Only one week left to have your say on the post conference Blog- feels a bit sad that only one person has found time to post a comment. I think socially engaged arts practise offers a new way forward towards relevance, function and audience. It's important to learn from the past but in some ways this is a forward looking movement which needs to shed a lot of baggage if it's to move forward to quote Ludwig Wittgenstien
"getting hold of the difficulty deep down is what is hard. Because it is grasped near the surface it simply remains the difficulty it was. It has to be pulled out by the roots; and that involves our beggining to think in a new way. The change is as decisive as, for example, that from the alchemical to the chemical way of thinking. The new way of thinking is hard to establish. Once the new way of thinking has been established, the old problems vanish; indeed, they become hard to recapture. For they go with our way of expressing ourselves and, if we clothe ourselves in a new form of expresion, the old problems are discarded along with the old garment."
1 comment:
although I was unable to make the seminar due to being otherwise [socially] engaged - I was up the Alps on the Franco-Italian border - I am interested in commenting on this subject. had I been there I certainly would have.
what constitutes socially engaged artistic practice?
there is a really clear difference in my mind between practices which have or do not have a coherent critical position. in terms of artistic practice I always find this expressed most clearly in artists' personal statements, which usually take one of two forms - either they are very sensual and descriptive ("I love the feel/texture/smell/taste* of the paint/clay/wood/jelly*) in which case they are by my definition not an artist but a craftsperson/maker*, or alternatively they have a considered critical position in which they discuss the meaning of their work in relation to the wider world. the first type of statement is self-referential, understanding the work in terms only of itself (form, colour, material ...), whereas the second seeks to understand the work in relation to things other than itself. in my opinion the latter type of position is necessary for the practitioner to be defined as an artist at all.
confusingly quite a lot of the former type of 'artist' (craftspeople/makers*) do a lot of work in community settings, schools and so on, but although they engage with society their work is essentially aesthetically engaged craft rather than socially engaged art. They may even engage with societal issues - mental health, education, social exclusion - but this does not automatically make their practice socially engaged (community arts and socially engaged artistic practice should not be confused); in order for it to be so they must have an articulated critical position.
then within the second group (those that do have a critical position) there are those that understand their work in relation to art history/art practice, and those that understand their work in relation to social/political issues. obviously some people do both, but those that only do the first of these cannot be described as socially engaged for me, and those that only do the second are in a problematic position where they may not be regarded as artists but instead as political activists (the Arts Council withdrew funding from the Artists Placement Group because they felt they were more concerned with social engineering than art - they clearly saw the two as mutually exclusive).
I personally think it is important that Art is identified as a distinct cultural practice, and in any case for practical purposes work which cannot be defined by Art institutions as Art (and thus validated) will not enjoy any funding or status as Art (it may even be seen as anti-Art, as 'Watch the K Foundation Burn a Million Quid' famously was by Andrew Nairne, brother of Sandy of Tate/NPG fame, when he was at the Scottish Arts Council). there undeniably is an 'Art discourse', and in order to define itself as specifically Art and not any other type of cultural practice much art through to the 1950's (and people are still doing it now!) has contrived to be as socially disengaged and self-referential as possible (the autonomous Art object/Clement Greenberg and all that. ask the man-on-the-Clapham-omnibus what the qualities of a work of art are and he will most likely refer to aesthetic/technical qualities - as with Rolf Harris they want to be able to tell what it is and will judge quality by the extent to which it resembles what it represents - rather than to meaning).
i am quite comfortable with the idea of an Art discourse, though like the Art itself the meaning of the discourse is related to its context, and so the Art discourse needs to be part of a wider social/political discourse rather than an entirely seperate discourse.
the key here for me is that there is a critical self-consciousness to socially engaged art practice, as opposed to an uncritical un-consciousness. it is not necessary to work with 'the community', or to eschew galleries in order to be socially engaged - some socially engaged practice will do both of these things, but then so will some socially disengaged artistic practice.
*[delete as appropriate]
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