Social Practice

I’m going to try my best to keep these posts a little shorter, but these concepts do not coalesce in my head very easily or in a very fully baked form, so I find myself having to really write through them. Also, I am not exactly the most concise of writers. So, thanks for bearing with me.

I would like to return to my discussion of theoretical frameworks that have been used to analyze socially-engaged artworks (oh, what a difficult term…isn’t all art rife with the social? But I hope you know what I’m talking about by now), as in my previous post on relational aesthetics. In that post, I pointed out that Bourriard’s discussion of relational aesthetics as a “theory of form” just didn’t quite do justice to the social, spatial, and political dimensions of this work. Grant Kester, in his book “Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art” gets a little closer to laying out the various layers of social practice, what he terms as “dialogical aesthetics” (another relatively useless term - shoehorning these practices into some qualified type of aesthetics still seems so reductive to me). Kester manages not only to link these practices quite cogently to an art historical lineage, but also to begin to think about a more rounded framework for approaching them critically. Which is why his book, even after 10 years, is still the undisputed central text concerning community-based and socially-engaged artworks.

Grant Kester, Conversation Pieces

Kester begins the chapter in which he lays out his analytic framework by talking about conceptual art not only as a move away from the purely visual, but as a robust set of concerns extending beyond (but not entirely rejecting) the art object itself. He says of conceptual artists like Adrian Piper, Vito Acconci and Felix Gonzalez-Torres: “They tend to focus on ways in which the optical experience is conditioned by a given social context or physical situation and by the viewer’s participation.” Seedbed, Acconci’s iconic performance  in January of 1971 at Sonnabend in New York, is cited as an example - the viewer must be present to complete the piece, as the interaction between the masturbating artist under the floor and the unaware, disgusted or curious viewer was central to the piece.

Vito Acconci, Seedbed, January 15-29, 1971, New York City

I like this little concise description of conceptual practice from this era, because it throws into relief the different territories we are dealing with in art: optical experience, social or physical context, and viewer participation. It also provides a useful model for distinguishing social practice: in my view, social practice takes the work of conceptualism and twists it to privilege the context over all else. To switch around Kester’s description accordingly, I would say that social practice artists are concerned with the way a given social context or physical situation (usually both) is conditioned by optical experience (or aesthetic exchange) and viewer/creator/stakeholder interaction.

Accordingly to Kester, how successfully an artist enacts this analysis and practicing of the social can be broken into a three-part theoretical framework. He takes John Latham and Barbara Steveni’s Artist Placement Group as the trigger for his first two parts: 1) a project should first be examined by its ability to define art as a “condition of openness.” Does the artist seize the opportunity to approach a problem “unconventionally, naively, open-mindedly, as if from the outside?” He does note, however, that the tolerance for this kind of problem-solving practice drops quickly when applied outside of the art world, as in APG. Secondly, he examines a project in terms of its “critical time-sense.” Is the artist thinking in very long terms, about the “viewer-to-be” and about communities that are not yet emergent? Is the artist also thinking backwards in time, with a historical time-sense? He links this with what he calls a “spatial imagination,” the ability to “comprehend and represent complex social and environmental systems, identify interconnections among the often invisible forces that pattern human and environmental existence.” Finally, Kester ends with an analysis of the ability of the artist/project to “enact these insights through dialogical and collaborative encounters with others.”

I do think that this framework hits upon three major reasons for why an artist might be an appropriate “incidental person,” someone equipped to confront larger societal problems: 1) the ability to approach a problem naively and with a condition of openness; 2) a longer critical “time-sense,” beyond the short-term thinking dictated by certain disciplines (i.e. the market, quarterly, in election cycles, in fiscal years, etc); 3) a spatial imagination as defined above.

Yet the enactment of these artistic insights is where we fall down. Relational aesthetics, dialogical aesthetics, conversations and beer drinking and making food for each other…it all feels very 1990s. Form evolves, as I said before. What are things like these day? Well, Mark Allen from Machine Project took over LACMA for a day and will be taking over Visitor Services at the Hammer Museum for a full year. Edgar Arceneaux is renovating houses down in Watts and conducting job-training in green technologies. The LA Urban Rangers are giving tours of public access beaches in Malibu and holding public easement potlucks. And that’s just a few…

LA Urban Rangers, Malibu Beach Safari

How do we approach such projects critically? Do we measure their effects, conduct surveys, link their forms to previous art historical models, interview the artists for some insight into their conceptual rigor? It is fraught territory indeed.

Joseph Beuys, circa 1960s

This past Wednesday, I gave a brief talk on Joseph Beuys, an artist I find endlessly fascinating because of his hugely influential pedagogical ideas that extend far beyond the physical objects he produced. The talk was a part of the Hammer’s Lunchtime Art Talks, little 30 minute curator-led talks that occur every Wednesday at 12:30pm and are quite popular with the many office building employees around Westwood. The talks are mostly made up of both regulars and those who just wander in … two straight-laced graying men come in regularly, a few well-dressed female employees from the Occidental Petroleum office tower above the Hammer, a youngish 30-something guy in a business suit, a few retirees, some foreign tourists. Some students, scruffy and clutching moleskine notebooks to top it off. The audience for my Beuys talk was fairly representative of this group, and I chose to orient the talk around one of Beuys’ best-known multiples, the Noiseless Eraser (Schnellman No. 101).

Joseph Beuys, Noiseless Blackboard Eraser, 1974

The object was small, literally an eraser that Beuys had signed and then stamped with the seal of his “Organization for Direct Democracy,” originally produced by New York Blackboard, Inc. It was made of pressed felt, a material Beuys knew well, and was surprisingly multicolored, with lovely bits of colored wool running throughout. One of our registrars pulled it out of the depths of our Grunwald Collection, surprising even herself as the collection is mostly works on paper. Since it was so small, we all gathered around a table in the Grunwald center to look at it, and the looks ran the gamut from surprise to confusion to aggression. One woman shocked me by picking up the eraser and shoving it in her friend’s face, “Hey, get a good look!” she cried, laughing.

I launched into my talk after the eraser was returned safely back to the table. I spoke about Beuys’ view on multiples, his idea that the art object represented mutability rather than permanence, that materiality was tenuous and constantly changing due to chemical processes. He saw multiples as objects of condensation for his ideas, as vehicles for distribution. This explained why he made so many (Noiseless Eraser had 550 editions), and why he dreamed of someday creating multiples in the 10s and 20 thousands. He wanted these objects to reach a wide number of people, but also had enough fascination in the methods of distribution in the art world that he accepted the object might only ever be possessed by the world’s elite collectors. In his own words:

“It’s a sort of prop for the memory, yes, a sort of prop in case something different happens in the future.

I’m interested in the distribution of physical vehicles in the form of editions because I’m interested in spreading ideas.

The objects are only understandable in relations to my ideas. The work I do politically has a different effect on people because such a product exists than it would have if the means of expression were only the written word.

Although these products may not seem suitable for bringing about political change, I think more emanates from them than if the ideas behind them were revealed directly.”

I then connected this object to Beuys’ philosophical ideas about the application of heat as initiating change, whether it be Erotic, metaphorical, or physical heat. He believed that one could achieve symbolic acts of transcendence through these chemical conversions. Felt was a material closely connected to heat for Beuys, and hearkens back to his own origin myth, the famous and controversial story of himself being wrapped in felt and fat by Tartar tribesmen in Crimea after his airplane was shot down in World War II. He also had an elevated understanding of the parameters of art, and saw his role in society as that of a shaman or teacher who could guide society in new directions. These “actions” were a different kind of application of heat, and just as much a part of his art practice as his installations, drawings, or sculptures.

Several of Beuys’ well-known sculptures from the 70s were blackboards covered in his scrawls about reform and political activism, the products left behind from his didactic lectures. He saw the lectures as the creative process through which these works were formed. Many of his central concepts and mottos could be found in this work, like “Capital = Art” and “Everyone is an artist.” This “deep pedagogical impulse” as Ina Blom calls it, separated him from other artists in the avant-garde project like Duchamp and Brecht. Whereas these artists believed that the art object itself was imbued with the ability to shock and transform society, Beuys preferred to supplement this intrinsic power by explicitly teaching lessons of artistic and political changed. For Beuys, seeing an unrealized potential in the world and trying to enact it pedagogically was a very different way of viewing the avant-garde project than the chance-based and passive tactics of Brecht and other Fluxus artists.

Joseph Beuys, Joseph Beuys's Action Piece, 26-6 February 1972; presented as part of seven exhibitions held at the Tate Gallery 24 Feburary - 23 March 1972 © Tate Archive Photographic Collection.

There I ended the talk by citing my belief in Beuys ongoing influence on generations of younger pedagogically and socially-oriented artists. “Any questions?” I asked.

Hands shot up immediately, first from one of the straight-laced older guys. He asked me first how much the eraser cost (I didn’t know, turns out it goes for around $600-$1000). He asked me who produced the eraser, then he came out with this: “Beuys is playing a joke on us. Capital=art, he said it himself. He’s not being serious, he’s doing this to play up the market, sell this junk as art and pull one over on us.” His frustration with Beuys was palpable. Before I could answer, though, a young guy with a scruffy beard who looked riled up himself said, “No, I think Beuys is completely serious. He sees these objects as imbued with a spiritual power, the ability to spark thoughts and ideas, to initiate change, to shake us out of our complacency.” A British tourist turned to her friend and asked, “Do you think it’s art, Sheila?” Sheila answered, “I think art is anything that an artist can imbue with meaning. And Beuys imbued this with meaning, so yes, I think it’s art.” Someone else said, “It’s like a party favor, a small reminder of some of his more radical ideas.” The straightlaced guy shook his head angrily.

That was about the extent of the conversation, but it was by far one of the more lively discussions we’d had at a Lunchtime Art Talk in a while. It hit me that Beuys’ eraser had acted as a provocation in precisely the fashion he had intended, and for a moment, the museum had become a dynamic place of learning rather than a cemetery for dead things. In Beuys’ words, it was for a moment, more like “a university, with a special department for objects.” To provoke such situations was, to him, the true pedagogical role of the artist.

Barbara Steveni and John Latham, Artist Placement Group (APG)

@ apexart coming up…

The Incidental Person
Curated by Antony Hudek

January 6 to February 20, 2010

Opening reception: January 6, 6-8 pm

“The “Incidental Person” was coined by the British artist John Latham (1921-2006) to qualify the status of an artist involved in non-art contexts such as government or large corporations. This exhibition expands on Latham’s original definition of the Incidental Person to include those persons for whom all aspects of life – political, social, esthetic, professional – are integrated into a unified whole. The new Incidental Person can be an artist, but does not need to be since for her or him meaningful production is not the exclusive property of any one member of society: the Incidental Person can be anyone as long as each of her or his actions partakes of a larger, unified life practice.

The exhibition argues that the Incidental Person stakes out a new position, outside of the 20th-century triad Joseph Beuys-Marcel Duchamp-John Cage. Unlike the latter, the Incidental Person does not seek to solve the “art-life” or “mind-body” problems. Instead, she or he fails to see them as problems at all, since for the Incidental Person art, life, mind, and body cannot be understood in opposition to one another. But this does not mean that the Incidental Person declares that anything can be art, as Duchamp suggested with the readymade. Rather art itself becomes subsumed under a larger, all-inclusive category of motions or things that bear the elusive imprint of Incidentality. And while the Incidental Person shares Beuys’ interest in pedagogy, she or he eschews the self-mythologizing of the avant-garde: if you do not recognize the Incidental Person walking past you in the street, this is probably because you have yet to learn what makes their life-practice Incidental - and vice-versa. This exhibition bring together persons formerly known as “artists”, “writers”, “technicians”, and “bureaucrats”, who imbue their everyday existence with Incidentality. In particular, the exhibition will underscore aspects of the Incidental Person’s life-work that do not appear obviously “artistic”, thus becoming a pedagogical forum to learn how to recognize and act out the potential behind seemingly disparate gestures, regardless of their professional or aesthetic tags.”

Interesting thought, this idea of “incidentality” and life-practice. I’ve been reading a bit about the fascinating Lygia Clark, who like Latham, brought together conceptions of time, mortality, metaphysics and the body in her practices. She said she “longed to live like the hand of a clock; passing a thousand times through the same route.” Ever concerned with divisions between the past and the future, this sense of time defined the wholistic conception of her practice. She said, “With me it is always like this - while I live a thousand turns of the earth the rest of the people here are marking out time, with rare exceptions, going backwards, and nothing is dynamic, everything is pause or death.”

Lygia Clark

A language of critique can be formed around life-practices such as these, as evidenced in the truly stunning survey of conceptual art curated by Peter Eeley at the Walker Art Center, “The Quick and the Dead.” Eeley’s cogent essay on the works of artists like Clark, Robert Barry, George Brecht, On Kawara, James Lee Byars, Tacita Dean and others highlight these concerns with death, time, and the metaphorical object.

Yet the notion of the Incidental Person that Latham puts forth and Hudek will attempt to expand upon in this exhibition might be more problematic to discuss in such a manner. Many artists concerned with social practice are “incidental people” inserted into political and social arenas as problem-solvers, but where do the parameters and limits of their artistic practices exist? It is problematic to call everything that an artist does in a social or political realm an “artwork.” Are the workings of government or community or social service utilized only as the context for performativity? Are the artists actually “solving problems,” somehow pointing out problems that no one else can see? I could cite many examples, from Merle Laderman Ukeles’s “Touch Sanitation,” during which the artist was in residence at the New York City Department of Sanitation, to John Latham’s stint at the Scottish Office’s Development Agency (through the Artist Placement Group). Besides these insertions, there is also the question of artist-conceived organizational structures that are called artworks, like Rick Lowe’s Project Row Houses or Watts House Project. Is this a strategic in some way, positioning these entities in an “innovative” categorization (not to mention funding and development), or is there a larger intellectual and conceptual artistic process at work? Something special and unique that an artist brings that no one else can, a revelatory experience?

It’s certainly a romantic notion, but I struggle with it. And if it’s true, what about these other “incidental people” that Hudek speaks of? The engineers, the scientists, the technicians, and the bureaucrats? I can’t help but believe that there is some hierarchy, some question of authorship, and general muddiness about shoehorning these artists/non-artists into a curated art show that is not being addressed here.

(Thanks to Aimee Chang for the conversation that led to some of these questions).

One of the issues with art that is inherently based on social exchange is that these practices have not really been clearly examined or theorized. There is a tendency amongst art writers and curators and artists to smush together all kinds of varied “movements” like Dada, Fluxus, the Situationists, Happenings, relational aesthetics (a la Bourriard), and dialogical aesthetics (a la Kester). Not to mention the fact that a variety of very vague terms are used to describe these practices (community art, public practice, social practice, etc). I have found myself falling into this lazy naming, but I feel that I must start somewhere. Very simply, the language has not been adequately defined, and I hope to work through some of these terms in my posts.

So what exactly am I talking about? Perhaps some of the definitions of writers I look to frequently in my studies of these practices will help map out this fraught territory, and an iterative study of particular projects will help to illustrate the context. We’ll start with Nicholas Bourriard. The term he coined, “relational aesthetics,” now elicits snorts and scoffs, and has come to stand for a post-critical art of “congeniality,” a realm in which a bunch of lazy artists have learned that they can call dinner parties and beer-drinking “artworks” within a gallery or museum setting. “Found” parties rather than objects, injected without much thought or rigor into art historical discourse.

Free Beer - Tom Marioni

I believe, however, that Bourriard was getting at something that has since been colloquially lost in translation - some (but not all) of the art he talks about hits on questions of community, societal mores, the meaning of public space, and how economies or technologies shape day-to-day social interaction. This is interesting, but the “theory of Form” that Bourriard advances lumps these practices with those that concern themselves only with the social networks of the art world and pleasurable congeniality. This is problematic, and does a disservice to the works that are critically examining political and cultural contexts. The metric he advances is simply not adequate to make those distinctions.

Relational Aesthetics

Bourriard calls relational aesthetics a “theory of form” in his series of essays on art from the 1990s. He traces this in the historical trajectory of the avant-garde, positing that the “perceptive, experimental, critical, and participatory” models of current art are carrying on the “modernist fight,” albeit in the context of quite different societal presuppositions. He defines relational art as “an art taking as its theoretical horizon the realm of human interactions and its social context, rather than the assertion of an independent and private symbolic space.” These artworks examine social systems, and turn small exchanges into issues reflective of a broader society shaped by political, economic, and social mores. He calls the “arena of encounter” created by these works “a game” - in which participatory structures are modeled. He believes that this “arena” must be judged by its coherence of form, the symbolic value of the “world” it suggests to us, and the image of human relations reflected by it.

Rirkrit Tiravanija, Exhibition View, Secession 2002

Some of the works Bourriard describes include:

“Rikrit Tiravanija organizes a dinner in a collector’s home, and leaves him all the ingredients required to make a Thai soup.”

“Philippe Pareno invites a few people to pursue their favorite hobbies on May Day, on a factory assembly line.”

“Vanessa Beecroft dresses some twenty women in the same way, complete with a red wig, and the visitor merely gets a glimpse of them through the doorway.”

“Christine Hill works as a check-out assistant in a supermarket, organizes a weekly gym workshop in a gallery.”

“Pierre Huyghe summons people to a casting session, makes a TV transmitter available to the public, and puts a photograph of laborers at work on view just a few yards from the building site.”

We could add people like Liam Gillick, Adrian Piper, Tom Marioni, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, and Jens Haaning to this list according to Bourriard’s rubric - but I still feel uncomfortable lumping the practices of these artists together. Perhaps they are all part of some broader contemporary trajectory, but they each are concerned with such different realms of interaction. Relational aesthetics is a good start, a useful entry into these practices, but is just too reductive in its language. Rigorous social practice rarely begins and ends with friendly interactivity between an artist and a public. We are beyond relational aesthetics as a theory of form, because the form keeps changing and evolving. What we need is a deeper analysis of how artists are inserting themselves into realms that have never traditionally been spaces for art.

Every chance I get, I climb above the city and take in the panorama. Los Angeles is particularly filmic – the mountains, the ocean, the neverending density, the outcroppings of tall buildings ensure that every view is both picturesquely framed and overwhelmingly extensive. I had two recent opportunities to view the city from above – one from the ridgeline hike in Runyon Canyon and another from the roof of the Talmadge, an anachronistic 1920s brick apartment building in Koreatown. This second experience, perhaps because it was night and the city spread out like a glittering jewel beneath the terrifying sheer drop of the uneven and ancient (by LA standards) rooftop, reminded me strongly of Michel de Certeau’s deeply poetic “Walking in the City.” Indeed, the city was arrested before my eyes, and just as de Certeau wrote about the crests and undulations of the “urban island” of Manhattan, I found myself admiring the long Wilshire district of steel and glass and occasional brick and the city beyond. The light-studded hills of Hollywood loomed to my north, the post-industrial orange street lights and boxy structures spread to the south, with the rising terrain of Bunker Hill to the east and the long wide boulevards to the ocean stretched due west.

De Certeau asks, as I eventually did on my rooftop perch, “Must one fall back into the dark space where crowds move back and forth, crowds that, though visible from on high, are themselves unable to see down below?” He calls this “an Icarian fall.” The city cannot remain frozen in our view forever, and the pleasure of totalizing the city into a vista is merely a temporary delight. This divide between the wholistic conceptualization of the city versus the messy, complicated morass of spatial practices and feelings and people and overlapping communities and spheres of knowing challenges any visionary that wishes to effect social justice or change by engaging the political. There is always the discouraging Icarian fall, and the struggle to hold on to the totalizing vision that binds all the uneven fragments together.

I remember that divide as I engage in these writings, which will comprise an ongoing investigation into the complex social practices surrounding art. I will try, to the best of my abilities, to embrace complexity and conflict, to work through difficult and contradictory issues, and to always try to see both the rosy vision and the chaos of reality.

What do I mean by social practice in art? Primarily, this blog will focus on artistic practices that utilize social exchange as the main medium through which to express a concept. I am by no means a cheerleader of these practices – in fact I think they often lack criticality, and are plagued by vague or misused terms like “community art” and “activist art” and “relational aesthetics.” But I am seduced by the idea that art can be a catalyst, that it can offer a different way of thinking about societal problems, and that it can advance social justice. Perhaps this is naïve, and perhaps it is simply not possible. One thing I am sure of, however, is that such an idea will never be taken seriously without a critical and systematic investigation of art that claims this status. This social turn in art must be peeled apart into its many messy layers in order to lay the ground for the truly innovative to be recognized and built upon.