Social Practice

There has been some excellent discussion in the blogosphere recently over the value of the NEA in light of its budget being cut by $21 million in a House vote. Often the site of controversy, federal funding for the arts has once again risen to the forefront of debate. In some ways, this whole discussion seems laughable, because $21 million in light of the federal budget as a whole is no more than chump change. In fact, the entire budget of the NEA is inconsequential compared to the deficit and debt we are facing as a country, making little to no difference in economic terms. But perhaps what is so galling about the NEA to economic and political analysts is that the value of the arts to this country cannot be easily quantified in terms of societal benefits - and therefore is rarely adequately addressed through the language of the market. Rather, the value placed on art betrays deeply personal preferences.

Tax Subsidies for the Arts

Isaac Butler and Matt Yglesias have picked up on the excellent point that much of federal subsidization of art is largely hidden in tax subsidies in this country, which partner with private funders to provide “decentralized funding of aesthetic endeavors.” Because this is a blanket exception in our tax code, subsidizing charitable donations to many non-arts (and thus more difficult to target) 501(c)(3) non-profit entities that provide blankets to homeless shelters, etc, it is not talked about and thus works equally well for conservatives and liberals as a hidden source of arts funding determined not by the federal government but by wealthy people and their foundations.

As one whose work is funded by this system, whose position and title and every endeavor relies upon a team of people within my institution who write grants and wheedle charitable donations from private and corporate givers and deal with countless memberships, I wanted to add my perspective to this discussion. Our current arts funding system does (at least on the surface) seem to allow for a greater freedom of art practices, and thus a more entrepreneurial and innovative scrappiness on the level of the individual artist or small organization.

The Limits of Scale

However, there is a limit of scale that occurs as arts organizations grow to a municipal or state level within this system. Arts patronage on a scale massive enough to fund these larger initiatives is extremely rare, and begins to meld into a power brokerage that in fact supresses innovative art that could be relevant to a city-wide audience. We begin to see the blockbuster art/entertainment exhibitions and privately funded vanity museums of the extremely wealthy, and one wonders if these subsidies only leads to a vicious cycle of insider-dom. It is again very difficult to measure the societal benefits of power-broker art patronage (who can argue against the famed Getty Center, or the Barnes, or countless other institutions that started in this way?) but one wonders if this country might be missing out on central artistic vision with a view towards the historical, such as that which might stem from a Cultural Ministry.

And even though the small organization or individual artist might seem to benefit from the subsidy system, there is the very real issue of capacity, and the impossibility of most artists to cobble together any kind of living wage. With the advent of non-object-based visual and performative work, most artists I know lose money on their art practices - even those that have extremely successful gallery and museum shows and are considered well-established artists. They simply don’t have the capacity or ability to search out the arts funding they need, and that funding is mostly restricted and cannot be used for real living expenses.The “starving artist” paradigm is an accepted situation - but why must it be? Doesn’t that bespeak an abysmally low value assigned to artistic work compared to the stunning figures quoted by Isaac Butler in terms of art’s economic value to a community? Artists do not reap any benefit from their stimulating “scavenger” work, from their ability to foment urban renewal out of nothingness - developers and businesspeople do. This does not mean that increased government subsidies for artists is the answer…but some return on artistic investment seems worth exploring.

So in a way, the NEA debate is merely the smallest sliver of this messed-up arts funding pie in America. I take issue with Matt Yglesias’s reading of federal arts funding as subsidizing essentially local issues (interestingly enough, he was my editor-in-chief when I was the arts editor of the Harvard Independent, way back when). This hearkens back to my assertion that it is dangerous to view the arts only within the language of markets, rather than a language of values. The localism argument assumes that the arts will be funded at all, and that localities would agree to the quality of life it imparts. In fact, I would posit that in many places, arts wouldn’t be funded at all if federal dollars were never made available. Why build a museum instead of a park? So the question really is, what is the value of arts to this country?

My personal view is that art has enormous value to innovation, and that divergent thinking is more clearly encouraged in art schools than it is in engineering, math, or technology departments. See my previous post on the untapped relevance of university art departments. The Obama Administration is making much of the STEM “Educate to Innovate” initiative to train more students in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math - I cannot understand why it is not STEAM instead. Unless the economic, societal, educational, and innovative value of art is taken more seriously, it will be continually doomed to the sidelines when it could offer real divergency and value to our deepest societal and cultural issues, as well as new ways to “win the future.”

Patterns in my life have emerged recently that have only intensified in their synchronicity; for some reason my work, teaching, and personal lives have encountered questions of collaboration and collectivity again and again. When I look more holistically, this synchronous set of overlapping concerns likely began with my Quaker education (a denomination and philosophy rooted in consensual decision-making), but more recently has emerged in my interest in collective artistic practices and organizational methods here in Los Angeles, which have seen a gradual increase in acceptance and interest over the past 10 years. I understand that collaboration and the collective is deeply rooted in human society and instinct, but also struggle with collective decision-making within hierarchical and individualized structures in American society. Collaboration is at once heralded as essential to any responsible organizational or educational practice, yet at the same time is so often poorly understood and implemented.

I teach “Art in the Public Realm” at USC to undergraduates, an art theory course focused on artistic practices that permeate the public sphere, and each semester I require my students to interview an artist/project/organization that does this. My class list has evolved over time, and is focused (by necessity) in Los Angeles. I struggle each semester to draw connections between such practices, partially because their disparate modes of working are so far beyond the traditional studio practices that my students are familiar with. Some look like galleries, non-profits, or tour groups – most have collective names and many members. All are formally trained in fine art but may have additional concerns related to architecture, urban planning, community organizing, pedagogy, activism. This collectivity and the forms it takes are hardest for students trained in traditional art historical models to grasp – as a member of a collective I admire, Fallen Fruit, expressed, “collectivity in art has always existed, but always on the fringe of art history.”

I invited members of that collective (David Burns, Matias Viegener, and Austin Young); Jade Gordon, Malik Gaines, and Alexandro Segade of My Barbarian; and Sara Daleiden and Sara Wookey of Being Pedestrian (and, at different times, of the Los Angeles Urban Rangers) to participate in a workshop at the Hammer Museum on February 12^th on this very topic. In planning the structure for the workshop, this stimulating group of multidisciplinary artists brought up some excellent points, both conceptual and logistical, about working as collectives. They spoke about collectivity as a choice with an aesthetic logic and a formal capacity – the aesthetic of the group, of the group dynamic, of the peculiar relationship of group to audience. They also spoke about it as an act of resistance against the paradigm of the individual artist, and here made the observation that perhaps radicality within art was made possible contemporaneously with adherence to group authorship. This conversation led to more logistical concerns as well – the coping mechanisms in decision-making (My Barbarian spoke of yes-anding and then simplifying, allowing the strongest ideas to rise to the top), the perplexity of institutions and funders when confronted with collective authorship, and the constant negotiation of power dynamics within and without the group.

Hearing the experiences of these long-time collaborations was enlightening, as I now find myself participating in several multidisciplinary “think tank” like bodies where the group dynamic alternately hinders or helps, obfuscates or clarifies the decision-making process. This is both frustrating and gratifying, but much can be gained from considering the group dynamic itself rather than striving to escape it. In the midst of a fruitful and reflective conversation about group authorship, a member of one of these bodies mentioned an example from psychotherapy, the Tavistock Method as developed by Wilfred Bion in 1961. Bion observed that any group working towards a goal or the completion of a task can be undermined by what he terms “basic assumptions” – dependency, fight or flight, and pairing. These primitive responses are defensive measures triggered by the anxiety of being in a group, and underlines how collaboration can be both socially useful and distinctly unsettling, resonating in our deepest instincts. The dependency assumption relies on a dominant figure within the group as holding all the answers, whereas the fight or flight assumption causes group members to behave as if there were some external threat. This can both unite group against a perceived threat but also hinder productiveness. Finally, the pairing assumption is a form of domination that occurs when two members hijack the conversation and relegate the rest of the group to passivity – hoping that the dynamic between the pair will solve the problem or task at hand without action from the rest of the group.

This simple categorization has broad usage, and Bion urges that true group productivity comes only when all such basic assumptions are suppressed. This can be a nearly impossible task without the time, effort, and reflection it might take to break down dominant power structures and reach a rational working mode. But taking collectivity itself seriously, taking the process of collaboration seriously, and allowing for the time and experience required for actual results, seems a necessity to this way of working. Even so, it does not always work, and failure must be actively embraced. This is utterly relevant to a society focused on expansion over depth, and one that is swayed by the group but inspired by the individual.

Yesterday I watched the “Public Art” episode of Bravo network’s Work of Art: The Next Great Artist. Besides the ho-hum projects produced and the silly, shallow commentary, the reality show solidified for me (in a fairly formulaic way) the big problem with contemporary art these days. By the end of the show, I didn’t understand why the people who won had won, why the people who lost had lost, and why the person who went home was kicked off. This is a fundamental problem with the show – the stakes are all muddy, and it’s unclear that even the participants understand what they are being judged on, not to mention the general public.

And it’s not that standards for judging art don’t exist, they are just never clearly stated. None of the various fascinating problematics of art in the public realm – histories of site-specificity and conditionality, issues of safety and accessibility – were ever spoken about (yet participants were judged on those implicit conditions nonetheless). Nor was anything outside of a sculptural object ever considered, no historical precursors were discussed, nothing challenged set notions of public art. Mostly there was musing on the blue sky, the poetics of the gravel in the “art park” area where the work was sited, and a lot of inter-artist drama (it was a team challenge – enough said). The show is absurd, and it brings to mind something my colleague Nato Thompson said recently, “Art is fighting for scraps in a Red Bull world.” The pale version of art and artists (some of whom are probably quite talented) that emerges is stereotypical, and reinforces what most of the general public thinks anyway – that art hates people, and that artists are elitist jerks or pixie-ish sprites or control-freak bitches that have nothing better to do with their lives. It’s not even good entertainment, not to mention a blow to advancing a deeper general understanding of contemporary art.

This alienation is what I believe the form (if not necessarily the content) of social practice is responding to, in part. People don’t trust art and artists, or much of anything anymore, and creating legibility in art is still not super popular. The forms that arise from the best social practice projects emerge from deep and durational research, and are often hybrids or plays off of familiar, accessible non-art social forms or spaces – schools, events, lectures, gatherings, story-telling, parks, gardens, speeches, protests, coffeeshops, restaurants, clubhouses, neighborhood associations.

Yet these forms have incurred a host of inadequate art writing, because so much of social practice work is hidden, existing over a long period of time. Traditional object-based art writers, no matter how smart and observational they are, are simply not capacitated to write about social practice. Quoting Nato Thompson again, “Without data, the hard work, the critique, everything is a gesture” – which is in turn the major critique of social practice, that it is just a series of empty gestures. It is therefore de-legitimized, marginalized, and not taken seriously.

A sustained and collective effort must be made to write more responsibly about these projects, to attempt a fuller understanding (or at least point to the untold aspects). Hard work is required – extensive interviews, the collection of documentation, on-the-ground experience over time. I would like to think that most writers don’t phone it in, and I have encountered several that really make an effort, but the mindset that this kind of legwork is needed in art writing must be adopted. I would love to see more dual residencies, writers paired with social practice artists on projects over long periods of time, allowing for a space of reflection and analysis. With the proliferation of both social practice programs and public art & culture theory programs in graduate schools (especially in the West), this kind of collaboration is natural and needed. Perhaps then artists can be recognized for the cultural contributors and thinkers that they are, not a bunch of elitists that perform empty gestures for an uncaring public.

I had two experiences in the past week in which students in a high-level pedagogical situation rejected all discussion of artistic theory or concept in favor of the nitty-gritty. In one, a workshop focused on Alternative Art Spaces and how they came to be (with excellent panelists Mark Allen, Julie Deamer, Lauri Firstenberg, Daniel Joseph Martinez, and Yoshua Okon), most participants were thrilled by the meaty conceptual discussions about motivation, intention, context and process - but a small percentage were upset and disappointed that no “worksheets” were given, no “practical advice” imbued.

The second was a discussion between students at one of the new “social practice” MFA programs out there and a well-known artist engaged in a community project. The discussion devolved from a conceptual and philosophical musing on process, adaptability, the importance of nimbleness, and the idea that preconceived structures rarely hold water for long in the real, complex world…into a demand for a step-by-step playbook of how to “involve” community partners more effectively. Without being privy to the many conversations, swirling politics, and difficult personalities involved, the students grilled the artist unabashedly - “Well, why don’t you just find a way to collaborate?” “Why don’t you figure out what they want and what you want and work within the common ground?” “What should be the five first steps to avoid these problems in the future?” These questions seem reasonable coming from the outside, but betray both a misunderstanding of community practice and a fundamental catch-22 - it is nearly impossible to gain an effective understanding of community practice without firsthand involvement, and nearly impossible to effectively critique a practice within which you are intimately entrenched.

Similarly with alternative spaces, there is no such thing as a play-by-play, a how-to for opening a successful non-profit. These things are dependent on people you know, the strength of your mission, your ability to express it, the appropriateness of your location, your relationship with funders, your prior experience. The only way to learn is by doing - and the smart participants of the workshop gleaned this from the very intelligent and experienced presenters. I would urge those who were not satisfied enough to go out and start volunteering at one of these spaces. Get down and dirty, get nitty-gritty. The best advice the panelists could offer was to go out and do it. Find a way. Meet people who have the skills you need and bring them on board. Talk, talk, and talk some more about your idea and get advice about how to implement it. That will probably lead to more questions than answers, but at least you will then know the right questions.

I am a teacher myself, but I grow tired of worksheets and playbooks and how-tos. I put on workshops to facilitate discussion of the conceptual and philosophical values that underly the best ideas. The nitty-gritty is where the rubber meets the road, and the nitty-gritty should be completely conformed to the philosophy of the project. You can’t teach it generally - it is inherently specific. So if you want to learn how to involve community - go and observe how someone tries to do it, from beginning till end. If you want to learn how to start an organization, go help someone do it. Or just do it.

“How might one structure an institution that is designed to problematize the idea of the institution?”

In Summer’s Artforum, Taraneh Fazeli poses this question in her reflection on the Night School, a recent hybrid collective artwork-as-pedagogical-structure conceived by Anton Vidokle and housed by the New Museum in New York City.

This question implicitly accepts the paradox of institutional critique, and Vidokle’s search for an answer bespeaks a series of prior attempts and “productive failures” like Manifesta 6. This biennial in Cyprus was organized around an art school structure, but was cancelled before it began. This prompted notions of experimentation and interesting failure, which became the central themes of “United Nations Plaza,” the result of Manifesta 6’s relocation to Berlin comprising a series of lectures and discussions that subverted pedagogical convention.

The Night School grew out of this project and morphed into a series of seminars and workshops over a year that involved multiple artists and cultural thinkers giving both public sessions and private workshops. The “core group” of 28 accepted applicants (of which Taraheh Fazali was one) committed themselves to a year of private sessions and meetings in addition to the public events. The series of eleven seminars were offered on three “tracks,” each on the last weekend of each month. The tracks were loosely organized around subjects like progressive cultural practices (Liam Gillick, Martha Rosler, and Boris Groys), artistic agency (Walid Raad, Jalal Toufic, Okwui Enwezor, Maria Lind, and Paul Chan) and self-organization in the field of cultural production (Rirkrit Tiravanija, Zhang Wei and Hu Fang, Natascha Sadr Haghighian and Raqs Media Collective).

Fazeli recalls her participation in the Night School’s core group, and ultimately believes that Night School was mix of successes and failures – success at facilitating a core group of art world insiders to achieve greater theoretical and cultural knowledge as well as the social networks that provide the armature for professional advancement - but a failure in its ability to problematize the institution in which it exists. Rather it legitimated the museum as a “center for power” and “hotbed of intellectual activity” as Martha Schwendener of the Village Voice describes – the museum easily co-opted dissent by inviting it in, and assembling art stars and individuals with high intellectual capital to participate in this series raised the New Museum’s cutting-edge profile.

I understand the “failure” that Fazeli talks about – the “public” audience of the Night School events could not experience the same level of engagement as the privileged core group and were already self-selected due to societal conventions surrounding museums. As Schwendener says, it was a “long way from Paolo Freire or…Hebert Kohl teaching kids in Harlem.” But institutions exist to perpetuate themselves, and the New Museum has an audience of art students and art world types who were exceedingly well served by this project. Both writers admit how complicated, gratifying, and ethical it was compared to a traditional pedagogical model. It is not really the purpose of the museum to teach the oppressed or to solve societal problems. The museum can, however, function as a site where these questions are raised and discussed, where education and institutions and power can be decoded and reapplied. Just because the museum benefits from such structures is no reason for them not to exist.

So the question remains – can such discussion and sustained pedagogical structures actually problematize the institutions in which they exist? If they can only do so by somehow breaking down and delegitimizing the umbrella institution, then no. The art world doesn’t work that way, not in reality. But working subtly within the paradox of institutional critique, adding to institutional reputation while simultaneously raising questions of theory and power amongst the stakeholders (the art world) can only be beneficial. One aspect does not negate the other. It is disingenuous to wish for a purity of critique, to ignore real contexts or real barriers – that constitutes shooting oneself in the foot before the project even begins (Manifesta, perhaps?). Much better to dream up an interesting structure with the best of theoretical intentions in mind, and see what transpires in all its complex and messy glory.

Read Fazeli’s entire article here.

Thanks to Tanya Yorks for her research help.

My student educators were fortunate enough to meet Bob Gober a few weeks ago on a walkthrough of the Charles Burchfield retrospective he curated at the Hammer. Gober, preeminent contemporary sculptor and curator of several highly regarded shows, approached my five UCLA students in the midst of their docent training, and quietly introduced himself. He didn’t say much about the show, but impressed upon them gravely how important their jobs were – to him personally as well as to the future audience of this landmark show. “You are representing this show to the world,” he said, urgency in his voice. “That’s a serious job.”

With that introduction, I’d like to consider audience in this post, and to expand the discussion of audience into one of taste and accessibility. As Martha Rosler says, “It seems appropriate to begin a discussion of ‘audience’ by taking note of the fact that there is anything to discuss.”

There has been much written about judgment and taste in regards to fine art, most notably by Bourdieu and those who have built upon his work. Yet as Rosler so astutely points out, a (not so) latent refusal to acknowledge a mass audience (thereby implying a non-art audience) is still par for the course in the art world. She writes: “Unconcern with audience has become a necessary feature of art producers’ professed attitudes and a central element of the ruling ideology of Western art set out by its critical discourse.” This critical discourse rests on the fact that without the need for broad appeal, the purpose of art can remain thus ill-defined. When we need to appeal to a mass audience, we need to more clearly define the purpose of art, and what it can achieve. And if we do that, then  we strip art of its freedom, its creativity of expression, and its “art for art’s sake” self-actualization.

I’m a fairly practical person, and I’ve always felt uneasy when people use the “art for art’s sake” phrase, usually as a way to avoid criticality or condemn the political and the contextual. I understand the difficulty in compromising aesthetic judgments to put on shows or make work with the broadest appeal – I am as critical as any of the unchecked blockbuster show, put on to put butts in seats or, as the case may have it, shuffling bodies in crowded galleries. My issue with “art for art’s sake” lies in the obfuscation of how judgment and taste are applied by curators, collectors, and art producers, and in the way that mass audiences are regarded by these professionals. They are either philistines who must be somehow imbued with the “right” sensibility, or the converted whose innate sensibilities enjoy reinforcement. “Art for art’s sake” perpetuates the cultural myth that art is universal, and urges us not to dig deeper into the contextual role of art. We either appreciate it or we don’t, because it is what it is and needs no prior explanation. Rosler pinpoints this divide quite eloquently:

“Mass audiences know that there is a restricted body of knowledge that must be used to interpret the codes of art at the same time that they recognize their outsider status. One is left confronting a void of permissible response out of which the exit line is often an apologetic and self-derogating “I don’t know anything about art, but I know what I [don’t] like.” For the art world audience, the knowledge that informs their taste recedes in unimportance compared with the compliment to their inborn “sensibilities” (taste) that an appreciation of high art offers.”

This view of audience as responsive only to their “inborn sensibilities” gets suspiciously close to a discussion of values, rather than one of acquiring knowledge. As one who has trained in conflict resolution, I know very well that once the argument gets down to values, very little ground can be given or gained through compromise or rational discourse. When art becomes about “knowing” rather than “appreciating,” however, we can begin to analyze the prior knowledge necessary for a rational judgment of art, and the opportunities possible to provide access to these codes.

The Burchfield show is just such an opportunity, and Bob Gober most certainly recognized that when he spoke to my docents with such gravity. He labored precisely and carefully with a pedagogically like-minded colleague of mine, the fantastic curator Cindy Burlingham, to abrogate the notion of the visionary, the genius, the poetic soul. Though Burchfield was all of those things in some way, in Gober’s show, it is clear that the man worked at it his entire life. Through his scrapbooks, his wallpaper, his labored drawings and doodles and carefully reconstructed paintings, we see the vision of a man who built up a knowledge and an understanding of his own practice that only really paid off in the last 15 years of his life. And through this show, visitors have an opportunity to build up their own knowledge – of artistic process, of the time period, of the way the art world worked at the time (a vitrine featuring the remarkable Sunwise Turn bookstore in New York, a little-recognized hub of modernism at the time, is a wonderful window into this social context). Bob Gober was absolutely right to impress upon the docents the seriousness of their job – they have the opportunity to either reinforce art appreciation as the arena of the elite, or to open up a base of knowledge and the painstaking but rewarding study of art as a possibility for anyone.