Last week, the fantastic Justin Langlois of Broken City Lab asked me to answer this question for an interview series they are doing:
Is social practice, as a term or label, more valuable in extending the reach and possibility of visual artists, or more valuable as an articulation of an entirely different space and mode of production?
Interesting question, and I had a great time answering it. You can read my submission here.
The parting thought of my answer is that there is danger in the label social practice, the danger of false expectation - that everything will be fun, easy, feel-good, and bring people together. When in fact, social practice can often be challenging, disturbing, and deal with some really unpleasant subject matter, all to attempt to bring light to some injustice or rework societal systems from some different angle.
Installation of the map outside of LAPD headquarters. Suzanne Lacy, Three Weeks in January, 2012.
As a case in point, soon after I wrote this answer I went to Suzanne Lacy’s Three Weeks in January candlelight vigil and performance. This reiteration of her 1977 project Three Weeks in May visually catalogued the past three weeks’ incidents of reported rape in Los Angeles through an enormous map installation on the exterior of the LAPD headquarters downtown, accompanied by months of conversations with activists, educational seminars, performances, a sound installation, and various other elements that comprise a signature Lacy project. The culminating performance asked audience members to share their stories, reflect on the crisis of rape in individual lives and in the city as a whole, and finally to commit to a goal to end rape and sexual violence in the next 40 years. Most powerfully, generations of rape activists took the stage at the end after sharing some truly heart-wrenching stories that were difficult to hear, and more than once brought tears to my eyes.
Activists at the final ceremony for Three Weeks in January, January 27.
As squirm-worthy as it seems on the surface, truly examining this subject is a rarity in any forum, especially if one does not have to. It is easy to simply push out of one’s mind. But such is the importance of projects like Lacy’s and their power. As if to reinforce these thoughts in my head, one supporter of the project thanked me for being there. “This means a lot that you are here,” she said. “There are a lot of more fun events you could have gone to tonight.” She was right, but I wouldn’t have traded in my meaningful experience for anything easier or more feel-good.
The below is a conversation between myself and Justin Langlois, Research Director at Broken City Lab, conducted over email this past month. Check them out at www.brokencitylab.org.
JUSTIN: So, I have a quick question, with regard to your categories of social practice, where might you situate practices that are more overtly activistic? While a level of activism is likely most overt in the New Models category, I was curious about your decision to not include that word or that specific language in those categories — is it a matter of it being an inappropriate description, or just not nuanced enough, too much baggage? I have my own concerns with activism as an idea, but it’d be interesting to hear your take on it.
SUE: I think activist practices run throughout all of the categories that I put forward. Just a caveat - all those categories are quite malleable at this point, I feel that they are simply a useful starting point for discussion of some social practices, but they are certainly not the be-all and end-all. I do hope they change and gain more clarity as time goes on.??I feel that, as much as social practice draws from art history, it draws equally from other forms of cultural production. Clearly architecture, urbanism, planning, theater, sociology, even advertising inform social practice, and I would place the history of protest and activism (social movements) in that context. I wrote an article for the Journal of Aesthetics and Protest on anarchist activist practices and compared those forms to some forms of social practice. You can read it here - I’d be interested to know your thoughts.
I find that traditional displays of “activism” or protest is one form of many that social practice can take, and has taken throughout its history - but that the socio-political concerns that underly these practices remain similar. Some are more effective in a more “activist” form, while others accomplish their intentions equally well through other formats. Likewise practices that are ineffective - both those traditionally “activist” in their forms and otherwise. At the Open Engagement conference recently, one participant made the point that “protest in this country is dead,” and that social practice is a reaction to that reality, a new form of activism. I don’t agree with this at all, but I do think that traditional forms of protest are frequently co-opted (um, recent Glenn Beck “rally” in Washington DC on the anniversary of MLK’s “I Have a Dream” Speech is one possible example? or the “1984″ Apple computer TV ads?) thus perhaps diluting some of their effectiveness in certain situations, and I conjecture that social practice artists often search for different formats to advance social agendas as a result. Just my two cents on the matter.
JUSTIN: I really enjoy the way in which you’ve outlined the variety of forms of cultural production that inform social practice, though I wonder if that articulation disregards the more social aspects of a social practice as well as the pedagogical aspects informing a social practice. Your loose working-categories touch on this, but it would seem that the categorization you’ve presented there and the (intentional or not) categorization you offered around modes of production are different in their organization, and in turn, equally limit the potentials for activity and affectivity within these practices that become situated through that organization. I completely understand those loose categories as works-in-progress, I suppose I’m just pushing the issue to better understand for myself.
It’s interesting you bring up the example from the OE participant talking about his skepticism of protest. While I don’t know that I’d go as far to say that protest is dead (it is alive, though perhaps significantly under the weather or even terminally ill), I’m inclined to feel that traditional forms of protest are ineffective in advancing any particular agenda and for that matter, I think the abundance of examples of the co-opting of activism’s aesthetics are, as you’ve outlined, a particularly good example of this increasing ineffectiveness.
You brought up a notion that I’ve found continually helpful, which I first read articulated by Sam Gould of Red76 — that is, questions of effectiveness and sincerity in relation to activism and art respectively. It’s a bit escapist to suggest that the in-between is the most interesting position to occupy, but yet there’s something there that could use a better articulation (and in that, perhaps it is in the term social practice).
I might offer that while social practice may or may not be overtly presented as political, we certainly know that politics continually inform it, and for a more effective form of creative push for a social change, it may be that artists taking on new roles in existing infrastructures might provide the best way forward. It’s not a new notion, but perhaps an increasingly pervasive one. And, as you’ve outlined in your article, artists continuing to take on collective forms to present workable organizational structures also continue to present a glimpse of possibility for change that has a lasting impact (whether those structures have been translated to corporate culture or not; Apple is still Steve Jobs and Google is a “friendly” monolith without a face).
To attempt to ground this for myself, perhaps the development of artists as community leaders (a strange term) is the most appropriate way to articulate how I view my practice, and in turn, what I view as being the next step towards a practice aimed at enacting social change. So, while not nearly as radical nor pointed as the collectives you outlined in Between Art and Activism, I believe there is a lot of potential in actively and publicly being in a place and exploring its complexities at a level most appropriate for the person in question. In that, there is an awareness and activation of the process of critique of existing systems and ‘ways of doing’ though with a decidedly less overtly political methodology. Maybe this is similar to Mouffé’s ‘agonistic’ political thought?
SUE: I want to address my notion of categories, which I think is tripping us both up a bit, as helpful as it might seem on the surface. Ultimately, there is only so far that these categories can go – although I do feel social practices are informed by the various forms of cultural production which I have outlined, and once produced they can be slotted (albeit in an ill-fitting way) into helpful categories that improve our understanding of these projects, you are absolutely right in that there is no connection between these two. On cannot remix aspects of architecture, art history, and activism and preconceive a project like Project Row Houses, for example. There are indeed “social aspects” that shape the best and most responsive social practice work in unpredictable ways, and I think that zone of production-in-progress is where I am struggling to write thoughtfully. Perhaps primarily because that zone also requires the writer to become intimately involved in the experience of the project as it is happening to truly gain any kind of understanding. So often, we analyze a project only from the front end (its influences and historical precursors) and from the back-end (its relationship to other similar projects, its effects, its “category” or “movement”), but not situated in the midst of process. Therefore the project in its current snapshot form, whatever that is, becomes mystifying – or worse, seems reproducible when it is not.
This becomes especially urgent when we are dealing with projects that actually seem to have some success in affecting change – then we all start looking for the rule that doesn’t exist in order to somehow reproduce it. The best way I have found to think about this is to consider the science of emergence – how ants and termites (practically brainless) are wired to follow chaotic behavior patterns until a problem presents itself, or food is available, and suddenly they all organize to perform the most amazing engineering feats. Emergence also describes how cities gain their character (how suburban Monterey Park has the best Chinese restaurants around, or how a massive jewelry district emerged in one corner of downtown Los Angeles), and how thoughts form in your head from just a series of zapping neurons and synapses. We want to believe that someone is pulling the strings, that a great conductor has “figured out” how to affect a particular kind of change in a complex environment, but these examples are simply processes that form order from chaos in certain situations. We humans are a bit different than ants, because we are able to reflect on our actions, but even so there is no rule. Artists can be facilitators and catalysts, but that does not mean that any one person is able to bend a complex environment to their will. The best we can do is what you so appropriately call “active being” – and there is something sticky about that process. Being there, in a place, investigating its histories, its resources, and reacting with thoughtfulness. This work is necessarily reactive and reflective, and thus exponentially difficult parse how it came to be. We all search for heroes, though, and it is so much easier to applaud the artist than to find out why and how the project emerged in exactly the way it did.
For more on emergence, I would highly recommend the 2007 Radiolab podcast about the subject - you can find it here. Thanks to Justin Langlois for his thoughts and for allowing me to reprint them here.