What is the role of the body and embodiment in social practice?

 

I often meditate about the body required by socially engaged art. Socially engaged art is a performative body practice. Whether the practitioner is a performance artist or not, the practice is performative. From conversational research and issue charettes; concept presentations and negotiations with gatekeepers and stakeholders; partner, participant and volunteer recruitment and instruction; complex staging across sites; to experiencing and evaluating the experience—everything is publicly performed. All is experienced through the body: entering, greeting, standing, speaking, bending, sitting, being still, listening, answering, moving, walking on. The individual and the collective body are the portal, the site, and the culmination of socially engaged art practice.

Although the socially engaged artistic body may generate silence and solitude, socially engaged art is not the gesture of a studio-sequestered body sending out materialized ideas to high culture retail, but of individually embodied experience seeking to trigger and enact collectively embodied experiences. It is about the work that art can perform in society, outside commerce. It reclaims the full repertoire of body gestures, currently reduced to the American notion that change can only be triggered through informed consumption, or the refusal to consume. Socially engaged art seeks embodiment but does not necessarily seek materiality. It is an art practice without anxiety for making collectible art. Its only prophetic concern is the generation of creatively critical, unspectacular, transformative experiences and enduring memory, recorded or left unrecorded.

Socially engaged art practice excludes cynical bodies. It is a humble strong body practice in which a vulnerable body seeks other bodies willing to become vulnerable with them, not as the surrendered raw material for public art, but as co-authors, collaborators, partners, participants, and audiences seeking their own existential insights. Socially engaged art is not about the life and state of an author’s body, but about the participants’ bodies. It departs from the isolated Platonic creative method and a rarefied art world stage and its select audience. It presents the artist’s body on public ground, in broad daylight, becoming even more grounded in the process, fostering reflection, connections and actions, grounding other bodies; fostering embodied consciousness.
 
For further reading please see:
Pujol Performance Text
Pujol Field Ethnography

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About the contributor: Ernesto Pujol is a site-specific performance artist and social choreographer engaged in public, durational group performances. Pujol performs the documented and undocumented histories and memories of peoples and places as a form of psychic portraiture, in the Jungian sense. He believes in the notion of the artist as citizen, the citizenship of museums, and the citizenship of art itself. Pujol believes that the creative critical thinking tools of artists are integral to the survival of American democracy in an increasingly diverse and impoverished society. Pujol strives to reclaim public spaces from clutter, noise, and speed, revisiting and stripping historical architecture, eliminating distractions, generating silent space for reflection; transforming them into sites for interiority, if not the early awakening of basic consciousness. ernestopujol.org