• Preface: What it is and how we did it
• Introduction
• Open Engagement: Making Things. Making Things Better. Making Things Worse.
• A Tracing, Socially
• Draft of a manifesto written in defense of a group of people that did not ask for my defense, using words they would not use and engaging people they ignore
• This is the End: Death and other Sensory Thresholds
• On the Discourse of Ethics in Socially Engaged Art Practice
• Are You Lonely? Make Art For Your Friends
• Interaction! Participation! Engagement! Production
• On Collaborating Within the M.O.S.T. (2003-2008)
• The Politics of Friendship, Or, Who Your Friends Should Be. An Interview with Matthew David Rana and Rick Butler
• On Multi-Tasking
• Making Things Better
• Me, Her and Us: Mapping Displacement with Anna Martine and Mary Anne Brooks at Open Engagement
• You Need To Have That Feeling That Anything's Possible
• Social Practice Art and Tech-Nihilism
• The Persistent Complicity of Heterogeneity
• Squirming
• Don't Just Invite Me To Dinner
• Open Engagement: A Toast to Access and Inclusion
• Thoughts On Social Practice Art
• Before, During, and After
• What is Public Art and Who is Your Public?
• From Every Angle
• What I remember about the video of John Paul II Marina Abramovic showed @ Reed in 2006
• What is there to dance about?
• Global Yawning Manifesto
• Interview: Musician, Movement Artist, Designer
• Clothing Musicians
• No Art But Class War
• Mirror Neurons to the Mona Lisa
• Fragments and Tangents
• Before
• Texts: What we are thinking about when we're thinking about Open Engagement
• After
• Contributors
• Appendix: The Back Channel
• Bibliography

You Need To Have The Feeling That Anything's Possible

Teresa Morani as transcribed by LR

I'm coming here to investigate what's next for me as an artist. I've had a lot of ideas that involve I'm working as a studio artist and would like to get more involved in the community through teaching and or creating collectively or facilitating groups. I sense that there's an obvious need for change on the planet in every area...politically, environmentally. We are in a place where we need to change the hierarchy, the way things are structured. There's a need for more creative, inclusive methods for visioning the future.

Someone asked in one of the sessions yesterday regarding the Otis Project, why do artists feel it's their job to go paint the facade of the building? There is crossover between social services and social art practices. I feel that artists work in very fundamental way with creative process. Creative process has no boundaries. It includes the arts, sciences, everything manifests through the creative process.

In interactions with members of my community, it seems they don't think they interact with creative process, they think it's just for artist the artist. I would like to offer them a more tangible way to think of themselves as creative. Artists can facilitate this.

I'm going to back up and say, the thing about this potent time in our history: I think it's happening already that there is a more inclusive and more interdisciplinary way of working. There's a collecting around social practice. I feel it's a movement, though I know there's a question of whether it's a movement. It's important to create community from a less fragmented and more whole place. Artists, scientists, construction workers, we have to come together to work together. When artists can participate in visioning outside of the art object more in a community sense.

Q: Does audience go away and all are participants?

I know this to be true about art objects. Art objects are powerful. When people come and view they are interacting. I heard a quote, the idea that an art object is not resolved, it's something that suggests something, but it's unresolved so when you approach it as an audience, you're participating. It opens your imagination and your critical thinking. So it has a role. Viewing has a role. Audience has a role. People doing performance on the street are definitely affecting audiences.That can be really powerful. It's hard if it's in the gallery. If you put work in a gallery you're not going to touch everyone, they may or may not come in, may not take the time to appreciate.

I can understand art that confronts, I can understand the need for it. But I feel we've come through a time when in order to change the system you had to tear it down. That's the role of that art, to bring attention to what's not working. For me personally, I would like to see more artists working in a way that instead of being at war with what is not working to just create works that have a soul, and a heart, and a life, that really do embrace what we want to focus on: positive creations, maybe at a smaller, more personal level to start building that future that will integrate (or not, or sidestep) or create new structures. And what I've heard from some presenters at the confrence is also about creating new structures; there's a lot of work around gardening and food.

As a society we are so inundated with bad news, it's almost unbearable. If you want to talk about sustainability, we need to sustain our souls through this change. You can start to think that the world is oppressive and things aren't possible if you don't have that. You need to have that feeling that anything's possible.

For myself, I had a show, and it so wiped me out. The long hours, the social context. Afterward you crash. I had to ask what is going to feed me? How do we feed ourselves? How can we be more responsible, more engaged on a daily, human level.

What artists are great at are metaphors. I don't know that everyone understands. I don't know that everyone understands. But I do know that it's great that artists can use metaphor, use it in community campaign, and take an active role in creating new structures.