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, accessable 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. www.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 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.

Build your endurance here.

Last year, Jennifer McGregor and I were working on a book chapter about audience and socially engaged artwork. We decided to approach this massive topic by interviewing artists for whom community engagement is an instinctual and integral part of their practice. Some of them began as studio artists, and I am grateful that they shared their experiences about how they developed into artists who work in socially engaged ways. The list of skills below reflects the knowledge shared in those interviews, my experience as an artist and an arts administrator who commissions artists to engage with communities, my experience as an attendee of many lectures and conference panels on this subject, and as a person who encourages people to expand the types of opportunities and resources for artists to be involved in the development of community. This list is not only written for artists who want to work in socially engaged ways. It is for anyone who wants to collaborate in a community.

About the contributor: Renee Piechocki is an artist and public art administrator living in Pittsburgh, PA. She is part of the collaboration Two Girls Working with Tiffany Ludwig. Their first project Trappings explored the meaning and presentation of power in women’s lives. 600 women from 15 states participated in interview sessions responding to the question: what do you wear that makes you feel powerful? Their current project explores the meaning of value in men’s lives and will be featured in an exhibition in Pittsburgh in fall 2015. She is also the founder of Pittsburgh’s Office of Public Art. You can learn more about her at www.reneepiechocki.com.

Dear Robby^[1],

I’m writing to you as I’m guessing that you know what I’m talking about better than most and that, despite any small differences in tactics, ideologies, goals and such, we are of a sort. What “sort” that might be remains to be determined and the unpacking of that is the job, the fun of it, yes? That’s the work and meaning. We are most certainly members of some sort of affinity group^[2], but I’d argue––and possibly you would as well––that we are more importantly members of a public. A public which is many. A public dispersed, disjointed, and constantly at odds, and hence very much a public. My hope in calling this out into the open is that in making our public visible it will assist in helping it crack, break apart and form new terrain for us and others to traverse across together. This should be the wish of us all. Because, as you know well, it is the friction generated through the convergence of bodies on a landscape of experience that helps in forming, not only the landscape we inhabit, but also the new visits to look towards, the new desires to dream about, the new trails to consider moving in the direction of, or possibly even astutely avoid. No matter. It’s this friction that bevels our lens, making the landscape a series of subjects, prismatic, deobjectifying our view of one another.

We exist as members of many publics upon a shared landscape, though not all of us recognize this. It is through the recognition of this shared landscape that our publics form, disparate and nomadic upon a terrain of experience. Here we begin to create (our)selves. This landscape is vast, infinite, and varied. The actions and effects occurring upon it forming a relational ecology. Through our collective (though, importantly, not in the least harmonious) experience we create more fill, more land, more vistas to traverse, and always, ever so slowly shifting tableaus which we gaze upon from varying distances. We exist, relate, and calibrate at a series of distances. This landscape is continuous and infinite when embodied across the multiple histories of experience which affect us, it’s just that sometimes, as we walk about, we enter a fog, or the debris of experience is too vast for us to recognize as anything but an impasse.

You’ve had those feelings of abstract ecstasy that I’ve had, haven’t you? If any public exists which we might call ourselves joint members of I believe it is these types of wordless Noetic^[3] moments that bond us, these inarticulate expressions and (mis)understandings of our collective experiences on this shared landscape of ours. It is these experiences in accumulation that align us, which hold us together and create a sort of pragmatism within all this uncertainty. By eviscerating the lines between what we might call life and what we might refer to as work, and insisting, as we do, to energize the surface^[4], however fleetingly, and make these sorts of convergences visible we are engaging in an act of public-making which we can define as publication; dematerialized, disjointed, at odds and in flux.

A publication is a mobile and ephemeral vessel for questioning. It is anarchic and flat. A public which forms through publication is a tool, a means and not an end. A publication is not a repository of knowledge and experience but the energizer of just that. It’s a waystation. A public materialized through publication is an apparatus for seeing, building, surviving.

Inasmuch, a public is different than the public; a body which doesn’t exist and never did exist. It is also decidedly different than a community, which is basically a micro-distillation of the notion of the public. These are two distinctions that purport a false sense of disparate agreement and cohesion and are hence unreal. There is no cohesion. We’re all alone here, but we are alone together if we desire it, and that counts for something when we begin to recognize the space between us as a space of meaning, the energizing point of all our knowledge and experiences. We articulate across this divide between us. It is within this space that publics begin to formulate themselves through shared questions and desires if not, often enough, the same set of answers or actions.

And so, I hope to see you this summer in Minneapolis to work on Henry^[5] together so that our varied publics might, as they do from time to time, collide through our shared affections, conjoin ever so briefly, and shatter, forming a bridge between the Midwest Radical Culture Corridor and hazy dreams of your Los Angeles.

Fare forward voyager,
Sam

We have been here before, and we will be here again. So let’s take this question through the gauntlet of arguments and counter-arguments that are often mobilized around it. So, on the one hand, we can remember that all art transforms, not only social practice art. Art exerts effects on receivers whether or not it understands itself to be addressing them, and whether or not its maker seeks to legitimate her practice through recourse to a domain outside it. Despite the fact that art only sometimes seeks to transform, art always gets celebrated for and accused of making effects beyond itself. Transformation is not a social practice invention.

On the other hand, a social practice context has enabled us to think more deeply about what effects might be and how we propel and define them. Transformation is context-specific and subject to multiple definitions. It can be material––a distribution of resources––or immaterial––a provocation of consciousness. It can be short-term or long-term, intended for one or intended for a crowd. Effects might be conceived with input from the people whom they engage, and effects can strategically––and sometimes not strategically––catch those people unawares. Effects can feel enabling, and effects can feel damaging. They can be economic, ethical, or physical, and effects can be metaphors for transformations other than themselves. The transformations of artistic practice can produce outcomes, but they can be perverted by the pressure for outcomes; outcome-pressure can neutralize energy and narrow possibility into predetermined and measurable pathways. One artistic practice’s transformation can be inspiration to some and debilitating to others, establishing specious standards for the verifiability of ‘effect-making’ wholly inappropriate to other contexts. If having an effect is important to one’s conception of art practice, then it seems important to have a clearer sense of how transformation might be defined and to cultivate a robust language for articulating why some definitions and measures lead us astray.

On the other, other hand, there is something odd about the structure of a query about whether one is being transformational. The question betrays a degree of investment in older conceptions of authorship, i.e. a discourse that social practice often seeks to unsettle. The urge to take credit for transformation can slide back into an older subject/verb/object construction that naturalizes transformation as the product of artistic volition: I made that. Is it necessary to claim ‘an effect’ as an artist’s product? Is it exciting and legitimating and career-building to place one’s signature on transformation? Sometimes, of course, it is useful and conceptually interesting to place the apparatus of a social movement inside one’s art practice, whether by lending art’s protections from censorship, by redistributing the income of an art market, or by placing the social within a conceptual frame in order to allow for its de-familiarization.

Sometimes though, probably more often, it seems useful to see one’s practice in relation to social movements that are bigger than you, that have been going on longer than you, that will go on longer and create more transformations than you can ever claim. The entitlements of artistic freedom and the delusions of artistic presumption still linger in the social practice field, and it might be time for some of those entrepreneurial claims to take a back seat. This is where the individuating, privatizing residue of artistic autonomies and artistic signatures have to be confronted. This is where you stop revelling in how hard your propositions got other people to work. This is when you stop putting your name on other people’s labor. Detaching from authorship and the subject––I/we––who claims transformational status means connecting to a space and to processes whose effects are not fully imaginable in advance by the fleets of people who make them happen. This is a space and process where people’s actions, behaviors, and daily coordination add up to more than the sum of the parts that they think they control.

In such a space, the notion of ‘being transformational’ starts to feel less like a targeted goal and more like a cultivated relation. In addition to asking whether we are making effects, we might also want to ask how effects make us.

About the contributor: Shannon Jackson is the Richard and Rhoda Goldman Chair in the Arts and Humanities at the University of California, Berkeley, where she is Professor of Rhetoric and of Theater, Dance and Performance Studies. She is also the Director of the Arts Research Center. Shannon’s most recent book is Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics (Routledge 2011), and she is  working on a book about The Builders Association. Shannon’s previous books are Lines of Activity: Performance, Historiography, and Hull-House Domesticity (2000) and Professing Performance: Theatre in the Academy from Philology to Performativity (2004).

Shannon was an Erasmus Mundus visiting professor in Paris at the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme Nord and at the Université Libre de Bruxelles for the 2008-09 academic year. Before moving to Berkeley, she was an assistant professor of English and Literature at Harvard University from 1995 to 1998. She used to perform and direct, before her children and her professorial “day job” took over. berkeley.edu/people/shannon-jackson/

In 1997 I was a resident at the prestigious Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. During the second week of my residency the popular culture spectacle of boxer Mike Tyson biting Evander Holyfield occurred on live television. I quickly created a triptych of a Mike Tyson portrait, an image of a face biting an ear, and a quarter incorporating the words, “Consumed”, “Consumption”, and “Consumerism” and installed it in the middle of the town’s commercial strip to, “Make people think about the incident and create a dialogue”. Skowhegan’s director at that time urged me to get permission prior to my installation, but I installed the piece non-permissionally rather than risk the work being denied. Only a few hours after it was up, the director came to tell me that the Skowhegan Village Police were looking for me, and that I needed to take the work down.

I believed that I was doing a great social service. I was contributing to a rural audience that I thought had limited access to art or art institutions. Unlike the commercial and private threads that weave through western art I was funding a piece for social change and donating my creative skills for public erudition. From one perspective the piece was a success, as it garnered newspaper and television coverage and became the talk of the town.

From another perspective, the work didn’t consider the history, culture, or challenges of the area, or provide socially relevant, localized solutions. Though the products were done with altruistic intentions, the installation wasn’t considerate of the director’s request or the relationship of the school to the town, and was ultimately driven by my agenda. In hindsight I left little room for the participation of others.

Granted, this anecdote is long before the term of social practice was coined, and is unsophisticated by today’s standards in the field or my practice. Yet it illustrates the inadequacy of believing art is social practice because one spends energy calling itself so. Like Grant Kester I too think exploring what socially engaged art does in its infinite forms is more valuable than trying to define social practice––or conflate “art” into it. More effective for me has been cultivating my personal, cultural, and intellectual diversity to discover models like The Public Science Project that have articulated thoughtful principles to guide collaboration and participation. Or study paragons like Pepón Osorio, the Tenderloin National Forrest, TROSA and others who remain largely unheralded in the popular circuits of social practice discourse, yet have been building loving communities for decades.

True community is more than a technique or a practice, but a praxis to transcend individual privileges, where separate expectations are replaced with equality and collective interest. By creating experiences of dynamic demographics, with exercises that everyone can create in, there is a unification of new community that is inclusive in its being. My favorite art and social practices are reminders that we are changed as individuals in making our world together.

Consumed Consumption Consumerism during non-permissional installation. Skowhegan Maine 1997

About the contributor: Brett Cook is an artist and educator, who uses his creative practice and to transform outer and inner worlds of being. His public projects typically involve community workshops featuring arts-integrated pedagogy, along with music, performance, and food to create a fluid boundary between art making, daily life, and healing. He has received numerous awards, including the Lehman Brady Visiting Professorship at Duke University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the Richard C. Diebenkorn Fellowship at the San Francisco Art Institute. In 2009, he published Who Am I In This Picture: Amherst College Portraits with Wendy Ewald and Amherst College Press. Recognized for a history of socially relevant, community engaged projects, Brett was selected ascultural ambassador to Nigeria as part of the U.S. Department of State’s 2012 smARTpower Initiative. His work is in private and public collections including the Smithsonian/National Portrait Gallery, the Walker Art Center, and Harvard University. He is a 2014 A Blade of Grass Fellow for Socially Engaged Art.  www.brett-cook.com

Film still of Be Black, Baby sequence of Brian De Palma‘s Hi, Mom 1970

Ask not what social practice can do for you, but what you can do for social practice.

The first thought I have in response to this question is a cynical one: that cover for cultural tourism is the #1 thing social practice (SP) offers white artists.Though perhaps if the question were what does SP offer black artists (keeping with the binary aspects of the original) the cynical, or even crass reply maybe the same. The tourism perpetrated by artists, self identified as SP or not, involves class more often and more openly than it does race.This could be due in part to SP reliance on institutions (for funds, access, viability) which tend to require ways of boosting their education departments and outreach, to those delicately phrased, underserved communities. Art, whether SP or not, can be a great cover for the hallmarks activities of cultural tourism: observation of the other and superficial interaction.

Social Practice also offers white artists a way to explore their own Whiteness. This door is one I’ve not seen many SP artists walk through. A few years ago my colleague Kebrina Lott, pointed me towards Sara Ahmed essay A phenomenology of whiteness. Within the abstract Ahmed writes, “Whiteness could be described as an ongoing and unfinished history, which orientates bodies in specific directions, affecting how they ‘take up’ space, and what they ‘can do’. The paper considers how whiteness functions as a habit, even a bad habit, which becomes a background to social action.” Since Kebrina Lott has been writing and creating photography at the borders of this phenomenology, I asked her to respond to the posed question.

“Social practice offers white artists a way to obtain knowledge through experiences that are extraneously culture specific and create a value from this process that to a large degree, remains outside (or cryptic) to the communities in which were engaged.

What might this offer SP artists? Public trust, nice CV stuff, “widened” perspectives, grant money access, and an opportunity to commodify documented experiences derived from or of ‘the other’ (name any one) discreetly, as community engagement, as self design, as art… But, I think the same is true, for any artist.

Once we acknowledge white identity, we paradoxically sustain it, affirm it from the myth and everything associated with it. Thinking behind the question, whiteness might be a ticket for some artists to access other communities for social practice purposes. White as the stuff of generational wealth, generational education, entitlement, harkening back to the pioneer.”

I have brought up this question to others as well. Recently I was a guest with Zachary Kaplan in Sean Joseph Patrick Carney’s Bruce Quality Foundation University class, where the discussion was centered around Claire Bishop’s 2004 essay Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics and Brad Troemel’s What Relational Aesthetics Can Learn From 4Chan. The class talked about the good and the bad of SP’s methods, its limitations, its perceived sincerity, in relation to the legacy of /b/. While at the bar after class with several of the participants I brought up this question. There was a clear, “whatever, that’s a weird question” response, maybe in part due to our reluctance to discuss race, let along whiteness. People also expressed dismay at SP projects that perform a light version of social work for brief periods of time: the parachuting in, leaving little more than a line on the artists CV. Detroit was brought up more than once, a critique readers here have endured before. As I did not want to lose the aspect of whiteness, I asked if the same critiques could be leveled at artists and projects such as Theaster Gates’s Dorchester Projects, Mel Chin’s Safe House/Fundred, or Rick Lowe’s Project Row House? Though they had some critiques of these projects around artistic merit, or aesthetics, they gave these artists a racial pass to make the work they did because these artists were not white. The thought that any artist should be given a racial pass on critique was a better head buzz than an ASMR video.

I would be interested in SP being used as a tool for white artist to use their whiteness consciously, to avoid the color-blind mindset that internalizes racism, and fully own the identity politics of being white.

René Kemp, Whitey, 2009

About the contributor: Mack McFarland is an independent artist and curator who creates a home in Portland, OR. His current focus examines experimental formalism and looks at dissent aesthetics and its relationship to Utopian thought. His works aim to develop a space for the viewer to experience an intersection of visceral aesthetic and cognation. These explorations manifest in the form of exhibitions, postcards, and sculptures. He has exhibited nationally and internationally; screening videos at Pixelodeon Festival at the American Film Institute in Los Angeles, the La Enana Marron Film and Video Festival in Madrid, and at Cine Fantom in Moscow. McFarland has also created works for the Portland Institute for Contemporary Arts’ Time-Based Art Festival, and a three-month-long project for the Tacoma Art Museum, which Sheila Farr of the Seattle Times called “startling, nutty, and technologically relevant.” McFarland has been quoted as saying, “Wherever I am, I’m making.” His post-studio mantra has taken him to archives, karaoke microphones, canoes, and into his studio. mackmcfarland.tumblr.com

Ellen Harvey, Mathematical Star, 2013. Permanent installation at Marcy Plaza in Brooklyn, New York.

About the contributor: Sara Reisman is the director of New York City’s Percent for Art program which commissions permanent artworks for newly constructed and renovated city-owned spaces, indoors and out. Recently commissioned artists include Pablo Helguera, Rico Gatson, Julianne Swartz, and Karyn Olivier, among others. Recent curatorial projects include  Still Acts, a group exhibition organized with Ian Daniel at La MaMa Galleria about the political potential of stillness in performance and choreography, and solo projects by Claudia Joskowicz (Sympathy for the Devil,2012) and Christopher K. Ho (Privileged White People, 2013) at Forever & Today, Inc. Reisman was the 2011 critic-in-residence at Art Omi, an international visual artist residency in upstate New York, and a 2013 Marica Vilcek Curatorial Fellow, organized by the Foundation for a Civil Society. nyc.gov/percent/percentforartnyc.tumblr.com

I have to admit to some ambivalence about the rush to identify a “best name” for this area of art practice. The fact that it hasn’t yet been definitively named is, in my view, not entirely a bad thing. The proliferation of candidates (socially-engaged art, social practice, activist art, participatory art, relational art) is symptomatic of the diversity of a field shouldn’t necessarily be homogenized. The anodyne term “social practice” seems to have caught on recently, perhaps because it sheds what some apparently consider the déclassé connotations of “activism” or “engagement”. It’s interesting that none of these terms involve an “ism,” and all of them, with the notable exception of “social practice,” deploy verbs as nouns (participate, relate, engage). This is a significant difference, which suggests the fluidity of the practice itself. Bill Kelley Jr. and I just finished compiling an anthology of writings by art collectives that have been working in Latin America over the last twenty years. It represents the work of over thirty artists and collectives active in ten different countries. What is particularly striking in all their reflections is the absence of any soul searching about what to call their practice. This concern with naming seems especially pronounced in the U.S. The desire to name and codify is, I suspect, linked to the remarkable speed with which socially engaged art, or whatever we chose to call it, is being institutionalized in this country (evident in the proliferation of dedicated MFA programs). This development has both positive and negative consequences for the kinds of work being produced today. It also reflects a degree of self-consciousness about the status of this work as “art” that is understandable, but also problematic. Why is it necessary for us to add a predicate that marks this work as a deviation from some perceived norm? Perhaps its due in part to the disdain that this work has so often elicited in the context of American and European criticism. The result of all these qualifying terms (social, engaged, participatory) is to naturalize a concept of (unqualified) “art” against which this deviation must justify itself.

The issue of nomenclature raises a deeper question. Does this area of work simply mark the formalization of yet another new ‘genre’ of art, which will dutifully take its place within the orderly progression of painting, sculpture, installation, performance, new media, etc.? Or does it entail a more profound re-ordering of the discursive system that underlies most existing modes of artistic production? Of course history will eventually decide this question, and probably bestow a label that none of us can anticipate, and which no one involved with the work itself will probably like. I suppose, given the institutional pressures of graduate programs, museums, funders, and the discourse of art history itself (in which I am complicit), that some branding will occur, but I think our time would be better spent in trying to simply describe what this work does, in all its diversity. How do these practices actually function to transform an individual consciousness or a public space? What effects, and affects, do they produce? What forms of agency do they catalyze, or preclude? And what are the operational and infrastructural differences among and between various forms of practice globally? We could use a bit of Plumpes Denken before we worry too much about applying a fixed label to a field that is far broader and more recalcitrant than most of us realize. There are plenty of important questions to ask but I wonder if satisfying answers will emerge from the culture of blog entries and Pecha Kucha blipverts that has characterized much of the recent conversation in the US. Perhaps we should try ten questions in one hundred days or even better, one really good question with one hundred different answers.

About the contributor: Grant Kester is Professor of Art History in the Visual Arts department at the University of California, San Diego. His publications include Art, Activism and Oppositionality: Essays from Afterimage (Duke University Press, 1997, editor), Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art (University of California Press, 2004) and The One and the Many: Contemporary Collaborative Art in a Global Context (Duke University Press, 2011). He’s recently finished work on Collective Situations: Dialogues in Contemporary Latin American Art 1995-2010, edited with Bill Kelley, Jr. grantkester.net

Finding myself in the midst of well-treated archives at Berkeley Art Museum’s Conceptual Art Study Center recently, surrounded by ephemeral treasures such as Tom Marioni’s “Avocado Box,” handled with white gloves only, was a real treat. Equally exciting was going through 20 or so semi-smashed banker boxes at Guillermo Gomez-Peña’s office in San Francisco. As a volunteer archivist, I browsed and chose what gets to stay and what gets to go–not an easy decision for the amateur archivist. Handwritten manifestos, contracts from big productions, letters: of course. Phone bills? Tax documents? Toss.

My thoughts on value were recently questioned by Rick Prelinger, co-founder of the Prelinger Library. Gomez-Peña’s phone bills from 1984 may look boring, but might tell us with whom the artist was cavorting, while his bank statements, headed for the shredder, may tell us who was funding the Arts at the time. Gomez-Peña has a radical idea for his archival materials: to curate “Border Boxes,” Fluxus-style artworks, and sell them. Though I question if breaking the archive apart is a good idea, spreading it around the world to collectors and museums sounds appealing.

These questions of value are poignant, considering the trend in Digital-is-God approach to archiving. I am witnessing the threat of an important public art poster series to be thrown away by a major arts advocacy organization. I see no public record of another major institution’s legacy, online or otherwise, because a recent director didn’t prioritize it. Another museum has no institutional or online memory of its bountiful Education initiatives. Meanwhile, I just counted and rubber band bound 230 extra postcards from a project I did a few years ago. Bad extremes.

We makers of socially engaged art have some big questions on our hands. Yes, we tend to produce some beautiful takeaways, and possibly well-designed websites. We hope we keep some of this material culture for the future. But what about the process? If you are anything like me, a lot of your practice happens via email and meetings. How are future researchers going to dig through our digital legacies (unless we are a person of interest to the NSA)? An example of a successful web-based archive is that of the Oakland Standard. That is, until the museum stops paying the hosting bill.

Last year whilst doing a collaborative Museum Hackathon, my group was given an abstract sculpture with a title, date and a relatively unknown artist’s name. Thanks to the archival material, including letters between the artist and curator, we learned about the piece and that it had never been shown. We were able to find meaning and create empathy for both the artist and this poor lonely sculpture that had never been out of its crate.

What are you all doing to keep your legacies researchable for the future? Are you keeping those notes and sketches and emails and ephemera? Who is going to be the steward of your memory?

About the contributor: Lexa Walsh is an interdisciplinary socially engaged artist based in Oakland, CA. She has an 8” stack of ephemera from the last three Open Engagement conferences in case anyone is in need. http://deyoung.famsf.org/education/lexa-walsh

The moral overtones of the question strike me as daunting. Other usages of good––good sex, good times, “how you doing?” “I’m good”––neutralize the ethical baggage of good versus evil. But a question about good hierarchies within a forum on socially engaged art begs an upright, polemic response. I dare say that social practice is prone to moral conflict. The conflicts are rooted in self-righteousness and power dynamics that are the heart and soul of hierarchy. Such an assertion demands unpacking (there’s an oblique reconsideration below) but I have no moral high-ground, I’m as conflicted as any person, so I need to approach this from another angle.

Michael, Jackson, Don’t Stop Til You Get Enough, (C) 2001 SONY BMG MUSIC ENTERTAINMENT

Talent is refreshingly hierarchical. Certain people are better at certain things, which is not to say society’s relationship to talent escapes inequalities regarding access, distribution, or arbitrary factors like standards for attractiveness––all of which comprise separate, yet interconnected, hierarchies. Talent can lead to popularity can lead to success, but the three have no logical, hierarchical linkage. Seven million likes on YouTube do not signal talent. In fact, consensus has a dubious relationship to hierarchies of discernment. “Art-by-committee” and “appealing to the lowest common denominator” are strictly derisive, yet universal appreciation of Michael Jackson affords the comforts of communion like little else. Necessary or not, hierarchies provide structure.

Invitations—the bread and butter of (artistic) social engagement––enact hierarchy. Largesse is double-edged, as potlatch and naming-rights remind us. Doubling down on OE’s invitation to me, I invited two undergraduate students from MIAD to also respond to the question.

Stephanie Gage writes, “When translated into different contexts, the term “hierarchy” can mean a multitude of things. The idea of an inherently and wholly “good hierarchy” is flawed, the very definition of the word demands inequality. This makes societal hierarchies problematic––certain social and financial hierarchies may limit power to individuals already at the top, leaving those at the bottom unequal and unprivileged. Depending on the individual hierarchy, there is a complex mix of good and bad within it.

Perhaps the closest we can come to an inherently good hierarchy is through the lens of art, for example, the visual hierarchy of a painting. Visual hierarchy helps the viewer better understand the artist’s intention. Although this hierarchy also runs into problems because a piece of art enters the realm of subjectivity, leaving critical evaluation up to “the viewer.”

Zach Hill offers, “The hierarchy that existed as the slice of bacon cheeseburger pizza I just ate: crust, sauce, toppings, cheese, is a good one. It was delicious and visually enticing, the main reason I bought it in the first place, therefore fulfilling its function. However, it is hard to imagine a complex hierarchy that is entirely good or bad.

School, for example. Inherent in the countless objective and subjective layers of school there is one ultimate function, to educate people. If this goal is not met, which as a current student I see often, the hierarchy has failed. One the other hand, I see the hierarchy perform its function flawlessly in some cases. When a hierarchy reaches a certain complexity, it is neither good nor bad but simply exists for the individual to manipulate and use accordingly.

About the contributors: Paul Druecke lives in Milwaukee Wisconsin. His suite of three bronze plaques, This Is Not A History, is included in the 2014 Whitney Biennial. His second book, Life and Death on the Bluffs, was recently published by Green Gallery Press. A co-authored discussion of his work will be included in the forthcoming Blackwell Companion to Public Art. He’s an invited Resident at the Zentrum für Kunst und Urbanistik in Berlin in 2014. Druecke received a Mary L. Nohl Fellowship in 2010. He has created projects with the Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne; The Suburban, Chicago; Outpost for Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Spaces World Art Program, Cleveland; Green Gallery, Milwaukee; Many Mini Residency, Berlin; and the Contemporary Art Museum Houston among other venues. His work has been featured in Camera Austria and InterReview, and written about in Artforum, Art in American, Artnet.com, and Metropolis.com. asocialevent.com

Stephanie Gage is currently a junior in the Printmaking program at the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design. She has just curated her first show, which opens May 2nd, 2014 at the Jackpot Gallery in Milwaukee. stephanielanegage.com

Zach Hill is currently studying Integrated Studio Arts at The Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design, focusing on drawing, sculpture, and performance. His one-man play, Infamous Me, debuts at an undetermined venue in the summer of 2014. zach-hill.com