ATHICA‘s exhibit “Taking Part” closes this evening. The body of works join together to communicate the importance of collaborative art. Take Part this evening before 6pm (160 Tracy Street), scoping out what six opinionated artisans have to say about our relationships with ourselves, others, & the world around us.

Exert from ATHICA website: Participatory art has its beginnings in the first half of the twentieth century with the performative and often political projects of the Dada artists, but reached its peak in the 1960s with artists such as Alan Kaprow, who coined the term Happenings, and Nam June Paik and Yoko Ono, who were part of the Fluxus network which embraced performance, mail art, sound art and video. The artists in this exhibition look back to those early days of participatory art, but also take cues from relational aesthetics and conversational art of the 1980’s and 90’s, which focused on the social rather than political. In his book, Relational Aesthetics, Nicolas Bourriauld defines Relational Art as “a set of artistic practices which take as their theoretical and practical point of departure the whole of human relations and their social context, rather than an independent and private space.” He speaks of inter-human encounters and familiarity, of the exhibition as catalyst for immediate discussion, unlike more privately consumed media such as television and film. Likewise, the artists in this exhibition each strive to transgress the boundaries between artist and viewer, the academic and the vernacular, and the public and private realms through the involvement of participants and the active engagement of the viewer.

(Maggie Benoit, UGA)