Socially Engaged Art and Its Pedagogy of Citizenship

Abstract

The complacent insularity of individualism provides the background against which the convivial performativity of art is conceptualized as acts of citizenship in this article. The alienated sculptural figures and figurations of Alberto Giacometti’s Piazza are considered germane in addressing the self-centered, collective obsession with socially mediated systems and technologies that prompt and perpetuate an ideology of individualism and its indifference toward socially engaged practices of art, pedagogy, and civic responsibility. As counterpoint to Herbert Marcuse’s notion of one-dimensionality and Pierre Bourdieu’s habitus, public artist Lonnie Graham’s community-based, cross-continental subsistent agricultural collaborations in the African/American Garden Project exemplify the convivial generosity of Mikhail Bakhtin’s answerability—a contingent and aleatory process of co-creation that is consistent with the interdependent citizenship of socially engaged art and its education.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ Concerned about similar oppressive circumstances, philosopher Arendt (2018) warned of the persecutory investigations of the House Committee on Un-American Activities in the 1950s that threatened the expropriation of U.S. citizens suspected of disloyalty and subversion, and denial of asylum in the US for refugees escaping tyrannical regimes. She referred to such peoples’ statelessness as a “deprivation of citizenship as punishment.… As long as mankind [sic] is nationally and territorially organized in states, a stateless person is not simply expelled from one country, native or adopted, but from all countries—none being obliged to receive and naturalize him[her]—which means that [s]he is actually expelled from humanity” (p. 99).

² Giacometti endured such migratory injustice during the Nazi occupation of France in 1941. Having traveled from Paris to Geneva to visit his mother, he was denied permission to reenter France. Unable to return to his home and studio, he lodged and worked in a Geneva hotel room where “he continued to reduce the size of his plaster sculptures, scraping them down to a height of mere inches” (Fontanella & Grenier, 2018).

³ In What Is Philosophy?, philosophers Deleuze and Guattari (1994) characterized the interstitial process of concept production in philosophy as immanent pedagogy—a “becoming that involves its relationship with [other] concepts situated on the same plane… linked up with each other, support one another, coordinate their contours, articulate their respective problems, and belong to the same philosophy, even if they have different histories… having a finite number of components, every concept will branch off toward other concepts that are differently composed but that constitute other regions of the same plane, answer to problems that can be connected to each other, and participate in a co-creation” (p. 18). In this writing, pedagogy is considered that which emanates from the transversal, co-creative process of conceptualization described by Deleuze and Guattari (1994), which is homologous with the dialogical encounters, alliances, and emanations of socially engaged art practice and its education.

⁴ About such artist-to-viewer bestowal, curator Jacob (2005) wrote: “In the social contract that is the art experience, the audience member, or viewer, is a recipient of what the artist makes: the artist gives, the audience receives” (p. 3).

⁵ Tech companies such as Facebook, Twitter, and Google’s YouTube are not beyond reproach, considering, as New York Times tech opinion columnist Swisher (2018) wrote: “They have mutated human communication, so that connecting people has too often become about pitting them against one another, and turbocharged that discord to an unprecedented and damaging volume. They have weaponized social media… the First Amendment… civic discourse… and they have weaponized, most of all, politics… and we are all paying the price” (subtitle and para. 8–9).

⁶ Social theorist Hauser (1999) characterized the public sphere as a discursive space where individuals discuss topics of mutual interest and as the “locus of emergence for rhetorically salient meanings… [based on] the rhetorical norm of reasonableness [rather than] critical rationality” (p. 81).

⁷ Unlike the repetitive and mechanical behaviors of habit, habitus dispositions are latent, instinctual, and require practical reason; instrumentalist in approach, they entail competence and means-to-end achievements. According to sociologist Nick Crossley (2013), “Habitus… suggests ‘acquired ability’ rather than ‘repetitive faculties’… it suggests ‘practical reason’. To acquire habitus is to acquire means of knowing, handling and dealing with the world” (p. 139).

⁸ The high-speed-manifold connectivity of the internet combined with the reductive facilitations of social media attenuate the probability of empathic immersion occurring, thus making this characterization of a two-person dialogue problematic.

⁹ The creativity of aesthetic citizenship should not be confused with neoliberal goals that organize and measure citizenship according to academic, institutional, and corporate assessments but with the relational and ideational potentialities of interdependent aleatory encounter (White, 2008, p. 45).

¹⁰ Nielsen (2002) characterized answerability’s potentiality in the following way: “Two perspectives together can raise a broader range of research questions into the ethics of transculturalism than either can separately” (p. 2).

¹¹ The first and second components, entitled Dora’s Room and At My Father’s Table, respectively, consisted of gallery installations containing photographs and memorabilia of Graham’s family history. Exhibiting his personal history through The Spirit House Project is characteristic of Graham reaching out to the public to initiate conversations between himself and others, talking to and with each other a way that “enriches all of our lives and not just the artist’s own and makes us aware of who we are as a people” (Dyer, 1999, para. 6).

¹² In 2006, Graham collaborated with the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia in presenting A Conversation at the Table, where leaders from the city’s arts organizations and 50 participating artists, craftspeople, and community members gathered around a 16-foot handcrafted Ghanaian Sapele wood table where they explored, exhibited, and performed public artworks as individuals and groups that addressed community-based art in terms of mind, body, and spirit (Fabric Workshop and Museum, 2006).

¹³ The Golden Triangle is the business and cultural center of the city of Pittsburgh.

¹⁴ Such dynamic encounters and alliances between and among multiple human and nonhuman entities (actors) are suggestive of philosopher-sociologist Bruno Latour’s (2005) actor-network theory (ANT)—namely, its constitutive capture of relational connections before they are conformed to a priori assumptions of social engagement (p. 178). While ethically significant, the capture of ANT’s interdependent sociality, and its aim toward specific outcomes, remains problematic insofar as it lacks the oppositional force of aesthetic criticality that Bishop (2012) has effectively argued resists instrumentalization.