Social practice (art)

For the community service, see social artistry.

Social practice or socially engaged practice[1] in the arts focuses on community engagement through a range of art media, human interaction and social discourse.[2] While the term social practice has been used in the social sciences to refer to a fundamental property of human interaction, it has also been used to describe community-based arts practices such as relational aesthetics,[3][4] new genre public art,[5] socially engaged art,[6] dialogical art,[6] participatory art,[7] and ecosocial immersionism.[8]

Social practice work focuses on the interaction between the audience, social systems, and the artist or artwork through aesthetics, ethics, collaboration, methodology, debate, media strategies, and social activism.[9] Because people and their relationships form the medium of social practice works – rather than a particular process of production – social engagement is not only a part of a work’s organization, execution, or continuation, but also an aesthetic in itself: of interaction and development.[10]

Social practice aims to create social and/or political change through collaboration with individuals, communities, and institutions in the creation of participatory art.[11] In the case of the Brooklyn Immersionists, who lived and worked in a toxic industrial area of north Brooklyn, both social and ecological engagement became important, leading to new theories of ecosocial subjectivity.[12]

Artists working in social practice co-create their work with a specific audience or propose critical interventions within existing social systems to expose hierarchies or exchanges, inspire debate, or catalyze social exchange.[13] There is a large overlap between social practice and pedagogy.[14] Social interaction inspires, drives, or, in some instances, completes a project.[15] The discipline values the process of a work over any finished product or object.[2]

Although projects may incorporate traditional studio media, they are realized in a variety of visual or social forms (depending on variable contexts and participant demographics) such as performance, social activism, or mobilizing communities towards a common goal.[16] The diversity of approaches pose specific challenges for documenting social practice work, as the aesthetic of human interaction changes rapidly and involves many people simultaneously. Consequently, images or video can fail to capture the engagement and interactions that take place during a project.[7]

  1. ^ "Community art".
  2. ^ a b Helguera, Pablo (2012). Education for Socially Engaged Art. New York: Jorge Pinto Books. p. 22.
  3. ^ Bourriaud, Nicolas, Relational Aesthetics, 1998
  4. ^ Bishop, Claire, “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics,” October Magazine, no. 110, 2004
  5. ^ abreu, manuel arturo, We Need to Talk About Social Practice, artpractical.com, 6 March 2019
  6. ^ a b Kester, Grant, “Conversation Pieces: The Role of Dialogue in Socially Engaged Art,” Theory in Contemporary Art Since 1985, 2005
  7. ^ a b Bishop, Claire (2012). Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the politics of Spectatorship. New York: Verso Books.
  8. ^ The Williamsburg Avant-Garde: Experimental Music and Sound on the Brooklyn Waterfront by Cisco Bradley, Duke University Press, 2023, p. 27
  9. ^ "Reviews In Cultural Theory". Reviewsinculture.com.
  10. ^ Finkelpearl, Tom (2012). What we Made: conversations on art and social cooperation. Durham: Duke University Press. p. 132.
  11. ^ "Collaboration is Where the Art of Social Practice Begins | ArtJob". Archived from the original on 2014-10-06. Retrieved 2014-09-19.
  12. ^ Introduction by Jonathan Fineberg to the catalogue for the exhibition, Out of Town: The Williamsburg Paradigm, curated by Fineberg for the Krannert Art Museum (University of Illinois, 1992).
  13. ^ "Social Practice Workshop". California College of the Arts. Retrieved September 18, 2014.
  14. ^ "After OWS: Social Practice Art, Abstraction, and the Limits of the Social - Journal #31 January 2012 - e-flux". E-flux.com. Retrieved 15 February 2019.
  15. ^ "Social Practice Art's identity crisis". Badatsports.com.
  16. ^ Davis, Ben. "A critique of social practice art - International Socialist Review". isreview.org.