I claim socially engaged art is DEAD. (Whether it ever lived or even existed beyond a category description is, of course, another question.) The Art World is DEAD. So, when the Art World subsumes the category description “socially engaged art” (and “social practice” and many more, for that matter) it must KILL the category description – the words.
Practice (the doing that arises from being) is beyond names, titles, descriptors, signs and signifiers. Attempts to categorise and measure the individual doing that arises from individual being (whether in the form of individual or group or culture-wide practice) always impose falsely limiting frameworks upon our innumerable acts of individual living; are always reductionist. Mapping, naming and measuring things (including practices) are not only acts of reductionism but also the first steps to empire and colonisation. Divide and rule. Dominate, exploit, displace, destroy. The aim of this (capitalist) game is to conquer everything whilst retaining individual words, emptied of their original meanings: meaningless words.
So, when I playfully suggest that socially engaged art is DEAD, I mean the words have been subsumed then repurposed by the Art World; by the Establishment. This is not new. THEY have always appropriated radical art practices in this way. (Was socially engaged art ever really radical anyway?) THEY steal the words and depoliticise the practice. THEY (revealing their total uncreativeness and dependency upon artists) institutionalise and sanitise EVERYTHING. Culturally, that is the role of Arts and Cultural institutions; their duty. THEY do it very well, even encouraging cohorts of new devotees who skip happily along, “delivering” the newly appropriated and totally depoliticised practices as commanded. (Of course, depoliticisation is one of the most politically aggressive acts possible – a negation of our rights, our freedoms.) THEY play by the rules of capitalism. WE must never forget this. Arts and Cultural institutions, with or without their Creative Industries branding, are part of the capitalist system.
Socially engaged art was said to be anti-institutional, politically motivated and subversive. It was, for a long time, dismissed as poor quality art or even ‘not-art’. Then suddenly it became BIG NEWS. Everyone’s socially engaged nowadays, aren’t they? Why? Socially engaged art, like community arts and many forms of avant-garde practice, left itself wide open to appropriation. (Perhaps, many in the field secretly wanted to be accepted by the Art World?) It expanded to include more and more interpretations. It did not define itself as a movement. It allowed itself to be courted by the same Art World that once despised it. It celebrated its recognition and celebrated the creation of ‘poster boys (and girls?) for socially engaged art’. It bought into government agendas like wellbeing, inclusion and education. It wanted a slice of arts funding. In short, it was bought. The writing was on the wall for socially engaged art for a long time. Its death should come as little surprise.
DEATH: Socially engaged art created increasingly expensive and exclusive conferences culminating in outrage by many grassroots practitioners illustrated, for example, in this excellent recent article responding to OPEN ENGAGEMENT 2016 which claimed to focus on ‘power’ whilst actually reproducing hierarchies of power within the field.
DEATH: Socially engaged art wins the 2015 Turner Prize. (Are Assemble socially engaged artists anyway?) Tate describe Assemble as ‘a perfect example of artists using socially engaged practise because they collaborate with residents to improve their local area’ in their glossary of art terms. I wrote about the not so collaborative commissioning of Assemble recently.
DEATH: (Linked to the point above.) Tate describe socially engaged art as ‘art that is collaborative, often participatory and involves people as the medium or material of the work’! They go on to say that the practice can ‘often be organised as the result of an outreach or education program’! They mention activism but limit the intentionality to helping a ‘community work towards a common goal, raise awareness and encourage conversation around issues, or perhaps to improve their physical or psychological conditions’. DEPOLITICISED and INSTITUTIONALISED.
DEATH: Arts Council England’s Creative People and Places initiatives now often claim to work with socially engaged art/ practice (in place of the now virtually buried ‘participatory arts’).
DEATH: Guggenheim Museum announce a new Social Practice Art initiative funded with a significant award from the Edmond de Rothschild Foundations (the philanthropic arm of the international private banker with some very unsavoury global investments). Of course, the Guggenheim themselves are widely recognised as one of the major arts institutions of the 1% as well as abusing the rights of workers employed to build its new museum in Abu Dhabi.
DEATH: Socially engaged artists are employed at the service of housing associations intent on social cleansing and gentrification. For example, here at Balfron Tower, London in this excellent article by Balfron Social Club.
I could go on. Perhaps you would like to suggest your own causes of the death of socially engaged art?
What does this mean for radical social praxis, activist art practices, socially and politically targeted interventionist art? Nothing. This practice continues as normal. In fact, it is growing. The tedious sublimation of radical practice pushes the practice forward; strengthens its resolve. THEY are always playing catch up.
Is it time for a new radical avant-garde?
It is time, I argue, that we stand against the Art World and wider Establishment status quos and expose their intricate links to neoliberalism and neo-colonialism whenever and wherever we find them! In leading member of the Situationist International Raoul Vaneigem’s words, The Revolution of Everyday Life.
More on the growth of anti-institutional, activist and revolutionary art practices soon…
colouring in culture 
On the edge of my seat for the next installment; up the revolution!
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Thanks Barbara!
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As ever, this is good provocative stuff, Stephen, which I hugely enjoy reading. Thanks for writing it 🙂 However, as someone who – from your perspective – is ‘part’ of this ‘uncreative’ establishment, there are some things I don’t recognise. I completely buy into the idea of struggle to preserve forms of Art which are broadly emancipatory, as opposed to more ‘instrumentalised’ versions of Art making which help to preserve a narrow and elitist world view of what counts as aesthetic experience. No problem there. For me, rather than just taking pot shots at it, the challenge is how to influence institutionalised discourse, and change the attitude of institutions toward the policy frameworks they feel obliged to inhabit.
Cultural institutions are funded on the back of cultural policy which seeks to preserve canonised versions of Art, and is willing to accept uncritical ‘evidence’ of the value of doing so. ‘It’s good because we like it, and we like it because it’s good’ etc. There’s little incentive for cultural institutions to do anything other than satisfy ACE requirements about ‘Great Art’ blah blah blah, so while institutions might comply with this policy framework for pragmatic purposes, it’s also at the level of policy where change needs to happen. Institutions do have a role to play in this, by purposefully developing programmes which oppose the narrow frameworks which policy requires of them, but it’s very easy for them not to. It doesn’t mean we shouldn’t want them to, and maybe reinforcing an ‘us’ and ‘them’ mindset about it also serves to reinforce the distinctions between practices, rather than ‘blurring’ or contesting them.
As someone within the kind of institution you criticise, I’m personally never really sure whether I’m part of the problem or part of the solution, and it’s often an uncomfortable space to inhabit – in my head, as well as in daily professional life. However, the very existence of this tension helps me to realise that this is where the possibility for change exists. It drives me to be more critical of my own practice, and I think it’s the same kind of ‘conflicted’ space that institutions can inhabit – they just need to be open to those levels of discomfort. Rather than writing institutions off altogether, I think it’s worth remembering that institutions are composed of individuals, and each individual has the capacity to be self-critical.
I accept that any kind of hegemonic process is always going to feel like a dilution of what constitutes the ‘essence’ of ‘outsider’ practice, but it also opens up new horizons for wider dissent, as your writing shows. Far from being dead, the kind of discourse facilitated on the margins is what keeps Art alive.
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Hi Dave and thanks for your thoughtful comment.
I understand your perspectives and I am a firm believer that the margins are indeed where dissent and radical action ferments and emanates from. I must be clear that I’m not writing institutions off: far from it. I am questioning their ability and desire to challenge a system that often subtly enforces compliance (to one degree or another) and that stifles (even mild forms of) dissent. I accept that it is theoretically possible for institutions (and individuals working within institutions – particularly senior individuals) to advocate for and even implement minor changes but I think that, in practice, this is not what commonly happens. There are just too many celebrations of compliance and too much fear of speaking out within institutions.
I am involved within the policy field myself and understand how to influence cultural policy. Again, it’s not quite as easy as you may suggest. Certainly, only large institutions have any real chance of calling for change and, to be honest, I’m not sure they want change. The status quo is THEIR status quo. Cultural policy is deeply political. It’s an important tool of state control (soft form).
My approach is then very much based around notions of “outsider-in” and “insider-out”: Guerrilla tactics. I do hope that, as to be fair you have done here, more people (and even organisations) speak out and call for real change and a much more creatively free and truly democratic way of incorporating art and culture of all kinds (not just the state-sanctioned forms) and of supporting artists who are struggling to make a living. All of these things were, of course, inevitable side-effects of the division of labour, of capitalism and now neoliberalism.
I call for increased opposition of institutions not their (total) overthrow. I hope that, as you perhaps suggest, one day some institutions might oppose arts policy and the technocratic, domineering cultural institutional system in radically subversive ways.
Here’s to a hopeful and just future for everyone, not just the privileged few!
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Yes, opposition ‘of’ institutions and ‘within’ them. Because they’re built and sustained on particular political ideas about ‘culture’, they often embody within the fabric of their physical spaces the negation of the thing they were supposedly set up to do. I don’t necessarily think of ‘opposition’ in terms of razing everything to the ground, but more in terms of what the ‘opposite’ of what we currently have would be. What if policy had funded the ‘opposite’ of what it has done for the last twenty years? What would our cultural landscape look like if every penny invested in cultural infrastructure had been invested in grass roots movements – studios, venues, artist networks? That really ought to be what drives policy – by reminding ourselves – Jim Bowen style – of what we ‘could have had’.
And yes, I agree about influencing policy – as an individual, I think the only thing I can really influence is the critical rigour I apply to my practice, the truth of my expression, and the quality of relationship I make with those I encounter along the way.
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Thanks Dave. I appreciate your honest and (perhaps to some) controversial thoughts.
I love the notion of “look what we could have had”, if arts and culture was funded primarily at the grassroots rather than almost totally top-down! We could have had a cultural democracy but THEY always sought to (falsely) democratise THEIR culture – elite culture.
As another person mentioned recently: Imagine how many full-time artists could work in a community for the cost of a (medium size) new cultural citadel costing, say £50m up front plus regular funding of say £5m per year thereafter. That approach regenerates at grassroots, rather than creating (another) place for the culturally voracious 4-8% (read elite) plus tourists…
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