on the aesthetics of social practice

” the social turn: collaboration and its discontents ”
artforum, february 2006, pp 179 – 185

by claire bishop :

This mixed panorama of socially collaborative work arguably forms what avant-garde we have today: artists using social situations to produce dematerialized, antimarket, politically engaged projects that carry on the modernist call to blur art and life. (…) For Grant H. Kester, in another key text, Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art (2004), art is uniquely placed to counter a world in which “we are reduced to an atomized pseudocommunity of consumers, our sensibilities dulled by spectacle and repetition.” For these and other supporters of socially engaged art, the creative energy of participatory practices rehumanizes – or at least de-alienates – a society rendered numb and fragmented by the repressive instrumentality of capitalism. But the urgency of this political task has led to a situation in which such collaborative practices are automatically perceived to be equally important artistic gestures of resistance: There can be no failed, unsuccessful, unresolved, or boring works of collaborative art because all are equally essential to the task of strengthening the social bond. While I am broadly sympathetic to that ambition, I would argue that it is also crucial to discuss, analyze, and compare such work critically as art.

read the full article online here

( including a critical response by grant kester
and bishop’s subsequent reply )

courtesy of one day sculpture new zealand.