Social Engagements With Contemporary Art Connecting Theory With Practice

Past Grant Kester

Contempo debates around socially engaged art have focused on the spatial and temporal nature of social modify (the relationship, for case, between an ephemeral effect and the more lasting transformation of a given social construction, or betwixt local or situational action and global, or geographically all-encompassing, forms of organized resistance). More specifically, these debates enquire how the local, situational or "advertisement hoc" deportment oft encountered in socially engaged art practices are related to systematic forms of domination.[1] A typical reproach directed at projects of this nature is that they function as little more than window dressing for a fundamentally corrupt system. The only manner to produce real, meaningful change is to engage in the direct overthrow of the capitalist economy in its entirety. This criticism is necessary only not sufficient. The trouble with this arroyo, of form, is that it relies on a hyperbolic model of capitalism (as an entirely bulletproof and fixed system of domination) while also assuming that artists today actually accept the selection of adjustment themselves with an existing revolutionary motility, poised to launch an all-out attack on neo-liberal capitalism, and have simply refrained from doing so. The conventional avant-garde resolution to this impasse is to withdraw from whatever direct appointment with the social or political world in guild to embody a pure principle of radical negation, assaulting all existing values and systems of meaning. Not surprisingly, these gestures have get almost entirely routinized within the protocols of international exhibitions and biennials (often serving every bit the necessary scandal that demonstrates the openness of a system predicated on bureaucracy and wealth). In about cases they simply let artists to pose equally incendiary critics of capitalism while securing a comfortable living from the investment habits of the 1%, to whom they sell their piece of work.

The residues of this larger belief arrangement keep to inform fine art criticism. Nosotros tin identify two related assumptions that take been peculiarly problematic when directed at the analysis of socially engaged art.

• The supposition that any form of art practice that produces some concrete change in the world or is developed in brotherhood with specific social movements (via the creation or preservation of a park, the generation of new, prefigurative collective forms, shifts in the disposition of ability in a given community etc.) is entirely pragmatic and has no critical or conceptually creative capacity.[2] Or, alternately, that such projects, by suggesting that some meaningful change is possible within existing social and political structures, do nothing more forestall the necessary, simply inevitably deferred, revolution.

• The assumption that whatsoever given art project is either radically confusing or naively ameliorative (trafficking in "good times, affirmative feelings and positive outcomes" as a typical weblog posting describes it).[three] This is paired with the failure of many critics to understand that durational art practices, and forms of activism, always move through moments of both conditional consensus or solidarity-formation and conflict and disruption.

This isn't to say that there aren't numerous "social art" projects that are based on simplistic, de-politicized concepts of customs. Still, if these projects are problematic information technology'south not because they seek to appoint in a concrete style with the world outside the gallery or museum, or rely on processes of consensually-based action. It'south because they have a naïve or non-existent understanding of power and the nature of resistance. The most damaging of these assumptions, for a theory of socially engaged art practice, involves the failure of critics to grasp the generative capacity of practise itself—it's power to produce new, counter-normative insights into the constitution of power and subjectivity.

Is at that place another fashion for us to sympathise the transformative nature of socially engaged art practice? This circuitous question is made more difficult by the accumulated weight of past art theory and criticism. Conventional forms of artistic practice (installation, painting, sculpture, time-based media, and more than traditional, actor-centered modes of operation fine art) enhance a very different set of questions that are, in many cases, not applicable to socially engaged art projects. Here the "practice" entails the artist devising a detail ready of forms, events or objects that are presented to a viewer. In this case the primary generative moment, the moment when decisive choices are made regarding the formal, textile and discursive constitution of the work every bit a unified, apprehensible object, occurs prior to the arrival of the viewer. The situation is, of course, quite different with many socially engaged art projects. Hither the human action of production ("practice" in the conventional sense) and reception are ancillary. Moreover, artistic practice at this level becomes "transgradient" (to use one of Bakhtin's favorite concepts) with other, not-creative, forms of cultural production, from participatory planning to environmental activism to radical pedagogy. Thus, nosotros have a form of art product that requires us to reconceptualize our understanding of both the "viewer" and the act of reception, and that also exhibits a promiscuous relationship to other modes of cultural activity.

Launched in September 2014, The Natural History Museum is a mobile museum that offers exhibitions, expeditions, educational workshops, and public programming; highlighting the socio-political forces that shape nature. Image: NHM

This promiscuity opens up an important line of analysis that connects socially engaged fine art with a larger gear up of debates over the more full general interrelationship between theory and practice. We might recall here the dramatic transformation that occurs in the ambitions of the Frankfurt School between the moment of its founding in the early 1930s and the period during and after WWII. As Horkheimer outlines in his inaugural lecture ("The Nowadays Situation of Social Philosophy and the Tasks for an Institute of Social Research" in 1931) the goal of a properly "critical" theory was to challenge the abstraction and pseudo-transcendence of traditional theory by integrating theoretical product with the empirical analysis of, and practical engagement with, actual social movements. The Frankfurt School was thus organized around a transdisciplinary approach that would unite scholars in the fields of folklore, psychology, political economy and philosophy with the goal of producing an exhaustive analysis of the nature of capitalist domination and the most effective mechanisms for challenging it. The reciprocal interconnection between theoretical reflection and political action was cardinal to the definition of a "disquisitional" theory. Past the mid-1940s the mission of the Frankfurt Schoolhouse had been dramatically curtailed, leading to an oftentimes sterile functionalism. Confronted with the failure of the proletariat to unite in opposition to fascism and the emergence of a "totalized domination" that fabricated the capitalist, fascist and communist state systems virtually indistinguishable (at least to Adorno and Horkheimer), the germ of an accurate revolutionary drive had been transferred to the sequestered realm of art, where information technology would be held in trust until a more fortuitous historical moment called for its reactualization.

The key upshot of this shift was to uncouple theory from whatever relationship to the specific, empirically verifiable, furnishings of social and political resistance. Nether the monolithic power of a "totally administered society" outlined in The Dialectic of Enlightenment, virtually every other cultural form except art, and every other intellectual subject area, except a very specific mode of self-reflexive philosophy, had been irredeemably contaminated by the instrumentalizing drive of capitalist rationality. If no real alter was possible here and now, then there was no signal in cultivating a gear up of analytic tools for understanding the nature of contemporary political resistance. And if art could simply preserve its new function as singular bastion of revolutionary truth by abjuring any direct involvement with the social or political world, there was no reason to reflect on the potential human relationship between fine art, or theory, and practical resistance. Here we encounter 2 central beliefs that remain a persistent feature of much contemporary art criticism. Beginning, that the creative person (or artist qua theorist) possesses a uniquely privileged capacity to comprehend the totality of capitalist domination, standing in for a proletariat that has remained stubbornly indifferent to its historical destiny (Adorno uses the metaphor of the creative person as a "deputy"). And 2d, that fine art tin can preserve this remarkable prescience merely by refusing to debase itself through any direct involvement with social resistance or activism. This is the foundation for Adorno'southward famous assault on what he viewed every bit the naïve "actionism" of student protestors during the late 1960s.[4]

We can observe here a symptomatic ideological and discursive transference, in which the conventional principle of aesthetic autonomy is infused with a new, revolutionary, rationale (the very altitude that fine art takes upwards from quotidian life provides it with a privileged vantage point from which to diagnose the overdetermination of this life by economic imperatives). This transformed concept of aesthetic autonomy is axiomatic across a range of gimmicky art practices, most recently in Thomas Hirschhorn'southward crude opposition between "pure art" (the foundation of his own practice) and "social work". In his widely publicized Gramsci Monument project, Hirschhorn was able to provide an extraordinary level of economic back up (including summer art classes and a figurer center for children, as well as insufficiently well-paying jobs) to the residents of the Forest Houses complex, located in a chronically under-resourced working class neighborhood in the Bronx. He was able to retain his "purity" precisely by refusing to take whatever responsibility for the disappointment, frustration or disillusionment of those residents when, after xi weeks, these resources, and the accompanying outpouring of public concern that the neighborhood had enjoyed, were abruptly withdrawn. The lesson, for the residents of Wood Houses, was that in the absenteeism of the artist's charismatic personality (and funding sources), "art" equally such is no longer sustainable.[5] For Hirschhorn, the practices and methods of creative transformation necessary to produce more sustainable or meaningful modify in Forest Hills are dismissed as intrinsically uncreative "social work".

Philosopher Marcus Steinweg, who ran a series of daily lectures at Gramsci Monument. Courtesy Observer.com.

I would suggest that, far from violating the purity of the aesthetic, socially engaged fine art practices often represent a compelling re-articulation of it, involving as they do many of the key features we accept come to associate with artful experience, including the suspension or disruption of habitual forms of idea, the cultivation of an openness to our own intersubjective vulnerability, and a recognition of our own agency in generating normative values. In order to develop a more noun theoretical analysis of socially engaged art, even so, I do believe information technology's necessary to challenge the singular privilege we've been taught to assign to art and the personality of the artist, and to acknowledge that art exists along a continuum with a range of other cultural practices that hold the potential to produce confusing or counter-normative insight. Artistic practice certainly carries its ain specific methods, protocols and capacities, generated through its extremely complex history, just information technology also shares points of productive coincidence with other practices. I would also suggest that we need to reconsider the specific ways in which the human relationship between the pure and the impure, theory and practice, and art and life, have been configured in existing art criticism. As well ofttimes each of these is treated equally a synchronically fixed, a priori entity, when the space betwixt them is always, potentially, semipermeable. Certainly "life," if fully comprehended, is not the realm of simpleminded habitual blindness that is so oftentimes evoked by the canon of critical theory, and fine art, in its actual effects, is not e'er its opposite. Autonomy, or the infinite of autonomy, is produced diachronically, through the tactical shifting of certain material frames and discursive and institutional systems. And in these spaces it'southward possible to engage in both "applied" action and the generative, distanced reflection that we accept come to associate with theory. Action, as such, ever contains both a practical moment (in its orientation to concrete modify and in the pragmatic feedback loop that must ever be between this modify and self-reflection) and a utopian or prefigurative one, expressing in embryo forms of the social that might be reactualized in another space or fourth dimension.

____________

[ane] Encounter, for example, ABOG, "Future Imperfect" (theme for 2014-xv) https://www.abladeofgrass.org/discuss/themes/ (July fourteen, 2015).

Social change often challenges "the system". Sometimes the arrangement is visible—the prison house system, the health care organisation, the education system. Sometimes, the organization is a addiction of idea or internal "cop in the caput" (chapeau tip to Augusto Boal) that polices our beliefs and governs the way we see ourselves in the world. Perhaps the failures of our governmental, economic and social systems can be seen equally a failure of the imagination. If so, what happens when art, an human activity of imagination, is used to creatively address these failures? What happens when instead of "fighting the man," artists become involved in reimagining the way things work? A Bract of Grass' 2014 Fellows for Socially Engaged Art and Organizational Grantees address this notion in different ways. By creating and expanding on ad hoc solutions to seemingly unsolvable bug, the artists' projects we are working with this twelvemonth visualize ways of addressing, changing, getting around and otherwise confounding "the system" to foster greater freedom and disinterestedness in our gild.

[two] The concept of "prefigurative" modes of social arrangement, developed in sociological accounts of new social movements, is concerned with the means in which specific forms of collective activity and controlling (deliberative democracy, horizontality, etc.) accept practical value while too serving as potential models for futurity social systems. See, for example, Ana Cecilia Dinerstein, The Politics of Autonomy in Latin America: The Fine art of Organizing Hope (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).

[iii] Amy Spiers, "Is at that place a place for disruption/reaction/antagonism in social practice art?," 100 Questions, Open up Engagement web log, http://openengagement.info/69-amy-spiers/ (March 9, 2014).

[four] Come across Grant Kester, "The Noisy Optimism of Immediate Action: Theory, Practise and Teaching in Contemporary Art," Fine art Journal (Summertime 2012), pp. 86-99.

[5] Out of the veritable blizzard of media and art journalistic coverage dedicated to Hirschhorn's Gramsci Monument only i writer, Whitney Kimball in Artfcity, thought it relevant to actually talk to the residents of Forrest Houses after the project had run its course. This elision is, of course, symptomatic of the limitations of current socially engaged art criticism. Among others, Kimball spoke with Susie Farmer, the mother of Hirschhorn's primary contact at Forrest Houses, Erik Farmer. Their exchange provides a useful indication of the consequences that ensue when conventional notions of creative purity and autonomy are projected onto complex social and political sites.

Whitney Kimball: I remember the terminal time I talked to you lot, you were telling me about kids who were getting actually inspired past the art there. Accept y'all seen that [enthusiasm] grow at all over the year? [Note: Last yr, Susie had told me a story almost a piddling boy who'd been peculiarly inspired by the monument, and had been thinking about going into an fine art plan because of information technology.]

Susie Farmer: No. And one piffling male child who we particularly idea would be very practiced [with art], I don't even know if he's going to school at present similar we'd encouraged him to practice. The children are request every 24-hour interval if information technology's going to come back. No, they're not going to come back. It was a former matter. Every day they had something to expect frontwards to. They would get up early and come up to the monument. It was something they never had in their expanse before, and they may never have it again.

Whitney Kimball, "How Practice People Feel virtually the Gramsci Monument Ane Year Later?," Artfcity (August 20, 2014). http://artfcity.com/2014/08/20/how-do-people-feel-about-the-gramsci-monument-i-year-later/

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Source: https://abladeofgrass.org/fertile-ground/on-the-relationship-between-theory-and-practice-in-socially-engaged-art/

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