Artist Forum: The Artist As Documentarian

As media technology becomes more accessible and post-studio practice more acceptable, there appears to be a corresponding increase in instances of art mimicking or mirroring documentary formats. The purpose of this forum is to explore the possibilities and problems that documentary-style artworks pose: what defines the work as artwork rather than a standard documentary? What is the role of fiction and fact, or subjectivity and objectivity? What sets of ethics or standards apply to documentarians that may be more or less applicable to artists? What formats of presentation are acceptable to documentarians versus documentary-style contemporary artworks? Artists whose work reflects these concerns and tackles these issues are encouraged to submit presentations for Art in General’s Third Artist Forum: “The Artist as Documentarian.”

The Art in General Artist Forums are designed as an opportunity for artists to present their work while also providing a platform to consider pertinent topics and concepts in the field of art production. Each forum will include presentations by seven artists whose work relates to the day’s identified topic, followed by a discussion period. The discussion opens up conversation to all attendees, allowing for both feedback on the work presented as well as the opportunity to discuss and debate larger issues of artistic production relating to the topic. The Artist Forums are open to the general public, presenting artists are selected through an open call.

APPLICATION INSTRUCTIONS

To be considered for the open call, please submit the work you would like to present to artingeneral.artistforums@gmail.com. Please see the Format Guidelines below for further details on acceptable work samples. Each artist selected from the open call will be allowed 8 minutes to present slides/videos of previous work or works-in-progress that relate to the forum’s topic, so please consider this in preparing your work for submission. Submissions for each forum are due by midnight on the Tuesday preceding each forum (in this case, June 22). Artists will be notified about whether they have been selected to present by 7 pm on the Thursday preceding the forum (April 24).

We intend for the forums to serve as an opportunity for open discussion by all interested individuals so we encourage all artists who submit to the open call to attend the forum. Attendance is also open to the general public, so feel free to invite guests from any background to the forums.

FORMAT GUIDELINES

Photographs:

You may submit up to 15 digital images of no more than 10 art works. Please include brief descriptions of your images including title, medium, date and up to 2 sentences describing the project/work. Images should be no larger than 1 megabyte each, saved at 72 dpi.

Videos:

Videos cannot exceed 6 minutes in total. In your submission email send a link to your video(s) hosted online (on YouTube or Vimeo or other video-hosting format). Please also include up to two sentences describing each video work you submit.
If you are selected for the Artist Forum you will need to bring a copy of the video saved on a flash drive in .MOV format, no larger than 100 megabytes in total. You will be asked to arrive 30 minutes in advance of the forum in order to allow time to download and prepare you video for viewing.