How do you measure/understand the impact of bringing artists and community members together?

 

I’m suspicious of the supposition that a community exists as a predefined membership prior to the arrival of an artist. That word ‘impact’ – so over-used and abused in the rush to articulate the value of the arts – tends to suggest one defined force meeting another. Is this how we understand art to evolve in place over time? Is this how we experience our individual role in divergent communities? Are our allegiances and connections rooted to a fixed set of actors in a single, static location? Of course not. Brian Eno once said, “sometimes the strongest single importance of a work of art is the celebration of some kind of temporary community.” Artworks intentionally produce communities of interest, whether they be fleeting or long-term, dispersed or localized.

But the question of measurement is, nonetheless, a very real challenge for anyone who wishes to make a case for public funding for the arts, and especially those who work beyond the statistical assurance of a box office. One only has to reflect on the raft of questions we face in justifying increasingly scarce public funds. Does your work demonstrate economic benefit, social impact or cultural value? Does it support artform and artist development? Does it engender well-being or produce and distribute cultural capital? How are you using your data, documentation and feedback? Should we return to art school studio assessments or embrace complex matrices which give equal weight to stakeholder expectations and GDP spend? Phew!

In the UK last year, the Artists Information Company (AN) published a blog post by art consultant Shaun Glanville, which rehearsed the now familiar arguments for a return to the assessment of art for art’s sake. “If the primary motivation [for making art] is not artistic or aesthetic”, Glanville argued, “then the question of measuring the value of the art becomes peripheral and the activity may as well be judged alongside any other type of social intervention. Any social good resulting from a work of art is incidental / accidental / fortuitous and not necessarily proportionate. It is illogical and unfair therefore to judge how ‘good’, ‘valuable’ or ‘investment worthy’ a work of art is by measuring, or attempting to measure, its social benefits.”

Glanville issues an urgent call to action to come up with a new set of critical questions by which we might judge the success of an artwork: His questions include:

▪    Is it exploratory?
▪    Is it well-constructed?
▪    Does it demonstrate an understanding of the form and history of the particular discipline?
▪    Is it helpful in furthering that art-form?
▪    Does it explore new or interesting methods of creation or construction?
▪    Does the artist show skill and integrity in the creation of the work?
▪    If it ‘fails’ (whatever we mean by that), does it fail because it is attempting to do some these things?
▪    Might it usefully provoke other work?

Glanville’s questions act as a retort to the predominance of data analysis as a means of judging success. Though his questions do represent the fundamental criteria by which we might judge any artwork’s significance, they offer a rather studio-based, narrow view of how an artwork might be judged. His text betrays a mistrust of other criteria of judgment, particularly the assessment of art’s social, economic or cultural impact, and in turn, the consideration of context as integral to a work’s resonance.

But Glanville, and those who dismiss the application of social science methods to assess artistic worth, miss an important point, perhaps best demonstrated through the example of social practice. There are other questions I would want to ask of work which evolves through social-engagement or, outside the confines of the artist’s studio, or is manifested in the public realm:

▪    Does it provoke new and surprising encounters?
▪    Does it shake up our perceptions of the world around us, or our backyard?
▪    Does it provoke us to see things as if they were different?
▪    Does it stimulate us to tell someone else?
▪    Does it enable social interaction, or provoke new connections?
▪    Does it contribute to a dynamic and progressive sense of place?

So why is it important to ask such questions of work which directly engages in people’s lives? Why is it not enough, as Glanville suggests, to judge artworks in the public realm on their terms alone?

Over the past two decades we’ve seen the diversification of approaches to commissioning art in the public realm. Artists have always worked beyond the boundaries of building-based programmes, of course, but what has changed is that such approaches are now actively sought out by commissioners and curators. Most notable changes include the commissioning of artists from the contemporary gallery sector employing media, materials and processes previously thought unsuitable for the public realm, the incorporation of dynamic curatorial methods and the exchange of single-sited, permanent outcomes in favour of dispersed interventions or cumulative social projects which evolve over space and time.

If you were to apply Glanville’s questions to these projects, you would miss out on the remarkable stories of transformation, displacement, intervention and process. The stories of how a public Bakehouse is being built by the Futurefarmers in Oslo, or the visit to a North Devon town of Ilfracombe by a nomadic Nowhereisland in 2012 and how these have engendered new social interactions. To integrate the voices of participants and producers, the texture of site and situation and the wider impact on remote digital audiences requires an entirely different set of assessment tools than those used by a sole curator or critic.

Over the past six months, Professor Lynn Froggett and her team at the University of Central Lancashire and Situations have been undertaking a new form of evaluation.[i] This was based on a technique used in a two-year-long study into the impact of socially engaged arts practice and the ways in which its value can be evaluated and articulated. The research is particularly useful in considering how evaluation might be undertaken over time in a particular place, and in doing so, gives us an example of how we might evidence how certain artworks maintain critical rigour whilst also being socially progressive.

Froggett suggests: “Artistic outcome and aesthetic (whether conceived as aesthetic of process or of product) is not subordinate to other social agendas. The artwork remains as an essential third object or point of dialogue between the arts organisation and members of the public who are not arts professionals… To ‘work’ as this third point of attention which activates new interpretations, it must retain aesthetic integrity – this enables it to endure as a third ‘object’ that opens up ways of seeing things differently. Where it ‘collapses’ as a third there may still be pleasurable experiential immediacy but it is unlikely to generate new relational forms or critical dialogue.”

It is this aesthetic integrity to which new forms of social practice aspire and which can distinguish critically successful projects from other cultural activities which offer immediate gratification, but which do not generate new forms of critical dialogue or transformation. It is here that we find our argument for the value of social practice beyond mass spectacle. It is here that we find the argument for investment in durational arts projects, which evolve over time and place to allow for those critical dialogues to emerge.

Building an evidence base is fundamental to making the case for the arts; finding arts sensitive methods to gather and analyse data has become one of the primary challenges for the arts sector. Methods such as UCLAN’s the Visual Matrix can help to move us beyond overt measures of impact to unlock the deeper story of an artwork’s effects on the imagination and the long-term value of socially engaged practice.

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About the contributor: Claire Doherty is the founder Director of Bristol-based arts producers, Situations, who support artists to realise extraordinary ideas in unexpected locations internationally, which open up new horizons for audiences and participants. Claire has written and lectured extensively on contemporary art commissioning. Her books include Contemporary Art: From Studio to Situation (Black Dog Publishing, 2004); Situation (Whitechapel/MIT Press, 2009), Locating the Producers: Durational Approaches to Public Art (2010) and the forthcoming Out of Time and Place: Public Art Now (2014). www.situations.org.uk / @SituationsUK and @ccdbristol