PARADE – Publication and Research in Art, Architectures, Design and Environments, seeks to explore the relationships between the built environment and the following disciplines:

 

FINE ART

Fine art has a deep history of relationships with the built environment, whether in the form of pictorial cityscapes, as background to narrative imagery or more simply through urban life serving as a site of inspiration for artistic practices. Certain cities become lost and regain their status as ‘centres for fine arts’ over millennia as the shifting economics underlying the contemporary art world have moved across the globe. This programme seeks to explore all these related issues and more.

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PUBLIC ART

It is possible to argue that nowhere is the relationship between the art world and the built environment more visible than in the realm of public art. The consequences, benefits and negatives of this have been debated and can be polemic. How does public sculpture improve people’s daily lives and what does it mean for artistic freedom and critical reaction? Is public art in some way counterproductive to the intense engagements and critical exploration of both artist and viewer? Does art need to be framed in a physical setting to be public in the age of the internet? These are just some of the questions this programme welcomes as possible topics of debate.

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SCULPTURE

The traditional three dimensionality of sculpture has always made it a discipline easily linked with that of architecture, whose artist-architects saw themselves as modelling their forms on those of the sculptor. Sculpture’s occasional fourth dimensional experimentation turned this interest into a fascination for 20th century avant-garde architects while the use of non-traditional neo, light and sound sculptures make it ever more a practice that inspires the creators of multi-sensorial public spaces through buildings. Beyond the presence of sculpture in public space and the physical spaces of galleries then, the potential relationship between the sculpted object and the environment it inhabits is open for discussion and further exploration.

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PERFORMING ARTS

In theatre, narratives take settings as integral to their drama. The setting can be a country, a city, a street, a building or a room. In dance, the body literally creates spaces or moves around them in the imaginary physical setting of the sculpted movement of the body. In music, stories are told of places of the past and the imaged locals of the future. The physical environment around us informs the work of the artist in multiple ways.  That environment can also be – literally – dependent on the arts. In the cultural turn of city regeneration, theatres, opera houses, concert venues and more all became central ‘economic’ components of a successful modern post-industrial city that today, has fundamentally changed in nature and form. There are however numerous places left behind, places abandoned by high culture and the consumerist city developments that attract the ‘creative class’. This programme solicits thoughts on such scenarios, and more

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