Art as active agent: democracy, pluralism and the production of knowledge

Once an experience of a work of art is radically untethered from a singular bject or location, its capacity to eclipse and transform traditional systems and circuits of display and consumption might be more easily realised. As contemporary art is now accessed in numerous ways and across multiple materialisations, situations and locations, it is increasingly important to consider ways in which art is connected with broader social, political, economic and environmental systems. In Forgetting the Art World (2012), Pamela Lee’s Heideggerian description, work of art’s world, accounts for a shift in focus from the ‘art world’ itself to the work of art’s world. Once we begin to consider the world of a work of art at a point where there is less concern for a passive form or product to be consumed, and rather with the idea of art as active agent, we can begin to more actively rethink the way in which systems of dominance might be reconfigured. Taking the impetus from a Community of Inquiry (COI) approach, adopted from The Philosophy for Children movement of the 70s, as a methodology for concrete action, this panel will present alternative models for the production of knowledge that are considered at once counter to, and complicit within, dominant systems of authority. Drs Lucas Ihlein, Sean Lowry, Jen Rae and Fiona Lee and PhD candidate, Rosemary Forde present a range of approaches, traversing models of art production, participation and dissemination that deal with environmental management, food dissemination, art evaluation, social agency and curatorial pedagogy while at the same time acting as agents and objects in new platforms for knowledge production.