Friday, November 3, 2017

Readings Week 7 (Michael)

Pablo

Shannon Jackson compares and contrasts SEA projects in her study Socia Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics, Juxtaposing the community art project Touchable Stories (Begun 1996), by Shannon Flattery, Which seeks to help “individual communities define their own voice,” the artist says, and the work of Santiago Sierra, who pays workers from disadvantaged and marginalized groups to do demeaning tasks.*

* Shannon Jackson, Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics (London: Routledge, 2011), p. 43.
+THIS is not meant to be a critique of community art, which, like all forms of art, exists in more and less successful iterations. Not is it a critique of Sierra’s practice. The examples are presented merely to illustrate the spectrum along which collaboration and confrontation operate.

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This points to  larger unresolved issue: Does SEA, by definition, have particular goals when it comes to engaging a community?

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Many problems in community projects are due to unrealistic goals in relation to the expected time investment. A SEA project can make particularly great demands of time and effort on th artist--demands that are usually at odds with the time constraints posed by biennials and other international art events , let alone the pressure for product and near-immediate gratification from the art market.


Pg 63 (continued from statement on 62)

Ashford: “In 1983, Raymond Bonner and Susan Meiselas got the art world to acknowledge tat El Salvador was ucked up. At the New York Times, they made a leap from journalistic practice to changing foreign policy. Professional lives like this that are truly non- or cross-disciplinary rarely exist anymore.”

Question: Like the fate of the downfall of investigative journalism within the larger culture of news media, is the practice of Socially Engaged Art suffering at the behest of art institutions?

Felshin: For the most part, I don’t believe that artists think they need to be careful, but my own experience is that when I propose a political exhibition at Wesleyan, it is looked at carefully in advance And sometimes the programs that accompany it are scrutinized and criticized. Universities are being very careful these days And I think that some of this has to do with corporate influence and funding.

Ewald: People are scared to lose their funders, so self-censorship comes in. Even if they're working outside of the art practice, Most everyone wants to be part of the art word There’s a flowering of people working with kids in photography, and where are those photographs sold? Sotheby’s, for example.

Felshin: During the late- 1980’s recession, it didn’t look good for corporations to buy artwork, so they started funding education projects, and this was true in the 1990’s as well. Funding priorities can drive what happens, what is produced, the programs that are initiated. ‘If you do this, w’ll pay for it.’ And it’s better for their image to fund things that involve the community.

Question: Recently during discourse about my work many professed the nature of it all being both confusing and problematic. That said, is not the nature of how art is being funded and where it's being exhibited and to whom often if not almost always problematic in some way? Is it not inherent in art, SEA especially, that there will be some aspect that's considered problematic?

Ashford: My dear friend Steve Kurtz has written about the Web and the growing activist amateurism. The international response to his arrest is an example of its collaborative capacity. His arrest may be a sign of how threatening the idea of artist as a reprofessionalized, activist amature may be.

Question: Given the possibility for SEA to be hyper politicized, is the nature of this work being censored and sabotaged before it can truly grow into its most powerful manifestation? Is this work being censored and muddled with by artists, creators, collaborators, and art institutions by both trying to frame the nature of it, and by subjecting it to critique and standards pre established by methods of art making that indirectly gave way to SEA but are ultimately inherently different?

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