Strategies of Engagment

I thought I'd reproduce here the list that Renate mentioned of Mel Ziegler and Kate Ericson's methodologies and strategies for engaging new audiences and framing information in new ways in Bill Arnings contribution to the catalogue America Starts Here.

Many of Ericson and Ziegler's main themes and methodologies emerge clearly, at least in retrospect, in the major works from the early years of their collaboration. The list of strategies Ericson and Ziegler used to make artworks seemed very unusual at the time, though today's young artists regularly employ these methods, which include the following: 1) Researching arcane areas of knowledge and pursuing a passion for the aura of the archive; 2) Using mapping and other similar ways of schematizing life; 3) Creating a system that dictates all significant visual decisions about a work's presentation; 4) Employing found elements rather than causing something new to be made; 5) Viewing the entire country as a test to be read, engaged, and decoded; 6) Using natural materials, like stone, leaves, and water, as tey are inflected or coded by culture; 7) Critically engaging decoration and architecture for what they reveal about society; 8) Using Americana as topic, material, or motif; 9) Engaging cultural institutionis, museums, and monuments, such as the Supreme Court, libraries, and universities: 10) Investigating government decisions about urban space nad making them public; 11) Collecting and collating found language, which can subsequently function as a type of found poetry; 12) Using the practical business decisions of others as a structuring device for works; 13) Designing projects as they exist in multiple states, each of which creates meaning, from the first research to the final use of materials; 14) Inserting delays into a process that unnaturally extends the in-between period of a simple task such as landscaping or cleaning, rendering otherwise invisible processes conspicuous and examinable; 15) Allowing works to disappear through transformation, making them cease to be "art" and instead begin to fulfill a useful function; 16) Cooperating with people outside the specific disciplines of the art world in a way that gives them a non-artistic reason to participate; 17) Choosing to work with each other as collaborators.

It's midnight now, but I'm going to have to come back to several of their works to help flesh out our discussions of the politics possibilities of labeling, performing the map in the physical environment, and more examples of the use of map language to provoke the mental process of mapping in non-map situations, and also their use of models and miniatures for the new fall semester course at Glassell: 3D Maps, Models, and Miniatures!