How do we work towards more honest documentation? Do we document our failures as well as our successes?
While synonymous with evidence, documentation typically has very little to do with honesty or truth.
Text, images, memory, complex installations, or drips of paint along a border––documentation is inherently about framing a story, about providing proof of what is, or supposedly what has been. While many social practice projects explore polyvocal avenues for generating meaning (expanding authorship and agency), more often than not, publicly available documentation of these projects reduces diverse and complex interactions into abstracted symbols and visual quotations used to support the artist’s own narrative.
These limitations and contradictions may inspire some to forgo tangible documentation altogether (Tino Sehgals’s “This Progress” at the Guggenheim stands out in my mind), mirroring an often articulated emphasis on the specific moment in which individuals experience the work. However, while these tactics attempt to sidestep issues of representation––like the clinically removed aesthetics found in the photo documentation of many projects––they fail to provide avenues for accountability, let alone a meaningful tool for secondary audiences (or the artist!) to learn from and build upon.
Artist Tania Bruguera, writing about education (which I believe can stand in for any practice of sharing knowledge), views the classroom as “a site for creating collectively and developing human and social potential, not simply acquiring or depositing information.” As socially engaged artists continually shift the function of creative labor to mirror Bruguera’s notion of education, the need for expanded documentation, flexible blueprints, and accountability is more present than ever.
There are, of course, limitations and logistical barriers that arise when we blur art and social practice. How do you, for instance, document and represent (or critique) the months of organizing, meetings, emails, etc. that often go into these projects in meaningful, interesting, or powerful ways? Something inevitably is lost, edited or cut away. Likewise, the presence of cameras, of an overly ‘mediated’ experience, can alter and restrict how participants engage in dialogue and exchange.
Some exciting steps are being taken by groups like NYC’s A Blade of Grass (ABOG). In addition to comprehensive support, ABOG is working with their artists to develop modes of accountability and reflection through participatory action research workshops, regular meetings with multidisciplinary groups of individuals, and by enlisting ‘external evaluators’ to produce two ethnographies of each project. While we obviously can’t all afford to hire a team of sociologists, there are still many challenging and exciting alternatives. What resources are present in your community (media collectives, gossip lovers, historical societies, universities…)? How is local, cultural, or historical knowledge produced and represented? Is the documentation useful to participants, the local community, those many miles away, or to each in different ways?
Calling for comprehensive documentation to provide secondary audiences with more a complex blueprint is not to suggest that these often hyper-localized engagements can, or should be, homogenized into social practice franchises. Any practice that makes listening and responding to local communities and contexts integral to their projects could source even the most specific ‘script’ and realize it in unique, relevant, and challenging ways. As artists increasingly make loftier claims for their work, complicating how and who creates each project’s narrative will not only bring meaning to hollow and overused phrases, but will expand the artistic, educational, and generative potential of projects.
About the contributor: Mark Strandquist is an artist, educator, and community organizer. His projects facilitate interactions that incorporate viewers as direct participants and propose alternative models for the civic and artistic ways in which we engage the world around us. The ongoing project, Windows From Prison, was awarded the 2014 Society for Photographic Educators’ Image Maker Award, a Photowings/Ashoka U Changemaker Award, and a Virginia Museum of Fine Arts professional fellowship. He is currently teaching graduate courses at the Corcoran College of Art on the intersections of art and social practice. nomovement.com