1.26.19

As soon as I finished writing short descriptions for the
first set of terms and topics related to social practice (see the previous
post) I immediately started compiling a new list. So here are an additional
twenty-two terms and topics with subjective definitions, I’m sure there will be
more to come.

Duration

The amount of time spent working on a project is one way of
looking at the duration of the project, though it could also be referring to
how long the project is active too, or both of those two together. There is a sort
of knee jerk idea that when it comes to socially engaged work that long
duration equates to being better, and that short duration is less good. I’ve
always felt that this was not an accurate assumption, and as I have said many
times, if a bad project lasts a long time it doesn’t make it better it just
means it is bad longer. My feeling instead is that duration is just another
factor in determining the best way to approach and develop any given project.
Some projects, based on resources available, circumstances, etc. are best when
they are very short term. There are ways to avoid the problems that come when
an artist is “parachuted” into a project, primarily by setting up the work so
that the artist allows local people to present content creating a situation in
which the artist becomes an audience to the project that they have conceived of
and or facilitated.

Social Justice

There is often a confusion that social practice work
inherently needs to be about social justice issues. I don’t think that’s the
case, if it were it would be called “Art and Social Justice” not “Art and
Social Practice”. Many artists doing socially engaged work are interested in
and engaged with social justice issues, and that can of course be the subject
and purpose of their work if that is what they want to do, but social practice
work could also be about non-political, non-social justice type topics, and or
can be indirectly addressing social/political issues in various ways.

Education

Many socially engaged projects have educational components
built into them. One of the advantages of project-based work is the opportunity
to use the process as a way to learn about topics that the artist is interested
in from experiential, direct, and indirect approaches. I like to position
myself, when working on a project in a place that I am not familiar with, as
the one who is learning from the people who I meet and interact with, often
creating project structures that allow those local, and more knowledgeable
people to be the ones providing content and leading the educating of me, other
outsiders, and each other.

Ideal Situations

Artists have the chance to construct situations in the way
that they would like them to be as opposed to the way that they might normally exist.
For instance, just because kids are not normally included in the art world, at
least not in positions of agency, it is still possible for artists to create
projects that allow kids to take those kinds of roles. That same approach can
apply to anything else that an artist would like to see happen within the small-scale
realm of possibilities that they have control over when producing a project.

Ethics

In general, it is important to be able to determine how to
behave and operate in life so that you are functioning within both personal and
societal ethical practices. There are of course constructed laws that we each
need to decide if we will follow or not follow and in what ways. This might be
partially considered from the point of view of self-interest, familial
interests, societal interests, and based on if the laws make sense in any
particular situational circumstances or not, though some people prefer to use
precedent and generalized moral codes instead of having to make ethical
decisions based on each issue and experience that they encounter. There are
pluses and minuses for both approaches, but I favor the situational ethics one
even though it requires a lot more work.

Artists need to also figure out their own ethical ideas,
methods, and value systems and then try to apply them as they do their work. I
tend to think that common sense and following basic social contracts of not
harming others (or annoying them too much) is the best approach, but it could
be that many artists are not aware of the potential harm they might cause through
their work and so need to educate themselves to have greater understanding of
their own biases, privileges, power etc., so that they can effectively do the
work that they want to do in meaningful and useful ways.

I have encountered the idea that social practice artists
need to be especially conscious of their ethical responsibilities because of
the social nature of their work, but I have always contended that everyone
(including studio/gallery artists) should be engaged with understanding their
impacts on other people, the environment, wealth distribution, hierarchies,
etc. and that artists who are interested in socially engaged practices are
generally at least already somewhat aware of these dynamics, whereas
non-socially engaged artists often times are less conscious of the ways they
are making impacts with their work from ethical perspectives. Also, when faced
with this question I often ask for an example of a socially engaged art project
that has had a negative ethical social impact and have not yet been given a
good suggestion (though I’m sure there are a few out there). Considering a
socially engaged project to not be very good from a subjective point of view
doesn’t qualify. There is lots and lots of “bad” art being made out there (and
because there are a lot more paintings and sculptures than socially engaged
projects that means there are also a lot more “bad” paintings and sculptures
than there are “bad” socially engaged art projects) but that is no reason for
artists to stop doing work, at least not from an ethical point of view.

Walking

Many socially engaged projects have featured walking as a
primary element (including several of my own). There are many reasons why
walking is appreciated from a social practice angle. Walking is something that
is free and available to most people in some form or other and does not require
special skills to do. It provides an opportunity to get exercise while holding
conversations, examining the environment that is being walked through, and
providing self-transportation. Walking can easily be combined with other
activities like presentations, readings, and performances. I also just really
enjoy walking, so when given the opportunity to do any kind of project that I
want to do I often choose to include walking as some part of it.

Funding

In the US the typical ways that artists fund themselves are
through commercial sales, teaching, or arts grants. In reality most people who
think of themselves as artists don’t receive any funding at all, and probably
most artists don’t even bother trying to get funding for their work. There is a
big disparity between the number of artists and the capacity of commercial
galleries to show and sell those people’s work, as well as a limited number of
art teaching possibilities and arts grant opportunities. Those options are all available
to project based socially engaged artists, but there are other ways to fund
work as well. Working on commissions from arts and non-arts organizations is
one example. Sometimes the commission can be for a project that does not
interfere with regular exhibition and other programming at the institution,
which makes it more likely and increases the number of possibilities (temporary
event-based projects or exhibitions in non-gallery parts of museums like cafes
and bookstores for instance). Another approach is to create projects that
function as self-initiated institutions or artist residencies within existing
organizations like schools, libraries, park systems, or sanitation departments
(like Mierle Laderman Ukeles) and to apply for funding that is not normally
available to individual artists through those entities. A small business model
is another option. It is important to see funding approaches as part of
projects and not just as the support system for them.

Variable Practice

There has been a pervasive idea in the past that artists
were supposed to pick a medium and develop a style for their art and work on that
for the rest of their lives. There has always been lots of deviation from this
approach, but it still persists as a concept that is often taught to art
students. The primary benefit of artists working in that way is to be able to
deliver consistent product for the commercial gallery system and all of the
other art world elements that rely on that system. Artists, on the other hand,
rarely only want to work with just one medium and style and have to be
conditioned into finding value in that approach. Any kind of artist can free
themselves from that way of thinking and create a more interesting, varied
practice for themselves, but socially engaged artists are particularly well
situated to work in that way because they are generally not directly connected
to the commercial gallery system, and work on different kinds of projects that
can be situationally determined, so that in one case the artist might use
photography in an exhibition form, and in another creates participatory
sculpture for a public context, or mixes up multiple mediums and styles in one
project, anything is possible when the artist has a variable practice.

Learning

As I mentioned in the “education” topic, an artist can
position themselves as someone who is given an opportunity to learn through the
process of creating a project. That could include anything from learning a new
media to learning about the culture and history of a project location. The
shift is that in normal conditions it is the artist that is supposedly offering
up culture and education to the public and in this other scenario the artist is
instead learning about existing culture and knowledge from members of the
public.

Site-visit

Going to a place where a project will be happening to have a
personal experience evaluating the nature of the place and the type of project
that would be interesting to develop there based on resources, social dynamics,
histories, etc.

Hanging Out Method

A process which can be used during a site visit or during
the research phase of any project in which the artist wanders around, talks to
local people, and spends time casually observing in the location where they
will be developing a project in order to come up with ideas for the concept of
the project.

Inclusion

Within a socially engaged art project the artist has the
opportunity to be as inclusive as they would like to be in various ways, that
could include who the collaborators and participants are, how accessible the
project is to local and diverse audiences, and in what ways the project is made
available in documentation form, which could include free publications
distributed publicly etc. to allow the project to be known by people who might
not normally go to a contemporary art venue or presentation.

Hierarchy

The art world system is built on status and hierarchy, but
artists can deviate from that approach if they want to. That can include not
going along with the idea that you can only go up the steps of “art world
success” which would dictate that once you move from showing in alternative
spaces to commercial galleries, to fancier commercial galleries, to museums,
that you cannot move backwards for fear that your stock will go down. Instead,
if artists showed their work based on what they actually thought was
interesting that could mean that they worked with a whole range of different
status level organizations (alternative spaces, Community College galleries,
museums, etc.) in different places (not just art world hubs like NYC, and LA)
and as part of socially engaged projects that might take place at schools,
prisons, hospitals, the list goes on). If artists make it clear that they don’t
want to be limited to art world status conventions and hierarchies then the
system can change, but examples need to be made by people in power to correct
that situation.

Artists can also use their agency to dissolve or diminish
hierarchy through collaborating with people who have less art world status
(kids, non-artists, artists with little or no art world connections, etc.) and
can also alter audience hierarchy by privileging and creating access for local
audiences and people who are generally given less value by the art world
system.

Instructions

The use of instructions, prompts, scores, or assignments as
part of a participatory art project. In many cases the artist comes up with the
instructions and others (who should receive credit for their roles) respond by
producing whatever the instructions suggest. This can be used as part of “distance
projects” but you really have to be careful about who is on the other end
facilitating the instructions, because if they don’t know what they are doing
or deviate from the specific instructions without consultation with the artist
things can fall apart or turn into something undesirable.

Exhibitions

Typically, it is assumed that artists want to primarily show
their work as part of exhibitions, but in the case of socially engaged projects
exhibitions might not be the best platform for the work. Sometimes an
opportunity for an artist is tied to doing an exhibition even if that is not
the primary interest of the artist. In that case the exhibition can be seen as a
resource for the project that can also include non-exhibition work (workshops,
public art, performances, web, publications, etc.) that happen both inside and
outside of the exhibiting institution.

Public Art

Public art has typically been thought of as permanent
sculptures or mural type projects that are funded by government percent for art
programs or corporate entities. There are several alternatives that could also
be thought of as public art including non-sanctioned street art of various
kinds, temporary public art in the form of fliers, posters, performances, or
interventions, and site-specific participatory projects. Over the last couple
of decades there has been a slow but promising shift towards using percent for
art government funding to support less orthodox ideas of what public art can be
considered. Social Practice seems to be included in that development.

Collections

A big part of typical art world success is based on the
museum and private collections that an artist’s work has been acquired by. But
what if as an artist you don’t make objects that are easily bought and sold and
shipped? If your work is project based and possibly ephemeral or site-specific
it might not be able to be collected in typical manners and that reduces the
status (and funding) that an artist can receive. But there are examples of
artist’s works that have somehow made their way into art collections while not
being object based. Roman Ondak’s piece “Good Feelings in Good Times” which is
owned by the Tate Modern in London is a good example. The project is a set of
instructions detailing how a group of actors should be hired to stand in a
queue line in various locations attracting members of the public to line up
behind them until they disperse and reassemble somewhere else to repeat the
process. Apparently, the work operates in the collection in a similar way to a
painting—it was purchased, it is listed as belonging to the Tate, it can be
borrowed by other institutions, etc. So instruction based work is one approach
to use for entering into the arena of a museum collection (and you would think
the Tate would be very happy with it because of the lack of need for storage
when it is not in use) but there are other methods as well. Documentation and
artifacts from a socially engaged project can also be collected, and if a
curator is open to it a project could be designed by an artist specifically to
function as part of the museum’s collection. When artists who have different
kinds of practices are treated equitably by art world powers then it will be
more likely that artists will be able to choose the ways that they want to work
without systemic structural pressure and conditioning determining that for
them.

Status Quo

I have realized over the years that much of my work is based
on creating alternatives to various status quo situations that I run across in
society. You could say that “conceptual twists” use similar dynamics—taking
something that has a normal way of operating and then tweaking it into some
alternative form so that it breaks from our status quo understanding. This has
made me think that it is important to understand and recognize the status quo
in various situations so that you can then contemplate deviating from that to
create an interesting project. The status quo is not always bad and a twist on
the status quo is not always good, so just making an alternative is not
necessarily the right thing to do in every situation, but it usually useful to
understand the status quo of a given situation and to critically evaluate it
for yourself when working on socially engaged projects.

Project Producer

This is the idea that, like a movie producer or other kinds of producers who handle logistics for a director or team of people working on a film etc., there could also be producers for socially engaged art projects that are not the main artist or artists and not a participant of the project, but instead help to produce the project by handling budgets, scheduling, paperwork, brainstorming ideas, etc. It would be interesting if artists took this role for other artists. I have not run across any formalized version of that in the US, but have encountered something like that in Canada and parts of Europe for some public art projects, but in those cases the “producers” were not artists and instead were administrators or curators of one kind or another.

Intimate Projects

This involves making projects that the artist has a personal
connection to as a starting point for something that could then be made of
interest through participation and other involvements by a wider audience. One
of the current students in the PSU Art and Social Practice program, Xi Jie Ng
has created several projects that operate in this way, one was based on her
interest in her grandmother’s bunions, and another that she is working on now
is about the apartment complex where she lives. Xi Jie suggested this term as
one that should be added to this list after I described a project that I was
working on that had to do with my grandfather and his work as a farm manager at
a university in California.

Re-naming

An approach to making work that very literally just renames
existing things in the world. That could include existing buildings, streets,
geographic areas, monuments, everyday objects, systems, jobs, activities, etc.

Theory

I’ve always had a resistance to reading and giving
legitimacy to theory in its typically canonized forms. I always found comfort
in the supposedly Yogi Berra quote “In theory there is no difference between
theory and practice, in practice there is” finding in that assessment a very
true statement, from my experience and perspective, that makes it hard for me
to value totally abstracted theoretical ideas (in terms of art) that have no applied,
concrete elements to them. But it could be that my aversion to theory has also led
me towards an unnecessary bias that could be more nuanced and less polarized. I
have read and appreciated lots of theory that is related to direct experience
on topics including alternative education, farming, politics, ethics, etc. I
also realize, especially as I have been writing these term and topic
definitions, as well as earlier writing of various kinds, that I have been in
some ways creating a kind of theory, but one that is based on my thoughts,
conversations, and readings, coupled with applied experiences of producing
socially engaged art projects for over half of my life. It could be that like
many other examples of redefining for myself what I consider to be valid forms
of various things–education, art, history, etc. that I also just need to think
of theory differently, allowing it to be another resource that I can tap into,
in ways and at times that I find useful.