There has been a significant increase in critical inquiry devoted to dialogic, participatory, co-produced aesthetic experience in current art practices. Miwon Kwon, Grant Kester and Claire Bishop have published important texts that articulate frameworks for these practices; however, there is infrequent consensus on language and criteria to assess artwork that focuses on dialogue as aesthetic encounter. Tom Finkelpearl's What We Made: Conversations on Art and Social Cooperation examines dialogue as an impetus that includes overlooked voices to the discourse.
Presenting a historical framework for cooperative art in the United States, the text traces its lineage from the social movements of the 1960s, to the radical pedagogy of Joseph Beuys, to relational aesthetics championed by Nicolas Bourriaud, Finkelpearl demonstrates that collaborative practices are not ahistorical but draw from a rich tradition of collective action. The book is a series of 15 conversations on different topics related to cooperative art. Driven by questions, the conversations develop a nuanced investigation balancing theory with practice of work where participants are equal authors.
What We Made is a companion to Finkelpearl's Dialogues in Public Art (2000). It provides a platform for artists to participate in conversations about their experiences, often working cooperatively with colleagues from related fields including social policy, architecture, art history, urban planning, and new media. It distinguishes works that provide an audience with a “scripted encounter” (like Paul Ramirez Jonas' Key to the City) and those created in “dialogical collaboration” such as The Living Museum, created by Bolek Greczynski with the patients at a Queens psychiatric hospital (p. 1). A resonant conversation with Gregg M. Horowitz and Daniel Joseph Martinez examines the artist's watershed project in Culture in Action in Chicago, 1993. This is followed by an interview with Naomi Beckwith, who was a teenage participant in Mark Dion's Chicago Urban Ecology Action Group in Culture in Action. The inclusion of Beckwith's perspective is a deft explication of how often the voices of participants are excluded from discourse on socially cooperative art.
If he does not privilege one method over the other, Finkelpearl is interested in co-authored projects represented in the book's collective and pluralistic title. Yet a problem in discussing such practices is divergent vocabulary. Examining “dialogical,” “social practice,” “social engagement,” and “social collaboration,” Finkelpearl ultimately advances “social cooperation.”
He concludes by positing pragmatism expressed in the philosophy of John Dewey as a useful framework for understanding socially cooperative art, contending that cooperative artists' commitment to shared action has an antecedent in pragmatists' privileging of engagement over academic philosophy. What We Made's strength is derived from its vibrant conversations, balancing the voices of such well-known artists as Tania Bruguera, Rick Lowe, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, along with urban planners, educators, philosophers, political scientists, and participants to create an interdisciplinary dialogue of “more continuity than dissonance” (p. 51). Finkelpearl's dialogue-based approach represents the dynamic and generative character of cooperative art.
© 2014, Sierra Rooney