Monday, October 8, 2012

CREATIVE TIME: Kim Upstill

On October 12, the Arts Research Center at UC Berkeley and the Curatorial Practice at the California College of the Arts are partnering to host a live-streaming of the Creative Time Summit, an annual conference in New York that brings together cultural producers--including artists, critics, writers, and curators--to discuss how their work engages pressing issues affecting our world. To jump-start the conversation in advance of the event, attendees have been asked to submit a paragraph on a keyword associated with one of the summit themes: Inequities, Occupations, Making, or Tactics. This posting is by Kim Upstill, artist.

Keyword: Tactics

Tactics are to move in relation to another, to design movement towards response. A strait forward version of a tactical action might be to act in a way that plays into an expectation, and elicits a predicted response. I want to think about tactics in terms of making art. When thinking about objects and words as being interesting, worth pursuing as signs or signifiers one can ask; where am I placed by these things. What are my predictable responses to these objects or words, and who or what structure is asking this of me? Here I think it is necessary to say that utility and tactics of object and words are linked. That when I think about things and actions getting responses from us I am also thinking about to what ends we are being asked to perform. When making I want to ask how can I use these learned responses (including boredom, disinterest, anger) to act tactically, to make/move in relation to an expectation of that thing (word object or situation).

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