Does it end at art?
 

 
When I first started thinking about this question, only cliches and tired arguments came to mind––perhaps indicative of how entrenched certain critiques are when discussing social practice. My inner monologue went something like this:

First thought––well, art can clearly be a catalyst for and contributor to social change. I can think of lots of projects–like Park Fiction in Hamburg Germany, which after many years years resulted in a park and became a paragon for participatory planning and right to the city movements; or work that proposes alternative societal systems while simultaneously exposing problematics, like Krzysztof Wodiczko’s Homeless Vehicles or FutureFarmers founded by Amy Fransheschini; or the viral political and iconic power of the graphics of Gran Fury during the Act-Up movement. So art is not an end, it’s a beginning. Who’s to measure the resonant power of political artwork anyhow, “social practice” or not?

And then the second thought reared its head––well, measurement is a problem and will always be a problem. Art has to be an end in itself, despite its social value, because otherwise it must be leveraged to meet metrics. It then loses its inherent risk capital, its experimental nature, its agonistic outlook––because art investigates the exclusions in society, the unforeseen, the imbalances and impossibilities––and would be fettered unimaginably by having to meet a standard. Any success realized by an art project according to some outside metric would need to be taken up by someone else, isolated, replicated, and built upon. This is not an impossible task––just impossible for art.

So I reach the third thought. Art is an end in itself, and here I go policing the boundaries of art, exactly the tired (and frankly, boring) exercise that I try rigorously to avoid when thinking or writing about social practice.

All of my initial thoughts are the results of the overarching problematics of inserting art into complex systems in order to effect some change. And these problematics will always be problematic. Rather than attempt to pick apart these raggedy old debates in my head (again), I choose to be a practical writer about socially-engaged art practice. It is sexier perhaps to just tear everything down all the time, but I actually want to help these kinds of projects resonate and evolve. It is important to think in specificities, and to consider not whether “it ends at art,” but how and why art is relevant in our lives.
 

 
One illustrative comparison I have been thinking about lately involves the Maker’s Movement (or Maker Culture), a much lauded zeitgeist of largely engineers and tech developers that revel in making physical objects rather than virtual ones to demonstrate new scientific or engineering ideas––also characterized as inventors, gadget-lovers, tinkerers. The language of the Makers’ Movement has seeped increasingly into the art world, as a legitimizing connection to object-making to hold on to (and in some cases, to justify arts education). The skills gained from art are made legitimate by the possibility that object-makers become robot makers become inventors, something with some real entrepeneurial potential. Art is the means to a lucrative ends. (Search for “MFAs are the new MBAs” or see this article.

This is in stark contrast to the philosophy of projects I’ve written about a lot in the past, like Market Makeovers, the healthy food advocacy work of Reanne Estrada and Mike Blockstein from Public Matters, Jeanne van Heeswijk’s Freehouse (which recently dissolved into a strong community-run co-op), and work by the collective Ultra-red. These are projects with a Freirean methodology of popular education and have no clear metric-driven goal. Art is the end, but there are other ends too, because there are other participants and agendas at play and the projects are shaped by those forces. These are necessarily complex projects because they deal in complex realities. What they produce, however, are not marketable inventions,  but the radical methodologies of how they negotiate culture, divisions, organizational politics, and economies. They produce ways of doing, knowing and being. I wouldn’t say those ways are “the end” of art either, but in some cases, they do represent a way forward.
 

 

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About the contributor: Sue Bell Yank organizes, educates, enacts, reads and writes about social practice in contemporary art. She worked on the Watts House Project and at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, among various other independent endeavors. She also produces online educational programs at the Oprah Winfrey Network. suebellyank.com