Quotes for beginning to think together about the histories of social practice art

Tania Bruguera, Tatlin's Whisper #6 (Havana version) 2009

Art is useful. Through art we can start building a world that works differently. -Tania Bruguera

Art no longer wants to respond to the excess of commodities & signs, but to a lack of connections. -Jacques Ranciere

How do you take pictures of somebody in a way that brings them to the table instead of putting them on the menu? -Sharita Towne 

Sharita Towne, Our City in Stereo, 2016

The line between art and life should be kept as fluid, and perhaps indistinct, as possible. -Allan Kaprow

Allan Kaprow, How to make a happening, LP, 1968 -link to tracks

The gradual push toward art as process and the abandonment of the art object —or the use of the art object merely as a reference, but no longer the final product of the art experience— has also eroded the boundary of art and the world. By and far the desire of the new generations of artists who try to break new ground is by reintegrating art practice into the world.
-Pablo Helguera

Art has become a metadiscipline —that is, that it modifies other disciplines by bringing their activity into a territory of experience, ambiguity, contradiction and criticality. Art making becomes a vehicle of producing knowledge in relation with other disciplines, and while it can continue to be a vehicle in it of itself, it can also function as a vehicle to advance the discourse of other areas of knowledge and human activity. -Pablo Helguera

Theory on a good day is meant to build things up, theory on a bad day is just bullying people. -Nato Thompson

There is a need for an understanding of art that goes not only beyond pleasant aesthetics, but beyond even typical ideas of creativity and imagination, directly engaging with the institutions of civil society. - Darren O’Donnell

How is culture made and who is it made for?
Even though it is easy and fun, we are sick of being the audience. We want to do something. We want to create our culture, instead of just buying it. -  Group Material

Group Material, Da Zi Baos, 1982

Every human being is an artist, a freedom being, called to participate in transforming and reshaping the conditions, thinking and structures that shape and inform our lives. - Joseph Beuys

Joseph Beuy, 7000 Oaks, 1982

Even the act of peeling a potato can be an artistic act if it is consciously done.
- Joseph Beuys

Joseph Beuys, Organization for Direct Democracy, 1972

The art worlder says, Oh yes, you’ll gain by calling it an art practice. Because you gain all of this conversational stuff by putting it into that category. Whereas the person engaging in the activity says, Yeah, but I’m not interested in all that stuff.
 -Stephen Wright

One reason for making and exhibiting a work is to induce a reaction or change in the viewer.... In this sense, the work as such is nonexistent except when it functions as a medium of change between the artist and viewer. -Adrian Piper

Adrian Piper, Self-Portrait as Nice White Lady, 1995

The binary of active/passive always ends up dividing a population into those with capacity on one side, and those with incapacity on the other. -Claire Bishop

Societies change and the arts can be a powerful way of expressing the changes. However, the arts are essential for helping individuals find their place within society and for shaping a collective cultural identity. - REPOhistory

REPOhistory, Civil Disturbances, 1998

We’ve already seen that there is nothing more important than working with our mistakes, and there is nothing worse than continually holding back from making mistakes, and always saying: Right, first I’ll do this, and then later, once I know everything, I’ll do that. In fact I’ll never know anything if I do that. I have to enter into things, jump in feet first. You only learn to swim in water. Get in, then you learn this. In making mistakes, the mistake leads you to a way of correcting it. The fact is through work itself, in the process of making mistakes, in failures, one can change the failure into something better.  - Joseph Beuys

True participation is open. We will never be able to know what we give the spectator/author. -Lygia Clark