Artblog | Hammam Aldouri

August 20, 2016 by Hammam Aldouri

Finding Philadelphia – Locating Contemporary Art Discourse Between the Local and the Global

This article concerns the restriction of contemporary art discourse to the specificity of Philadelphia in the city’s DIY art scene. It strikes me that the focus on the geo-political and cultural particularity of Philadelphia produces a strange contradiction in how we think about contemporary art in Philadelphia. The contradiction is between the parochial fixation of trying to speak for a Philadelphia contemporary art (distinct from a contemporary art in Philadelphia) and the global status of contemporary art. In what follows I want to develop an understanding of this contradiction by paying particular attention to some interconnected issues such as the notion of contemporaneity, globality and internationalism. I close with a couple of questions, both oriented by the attempt to inquire into the very possibility of a discourse of contemporary art within the context of an explicitly regionalist focus.

July 17, 2016 by Hammam Aldouri

The One Percent

The question that I constantly ask myself when thinking about a phenomenon such as Percent for Art is quite straightforward: what kind of experience does public art funded by Percent for Art produce? I think this question needs to be posed whenever we find ourselves before public art, especially if one considers that, in periods of urban rejuvenation, public art will become increasingly visible.

February 21, 2016 by Hammam Aldouri

Response to “LOVE stays in the picture”

Why should we celebrate Indiana’s public artwork? It is, to my mind, not at all clear why the approval by the Arts Commission constitutes, as Kyu puts it, “a hugely positive sign”.

January 12, 2016 by Hammam Aldouri

On immanence (2): Continued reflections on critical art practice

In this essay, I want to further develop the idea of art’s immanence by focusing on a well-known text by the German philosopher and critic Walter Benjamin: “The Author as Producer” (1934). With the help of Benjamin’s text, we will begin to have a clearer idea of the way in which artists can function under the conditions of capitalism, that is, of what it means to be an artist “in” capitalism.

January 3, 2016 by Hammam Aldouri

On immanence (1): Continued reflections on critical art practice

Art is not an “autonomous” realm of cultural production that is cut off from, or outside, the unfolding of everyday life. Rather, it is something that takes place within reality at a given socio-historical moment. I would like to build on these initial reflections by developing the very idea of this “taking place within”. I will refer to this, more precisely, as art’s immanence (I take this word to mean here, quite simply, a status of “being within something,” a kind of “indwelling”).

November 29, 2015 by Hammam Aldouri

On critical art practice: some preliminary reflections

October 7, 2015 by Hammam Aldouri

On ‘Theory’: The Division of the Experience of Art

I think there is something deeper at work that has generated a certain resistance to ‘theory’ on a general cultural level, one that is much larger than the development of art in Philadelphia. I think that this ‘resistance’ is an effect of broader and deeper cultural attitude that has developed over the last twenty years (at least) in such a way that it does not allow us to see what is important about criticism or thinking ‘theoretically.’