Engaged Art Practice Research Articles

Two approaches to socially engaged art with the Hong Kong Filipino community

Abstract The Filipino community of Hong Kong has often suffered from the way the vast majority of its members are perceived: their work as domestic helpers has created conditions for the general Hong Kong public to put them in a subservient position within the local society. Local art practitioners have recently attempted to address this issue by creating art projects aimed at changing the position of Filipino domestic workers in the social culture of the SAR. Zheng Bo created an interactive object in a public space that he himself presents as a public service, while Luke Ching (working for within the Rooftop Institute collective) organized a number of workshops aimed at bringing together the Filipino domestic helpers and the children of the family who employ them. While both approaches are designed to bring people from widely different horizons together to work out and reconcile their differences, they, however, function very differently and fulfil profoundly different missions. These two projects will be analysed and assessed in the context of the ideas of Nicolas Mirzoeff about visual culture and the frequently quoted works of Jacques Rancière in the domain of socially engaged art practices.

Village transformed: Jin Le and community development through contemporary art

Abstract Drawing upon field research, this article examines the work of artist Jin Le who strives to engage his fellow villagers from the remote rural village Shijiezi in light of the growing desire among the contemporary Chinese art circles to seek alternative spaces for artistic production and to make art relevant to community development. Increasingly stricken by the gap between metropolises such as Beijing where he was based and the countryside such as Shijiezi where he grew up, Jin left Beijing in 2005 and has since endeavoured to introduce art as a stimuli for changes to his poverty-laden home village in both materialistic and cultural terms. His work includes making site-specific sculpture and installation works to enrich the public space in the village, taking villagers to participate in art-related events in the cities, inviting artists and other professionals to visit and interact with villagers, initiating projects for collaborations between art professionals and villagers, and facilitating the implementation of these collaborations, among others. Jin’s election to be the village head in 2008 by the villagers and their agreement to offer their private homes as ready-made exhibiting spaces so Shijiezi Museum could be found in 2009 testify to a certain level of efficacy of Jin’s socially engaged art practice. Building upon local support, Jin and his collaborator Qin Ga, a Beijing-based artist, launched the ambitious Fly Together: Shijiezi Village Art Practice Project in 2015. This one-year long collaborative project facilitates the collaboration of 25 artists and artist collectives and 25 local residents, resulting in many thought-provoking artworks and pragmatic outcomes as well as long-term collaborative relationships. Arguably, Jin’s effort highlights the potential of employing art for intersubjective communications, the growth of transformative relationships, and grassroots-initiated social changes, even at a small-scale and with limited resources.

Non-Visual Aesthetics: Seeing the World with Our Bodies

This article explores the role of ‘physical ontologies’ within socially engaged art practices, and explores how the notion of visual art can be limiting for artworks developed with communities and ‘non-artists’. It uses the field of embodied cognition and the concept of an anthropology of the body to frame how physical activities can be positioned not only as ‘art’ but as processes by which artists can ethically explore the world with communities. It therefore provides a counter-narrative to assumptions of how art should function within socially engaged contexts, and examines how physical ontologies become effective – and affective – tools when working in a genre of art that is fundamentally based on humans exchanging with each other in a process of meaning-making.While there are many current discussions about the role of art within the public realm, the formulation of a physical ontology within socially engaged practices has been less explored, and this article provides a reflective discussion point. It is written from the perspective of a practice-based researcher who has worked within the field of participatory/public art for over fourteen years, and provides an example of a physical methodology to frame the argument.This information would be important and interesting for any fields or practitioners working in an engaged or participatory manner with an artist, such as social work, participatory democracy/activisms, or other socially engaged practices.

Møter gjennom mønster i filt. Narrativ og poetisk dokumentasjon som utgangspunkt for og pådriver i kunstdidaktisk praksis i en helsekontekst

I denne artikkelen søkes det, fra et kunstdidaktisk perspektiv, å belyse forbindelser mellom kunstpraksis og utvidet omsorgsarbeid i en helsekontekst. Hensikten er, gjennom å beskrive, analysere og konstruere kjennetegn ved praksis, å bidra med kunnskap om hvordan en relasjonell og sosialt orientert kunstpraksis konstitueres med demente beboere og helsepersonell over tid på to sykehjem. Forskningsspørsmålet tar for seg hvordan narrativ og poetisk dokumentasjon påvirker didaktiske valg og hvilken betydning det får i utviklingen av kunstnerens praksis. I artikkelen resonneres det med at en gjennomgående og systematisk bruk av narrativ og poetisk dokumentasjon fører til en refleksiv kunstdidaktisk praksis som åpner for affektive møter gjennom materialer, integrering av levd kropp og aktørenes mulighet til å være i det kommende sammen. Disse aspektene forståes som vitale kvaliteter som kan ha overføringsverdi til sansebaserte strategier i et utvidet omsorgsarbeid. Kunstnerens dokumentasjonspraksis løftes fram som en strategi for å lyssette den etiske dimensjonen når personer med redusert eller manglende samtykkekompetanse inkluderes i kunstpraksis. I en refleksiv forskningsprosess som har en kunstledet, narrativ og praksisledet tilnærming utforskes visuelle metoder. Resultatene av studien formidles både som teoretisering i artikkelform og gjennom utprøving av undervisningsopplegg for sykepleiere, helsefagarbeidere og studenter med fokus på samarbeid mellom aktører i helsefeltet, forskeren og kunstneren.

The New Forest: The Relationship between Social Work and Socially Engaged Art Practice Revisited

In 2015, Leanne Schubert and Mel Gray wrote a critical commentary in the British Journal of Social Work entitled ‘The death of emancipatory social work and birth of socially engaged art practice’. In this commentary, the authors argue that artists have moved in to fill the void that increasingly emerges as social workers vacate the public spaces of activism and social change. However, there is little consensus in the existing body of research about the so-called ‘death of emancipatory social work’ and what ‘social engagement’ in the arts precisely entails. The aim of our article is therefore to revisit the relationship between social work and socially engaged art practices. A rhetorical analysis of the differing constructions about social engagement in the case study The New Forest displays different roles of artists: (i) the artist generates change, (ii) the artist imagines, (iii) the artist researches, (iv) the artist acts as an entrepreneur and (v) the artist confirms the social order/takes advantage. Our analysis of how artists deal with the complexity of social problems and attempt to take up an explicit social engagement offers insights for a reconsideration of the emancipatory potential and social justice aspirations of social work.

"Found Performance": Towards a Musical Methodology for Exploring the Aesthetics of Care.

Concepts of performance in fine art reflect key processes in music therapy. Music therapy enables practitioners to reframe patients as performers, producing new meanings around the clinical knowledge attached to medical histories and constructs. In this paper, music therapy practices are considered in the wider context of art history, with reference to allied theories from social research. Tracing a century in art that has revised the performativity of found objects (starting with Duchamp’s “Fountain”), and of found sound (crystallised by Cage’s 4′ 33) this paper proposes that music therapy might be a pioneer methodology of “found performance”. Examples from music therapy and contemporary socially engaged art practices are brought as potential links between artistic methodologies and medical humanities research, with specific reference to notions of Aesthetics of Care.

Culturally reimagining education: Publicity, aesthetics and socially engaged art practice

This paper sets out to reimagine education through a cultural perspective and explores education as a performative practice that establishes certain borders of ‘public’ belonging. Wide-spread debates about the public dimension of schools and universities have focused on how economic rationales need to be replaced with alternative visions of education. This paper seeks to contribute to this revisioning of the public in education by reclaiming education as a specifically cultural endeavour, one tied to practices that are at once both performative and aesthetic. To this end, I draw on theoretical notions of publicity that highlight its performative character. I then offer a reading of a socially engaged art project in order to suggest ways in which this performative character of publicity can be seen to be educational. This paper argues that education itself emerges through various cultural enactments that delineate the contours of who counts as a public and who does not.

Introduction: An Aesthetics of Dissonance

Paul Chan is an artist whose work transcends any potential boundaries of convention, skill, or intellect. He has applied any medium possible—film and animation, sculpture and typography, painting and publishing—to a sly and exuberant exploration of contemporary life and what it now means to be an ethically directed artist. Holland Cotter is a writer and critic whose seminal writings have nurtured an entirely new field of globally engaged art practices. His language is one of the most finely calibrated instruments for accessing an individual artist’s work, regardless of its locality. Given their stature, these insights by Chan and Cotter regarding their skepticism as to the potency of art are evidence of tectonic shifts in art thinking, and not isolated observations.

Shared stakes, distributed investment: Socially engaged art and the financialization of social impact

AbstractThis article examines the implications of the financialization of social impact and the emerging social impact bonds (SIBs) market for socially engaged art practices. How do SIBs, which allow for investment in social impact metrics, shift the broader contexts through which the value of social impact is understood in art discourses? In the British context, recent projects by Assemble, Open School East and others do important social work, yet echo the logic of the social investment market by outsourcing social impact. Rather than dismissing socially engaged art initiatives as having been recuperated by financialized capitalism, I suggest the need to develop new ways of achieving a double reading of these works as they relate to - and upset the distinctions between - stakeholder and bondholder valuation.

Hair Craft Project

The Hair Craft Project is an exercise in socially engaged art practices, based on the premise that hairdressing is the primordial textile art form. Sonya Clark, artist and project director, sought to bridge multiple communities: African American hair salons; students, faculty, and alumni of Virginia Commonwealth University’s nationally ranked arts programs; and the broader art community. The project frames the complex craftsmanship, engineering, and skill of hairstylists specializing in African hair-braiding techniques in cultural, historical, and contemporary-art contexts. The Hair Craft Project is innovative in its methods of attracting, building, and bridging audiences while supporting and acknowledging the parallel skills of artists and hairstylists. Through this art form, the project connected cultures, class, and race in Richmond, Virginia, a city with a history of being racially, culturally, and economically divided. The project went on to gain national attention. It was selected by artists Leonardo Drew, Katherina Grosse, and the late founder of Art 21, Susan Sollins, for the Juror’s Grand Prize at Art Prize in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in fall 2014. The Hair Craft Project will travel to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in Fall 2015.

Revitalizing Debates around Collective Action and Democracy: A Conversation between Oliver Ressler and Bruce Barber

This text is the result of a discussion conducted via email between Oliver Ressler and Bruce Barber during March 2014. The topics were wide ranging and focused upon material presented by Ressler in his invited lecture at NSCAD University as part of the Public Lecture series. Key topics explored in the conversation include Austrian politics, art and activism, interventionism, collaboration, operative and engaged art practice, the ‘coming community’ (Agamben), ‘Dark Matter’ of the art world (Sholette) and specific projects: Robbery (2008), The Bull Laid Bear (2008) What Is Democracy? (2011), and We Have a Situation Here (2011).

Navigating Socially Engaged Documentary Photographic Practices

Abstract As Documentary Photographers increasingly introduce the collaborative and participatory methodologies common to socially engaged art practices into their projects (particularly those that are activist in nature, seeking to catalyse social change agendas and policies through image making and sharing), there is an increased tension between the process of production and the photographic representation that is created. Over the course of the last five years I have utilised these methodologies of co-authorship. This article contextualizes this kind of transdisciplinary work, and examines the ways in which the integration of collaborative strategies and co-authored practice in projects that are explicitly designed to be of benefit to a primary audience (the participants, collaborators and producers) might be usefully disseminated to a secondary audience (the general public, the ‘art world’, critics etc.) through analysis of my projects Red Light Dark Room; Sex, lives and stereotypes made in Melbourne, Australia, and The King School Portrait Project made in Portland, Oregon, America.

The Death of Emancipatory Social Work as Art and Birth of Socially Engaged Art Practice

The growth of socially engaged art practice over the last decade is considered in light of the relationship between social work, art, and social change. The question posed is ‘has social work – caught in neoliberal paternalism – given way to socially engaged art as a medium of social change?’ The paper argues that, as social workers have vacated public spaces of activism and change, so artists have moved in to fill the void and suggests there has never been a better time to reinvigorate critical social work and its emancipatory potential.

From Outsider to Participant: Developmentally Disabled Dialogue in Socially Engaged Art

How can the museum incorporate the voice of the developmentally disabled artist? How can the very idea of dialogue be reconsidered through the interactions that the museum curator might develop with artists that have atypical cognitive abilities? I trace these questions through an examination of a video and the circumstances around it, entitled CREATE: The Artists Are Present (2011), which showcases a series of interviews with developmentally disabled artists from Creative Growth in Oakland, Creativity Explored in San Francisco and National Institute for Art and Disability (NIAD) in Richmond, California. The interviews were conducted by self-identifying physically disabled artists as a reaction against the lack of self-representation of the interviewed artists in the large-scale exhibition, CREATE (2011), co-curated by Lawrence Rinder, Director of the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archives (BAMPF), California, and Matthew Higgs, Director of White Columns, New York. This paper argues that the very nature of artist/curator dialogue and socially engaged art practices in the museum can be deepened and enriched by much more variegated forms of communication amongst those typically occupying the margins.

Performing an intervention in the space between art and education

Abstract In this article, we consider and discuss an artist-teacher residency staged at our university that explored and examined relations between art, learning and teaching. Comprising artists, pedagogues, becoming teachers and researchers, this residency was initiated to examine how becoming art teachers (teacher candidates) come to understand pedagogy in their field, and to create an event where they would encounter qualities of pedagogy through art-making. The article begins with a short discussion of the pedagogical turn in contemporary art and interventionist art practices before describing the artist-teacher residency that bears similarities to certain socially engaged art practices. Drawing upon the concept of emergent knowledge, we reflect upon the teacher candidates’ accounts of the experience of participating in the artist-teacher residency. We consider the impact that these experiences had on teacher candidates’ understandings of art and pedagogy. Throughout the project, a/r/tography offered a rich form of living enquiry that initiated processes of learning to learn.

FLΔG Collective: Praxis between the educational turn and the art school

Abstract This article will explore the FLΔG Collective’s ‘cake methodology’ developed to enable a shared praxis between a group of multi-level (B.A., M.A., Ph.D.) fine art students and staff. Cake methodology is a term developed to frame FLΔG’s working methods analytically by describing the methods and exploring how these approaches may have a critical purpose both within and potentially outside the art educational institution. The methods include baking and sharing cakes within the group and with participants, but rely on forms of engagement that move beyond the association with food or eating. Praxis, as the process by which a theory, lesson or skill is enacted, practiced or performed, is central to our approach, and was developed through an exploration of, and engagement with, the ‘educational turn’ in the contemporary art world. FLΔG, however, re-turned the exploration of pedagogy and art to the academy, and cake methodology emerged as part of this ‘re-turn’. The praxis afforded by this re-turn can thus perhaps provide a perspective on current higher art education and on aspects of relational and socially engaged art practice. Two FLΔG events will be used to exemplify this methodology: Workshop in the Workshop at Chelsea School of Arts (2014) and Quiet Cake Conversation at The Showroom Gallery (2013).

Socially engaged art practice and character education: Understanding others through visual art

Abstract This article examines to what extent socially engaged art practice encourages students by promoting creativity, a sense of citizen responsibility, critical thinking, reflection, an interest in social justice, and consideration of people living in the local community, and ultimately contributing significantly to character education. In community-based art education, which enables the building of character, learners overcome the limitations of knowledge-oriented education to understand others, thus adding more meaning to their lives and helping them cultivate democratic citizenship so that they may serve society. This article discusses a key feature of socially engaged art practice through a case study by focusing on the service learning of an alternative school for North Korean adolescent refugees. The theoretical roots of socially engaged art practice and service learning for developing democratic citizenship are examined. The case of art education at alternative schools for North Korean adolescent refugees is discussed through the lens of community-based art education. North Korean adolescent refugees and South Korean graduate school students taught and were taught through reciprocal participation in service learning.

Re-Animating Joseph Beuys' “Social Sculpture”: Artistic Interventions and the Occupy Movement

Since making its presence felt in September 2011, the Occupy movement has drawn upon aesthetic-affective techniques and cooperative structures developed in socially engaged art practices from the mid-twentieth century onwards—such as Joseph Beuys' notion of “social sculpture”—as resources for producing new social compositions. These practices extend the concept of art into a social plastic form that reshapes and re-forms our subjectivities, the way we communicate, our social structures and by extension, the world we inhabit. At the same time, before the mass evictions of Occupy took place across North America, the movement placed a heavy emphasis on visibility and space. Its short-term strategies and successes were largely owed to the seizing of a particularly opportune moment in a highly visible space that provided a symbolic frame for “Occupy Wall Street as event.” This paper explores the possibility that the eviction of Occupy from its encampments was not the disaster bemoaned by many of its participants—or the failure celebrated by its detractors—but a renewed opportunity for social composition.

Afterthoughts on Engaged Art Practice: ATSA and the State of Emergency

The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the “state of emergency” in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight. Then we shall clearly realize that it is our task to bring about a real state of emergency, and this will improve our position in the struggle against Fascism.—Walter Benjamin

Making art in the wrong place: violence and intimacy in Speak English To Me

Discourse around socially engaged art practice needs to consider the roles symbolic and representational violence play in collaborative community-based settings. In this article, I examine a dialogical art project, Speak English To Me, which I conducted on the streets of Yeoville, Johannesburg, in 2007 and 2008, in terms of the ‘intersubjective vulnerabilities’ (Kester 2004) and forms of symbolic power (Bourdieu 2005) that emerged in my engagements with the residents of the area. Aspects of the project are closely described in terms of the relationships that developed between myself (as the artist) and the participants, in our collaborative development of aesthetic representations. Using two key texts as a departure point, namely Joseph Gaylard's The retreat of creativity: reflections on the role of the South African visual arts in social development (2005) and Colin Richards’ Bobbit's feast: violence and representation in South African art (1999), I reflect more broadly on the conceptual tensions that exist in local criticism around representational and situational aesthetic practices within a post-colonial context. I assert that socially engaged art practices necessitate a revisiting of the concept of otherness in terms of addressability, audience and modality, and that symbolic wounding in representation is intimately tied up with the context of reception. Through my analysis of Speak English To Me, I conclude that socially engaged art discourses cannot avoid issues of representational violence, and would benefit from understanding them as intrinsic and valuable to aesthetic practices conducted in everyday community settings.