Soowan An Ethic of Engagement Week 5

1. - One thing the article helped bring insight on was the role of power relations in collaborative art. When reading about the repetitive aesthetics of Zmijewski’s collaboration piece of surveillance my first first initial thought was that there were several unethical factors. It made me question where the line is drawn when it comes to collaborative art or art in general, or if there even is a line that can be drawn in any form of art. Although some people may find the art within the repetition in the project directed by Zmijewski and how his positional power in directing the distributed power with the collaborators, I personally found it hard to see any aesthetics in this example and only saw the ethical problems.

- The participation in observing in the process of creating art was something I feel like I could understand two sides of in the example that is Marten’s film. One is the concept that through Marten’s film, the consumer/audience will watch it and take the impact his work had and somehow help the people who were being documented. The second side, which is more contrary, is that Marten will gain some sort of benefit from his art whether that be money or exposure, etc and in the end, it most likely will be the case that he gains something and the people he collaborated with will get nothing or very little benefits compared to what he received. This gave me insight on how artists should consider how to manage the outcome of their art so that it is truly impactful for all collaborators to get a balance in benefits.

- Under the section “participative thinking: towards an ethics of engagement”, I found the quote “a theory of collaboration and participation that employs an ethics of engagement, not as an afterthought or means by which to deconstruct such practices, but as a way of re-inscribing the aesthetic as a form of sociopolitical praxis.” This, like the previous sections, brought up the question can we find a balance between the aesthetics of art and the ethics of art? When it comes to contemporary performance art practices that involve a political and possibly controversial factor, I think there may be a difficulty producing a final product that will please the majority of the audience. I think it is inevitable in practices like these that many will question the ethics behind the purpose and probably the production of the art and create the assumption that the the artist sacrificed their morality and benefits of the collaborator(s) for sake of aesthetics. Personally, it brings into light that perhaps I should be thinking about finding a balance if I were to ever think about doing this sort of collaborative contemporary art and to always keep in mind the tipping scale between aesthetics and ethics.

2. - Do you personally think that there is an acceptable situation where you decide aesthetics over ethics for your art?

- Do you think there even is a balance that can be found between aesthetics and ethics?

- Why do you see the art in Zmijewski’s repetition “experiment”? I ask this because I am having a hard time understanding why this would be used as an example for the ethics in art when this feels much more like scientific experiment like the Stanford Project.

3. I think this serves to remind me of the impact I make as an artist and I don’t mean the intentional impact when I create something, I mean the impact during my process in creating art and also the multiple interpretations that could be created separate from my personal intention and purpose behind any art that I contribute to or direct.

4. An ethical concern from the performance, the Roof is on Fire maybe that although the conversations between the students were very real and true regarding concerns of their community and social issues, but it was very staged almost as if it was scripted which makes the whole performance questionable in terms of its openness about other topics that could have risen in the conversations.