Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics

by Shannon Jackson

‘a game-changer, a must-read for scholars, students and artists alike’ – Tom Finkelpearl At a time when art world critics and curators heavily debate the social, and when community organizers and civic activists are reconsidering the role of aesthetics in social reform, this book makes explicit some of the contradictions and competing stakes of contemporary experimental art-making. Social Works is an interdisciplinary approach to the forms, goals and histories of innovative social practice in both contemporary performance and visual art. Shannon Jackson uses a range of case studies and contemporary methodologies to mediate between the fields of visual and performance studies. The result is a brilliant analysis that not only incorporates current political and aesthetic discourses but also provides a practical understanding of social practice.

Genres: Nonfiction, Academic, Art

310 pages, Paperback

First published February 1, 2011

Reviews

[Craig Werner · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm officially finished reading books about contemporary performance art and/or "relational aesthetics." This isn't as horrible as last year's one-star book Relational Aesthetics by Bourriaud, but it still makes for excruciating reading. Like B, Jackson's mired in a theoretical debate which allows her to (I'm not making this up) defend a book which she acknowledges as "pompous and badly written." The debates consist of the worst sort of posturing, composed of claims to superior political and aesthetic insight. Claire Bishop seems to be the worst offender, though why anyone would care about what she thinks is beyond me. Jackson's writing frequently matches abstract nouns with verbs that require a human subject. She uses the "editorial we" in ways that consistently make me say "what we, kimo sabe?"

What keeps the book form being one star is the descriptions of actual works of art, most notably a production of Waiting for Godot which took place in post-Katrina New Orleans. The things she's interested in--the relationship between art and the various networks which support it; the changing contours of genre--are important. I think I'm basically in agreement with most of her conclusions.

But the book's unreadable.

[Sonja Kuftinec · Rating 5 out of 5]

Social Works is that rare form of critical engagement that moves readers deep into the printed word and back out to lived experience and remembered arts events – recasting their sense of meaning in each location. It does what the best forms of modern drama and contemporary performance art do: productively arrest us in the act of living.

[S. Alberto ঌ⁻⁷ (semi-active, always yearning) · Rating 4 out of 5]

This one really came through for me—Social Works was super helpful for my seminar presentation paper. Shannon Jackson does a great job bridging performance studies and social practice art, and the way she breaks down the intersection of aesthetics, labor, and support structures had me highlighting like crazy.

It was one of those reads where I felt like I was finally getting language for things I’d been trying to articulate in my own work. Jackson’s analysis of how art isn’t just something we view but something we do—something that functions within social infrastructures—was both clear and layered. It gave me a framework to think through how performance can build publics, not just reflect them.

Definitely recommend if you’re writing on participatory or relational art, or just want to understand how performance theory and social impact intersect. A solid 4 stars from me—I actually learned something and had fun quoting it.

[Phillip · Rating 3 out of 5]

The idea in Jackson's book is good, tracing some of the techniques and implications of contemporary socially engaged art within networked support systems, but for the purposes of my dissertation this wasn't that useful. Westerners tend to think of art as somehow divorced or apart from society, social collectivity, and communality--instead thinking generally of art as an individual artist's creation, but, Jackson argues, this way of thinking about art denies the support networks that make any artistic creation, display, or performance possible--in other words, the binary between art and community/society is a false one. She examines contemporary European and North American art/performances engaged in the social turn, which is a contemporary attempt to rethink the relationship of the arts to society and the responsibility of the artist as a social being. One of the major points here is that art is always situated in a social context, and it takes support (an important concept for Jackson) to make or present any artwork/performance--direct support from viewers, gallery owners and staff, governments that provide arts funding, and so on, but also less direct support from the workers who build gallery or performance spaces, the communities in which these spaces are located, people who produce the physical materials that go into art, etc. The social turn, as Jackson explains, involves a new attempt to figure out what these support networks mean for art, how artists should locate themselves relative to this sociality, and so on.

[Dorothy Chansky · Rating 5 out of 5]

Shannon Jackson's superb new book is, in a very challenging way, about vocabulary. Bypassing--even eschewing--language sometimes dissed as "jargon," Jackson forces readers to think and think again about basic terms such as "performance," "social practice," "art," "politics," and "public." This book is an invitation to consume art promiscuously but to choose words as if the future of the world depended upon them. I'll be depending on it for a long time.

[B3K]

Finally a comprehensive and intelligent look at the sprawling messy field of emerging social practice/socially engaged from a performance studies scholar who acknowledges the arc of gallery/theatre disciplinary threads that are playing around this field; and explores how this is differencing and shaping the way we understand the field.

[Poppy Spowage · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Social Works offers a refreshing and rigorous take on performance practice, at a time when much critical theory has established oppositional relationships between the social and the aesthetic, the effective and the affective."
— Poppy Spowage, People's Palace Projects
Platform, Vol. 6, No. 1, Spectatorship and Participation, Winter 2011