The Dark Side of Art’s Social Turn: Towards a Discourse on the Impact of Art’s Use of Social Forms Upon the Social

Abstract

The recent “social turn” in art, in which art favours using forms from social life above its own, has been extensively discussed. Relational Aesthetics by Nicolas Bourriaud, Conversation Pieces and The One and the Many by Grant Kester, essays by Claire Bishop who supplies the term “the Social Turn,” and her recent publication Artificial Hells, are now as important to the field as the art they scrutinise. Ironically, however, when this discussion regards the implications of the “turn”, it habitually addresses the effects of this development from – and for – art’s point of view, overlooking the way in which artists’ inroads into social life may be differently regarded in the social realm. As much as this represents a failure to illuminate a particular area for knowledge, it also signifies a failure to take art’s revalorised commitment to the social to its ethical conclusion: such, from two perspectives, is the “dark side” of art’s social turn. This article seeks to mitigate these oversights. In particular, it looks at art in which an artist undertakes another person’s professional work. Considering the effects of this on those whose practices are appropriated, I propose a consultative approach, involving ethnographic and empathetic modes of address. Consequently, this article does not present an answer to the question it poses, “how do professionals in the social realm see art’s appropriations of their practices?” but rather, a framework for approaching that.

Notes

1. Joseph Beuys quoted in Tisdall (1974, p. 48). Whereas I’m approaching the issue of artists’ capacity to realize a cultural practice as art via a historical-materialist formula (access = artist’s cultural capital in relation to a given practice), Beuys on the other hand, conceptualizes access as having to do with the way in which a given practice is performed. As Harald Lemke notes, for Beuys, ‘The preparation of food does not become “art” because the meal is made by a professional cook – a “culinary artist” – but rather because the individual preparing the food becomes creative and engages in a life-artistic activity’ (Lemke 2007, p. 63). In fact, for Beuys, being a professional may even stifle the creative expression of that profession’s practice.

2. See http://www.sfmoma.org/exhib_events/events/1246#ixzz24eKtFywE%20San%20Francisco%20Museum%20of%20Modern%20Art (accessed 13 September 2012).

3. See Annemarie Sauzeau Alighiero Boetti’s One Hotel http://www.hatjecantz.de/controller.php?cmd=detail&titzif=00002874&lang=en (accessed 13 September 2012).

4. Nor is this inflection covered by the clause that succeeds the passage quoted whereby Bourriaud argues that the artist ‘aims to set up a certain ambiguity, within the space of his activity, between the utilitarian function of the objects he is presenting, and their aesthetic function’ (Bourriaud 2002, p. 25).

5. See http://www.superfictions.com/encyc/entries/ingold.html (accessed 13 September 2012).

6. For examples of the ways in which Kester invokes a new mode of criticism for collaborative art-practices which he never implements, see the following passages in The One and the Many: 10–11; 81–83.

7. It’s interesting that Bishop quotes from Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Author as Producer’ in an earlier article ‘Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics’ (Bishop 2004), but not his famous assertion: ‘the tendency of a literary work can only be politically correct if it is also literarily correct. That is to say that the politically correct tendency includes a literary tendency’ (Benjamin 1982: 213–214).

8. The phrase describing Rancière’s philosophy of art and politics is, however, Kester’s (Kester 2011, p. 60).

9. The knowledge that it draws upon comes in a published form, with all that this implies (the published ‘speaker’s’ access to the means of production etc).

10. From now on the term ‘art world’ is used as a short-hand for ‘art worlds’.

11. Meecham and Sheldon actually give it as: ‘Everything the artists spits out is art’ – adding an ‘out’ that does not appear in the much more frequent, non-academic citations.

12. For a more detailed discussion of Lingner’s text and its application to the Danish art collective Superflex’s ‘Supergas’ project, see M A Francis ‘Dirty Work: Art Beyond Autonomy’ Journal of Visual Art Practice 6.1.

13. See for example her 1976 work involving 300 maintenance staff at a Manhattan Bank, I Make Maintenance Art One Hour Every Day - http://www.greenmuseum.org/c/aen/Issues/ukeles.php

14. http://comment.ofqual.gov.uk/gcse-reform/ (accessed 13 September 2012).

15. See for example the Fine Art: Critical Practice BA (Hons) course at the University of Brighton, in which second year students undertake an ‘artist’s placement’ supported by a programme of theoretical and historical study.