Just finished teaching a subject (with Lucas Ihlein) called Social Intersections. The aim was to review traditions of socially engaged art practice, from Dada and Surrealist efforts to recast lived experience to contemporary experiments in ‘social practice’ linking art to dimensions of ethnography, political activism and social work. Unitary urbanism, psychogeography, the writings of Georges Perec, 1960s happenings, 1990s relational art – all got a look in. The relation between art and everyday life was a specific focus of concern and many of our projects involved walking.
Unsurprisingly, this kind of subject prompts the inevitable question, ‘but is it art?’ However daft and unanswerable, however binary, the standard pedagogical pattern is for students to frame their engagement with the subject in terms of this question, typically gradually acknowledging that more and more things can be art – that, of course, not only gallery objects are art but also all manner of interventions in real social space, whether it be ‘toothbrushing’ (Alan Kaprow), pushing a piece of ice along a street (Francis Alys) or running an abortion clinic on a ship (Rebecca Gomperts – Women on Waves).
Now all of this appears mete and right. After all, who needs some wretched, irrelevant space of autonomous art? Let’s once again discover means for merging art with everyday life. Yet this well-meaning orientation towards the social field can also have a sinister aspect, particularly in terms of its amorphous, blobby motion of aesthetic expansion. All the time latching on to new dimensions of social interaction, socially engaged art practice can appear as a soft and mushy form of aesthetic appropriation. All kinds of contexts and activities that ordinarily have very little to do with art suddenly find themselves positioned as art. It is as though art adopts the model of some utterly fanciful form of historical colonialism; people in Western ships travel to exotic isles, leap on to the beach, hug the natives, proclaim that cultural difference is irrelevant and, precisely on this basis, convince the islanders that their colonisation is essential. It is the Hegelian aufehbung without any sense of violence or destructive appetite. I know that this is a bit unfair, that you could equally argue that art is passing beyond its ordinary limits and risking other modes of discourse, other idioms of interaction, but there is still a vital need for art to be sensitive to the political implications of its expansion into other contexts. It is not that I am opposed to socially engaged art practice. Nor do I wish to argue for some narrow, conventional conception of genuine art. It is just that artists can’t simply commandeer fields of social action that already have a sense of direction and integrity – that are already constituted well enough without art. Of course they can be taken up by art, they can be re-framed within the context of art, but there is still a need to acknowledge their distinct identity. There is a particular need to question the assumption that art is some kind of innocent honest broker, with an unerring capacity to cut to the chase, catalyse action and revitalise dimensions of social process. This places too great an emphasis on art to solve complex, cultural problems, as well as limiting art’s capacity to respond obliquely, irresponsibly and at a sometimes necessary remove.