Lisa Radon
It's fascinating, as one who often has her head buried in contemporary art history, to be alive and aware at the precise moment of the Naming, when words we use to describe a particular tendency in art move from neologism to nomenclature. And it will be even more interesting to see how the broad acceptance of the Name, bolstered by the academy's locking down its definition through pedagogy and propagation, will serve to influence and circumscribe art made in its name.
Social Practice is what the newly minted Left Coast MFA programs and friends are calling art that overlaps with but is not necessarily equivalent to participatory, relational, and community-based art. Happening all over the country, particularly in the heartland, social practice artists and works have been multiplying over the last decade supported by institution via residencies and exhibitions.
John Dewey would question whether art can not be social. I tend to agree with him, but for the purposes of understanding what we're talking about when we talk about social practice, let's trace some of its origins and examine some of the very different kinds of work that is being gathered under this umbrella.
Broadly social practice is a movement away from the studio, from object as fulcrum between the artist and the audience, toward participation and away from passive audience, and in the words of the conference that inspired this project, a desire to be "making things better," whether it's the system of making, displaying, viewing art or more broadly addressing social and political concerns, essentially those of building community and critiquing capitalism both within the art world and the culture/society at large. It is about experience rather than object, interaction rather than entertainment, the ordinary rather than the spectacular or sublime. It focuses on the group rather than the individual. It is populist (or perhaps democratic is a better word) rather than elitist. That is to say that work of this nature has an of the people, by the people, for the people attitude. It includes the non-artist in primary art production.
Specifically social practice might manifest as projects of:
But the interest in interpersonal relationships, in the fuzzy edge between art and life found when art moves out of the studio and into the world, and underlying humanistic and/or political aspects of the work can be traced to other sources.
How is this relevant to art? Why is this not just sociology? It is relevant because developments within modernism itself let to art’s dissolution into its life sources. Art in the West has a long history of secularizing tendencies, going back at least as far as the Hellenistic period. by the late 1950s and 1960s this lifelike impulse dominated the vanguard.
Art shifted away from the specialized object in the gallery to the real urban environment; to the real body and mind; to communications technology; and to remote natural regions of the ocean, sky, and desert. Thus the relationship of the act of toothbrushing to recent art is clear and cannot be bypassed. This is where the paradox lies; an artist concerned with lifelike art is an artist who does and does not make art.
Anything less than paradox would be simplistic. Unless the identity (and thus the meaning) of what the artist does oscillates between ordinary, recognizable activity and the “resonance” of that activity in the larger human context, the activity itself reduces to conventional behavior. Or if it is framed as art by a gallery, it reduces to conventional art. Thus toothbrushing, as we normally do it, offers no roads back to the real wold either.
But ordinary life performed as art/not art can charge the everyday with metaphoric power. - Allan Kaprow
Composer John Cage was the font from which myriad new practices emerged in the early 50s. Allan Kaprow's notion of the Happening, first executed in 1958 and the scores or proposals for events that involved everyday actions and everyday people created by Fluxus artists like Dick Higgins and George Brecht can be traced to studies with Cage. While Kaprow moved art out of the studio, the gallery, and into the world, making work dealing with interpersonal relations (see his Routine, executed here in Portland at the Portland Center for the Visual Arts) as well as participatory work on a large scale employing audience almost as material, Fluxus artists created brief poetic instructional pieces and events that frequently highlighted the ordinary with a sense of wonder as in Yoko Ono's “Whisper Piece” in which audience plays telephone whispering neighbor to neighbor. In Brazil, Lygia Clark's “Organic or Ephemeral Architectures” were seminal participatory works while her collaborator, Helio Oiticica's, late 60's environments to be inhabited by audience at leisure can be seen as antecedents of installations as site for audience participation/interaction.
The more community activist social practice art finds its domestic roots in early 20th century labor activism and much later in the writings and actions of the French radical group that was political first, art second, the Situationist International. It's to the profoundly influential German artist, Joseph Beuys (as well as education experiments like Black Mountain College and Summerhill), that we can look to as inspiration for the numerous free education and knowledge share projects in which social practice artists are engaging. Mierle Laderman Ukeles' quiet activism highlighted feminist concerns of demanding recognition for the value of women's work by doing ordinary tasks as art and later drawing attention to other unrecognized work by shaking hands with and expressing thanks to every sanitation worker in New York City.
Unlike the aggressive or insistent interactions like Vito Acconci's “Proximity Piece” (1970) and work by Adrian Piper, social practice work enacts a kindler, gentler interaction with its man-on-the-street audience. Trace conviviality and social gathering (it is impossible to talk about this kind of thing without mentioning Rikrit Tiravanija's work) as art to Tom Marioni's “The Act of Drinking Beer with Friends is the Highest form of Art” (1970). On a related note, Palle Nielsen's “Model for a Qualitative Society” (1968) executed once in a housing project, once in a museum, presaged the embrace of play, temporary autonomous zones, and cooperative activities by creating a free space for children's play. In particular, Palle's “Model” that existed outside the institution embodied both the socially engaged and the community connected elements that many contemporary social practice artists employ. That Palle's project grew out of its times, with social activism at a high, raises the question of just what it is about today that creates the conditions for this tendency to bubble up again?
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