Art/Archaeology: the Ineligible project (2020) - extended book chapter (original) (raw)
Related papers
Ineligible: A Disruption of Artefacts and Artistic Practice - Conference volume (2020)
2020
This volume of essays derives from the conference held in March 2020 at the International Museum of Contemporary in Portugal in association with the exhibition, "Creative (un)makings: Disruptions in Art/Archaeology". Archaeology normally sees artifacts as art objects for us to examine and interpret. Conference participants asked if there is any fresh territory available to work in beyond the well-worn paths taken either by contemporary artists who play with archaeological materials to make their museum and gallery installations, or by archaeologists who look to modern artists for new ways to explain behavior and patterns in the past. This book suggests that one way forward is to explore the potentials of an art/archaeology. The proposal is that we should move beyond traditional efforts to explain or interpret the past, and that we do this in a creative way that has impact on contemporary societies.
Creative (un)makings: Disruptions in Art/Archaeology - Exhibition Catalogue (2020)
2020
Art/archaeology, a new transdisciplinary practice has fractured traditional perspectives on the relationships of art and archaeology, and the exhibition "Creative (un)makings" brings that disruption to the museum world for the first time. This book is the catalogue from the exhibition at the International Museum of Contemporary Sculpture in Portugal (March-September 2020) Seen from the standard perspective of traditional academic and cultural subjects, art and archaeology have comfortable relationships: collaboration, co-inspiration, shared aims to advance knowledge of human behavior and thought. Art/archaeology argues that writing and thinking about the past should move beyond existing boundaries of both disciplines, and that creative work should replace written texts and lectures. Art/archaeology opens a new space where creative work, thought, and debate expand in unexpected directions, and where we find innovative potentials for objects from the past.
Art // archaeology // art: letting-go beyond (2013)
Published in I. Russell and A. Cochrane (eds). Art and Archaeology: Collaborations, Conversations, Criticisms, pp. 231-50. New York/Dordrecht: Spring., 2013
In this text chapter, Professor Bailey investigates the articulations of art and archaeology. He argues that while recent influences of contemporary art have expanded archaeological interpretations of the past, more provocative and substantial work remains to be done. The most exciting current output is pushing hard against the boundaries of art as well as of archaeology. Bailey’s proposal is for archaeologists to take greater risks in their work, and to cut loose the restraints of their traditional subject boundaries and institutional expectations. The potential result of such work will rest neatly within neither art nor archaeology, but will emerge as something else altogether. The new work will move the study of human nature into uncharted and exciting new territories.
Shaping the Past introduction to Sculpture and Archaeology
sculpture and archaeology 2 material, and between sculptors and archaeologists; archaeology as a metaphor in modernity and psychoanalysis; myths of origins and the ways in which the archaeological dig, the cave and the quarry have been variously appropriated; and the philosophy of place and the ways in which questions of site-specificity are significant to both sculpture and archaeology in urban, rural and industrial environments. The fact that the original call for papers generated more than sixty responses is a testimony to the fertility of thought in this area, and twenty-five papers were finally selected for presentation. These were aggregated into five discrete sessions on models and metaphors; excavation, site and place; excavation, myth and modernity; the status of the fragment; and the politics of archaeology and sculpture.
Ineligible (2020) - short catalogue essay
In D.W. Bailey, S. Navarro, and Á. Moreira (eds) Creative (un)makings: Disruptions in Art/Archaeology, pp. 28-50, 65-91. Santo Tirso: International Museum of Contemporary Sculpture., 2020
In this brief essay from the 2020 catalogue for the exhibition "Creative (un)makings: Disruptions in Art/Archaeology" at the International Museum of Contemporary Sculpture, in Santo Tirso, Portugal, Professor Bailey introduces the "Ineligible" project and discusses each of the works installed in the show. (Readers interested in the "Ineligible" project should also read the much fuller account: Bailey, D.W. 2020. Art/archaeology: the Ineligible project. In D.W. Bailey, S. Navarro, and Á. Moreira (eds) "Ineligible: A Disruption of Artefacts and Artistic Practice", pp. 11-26. Santo Tirso: International Museum of Contemporary Sculpture.)
Art archaeological interactions (2024).
2024
Bailey, 2024. Art archaeological interactions. In A. Gago, J. Amorim, and N. Moura (eds) [e]motion, pp. 11-25. Porto: UCP. This chapter is the result of Doug’s keynote at the 2021 [E]motion Conference on Science and Technology in the Arts coordinated at the Center for Research in Science and Technology of the Arts, of the School of Arts, Universidade Católica Portuguesa in Porto. One of the important archaeological conversations taking place today surrounds this important question: what are the creative potentials for collaborations between artists and archaeologists? The content and potential of these conversations are fresh and exciting, to the extent of even challenging standard traditions of work between the two disciplines.
The volume investigates the processes—historical, intellectual, and political—through which archaeological artifacts have been, at moments in their histories, transformed into aesthetic objects. That investigation is critical, thorough, and revealing; inclusion of archival records and contemporary objects challenges the reader (and in the original exhibition, the viewer) to wrest the artifacts out of whatever art historical or archaeological narrative they had nestled into and view them critically and historiographically as constructs of particular historical ideas.
Disarticulate—Repurpose—Disrupt: Art/Archaeology (2017)
Cambridge Archaeological Journal 27(4): 691-701., 2017
This project sees archaeology and art as a political tool for disrupting conventional, politically loaded narratives of the past. Rather than producing institutionally safe narratives conventionally certified as truth, archaeologists should follow the lead of artists who use the past as a source of materials to be reconfigured in new ways to help people see in new ways. Using as an example the works of the Canadian artist Ken Monkman, who subverts nineteenth-century landscape painting to reinsert the missing critiques of Anglo-American colonialism, dominance of nature, and heteronormativity, this paper advocates disarticulat-ing materials from the past by severing them from their context, repurposing them to bring contemporary concerns to the fore and creating new, disruptive visions from them. The article proposes the practice of an art/archaeology.