Why is social practice looking at replicating models from social science & activism?
The politicisation of art manifests or responds to time and place, and to the cultural, social and political systems contemporarily at play. Be it the socialist art theory of William Morris post industrial revolution, the hybrid activist practices of the avant gardes, socialist driven community art responding to Thatcherite pressure on trade unionism, or the fall of the Berlin Wall, artists have proposed or generated alternative social models through practices which commit to social experiment, critique and protest. Their ideological positions and levels of engagement are grounded in different theoretical or practical starting points. In the process of research, experimentation, pragmatism, reflection or evaluation artists are free to bricolage, to borrow, or to stand on the shoulders of whatever giant they deem appropriate or useful for their response. Artists strengths are independence, a capacity to break the rules, to appropriate means and methods without being bound by the rigours of academia, or by the agenda or controllers of an institution. They are free from an obligation to follow protocol or make a contribution to a singular profession.
Why is social practice (in Contemporary Art) looking at replicating models from social science and activism? Why only an emphasis on ‘social science’ or ‘activism’ in this question and let’s exchange the word ‘replicate’ for ‘appropriate’. Contemporary (socially engaged) artists appropriate from much more than these two fields of activity, but for the sake of answering the question perhaps we could state the obvious, we’re concerned with the same subjects: social relations in specific contexts, the power of the market and institutional systems, the redefinition of labour, the movement of capital, networked societies, gentrification of neighborhoods, new methods of food production, gender or ethnic oriented inequality, climate change, the social political moment in advanced capitalist societies coping with neoliberalism under the thumbs of the World Bank, IMF, multinational corporations, GAT, etc, etc.
Is an answer simply that artists are looking at the social sciences because these offer data and sometimes analysis pointing to loci for social practice, e.g., wage stagnation, mass youth unemployment, growing social inequality. The Social Sciences record, document and share theories, research, methods, evaluations and outcomes in a form that is transparent, accessible and thorough. Essentially their work is open source and available for reconfiguration within art practice. (see an example P.34). Similarly perhaps activists help artists in selecting strategies to engage and help communities. For example artists could learn from the history of the Highland Folk School of Tennessee who trained civil rights activists such as Rosa Parks in nonviolence or Saul Alinsky’s ‘Reveille for Radicals’ which continues to be a useful handbook for community organizing. Even the Occupy movement can provide lessons in what to do and what not to do.
At the risk of ending on a cynical note, artists may be frustrated by the failure of the social sciences to answer the right questions or of seeing them being ignored when it does; or may be driven by the lack of success of activists who are unheard (or heard but not feared) by elites, the governing classes, the oligarchs?
About the contributors: Dr. Marilyn Lennon and Prof. Nona Glazer met at Open Engagement 2013, the reply to this question is a collaboration based on an ongoing conversation they’ve been having since…
Marilyn Lennon’s work is both collaborative and interdisciplinary in nature and is situated in an ongoing artistic interest in the contested questions of ownership, autonomy, privatisation, agency or control in public space and place. An engagement in critical spatial practices first emerged in her work in 2004 when invited to act as an artist/advisor on postgraduate summerschools on Interaction Design in public spaces under the European Convivio network, first in Italy, and later in Sweden, Croatia and Romania. Later again, in 2009 she initiated the SpiritStore project, a collaborative project which addressed questions of public ownership through the setting up and development of an autonomous art space amidst the site of a large stalled commercial development in Limerick city centre. SpiritStore became an ongoing project taking diverse approaches to conveying or contesting experiences of the city and the experience of making art for and with public. Over the past year and half she has been working in collaboration with the Knockatallon Ramblers hiking club (Co. Monaghan, Ireland). The collaboration investigates the potential of critical cartography and the act of walking at the border of Ireland and Northern Ireland to address spatial contestation and to offer alternative intimate narratives of place. She is Programme Joint Leader, MA in Social Practice and the Creative Environment (MA SPACE) at Limerick School of Art and Design, Ireland. marilynlennon.net
Nona Glazer is a retired professor of sociology and women’s studies from Portland State University, Portland, Oregon. Nona researched women’s waged and unwaged labor, while doing political and intellectual work as a Marxist-feminist. She retired early to make art full time rather than continuing it as a secret vice, off and on, since childhood. She continues art making while observing how the neoliberal drive to reduce or eliminate wages continues unabated with unwaged labor expanding to draw in men along with women. Her training as a sociologist surfaces also in her lifetime worry about whether art intending to change viewers’ understanding of the social world do so, leading to social justice actions, but especially about what the social and political gains are from art and art-making for communities whose members collaborate with activist artists.