Pool 5: Art & Bad Taste 

Bad Taste – Finding Pleasure and Power in Minor Aesthetic Categories
Nummer und TypMFA-MFA-Po00.21H.005 / Moduldurchführung
ModulPool: 
VeranstalterDepartement Fine Arts
LeitungRabea Ridlhammer
Anzahl Teilnehmendemaximal 13
ECTS3 Credits
VoraussetzungenCourse language: English
LehrformSeminar
ZielgruppenMA Fine Arts students
Open for exchange students
Lernziele / Kompetenzen• To critically examine and employ exemplary aesthetic categories and artistic strategies
• Considerations of staging artistic and performance work
• Gain better understanding of role of context and materials in one’s own practice
• Practical experimentation through workshop & collective visual research
InhalteThis seminar will examine and explore “taste” both in relation to aesthetic judgement as well as the pleasures of (culinary) consumption. We will focus particularly on certain “low” or minor aesthetic categories such as cuteness, camp and kitsch and connect these to notions of value, power and gender.

Looking at artistic practices and positions between visual and performing arts that skate on the edge of what might still be considered “bad taste”, we will develop ways to deconstruct learned categories of taste and to consciously employ trivialized aesthetic categories, visual languages and performance practices as a critical and pleasurable artistic strategy of empowerment – in practice (in a workshop) and “with gusto”! Sampling the works of various artists will provide further insight into possibilities of successfully basking in bad taste. We will take inspiration from the seemingly trivial and theatrical and further explore the connections to culinary enjoyment.

Together with the dramaturg Felicitas Arnold we will also experiment with performative ways of conducting a collective research about “bad taste” to result in a publication which will become part of the long-term project “Mon Ch3rix – A Tasting of Sweet Pleasures”. The interdisciplinary format developed by Felicitas Arnold and Rabea Ridlhammer will first take place in June 2021 as a performance soirée at Oval Office, the bar and exhibition space of the Schauspielhaus Bochum, DE. An adaptation connecting to the local context and including the students’ publication will be presented in Switzerland in the Winter of 2021.

About the lecturer:

Rabea Ridlhammer (DE, 1990) is an artist and graphic designer based in Zürich. Her work is often research based and collaborative, making use of and dealing with trivialized practices and minor aesthetic categories such as cuteness, comedy, craft or gossip. The bar is a recurrent element or site of her works, being both a space of social encounter and a place with a specific function outside of the art context.
Bibliographie / LiteraturWill be handed out during the course.
Leistungsnachweis / TestatanforderungMandatory attendance (minimum 80%); active participation
TermineTime: 10:00 - 18:00 o'clock

CW 46: 15 / 16 / 17 / 18 / 19 November
Bewertungsformbestanden / nicht bestanden
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