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Social Practice Art in Turbulent Times
The Revolution Will Be Live
Eric J. Schruers, Kristina Olson, Eric J. Schruers, Kristina Olson
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eBook - ePub
Social Practice Art in Turbulent Times
The Revolution Will Be Live
Eric J. Schruers, Kristina Olson, Eric J. Schruers, Kristina Olson
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About This Book
This volume is an anthology of current groundbreaking research on social practice art. Contributing scholars provide a variety of assessments of recent projects as well as earlier precedents, define approaches to art production, and provide crucial political context. The topics and art projects covered, many of which the authors have experienced firsthand, represent the work of innovative artists whose creative practice is utilized to engage audience members as active participants in effecting social and political change. Chapters are divided into four parts that cover history, specific examples, global perspectives, and critical analysis.
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Part I
Free Radicals
Origins and Proliferation
1 Thin Generosity
Contemporary Social Practice Art and the Rhetoric of Invitation
Kerr Houston
I
The phrasing is now so common, so ubiquitous, that it can be easy to forget that it is also a recent development in the presentation of contemporary art. Indeed, the terminology is so familiar that it feels entirely natural: you walk into a gallery or an exhibition space and you are invited to do somethingâto explore an environment, to take a poster, to leave a comment, to handle a mound of clay, to sit and consider an idea.
The tendency was especially pronounced at the 2017 Venice Biennale, where numerous wall texts proffered invitations of various sorts. Three examples may suffice as evidence of a broader pattern. Rasheed Araeenâs Infinity, viewers were informed by a placard, âinvites the spectator to take and move the colored cubes as they wish, so creating a multitude of combinations.â Meanwhile, viewers standing before Ernesto Netoâs A Sacred Place were âinvited into a polyamide structure suspended from the beams of the ceiling.â And a text adjacent to David Medallaâs A Stitch in Time announced that âthe audience is invited to work on a large cloth hanging on the wall.â
So many invitations! Simply strolling through the exhibition could make a viewer feel like the popular target of a series of well-intentioned solicitations and summons. But as soon as one stepped outside of the heated hall and took a few moments to consider the rhetoric, some nagging questions began to occur. When did these solicitations become so common? What exactly do such invitations imply or entail? And, ultimately, what might this interest in inviting the viewer to do things suggest about changes in the way in which we perceive and discuss art?
II
It wasnât always this way. In the 1960s and early 1970s, when a number of artists turned to participatory art as a means of challenging traditional notions of authorship, they only rarely used the language of invitation, preferring a range of alternative phrasings that often bore very specific, and sometimes quite pointed, connotations. In a 1965 issue of Signals, for instance, Lygia Clark published a photograph of a woman making one of her Caminhandos (Trailings), accompanied by a precise set of instructions:
Make yourself a Trailing: you take the band of paper wrapped around a book, you cut it open, twist it, and you glue it back together so as to produce a [M]öbius strip. Then take a pair of scissors, stick one point into the surface and cut continuously along the length of the strip. . . . When you have gone the circuit of the strip, itâs up to you whether you cut to the left or the right of the cut youâve already made. This idea of choice is capital. The special meaning is in the act of doing it. The work is your act alone.1
The spirit of the piece seems clear: Clark establishes a general set of steps to be followed, but then moves aside, ceding a degree of creative control (âitâs up to youâ) in order to allow the viewer (or reader) to assume an active role in its realization.2 But note that Clark doesnât invite us to do anything. Rather, she uses a staccato series of active imperativesâmake, take, stick, cutâthat are then supplemented by a series of more general comments on the significance of the work. The result is a tone that is at once casual, matter-of-fact, and exhortative; Clark openly encourages us to complete this relatively simple set of tasks. Indeed, she seems to assume that we willâfor, as she puts it, the very meaning of the work consists in the act of doing it. This was wholly typical of Clark, who was intent on relinquishing a degree of authorial control; as Yve-Alain Bois has observed, she seems to have aimed at the âdisappearance of the author.â3 And that disappearance is accomplished, in part, linguistically, as Clark employs concrete, unmediated directives that emphasize the actions of her audience: the work, she insists, is your own.
Importantly, Clarkâs repeated use of imperativesâin other pieces, she instructed viewers to âPlease handleâ or âTouchââwas not unique. Indeed, a similar strategy characterized the work of many contemporary Fluxus artists. In 1966, for example, Bici Forbes created an event (as part of her Subway Series) that consisted of the following instructions:
- Write ânumber twoâ on a subway wall or poster.
- Stand in plastic packages on a subway platform during morning rush hour.
- Flood the subway with Coca-Cola.4
Like Clark, then, Forbes employs a series of abrupt, unmodified directives that imply little interest in any process of negotiation between artist and performer; instead, they are motivated above all by an interest in action. To be sure, Forbesâ piece is motivated in part by a spirit of parody. Importantly, it also features an apparent political dimension: in using simple verbal instructions, she implied that her work could be performed by anyone, at any time.5 In any event, though, Forbes shows little interest in the formal rhetoric of invitations and their foregrounding of the possibility of involvement. Instead, her language assumes involvement, as it collapses the position of viewer, reader, and participant.
As a final example, we might consider Marina AbramoviÄâs Rhythm 0, a performance piece staged in a gallery in Naples in 1974 and accompanied by an unsettling accompanying text:
- Instructions.
- There are 72 objects on the table that one can use on me as desired.
- Performance.
- I am the object.
- During this period I take full responsibility.6
Nearby stood the table, covered with a white tablecloth and an array of items that included a lamb bone, a rose, an ax, and a loaded pistol. For three hours, little happened: a shawl was draped on AbramoviÄ's shoulders and the rose was placed in her hands. Eventually, though, things intensified, as one viewer removed her shirt, another cut her neck with a knife and sucked her blood, and a third placed a bullet in the pistol, put the pistol in the artistâs hand, and raised her hand towards her neck. âIn that moment,â AbramoviÄ later wrote, âI realized that the public can kill you.â7
Clearly, such a work depended upon the participation of the public. But it seems fair to say, too, that the form of that participation depended in part upon AbramoviÄâs precise choice of words. Importantly, her instructions differ from those of Clark and Forbes in that they openly emphasizeârepeatedlyâthe position of the artist, positioning both as passive object and responsible party. The phrasing of her text, too, is comparatively formal; unlike Clark and Forbes, she eschews imperatives and uses the relatively stilted one rather than the more conversational you. Nevertheless, despite these decisions, AbramoviÄ also eschewed the formal niceties of an invitation. Instead, in foregrounding desireâobjects that one can use on me as desiredâand in bluntly absolving viewers of any responsibility for their actions, she encouraged viewers to follow their instincts. And that waiver of any polite restraint helps to explain the calls that the gallery received a day later from some of the people who had taken an especially active part in the performance. âThey were terribly sorry,â AbramoviÄ has claimed. â[T]hey didnât really understand what had happened while they were thereâthey didnât know what had come over them.â8 For the artist, though, this was the very point of the piece: that performance could be transformative and that fundamental standards of civility are fragile and contingent. Given such an aim, AbramoviÄ deliberately chose not to employ the delicate rhetoric of invitation, opting instead for phrasings (there are, can use, I am, I take) that insistently imply directness and action.
And that was, it is worth stressing, a choice. For in fact a few artists and critics did allude, in the 1960s, to an invitational quality in discussing participatory art. A 1967 piece in Time magazine is notable in this sense. In describing the Minuphone, a telephone booth that had been modified into an environment by the Argentine artist Marta MinujĂn, the unsigned article remarked that âThe viewer is invited to step inside and dial a number. The phone really works.â9 The option, then, existed; viewers could be invited to engage with works of art. But in practice such a phrasing was used quite rarelyâand even when it was employed, it was used in very delimited ways. For instance, in his important 1961 essay âHappenings in the New York Scene,â Allan Kaprow wrote that: âHappenings invite us to cast aside for a moment these proper manners and partake wholly in the real nature of the art and (one hopes) life.â10 Happenings invite us: here, Kaprow uses the term in a historical, descriptive sense rather than an immediate, exhortative sense. He is characterizing the aims of a genre, instead of appealing to a potential participant. And, indeed, when he did want to appeal to a participant in the 1960s, Kaprow generally opted for the sorts of imperatives that were favored by Clark and Forbes. His 1966 lecture on How to Make a Happening, for example, begins with the following rule:
- Forget all the standard art forms. Donât paint pictures, donât make poetry, donât build architecture, donât arrange dances, donât write plays, donât compose music, donât make movies. And above all, donât think youâll get a happening out of putting all these together.11
Here, Kaprow could have composed his rule using the rhetoric of invitation. Such a wording was familiar to him and his peers; it constituted an option. But like most artists who were active in the 1960s and early 1970s, he chose to treat the idea of viewer involvement using other language.
III
Interestingly, Kaprow did eventually employ the rhetoric of invitation. In 2001, he wrote that: âMy audience (never large) was reduced further to a handful of participants plus the accidental passerby who was invited to join the activity.â12 But this was several decades after Kaprow had made the work in question; he never used the word in a comparable way in the 1960s. And yet, by embracing it in the early 2000s, Kaprow was part of a broad linguistic turn. Googleâs Ngram Viewer, which measures the relative frequency of certain phrasings in published works, offers an illustration of the tendency in visual and numerical terms (Figure 1.1). The pattern is obvious. A few occasional uses of the phrasing appear, as we have seen, in the 1960sâonly to increase steadily in frequency during the course of the 1900s, culminating in a relative torrent of uses in the early 2000s (Ngram only measures results through 2008).