Socially Engaged Art and Its Pedagogy of Citizenship

Abstract

The complacent insularity of individualism provides the background against which the convivial performativity of art is conceptualized as acts of citizenship in this article. The alienated sculptural figures and figurations of Alberto Giacometti’s Piazza are considered germane in addressing the self-centered, collective obsession with socially mediated systems and technologies that prompt and perpetuate an ideology of individualism and its indifference toward socially engaged practices of art, pedagogy, and civic responsibility. As counterpoint to Herbert Marcuse’s notion of one-dimensionality and Pierre Bourdieu’s habitus, public artist Lonnie Graham’s community-based, cross-continental subsistent agricultural collaborations in the African/American Garden Project exemplify the convivial generosity of Mikhail Bakhtin’s answerability—a contingent and aleatory process of co-creation that is consistent with the interdependent citizenship of socially engaged art and its education.