 |
| Claire Bishop |
 |
| Link to pdf of Participation, edited by Claire Bishop |
We will read art historian and critic Claire Bishop's essay The Social Turn published in Art Forum in 2006, and the response the magazine also published by author and art historian Grant Kester. A copy of their full interchange is here, and also in our reading section.
 |
| Grant Kester |
Grant Kester is one of the founding editors of Field Journal, one of the only publications to focus on socially engaged art.
http://field-journal.com/
Along side that we are going to read A User's Guide to Demanding the Impossible by The Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination, which was initially published in 2010.
https://demandingimpossible.wordpress.com/about/
http://www.labofii.net/
https://labofii.wordpress.com/
I tried to post here but it wouldn't let me. I did something else. Its here
ReplyDeletehttp://hsp2017psu.blogspot.com/2017/10/readings-week-4.html
“There can be no failed, unsuccessful, unresolved, or boring works of collaborative art because all are equally essential to the task of strengthening the social bond.” -Bishop
ReplyDelete“Oda Projesi consider aesthetic to be ‘a dangerous word’ that should not be brought into discussion. This seemed to me to be a curious response: If the aesthetic is dangerous, isn't that all the more reason it should be interrogated?” -Bishop
“...their desertion set them free to continue to take uncompromising actions as they will never have to depend on courting favor with the museum again.” -Labofii
Without some kind of universal framework of quality control, is socially engaged art doomed to exclusion and disregard? Who gets to decide the quality of the execution/outcome?
Is Oda Projesi dodging responsibility or does Bishop’s framework of aesthetics not apply to/detract from the purpose of the work?
Can socially engaged art only achieve stable footing in the exclusive realms of activists or artists etc? Does adopting elements from both gain favor of neither? Can there be a meeting of minds or would it be worth it to reject the support of some institutions?
Quotes:
ReplyDelete"Sedwick juxtaposes paranoid knowing... with reparative knowing, which is driven by the desire to ameliorate or give pleasure. As she argues, this reparative attitude is intolerable to the paranoid, who views any attempt to work productively within a given system of meaning as unforgivably naive and complicit; a belief authorized by the paranoid's "contemptuous assumption that the one thing lacking for global revolution, explosion of gender roles, or whatever, is people's (that is other people's) having the painful effects of their oppression, poverty or deludedness, sufficiently exacerbated to make the pain conscious (as if otherwise it wouldn't have been) and intolerable", Kester's response to Claire Bishop.
"Be careful with the present that you create because it should look like the future that you dream." A Users Guide to the Impossible, p22.
"We can all be engineers of the imagination. Marx argued that our "general intellect", all the collective knowledge and skills we use in making things, are taken away from us and embodied instead in the machines of our work. What would happen if we somehow re-engineered these machines and did what Guy Debord argued and started, 'producing ourselves... not the things that enslave us.'" A Users Guide to the Impossible, p28
Questions?
"What post-capitalist machine is waiting to be imagined inside your head?" (question taken from A Users Guide to the Impossible, p31)
"What is the role of aesthetics in social practice? Is the possible impact diluted with de-authored organizing? How the work that Claire Bishop praises effect change and for who?"
"
“Oda Projesi consider aesthetic to be "a dangerous word" that should not be brought into discussion. This seemed to me to be a curious response: If the aesthetic is dangerous, isn't that all the more reason it should be interrogated?”
ReplyDelete-Kester
“...video installation they shoot horses, 2004. Collins paid nine teenagers to dance continuously for eight hours, on two consecutive days, in front of a garish pink wall to an unrelentingly cheesy compilation of pop hits from the past four decades. The teenagers are mesmerizing and irresistible as they move from exuberant partying to boredom and finally exhaustion. The sound track's banal lyrics of ecstatic love and rejection acquire poignant connotations in light of the kids' double endurance of the marathon and of the interminable political crisis in which they are trapped. It goes without saying that they shoot horses is a perverse representation of the "site" that the artist was invited to respond to: The occupied territories are never shown explicitly but are ever-present as a frame.”
-Kester
“To dismantle and reinvent institutions or systems we have to start at the roots, with the culture that supports them. Culture is the material substratum of politics, the muddy foundations upon which it is built, but these foundations can’t be changed in the same way that you can undo a law - they are transformed by infiltrating them at the molecular level, through the fault lines, pores and gaps, burrowing away like an old mole opening up millions of potential north-west passages. Luckily for you, that’s where you are already.”
-Greenburg
Quotes:
ReplyDelete1. "'art is the place that produces a specific sociability,' precisely because 'it tightens the space of relations, unlike TV'" (Bishop)
2. "More information is not going to motivate us to act, neither are representations for pictures of politics, what makes us move is tasting dreams of what could be, stepping into the cracks where another world is coming into view" (A Users Guide to the Impossible, 25)
3. "If you're opposed to the logic of turning art or education into a market, you are already opposed to yourself as defined by that logic: you are not the artist, student or worker that capital needs. This means you have already begun to abolish yourself." (A Users Guide to the Impossible, 16)
Questions:
1. How does the "role" of the artist change in socially engaged work? If the artist tries to resist this role, what are the possible consequences?
2. From Users Guide: "What could you do with them? What *else* could you do with them?"
3. What does it mean to abolish yourself? your "self"? ego?
Some of my favorite and most powerful quotes are listed by Kate and Eric above so I am going to skip over them and pick out these three:
ReplyDeleteQUOTES:
Bishop
"His [Kester] righteous aversion to authorship can only lead to the end of provocative art and thinking." p9
Labofii
"You could start with your own body. It's the eco-system you know best, the source of most of your knowledge and dreams. The art of social movements has often begun with collective bodily performances as its first most abundant resource." p8
"In imagining the art of the future, Alan Kaprow believed that "We may see the overall meaning of art change profoundly - from being an end to being a means, from holding out a promise of perfection in some other realm to demonstrating a way f living meaningfully in this one."" p23
QUESTIONS:
Can we expand upon the definition of "reparative knowing" (Kester in response to Bishop p8)? I want to know more about what Kester/Sedgwick mean when using this term.
Eric framed my questions about aesthetics beautifully: "What is the role of aesthetics in social practice? Is the possible impact diluted with de-authored organizing? How the work that Claire Bishop praises effect change and for who?"
In response to my Bishop quote ("His [Kester] righteous aversion to authorship can only lead to the end of provocative art and thinking."). In your experience, in what ways could this be true? And not true?
Our relationship to technology has changed dramatically in the last seven years (since 2010 when Labofii produced their manual), the most notable transformation is our relationship to social media and disembodiment. Labofii states that our own body is "the eco-system you know best." Do you think this is true?
"What kind of relationships can you (re)perform in moments of courage?" (question taken from A Users Guide to the Impossible, p40)
This comment has been removed by the author.
Delete1. Following the User’s Guide to Demanding the Impossible, what are some subtle ways we can make subversive, creative interventions in the most routine and mundane parts of our lives? And with what mediums, which might be so taken for granted to as not even occur to us?
ReplyDelete2. In her initial article, Claire Bishop mentions the construct of “real people,” meaning those who are not the artist or the artist’s friends or other artists. This is a fascinating distinction to draw – isn’t everyone a “real” person? This reminds me of a concept in Buddhism, where the attachment to self - even manifested in state of harsh self-judgment – indicates an attachment to ego, in thinking yourself different from anyone else. How and why do these artists see a demarcation between themselves and others?
3. Is there a place for the “shock” of Dada and Surrealism, and for the “authorial presence,” in meaningful social engaged art? Where is the balance?
“Kester’s position adds up to a familiar summary of the intellectual trends inaugurated by identity politics: respect for the other, recognition of difference, protection of fundamental liberties, and an inflexible mode of political correctness. As such, it also constitutes a rejection of any art that might offend or trouble its audience…”
(Bishop, pg. 4)
“Take up residence in the thing you will transform, flow with it until your relationship becomes seamless. Feel its patterns and networks so deeply that they somehow become you.”
-User’s Guide (pg. 13)
“…we know that to limit demands to what seems ‘realistic’ is a guaranteed way of reducing what is possible.”
-User’s Guide (pg. 56)
Really great selections! So many quotes!
ReplyDeleteBishop--
“If the aesthetic is dangerous, isn't that all the more reason it should be interrogated?”
“And this may explain, to some degree, why socially engaged art has been largely exempt from art criticism. Emphasis is shifted away from the disruptive specificity of a given work and onto a generalized set of moral precepts.”
“Collins also provides a commentary on globalization that is considerably more nuanced than most activist-oriented political art.”
Kester
“However, activist work triggers a kind of sacrificial response for Bishop, as if to even acknowledge this work as "art" somehow threatens the legitimacy of the practices that she does support.”
Labofii--
Page 4
“This is the art that does not show the world to us, but changes it. This art of social movement has its own secret history of rebellious performances, subtle images, insurrectionary inventions, and seductive sounds. Our challenge today is not only to remember (literally - put back together) this secret history of art, but to discover and create tendencies in the present which provide alternative paths out of the current crisis.”
Page 16
Once you know your material and place... it’s time to escape. Everything begins with a leap. Not desertion as retreat, but as engagement. If you’re opposed to the logic of turning art or education into a market, you are already opposed to yourself as de ned by that logic: you are not the artist, student or worker that capital needs. This means you have already begun to abolish yourself.
QUESTIONS:
Does it make sense to have this sense of the ideal in social practice art, or deeming one project better than the other? If the artist is coming from being interested in social fabric, can’t that be the space of critique?
What is required to produce ourselves and not the things that enslave us?
With all of these successes of creative strategies mentioned in this piece, what is the danger of not including them in the art historical critical context that has existed before? Or can there be a new set of terms?
“The artist should renounce authorial presence in favor of allowing participants to speak through him or her. This self-sacrifice is accompanied by the idea that art should extract itself from the “useless” domain of the aesthetic and be fused with social praxis.” Bishop
ReplyDelete“They (Mujeres Creando), like many art-activists, know that the future isn’t out there, waiting to arrive like an apocalyptic railroad train. It’s something we make now, in the present – and responsibility for the present is the only serious responsibility for the future.” Users Guide, 22
“What are the machines you work with?” Users Guide, 28
Questions:
Yes, what are the machines you work with? Do you create your own machines?
Can Time-Based-Arts be considered socially engaging, created in the present to see the future?
In renouncing authorial presence, does the artist give into the idea of self-sacrifice for the benefit social engagement? Or is this a lack of taking responsibility?
Claire Bishop & G. Kester - Social Turn
ReplyDelete“This emphasis on process over product (i.e., means over ends) is justified as oppositional to capitalism's predilection for the contrary.” (p.2)
“a political work of art disrupts the relationship among the visible, the sayable, and the thinkable without having to use the terms of a message as a vehicle. It transmits meanings in the form of a rupture, rather than simply giving us an "awareness" of the state of the world. As he writes in The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, (Continuum, 2004): "Suitable political art would ensure, at one and the same time, the production of a double effect: the readability of a political signification and a sensible or perceptual shock caused, conversely, by the uncanny, by that which resists signification". (p. 9)
How do you react to this association of social practice with the avant-garde? How does this undermine and reassign social practice to the historically hierarchical nature of art?
A User's Guide to the Impossible:
"This kind of culture brings us together rather than separates us, it allows us to find each other amongst the ruins...This is the art that does not show the world to us, but changes it. The art of social movement has its own secret history of rebellious performances, subtle images, insurrectionary inventions and seductive sounds" (p.4)
The suggestion seems to be not that "Art is useless when it is not ultimately used to make profit" (p. 2), but when it ultimately is. What meaning can or does art retain even when it is solid as a commodity? Does art have the ability to transcend influences of capitalism? If so how? why is it able to?
What role does insurrection play in social practice? Does or How can anti-social actions or conflict lead to stronger community connections and future collaboration? What role does conflict and defiance play in the current understanding of social practice as a whole?
-Kayla