Social Practice

On March 22nd, I had the fortune of seeing the Thai contemporary artist Rikrit Tiravanija lecture at USC. I was quite excited by this chance, especially because I had frequently read about Tiravanija’s work as theorized by others, particularly Bourriard and his seminal book on relational aesthetics (and thus heavily categorized and polarized over time through that lens) but had never had the chance the hear the artist speak in his own words about his work.

After studying only the now-canonical and much imitated cooking-food-in-galleries projects of the 1990s, I was pleased to learn about Rikrit’s more recent work, and to hear it described in its complexity of possible meaning and process rather than as relational aesthetics. It actually gave me a new perspective not on the aesthetics of relations or social exchange, but rather on labor and distribution processes as related to the aesthetics of protest and activism. Not at all what I was expecting.

Rikrit’s practice is evolutionary in its iterations, often seizing on a theme or way of working and building upon possible tendrils of meaning, form, distribution processes, and contexts over a series of exhibitions and projects - and responding to the restrictions and frameworks of an institution or art context in the process. His current work can be traced to a process he has since worked with in many variations - collections of traditional images of protest from around the world (hand-made signage, peaceful and violent gatherings, rallies and marches) clipped from newspapers and then carefully re-drawn by art students in Thailand and elsewhere. These collections of images are then displayed in myriad contexts within institutions around the world - framed as works on paper, fabricated into silk-screened wallpaper, drawn as collaborative wall murals over the course of an exhibition, translated into sound and pressed on to vinyl records, etc, etc.

Alongside this, Rikrit has begun to experiment with the fabrication, distribution and display of that most ubiquitous and anonymous vehicle of protest imagery, the t-shirt. Sporting tongue-in-cheek phrases like “No Country for Old Prime Minister” (distributed and photographed at the Bangkok protests of 2008), or “Less Oil More Courage” (which has since made its way on to Greenpeace tote bags), these shirts have most recently been fabricated by art students in a makeshift pop-up shop in Gavin Brown’s space in New York, and displayed in “parades” (not protests or marches) on the backs of teenage models in art fair contexts. The slogans, a jumble of appropriated, submitted, and made-up phrases referring to a variety of social issues and protest contexts, are gathered haphazardly into the frame of art before just as fluidly migrating out into other frameworks and lives.

Rikrit embraces and lays bare these distribution methods of activist imagery dedicated to social change (of the t-shirt, the newspaper, the hand-made sign, the protest gathering, the gallery, the art edition, the art fair spectacle), as well as issues of labor and authorship - and this, what I believe to be the most compelling and critical aspect of his work, is also what opens him to the most vitriolic criticism. After his talk, a young MFA student attacked Rikrit for using the labor of “Thai children” to produce his work, for failing to produce anything with the trace of his own hand (i.e. Walter Benjamin’s “aura”), for ethical irresponsibility and charlatanism.

Authorship is one of the greatest sticking points, again and again, when it comes to social practice works. Surprisingly, it comes from a much younger generation of artists (today’s MFAs) than one would expect, and the anger and confusion behind these “authorship” questions is sometimes palpable. It would be a little too easy to blame this young artist himself for just having a screw loose and dismiss his comments - his rage was palpable and I have felt it elsewhere - and it speaks to the state of the very system that Rikrit is attempting to address through the transparency of his methods. Young MFAs are often doomed to work as studio assistants during their best years, and resigned to a difficult life of adjunct teaching positions, the struggle for recognition, and the pressure to produce ever more cutting-edge commodified objects. Clinging to self-expression and craft and authorship is a very natural reaction to the life that these artists are very likely entering into.

Yet by this very token, artists like Rikrit are creating critical art by questioning the anonymous power of protest imagery in those contexts, re-appropriating that anonymous imagery to an artistic context and applying complex layers of authorship and distribution to it (like licensing phrases/slogans for free to Greenpeace, selling t-shirts for $10-20 that could be considered art objects that are fabricated by art students, clipping media images and applying the hands of artists, albeit student artists, to their reproductions and selling them under his name and then redistributing that money back to the student artists…). Rather than attempt to assert or remove himself, rather than insist upon a false frame for what he does, Rikrit navigates the many complexities and contradictions of these very systems of aesthetic distribution, influence, and power - embracing them and peeling them open. Anger is a natural response, but it should be leveled at the contextual processes Rikrit so masterfully identifies and lays bare rather than the man himself. This work is so much more than cooking food in galleries and congenial conversation - it implicates each of us participating in this art world context and beyond - with a smile and a wink.

In response to the ongoing economic crisis and the slow erosion of public monies dedicated to higher education in California, research institutes such as the University of California Institute of Research in the Arts (UCIRA) are focusing on the state of education in the arts and humanities, and how critical pedagogy in these departments is affected by impending pressures on these departments to demonstrate their revenue-generating viability. As Grant Kester posed in his keynote address at the recent UCIRA conference, these pressures have manifested in two strands that complicate the autonomy of the university, “on one hand, seeking to integrate it more seamlessly into the circuits of commercial development, to make it more subordinate to the demands of the market, and on the other to expose this creeping integration as a symptom of the erosion of the university’s raison d’etre and the growing pressure to place dwindling public monies in the service of private development.”

This pressure towards integration has, in part, thrown traditional Enlightenment notions of humanistic education [as outlined by Emmanuel Kant and Friedrich Schiller] into crisis, in which Socratic dialogue and argument in the sequestered realm of the University lose legitimacy when proposed as actions that attempt to change the existing social order – insisting instead that ideas refined in the forge of the classroom be utilized only to bolster the existing capitalist system.

Art departments in particular have struggled to reconcile their pedagogical development since modernism with these new pressures and current social contexts – in many cases by withdrawing themselves further into hermetic and insular discourse. As Kester proposes along with theorists and teaching artists such as Ernesto Pujol and Boris Groys, “[The University, especially departments of art and humanities] has evolved a curious symmetry with modern notions of art and the aesthetic as sequestered realms dedicated to the preservation of certain utopian impulses, carried over from our religious past in desacralized form. These include the harmonious reconciliation of the individual and the social, the cultivation of an ostensibly intrinsic ethical impulse, and a projected notion of humanity striving towards perfection or improvement.” Art education in this country, along with modern notions of art and the aesthetic, seek to cultivate new forms of consciousness in the passive receiver, inevitably emphasizing the division between the enlightened expert/artist and the ignorance of the student/viewer.

There is a value in preserving the university (and specifically the Arts and Humanities) as the one place where new ideas can be proposed and discussed for their own sake – [ostensibly] not driven by the forces of the market, capitalism, and neoliberal politics. In a way, art departments must become the “conscience of the art world” – and universities the conscience of our broader social context. Criticality and an educated public opinion is necessary for democracy to function and for social change to occur – according to educational theorist John Dewey, “education is a regulation of the process of coming to share in the social consciousness; and that the adjustment of individual activity on the basis of this social consciousness is the only sure method of social reconstruction.” The tools of critical thought lead us to a more functional democracy. Yet making the connection between the sovereignty of ideas within the university and the application of research fluidly in actual social context remains a deep gulf to bridge when social context (specifically within art departments, but throughout the humanities) is held consistently at arm’s length.

The rejection of professionalism in the arts as related to modernism has left art an open field where both positive and negative liberties can occur – though art schools preserve a surface appearance of openness and self-actualization, it is unclear whether they are actually providing the tools to students to either successfully function commercially or become critical thinkers and active citizen-artists. What situations are we preparing students for? To be teachers? To be commercial artists? To be critical thinkers? Ernesto Pujol claims that “In the United States, we are not graduating artists, we are graduating teachers right and left, and we should finally admit it.” If this is the case, how do we rearticulate theory and practice within art departments, recast art as research and practice as the development of theory, and theory as a critical tool to aid in the formulation of engaged action in the social context? This is not to make art necessarily the site for social change, but not to recognize the important and rapidly dwindling space for “social consciousness” within art departments spells their doom.

Almost despite their pedagogical context, art students are paying more attention to audience, and rejecting the vestiges of modernism. Many are searching for new methods of synthesis (built upon the immediate and universal access to information), more criticality, and the elusive possibility for social relevance. This change is emerging from the passive student/viewers rather than the artist/experts at the helm (though in some cases the teaching cycles turn over so fast that last year’s MFA grads end up teaching this year’s adjunct classes, bolstering Pujol’s claim), as well as increasing numbers of non-accredited artist-run pedagogical spaces that seek to explore new paradigms. This “pedagogical turn,” including projects like the Mountain School for the Arts, SOMA, the Bruce High Quality Foundation University, and the Public School is not new (Allan Sekula’s School is a Factory and the pedagogical activities of Joseph Beuys are excellent precursors), but many have reached quite unexpected entrenchment and longevity. One could even argue that these ground-up shifts have resulted in experimental new programs emerging from within public universities in California and elsewhere that focus specifically on art’s relevance within social contexts (UC Santa Cruz’s Digital Arts/New Media MFA program, CCA’s concentration in Social Practice, Otis’s Public Practice Program to name a few). It remains to be seen whether such programs represent any structural pedagogical change that translates to an increased flow of ideas and action into real social context, but the enduring value of the public university and its art departments demands increased relevance over stagnation.

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.

Marjetica Potrc, Urgent Architecture, 2004

One huge challenge I see in social practice is an enormous shift in the kind of working method and knowledge base required of these artists than those who work exclusively in the studio. If social practice involves an artist “inserting” him or herself into a community, the types of knowledge and skills required of that artist expand exponentially.

Of course, it’s difficult to make that statement lightly, because contemporary studio artists work in incredibly varied ways, many involving huge amounts of contextual research into history, society, and space. Not to mention that such artists, in order to navigate the territories in which they operate, often need a fairly solid art historical and theoretical knowledge base. But artists operating in social arenas must strive to understand the communities they inhabit, even briefly, and they must be completely self-aware and reflective that their actions are of consequence within such communities. They must even be prepared to face the fact that their presence might be unwelcome, unwanted. These artists must be prepared to fail on a wholly different scale than studio artists – a very public and a very consequential scale.

The weighty social practices I am talking about here are largely community-based, and exist outside of the safe space of the museum or gallery. These practices are in the public, involve city government, require groups of people buy in to the project, and call for often massive funding. Amy Franceschini’s Victory Gardens project in San Francisco was on a city-wide scale, whereas The Watts House Project operates in a very small, specific community in Watts, but perhaps affects peoples’ lives (for better or worse) even more deeply because of its focus. Marjeta Potrc’s interest lies in informal cities and design solutions in places like the West Bank and Caracas, and her massive research into these communities reflects the social practice aspect of her work.

Amy Franceschini, Victory Gardens, 2008

Yet to juggle the huge range of contextual knowledge required, the specific proficiencies needed in the realm the artist makes his or her own (i.e. housing, philanthropy, building social connections, pedagogy, marketing) and the added ability to reflect, to remove oneself from everything and break down one’s systems of doing things, analyze the hierarchies and power structures at work, and make connections amongst all the different spheres of one’s knowledge is a tough prospect. As the scale of the project grows, it becomes less and less likely that all of these skills and knowledge can be embodied in one person. Teams must be put together, and the artist must acquire yet another skill – how to run a working and dynamic organization. Although social practice artists often talk about collaboration (more on that later), it is really organizational practice that forms the infrastructure for massive project production to occur.

Perhaps it is the socio-cultural-spatial-economic building of knowledge, the work with groups of people, the organizational capacity, and the rigorous approach to a problem that distinguishes the social practice artist.

Quickly back to the pedagogical theme of these posts, though, and a final question: How can the academy support this type of knowledge-building for MFAs in social practice programs? What spheres of understanding do they feel are most primary, and how does this privileging reflect the hierarchies within these institutions themselves?

How do you teach someone to be a visionmaker, teacher, communicator, connector, housing expert, engineer, marketing expert, director, and artist all at once in a two-year program?

You don’t, not really. You nurture the desire and hope they can rise to the challenge.

Art and Beer Event at the Portland Museum of Art, Eric Steen

Artist Eric Steen, a recent graduate from the Social Practice MFA program at Portland State University, wrote me the following in an email yesterday:

“In this article by Kristina Lee Podesva, in Fillip Magazine, she mentions that Claire Bishop calls much of the work where artists are turning galleries into bars works that have a “Microtopian Ethos”…saying, “an artist re-purposes [the gallery] as a site of refuge from the real world (even though he or she attempts to recreate social interactions there typically associated with existing places such as the pub or community centre). In this way, this work does not encourage us to strive for a larger utopian goal—such as securing permanent and free communal space—but rather to sit back and enjoy, in whatever way we can, the here and now.”

When I think about my own work, it is the smaller interactions, the ability to build relationships and insert myself into another community that is a more effective process for relaying my ideas to a broader group of people. For me, the small act, the conviviality, the togetherness, are all actions that are activism. It may be quiet, it may be small, it may not impress anyone but the people to which they are directed.”

Mr. Steen’s thoughts got me to thinking about several themes I’d like to explore in the next few posts, including the role of the academy in art production (and society in general), and what Podesva calls “the pedagogical turn in art” – in which educational activities are utilized as artistic processes or products. I find this particularly interesting both in my capacity as an educator at the Hammer Museum and as a former public school teacher. In my present job, I work frequently with undergraduates and graduates studying art (at UCLA in particular, but also many of the other first-class art schools in the Southland). I find quite a rich territory where education and art meet – from the notion of the second-class artist-educator (thanks to artist Liz Glynn for that particular categorization), to the fact that museum education departments are becoming the de facto sites for social practices (i.e. public programs such as MOCA’s Engagement Party series), to the massive output of MFAs across the country each year. What do all of these factors mean to systems and hierarchies of art production? And what does it mean to have such a professionalized MFA program dedicated to Social Practice? (Note: I currently know of three. Otis’s Public Practice MFA, the PSU Program, and CCA’s new MFA concentration in Social Practice).

Mr. Steen, the product of such a program, seems to be rethinking the foundations of relational aesthetics as well as pedagogical practice in his work. Building relationships, sharing ideas, facilitating social interactions. I am immensely curious how his colleagues from PSU are operating, and what similarities might be drawn from their work. How are they analyzing communities, the public, their audience/participants? What are the activist qualities of these “small actions” Mr. Steen speaks of, and is their purpose to impress, or change, or cause revelation, or build connections, or pleasure? Should one measure such effects? How? What are the larger societal concerns and implications of this work? How is the process of social practice production and relevant theory taught?

So many questions. Attempting to address them will require some research on my part, but this wave of new social practice art graduate programs is fascinating, and I will continue to post my thoughts down the line.