, and possibilities in contemporary performance. What, exactly, is a performance, how do these actions relate to objects, both permanent and temporary? How do we capture these actions and what affect do these modalities have on the meaning of performance? We will perform a variety of daily exercises--both solo and collaborative--designed to raise questions about "the creative process," as well as how performances are constructed in terms of materiality and reference. Responding to the existing social and physical environment, the students and teacher will formulate these
exercises together in order to shine a self-reflexive light on the steps involved in moving through the idea-execution-documentation-distribution process. We will incorporate frequent readings written by artists such as A. Kaprow, M. Rosler, the Vasulkas, Nam Jun Paik, Rauschenberg, that establish a vocabulary for these sorts of performative works while tracing the genre conventions of critique in the first-person. We will also address issues of resonance, site-specificity, temporality, and information flow, within the immediate milieu of Ox-Bow, as well as the broader spheres of the art world and the internet, looking closely at the cultural history of technology and how it is currently defined.

WRITING 605 001
Listening/Talking To Nature
August 15- August 21, 2010
1 credit hour
Instructor: Mark Caughey

The writer’s life tends to be all too insular: writers are cut off from their colleagues, their community and the larger world. This course seeks to act as remedy for the excessive inwardness of the writing process. Each session will begin and end with group discussions addressing issues of craft, artistic models, shared concerns and student work. However, the heart of each session will be devoted to writing en plein air. Students will avail themselves not only of the luxury of time but also of the kind of contact not usually afforded them -- contact with other students, contact with the instructor and contact with the natural world -- to move beyond the critical approach of the typical writing workshop to a truly generative process.