Social Works

Performing Art, Supporting Publics

Shannon Jackson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781136979828
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Arte
• Subtopic: Arte generale

This text mediates between visual and performance studies, incorporating political, aesthetic and social discourses. This book uses case studies and contemporary methodologies to give insight into experimental art-making.

1

PERFORMANCE, AESTHETICS, AND SUPPORT

A group of artists in Turkey rent an apartment together in a diverse, intergenerational neighborhood; instead of using the space to paint or display, they invite their neighbors to dinner, create a playroom for children, and organize a neighborhood parade. They call their work Oda Projesi or “The Room Project.”

In a modest kiosk installed in New York’s Times Square, Paul Ramírez Jonas distributes thousands of custom-based “keys to the city” of New York. Re-defining a ritual that is usually reserved for visiting luminaries, Jonas democratizes this civic honor, granting to everyday citizens special access to cultural landmarks throughout their city.

In a commissioned art piece in Zurich, the artist collective WochenKlausur invite sex-workers, politicians, journalists and activists to take a boat ride on Lake Zurich; gathered around the table of a main cabin, they are instructed to “have a conversation” in an “Intervention to Aid Drug-Addicted Women” that is both an art piece and a social process.

“Eleven people” explore “sixteen spaces” in the city of Chicago, roaming beneath highways and atop dumpsters, placing their bodies in different arrangements to find alternate modes of encounter with the city’s public infrastructure. The actions of Temporary Services both highlight and exceed the planned design of civic service.

Much has been made recently of the “social turn” in contemporary art. As someone who comes to this discussion from the field of performance studies, this turn is perpetually intriguing. But what exactly does it mean? How do we know when we are in the presence of “social practice” in art? Is this turn in any way new? What histories, frameworks, and methods are most appropriate for understanding what social art works are and what they do? For some in the field of performance, the language of “social practice” seems to lie at the heart of our conceptions of the field. As a term that combines aesthetics and politics, as a term for art events that are inter-relational, embodied, and durational, the notion of “social practice” might well be a synonym for the goals and methods that many hope to find in the discipline of experimental theatre and performance studies. Social practice celebrates a degree of cross-disciplinarity in art-making, paralleling the kind of cross-media collaboration across image, sound, movement, space, and text that we find in performance.It also gestures to the realm of the socio-political, recalling the activist and community-building ethic of socially engaged performance research.

Figure 1.1 Paul Ramírez Jonas, Key to the City, presented by Creative Time in cooperation with the City of New York (2010)

Source: Image by Paul Ramírez Jonas, courtesy Creative Time.

Like the term “performance,” however, the term “social practice” is resolutely imprecise. It joins other unwieldy vocabularies coined as catchalls to help us understand a variety of “post-studio” practices in contemporary visual art as well as the “postdramatic” practices of contemporary theatre.¹ I remember being at a festival in 2008 organized around the theme of “social practice” and finding myself amid an incrdible range of practitioners. Performance artists Annie Sprinkle and Guillermo Gomez-Peña were on the same panel as California food artists Ted Purves and Susan Cockrell, vacillating between hyperbolic spoken-word spectacles on sex and race with quieter chronicles of neighborhood cooperation around the environmental values of local growing. Tina Takemoto was on the same panel as Josh Green, juxtaposing the former’s theatrically costumed anti-Orientalist intervention at the opening of Matthew Barney’s SFMoMA (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art) show next to Green’s nearly anonymous, networked performances as a waiter who dispensed his tips as micro-grants to fellow artists. The Yes Men were there, and Linda Montano was there—occasionally asking but sometimes begging the question of whether the former’s corporate mimicry paralleled in practice or politics the art/life endurance performances of the latter.

In our current moment, symposia, exhibitions, festivals, catalogues, biennials, community centers, and other contemporary venues routinely gather very different kinds of socially engaged artists. Within the same setting, we often find that assembled artists have quite different goals and different medium-specific skills. The “interdisciplinarity” of experimental art-making cannot ignore the fact that artists are often “disciplined” by previous training and, as a result, do not always share the same standards in craft, image-making, acting, or community organizing. Some social art practices emphasize shared, real-time presence as a necessary condition; others initiate their work through remote and digital means. Some call their objects craft; others call their objects sculpture; others call their objects props. Some create “characters”; others shun the idea. Some work addresses solo interlocutors in private rooms; others address the multitude. At the same time, it is often the case that these experimental artists find themselves treading on the expert territory of other art fields. Performers find themselves becoming fabricators; body artists are learning the language of new media; introverted studio inhabitants have become extroverted site performers. In these contexts, the language of cross-arts collaboration means different things as projects integrate some art forms, revise other art forms, and often break from the traditions of their own art practice by resuscitating the art traditions of others.

This aesthetic heterogeneity is complicated further by what might be called the social heterogeneity of social practice. While a radical progressivism is often assumed in experimental art gatherings, a closer look reveals a number of questions about what social models such varied social practices actually imagine. Whereas for many the word “social” signifies an interest in explicit forms of political change, for other contemporary artists it refers more autonomously to the aesthetic exploration of time, collectivity, and embodiment as medium and material. Even when social practices address political issues, their stance and their forms differ explicitly in their themes and implicitly in their assumptions about the role of aesthetics in social inquiry. While some social art practice seeks to innovate around the concept of collaboration, others seek to ironize it. While some social art practice seeks to forge social bonds, many others define their artistic radicality by the degree to which they disrupt the social.

This book questions models of political engagement that measure artistic radicality by its degree of anti-institutionality. While the activist orientation of some social practice displays the importance of an anti-institutional stance in political art, I am equally interested in art forms that help us to imagine sustainable social institutions. In the projects that I consider, time and collectivity serve as medium and material for exploring forms of interdependent support—social systems of labor, sanitation, welfare, and urban planning that coordinate humans in groups and over time. For me, this is also where a performance perspective offers the discourse of social practice a certain kind of critical traction. Performance’s historic place as a cross-disciplinary, time-based, group art form also means that it requires a degree of systemic coordination, a brand of stage management that must think deliberately but also speculatively about what it means to sustain human collaboration spatially and temporally. When a political art discourse too often celebrates social disruption at the expense of social coordination, we lose a more complex sense of how art practices contribute to inter-dependent social imagining. Whether cast in aesthetic or social terms, freedom and expression are not opposed to obligation and care, but in fact depend upon each other; this is the daily lesson of any theatrical ensemble.

To use the language of inter-dependence in the analysis of art practice is never a straightforward gesture, however. For many, such a language recalls the long and vexed history that surrounds the concept of artistic autonomy. From such a view, an emphasis on the social inter-dependence of the art object risks censorship as much as it invites collaboration; an open-ness to the social can encumber the work of art as often as it activates it. Questions of autonomy and heteronomy will recur throughout a book that seeks to define social practice in relation to the complex questions of aesthetic and social support. But for the moment it might be useful to remind ourselves that autonomy, in both aesthetic and ethical discourses, is defined as “self-governing,” opposing itself to objects and subjects who are heteronomously “governed by external rules.” The risk of an interdependent language is that it might compromise an aesthetic practice, especially in the context of social engagement where art could find itself “governed” by the “external” claims of communities, special interests, audiences, governments, bureaucracies, and other social entities from whom it must properly stand apart. For those of us identified with performance, the language of autonomy is a conflicted one, as the art form’s inter-dependence with ensembles, technologies, and audiences has always been hard to disavow. But to bemoan the compromises of performance’s aesthetic interdependence is also to assume a clear division between the autonomous performance event and its heteronomous environment. What if the formal challenge of performance lies in the ambiguity of such a division? What if, for instance, the formal parameters of the form include the audience relation, casting such inter-subjective exchange, not as the extraneous context that surrounds it, but as the material of performance itself? What if performance challenges strict divisions about where the art ends and the rest of the world begins?

To those who have tracked twentieth-century expanded art practice, such questions will have a familiar ring, central as they are to a history of aesthetic movements from Constructivism to Situationism to Minimalism to institutional critique and now to social practices that have challenged the bounded integrity of the art object. Because performance, even in its traditional forms, has often had difficulty maintaining aesthetic boundaries, it seems important to track some of the ways that the performance project might respond to this expanded turn in visual art practice. If, as performance studies scholar Fred Moten suggests (in his re-reading of Derrida re-reading Kant), the parergon cannot be strictly divided from the ergon of aesthetic autonomy, then specious divisions between aesthetic insides and social outsides must go as well. The parergon becomes less a guarantor of an “extra-aesthetic” realm than a figure for the precarity of such a delineation. The parergon—and the widely heteronomous domain to which it is linked—is more resonantly “the exteriority that interiority can’t do without, the co-operator.”² Throughout Social Works, I try to explore the social aspirations of socially engaged projects less as the extra-aesthetic milieu that legitimates or compromises the aesthetic act and more as the unraveling of the frame that would cast “the social” as “extra.”

Questions of aesthetic autonomy gain an acute urgency when we consider what it means to sustain not only the life of art but also the lives of artists. In fact, the variation in content, form, and goal in social practice and experimental art subtly interacts with artists’ differing sense of where they will find security of employment. In such heteronomous reflection, it becomes harder to argue for the purity of aesthetic autonomy. Who or what, after all, will be an artist’s primary source of support and promotion? Will it be a curator? A booking agent? A director of a community center? A program officer at a foundation? An arts commissioner? A presenter? A collector? Such variation highlights the quite different economies and networks of commissioning, hiring, touring, granting, political mobilization, and do-gooding in which artistic practices are supported. Some performing artists know not to bother talking to the curators whose venues are not disposed toward theatrical presentation. Meanwhile, other artists never imagine their work to be transportable across the proscenium stages of a booking agent’s national tour. Many wonder whether their livelihoods as social artists will come in advance from public art commissions or ex post facto, that is, by selling video and photographic documentation of their actions in a limited series. Some artists are represented by galleries, some by performance ensembles, some by agents; some are free agents who would never want an agent other than themselves. Some receive fellowships from other non-profits; some entice private collectors. Some form their own non-profits; others join nationally subsidized theatres and museums.

As we imagine sources of artistic support, we inevitably find ourselves widening the scale to understand how artistic livelihoods interact with larger governance models. US artists wonder whether they will have access to reliable federal support for the arts and public health. Non-US artists worry that the steady encroachment of “Americanized” or “Anglo-Saxon” social models of neoliberal government will mean the withdrawal of national art and health care funding in their own countries. These kinds of anxieties also inform my interest in relating art practice to questions of systemic coordination and public support. If progressive artists and critics unthinkingly echo a routinized language of anti-institutionalism and anti-statism, we can find ourselves unexpectedly colluding with neoliberal impulses that want to dismantle public institutions of human welfare. It seems no coincidence that Richard Sennett’s early prognosis in The Fall of Public Man worried most acutely about our diminishing capacity to imagine interdependent connection spatially and temporally to humans who will, for the most part, remain strangers to us.³ It is also no coincidence that Sennett made substantial use of a theatrical analogy in defining public actors in expressive and systemic relation to people whom they do not know.

If the heterogeneity of social practice in art can be tracked and analyzed, it seems to me that it will come by examining two related forms of ambiguity in our contemporary conversation about art and politics. One has to do with the reach of interdisciplinary aesthetics, whether it can simultaneously account for the ways that interdisciplinary artists have in fact been disciplined—and skilled—by deep involvement in distinct art forms, art histories, and contexts of professionalization and fiscal support. The other has to do with whether a generalized leftism can adequately account for what we understand the social to be in social practice, particularly when community claims, public funding, private funding, and state welfare models differ so extraordinarily across regions and nations as well as across the political economies that finance particular arts fields. To my mind, the lack of clarity about the difference these differences make is the elephant in the room at every gathering on art and politics. Social Works will not force agreement or pretend to offer a single clarifying silver bullet. This book does seek to bring different genealogies into high relief and to foreground the conflicting assumptions behind key terms that animate both the aesthetic and the social field: collaboration, efficacy, intelligibility, freedom, collectivity, institution, action, the aesthetic, and the performative.

Across the Arts

Let us take another look at the term “social practice,” or a phrase that is both more and less specific, “socially engaged art.” Such terms have allegiances in a number of fields—experimental visual art, social movements, and theatre and performance studies to name a few.⁴ Those allegiances bring to mind other terms that share some kinship with social practice: activist art, social work, protest performance, collaborative art, performance ethnography, community theatre, relational aesthetics, conversation pieces, action research, and other terms that signal a social turn in art-making as well as the representational dimensions of social and political formations. However, social practice also brings to mind a series of other terms that do not always enjoy triumphant celebration: literal art, functionalist art, dumbed-down art, social realist art, victim art, consumable art, and related terms that have been coined to lament the capitulations to accessibility and intelligibility that can occur when art practice and social practice—aesthetics and politics—combine. Meanwhile, a similar skepticism comes from another direction, asking whether it is ever possible to conceive of any art form as free from social engagement. This last critique—akin to the “But isn’t all art political?” question that has spurred and stalled politicized art movements for over a century—worries understandably about the unintended consequences of social or political designations. If some art is politically engaged, does that mean that other art does not have to be bothered with politics at all? If some art is presented as social, can other art forms present themselves as mercifully free of the encumbrances of sociality? As the book continues, you will see me most interested in asking how such questions can be channeled to engage a long history of debate on the relational autonomy and heteronomy of the art event, one that has implications for the medium-specific histories of aesthetics and, interestingly enough, for the medium-specific imaginings of social theory.

Before continuing then, let me also say a word on the medium-specificity and unspecificity of social practice. As noted above, to analyze social practice is inevitably to engage a range of artistic practices, including those that more and less self-consciously reinvent the territory of sculpture, painting, theatre, dance, film/video, photography, and more. As an umbrella term for practices that performatively extend inherited art forms in space, duration, embodiment, and collectivity, social practices can induce all varieties of responses and readings. It is my contention that these responses often depend upon different receivers’ experiences with prior art forms. If, for instance, we understand a relational art work to be a revision of sculpture, we encounter it differently than if we understand it to be a revision of theatre or dance. Some may not understand the work to be a revision of anything. The inclusion of an artist’s body in a gallery is formally innovative to some viewers; to others, it is just bad acting. To some, the dispersal of an art practice is an intriguing “de-materialization”; to others, it is an assembly of blocked site lines. To some, a durational experiment is tediously slow; to others, it is a meditation on the nature of human endurance. For some, the social is figural, for others, it is literal. One critic’s sense of ground-breaking innovation is another critic’s Emperor’s New Clothes. The social extension of the art object also challenges inherited methods of curatorship, installation, and per...