How do you explain social practice to your grandmother?
Grandmothers are sly, like this question. It’s easy to make assumptions. Let’s lay them out on Nana’s tea tray and have a good look. The question invokes our father and mother’s mothers as a sort of catch-all person, a stand-in for people who are not in regular touch with contemporary art in general, much less social practice. It morphs them into an everyperson: someone who could know anything or nothing.
Why ask this question? I think it might be psychological. We ask it because if we–that is, those of us interested in asking and answering this question–can explain social practice well enough, we might get approval. It doesn’t matter if it’s from our grandma or the everygrandma. There’s a chance we might be validated in our desire to effectively communicate across the hazy gap between generations.
Grandmothers, and here I mean only grandmothers in their general, ideal sense, rarely worry about approval or communication. They communicate without apprehension, whether in approval or disproval. It’s easy to make assumptions about grandmothers, their years of experience, adventures, skills acquired, books read, memories held silent, letters written, and children raised. In our vulgar assumption of the every-grandma, these nuances are shrouded behind a silver veil.
Of course, not every grandmother is nurturing, or talented, or alive. But I think this question aims at the everygrandma, so that’s what I’m addressing. Our question might really be: “How do you explain social practice to someone of another generation who doesn’t know Social Practice from Adam?”
Well, when I think about answering, I think of the worlds those grandmas inhabited being so wildly different from ours that I host suspicion about whether social practice might even register for them. “What do you mean,” they’d say, the whole chorus of them, “art is John Singer Sargent or the poster I bought at the Met or the neighbor’s embroidery. The ashtray junior made at the rec center. Life is life and art is art.” Do they need art to focus their attention on life? Do they need lifelike art to remind them that life, in all its registers from small to large, can be animated, attended to, enhanced, and revitalized with a spirited intention that, in our context, emanates at least partially from the domain of art?
How does grandma attend to, animate, enhance, and revitalize ordinary life? How did she make clothes, and blankets, and quilts, and maintain epic correspondence with dozens of people simultaneously and know so much and read so broadly? Dressed as a clown, entertaining sick kids in the hospital. Where did her idea to invent a family crest and sculpt it in papier-mâché come from? How did she wheel about with six kids in a VW bus, the immersed in raising them (alongside bridge, and books, and hobbies, and politics, and work) over two decades? And all of this with what seemed to me, a child, as executed with effortless grace and aplomb. How would Grandma explain social practice to me?
If, scrapping with the nine other grandchildren in her backyard under the shadow of Grandpa’s totem pole, a cousin wrenched my arm behind my back and made me explain it to her I’d say, “Grandma, social practice is when someone devotes an extraordinary amount of time, energy, and attention to relationships between people.”
That sounds a bit like a grandma.
Excerpt from a letter to the author from his Grandma. June 9, 1988.
About the contributor: Bryce Dwyer lives in Chicago. For the past seven years he has hosted chili cook-offs, run trivia games, curated, organized grants raised by meals, DJ’d, ran a storefront art space, built shacks, and organized lecture series with the other members of InCUBATE. He is also the Managing Editor at Contemporary Art Group, the non-profit organization that publishes Contemporary Art Daily. Every so often he writes about things like: soccer practice, space travel, album covers, and Florida.