Advisor/tutor: Jorinde Seijdel

Independent reviewer: Christel Vesters

Arnhem, June 2013

ABSTRACT

This thesis has been formulated as a set of theoretical and practical instructions in order for the reader to understand and approach a certain method of artistic production. Taking the spirit of technical how-to manuals, its form is inspired by the thoughts of the book The Craftsman by Richard Sennett. Art can be materialized in a myriad of different shapes, images, ideas, sounds, tastes, objects and actions. All of these forms respond to a social, political and cultural context, we take into consideration the context defined by the statements that appear in the trial of Guy Debord's The Society of the Spectacle.

In How can I Build Art? we take the public space as a place in which the artists can create an auratic experience for the communication of their practice. Here we refer to the aura in the sense that Brea introduces; like a transmission of
information, movement and communication, in the artistic activity. If we take this aureatic experience into consideration, we can isolate a group of ways of exhibiting that permit a sort of total experience, or catharsis. Specifically, I am referring to authors who use the form of the narrative (in the widest sense of the word) to formalize their experiences and proposals. This kind of narrative reaches the viewer's mind through the visualization of multidisciplinary pieces to create a set, an environment, which contains a proposed syntax that is described by the author. The intention of this thesis is to detect which formal aspects are used by the authors to create an experience of their work that surrounds the audience. If we go further, and we try to see this way of presenting work as a method, more widely applied than within individual practices, we can detect similarities and common strategies in how this type of contact with the audience is created. The focus of this thesis is on the possibility of establishing effective parallels between the set of ideas proposed and the selection of work in order to analyze this method of communication within the realm of art production.