Notes on The Social Turn: Collaboration and its Discontents by Claire Bishop, Artforum February 2006
Catalogue of projects that have come out of the recent surge of collective and community art projects. Weaker profile in the art world than individual projects and harder to market as more likely to be a one off event or performance. Also occupy an “increasingly conspicuous presence in the public centre”.
An increase of yearly shows has contributed to this increase, as commissions are often made here. Addresses sites as social rather than formal. “The intersubjective space created through these projects becomes the focus—and medium—of artistic investigation.”
“This expanded field of relational practices currently goes by a variety of names: socially engaged art, community-based art, experimental communities, dialogic art, littoral art, participatory, interventionist, research-based, or collaborative art.” More interested in the rewards of collaborative activity. Working with or establishing new communities. Rise was inline with postmodernism is early 1900’s. “when the fall of Communism deprived the Left of the last vestiges of the revolution that had once linked political and aesthetic radicalism.”
Social collaboration as an extension of own practise with no distinction between work inside the gallery and outside the gallery.
“This mixed panorama of socially collaborative work arguably forms what avant-garde we have today: artists using social situations to produce dematerialized, antimarket, politically engaged projects that carry on the modernist call to blur art and life. “
“art is the place that produces a specific sociability,”
Look at Grant H. Kester- Conversation pieces: Community and communication in Modern Art, 2004.
Art can for a community rehumanize when they have been “.”
Urgency for this community and dismantlement of capitalist structures means that community art is often perceived as a resistance. No social art practise is failed as it strengthens the social bond. New labour has policies similar to that of socially engaged art. However the government may prioritize social effect over considerations of artistic quality.
Is there ground where art that is all good as benefiting the community and then art that reinforces art autonomy focusing on aesthetics, can meet.
“The social turn in contemporary art has prompted an ethical turn in art criticism” artists are judged on processes now and judged harshly on there interaction and communication with the community as to avoid exploitation. Process over product opposes capitalism.
“Accusations of mastery and egocentrism are leveled at artists who work with participants to realize a project instead of allowing it to emerge through consensual.
Oda Projesi base their success on dynamic and sustained relationships with no aesthetic considerations. They consider aesthetic a word that should not be brought into discussion. But if aesthetics is dangerous then maybe it needs to be discussed.
Comparison of Hirschhorn's project and Oda projesi project; Hirschorns partispiants were paid and had a role of executor and created “social porography”, whereas Oda Projesi worked with people in their immediate environment. Lind’s comparison.
Oda projesi’s work makes dialogue into a medium and dematerialized a project into a social process. Lind’s criticism is based on ethical judgements.
Lippard The Lure of the Local: Senses of Place in a Multicentred Society (1997) presents 8 point “Place ethic” for artists who work with communities.
Kester’s conversation Pieces presents the artist as not holding creative mastestry. With work we must weigh the presentation and representation of the artist's good intentions. A lot of the time the intentions of community work is valued over the works conceptual significance. Reason why socially engaged art is 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.”
Kester argues art has shifted towards “discursive exchange and negotiation”. Believes communication is an aesthetic form. Believes social art projects are successful if it works on the level of social intervention even if it's weak on the level of art. Rejects any art that may trouble the audience. Rejects Dada and surrealism as its aim was to shock the world and that the artist is the enlightened one. Bishop argues that this shock element can be crucial elements to an art piece and essential for gaining new perspectives. Some artists think the aesthetic and social/political together, rather than subsuming both with the ethical.
“We can only ever have limited access to others’ emotional and social experiences, and the opacity of this knowledge obstructs any analysis founded on such assumptions.” Bishop while commenting on Zmijewski’s performance of death children singing. Limited access as cant understand the sign language or understand how it feels to sing and not know what you sound like.
“THE DISCURSIVE CRITERIA of socially engaged art are, at present, drawn from a tacit analogy between anticapitalism and the Christian “good soul.”” “The artist should renounce authorial presence in favor of allowing participants to speak through him or her.” This should be fused with the aesthetic. Art autonomy and heteronomy( its blurring of life and art) is in question meaning that the aesthetic can't be ignored. Arts ability to think of this contradiction. Art in the social change.
“The best collaborative practices of the past ten years address this contradictory pull between autonomy and social intervention, and reflect on this antinomy both in the structure of the work and in the conditions of its reception.”