110 pages

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Intellect Books - Gretchen Coombs

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110 pages

English

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Description

This new and original book is a creative practice ethnography, which navigates a spectrum where at one end the author works closely with socially engaged artists as part of her ethnographic research, and at the other she tries to find a critical distance to write about their art projects and the institutional structures that support their work, such as art schools and conferences.

Artists increasingly find themselves working in participatory settings where skills in social engagement are as essential as their creative skills. The author was involved in the field of social practices from its early stages and stayed engaged with the primary movers in the field for nearly two decades as a witness, participant and critical observer. Her writing evokes the people and places she discusses, and her writing style is personal and accessible.

Over the course of the book, readers are introduced to artists and their work, and to the key debates and issues facing this fast-growing and emergent field. The author navigates the contradictions and paradoxes of this field of practice through description and analysis and, importantly, gives voice to the artists who are working to make art relevant in times of social and political uncertainty.

The problems addressed by social practices, as well as their contradictions, very much reflect our troubled political global moment. This book is a significant contribution to the field – few people have followed the development of social practices for as long as Coombs, and her dual perspective as an art critic and anthropologist make her ideally placed to describe and evaluate the institutions and practices. While there are many books already in this growing field, the experimental and intensely personal nature of this book sets it apart. It could be a useful teaching tool to generate debate around the tensions and paradoxes inherent in the field of social practices and politically engaged art. Students will appreciate the author’s attempt to convey what it was really like to be there at certain key events and insights gained from direct conversations with the artists, curators and writers shaping the field.

Relevant to academics working in, and students studying, art and social practice, community arts programmes, contemporary anthropology, cultural historians and those with an interest in the sociology of art, protest or activism.

Will appeal to artists, writers and students interested in the history of how social practices developed as a field through its practitioners, discourse and lived experience.

Acknowledgements

A Letter to the Preeminent Feminist Art Critic Lucy Lippard

Introduction: Art and Social Practice

Art & Social Practice: A Constellation of Influences

Encounters

Contemporary Artists (and One Curartor)

Ted Purves

Come Together (Harrell Fletcher)

Jen Delos Reyes

Amy Spiers

Aaron Hughes

Gregory Sholette

Fallen Fruit: Austin Young and David Allen Burns

Chloë Bass

Gabrielle de Vietri

Carol Zou

Astra Taylor

Bek Conroy

Aaron Gach

Marisa Jahn

Nato Thompson

Institutions

California College of the Arts

Otis Public Practice

The Shape of a Conference

Come Together

On and Off Stage

Field Notes

Spectres of Evaluation, Rethinking: Art/Community/Value

Open Engagement: Life/Work

Queens Museum, New York City, May 2014

A Lived Practice

Creative Time Summit: The Curriculum

Open Engagement: Place and Revolution

Creative Time Summit: The Curriculum

Civic Actions: Artists’ Practices Beyond the Museum

Creative Time Summit: The Curriculum

ENGAGE MORE NOW! A Symposium on Artists, Museums, and Publics

Open Engagement: Power

Creative Time Summit: Occupy the Future

College Art Association

Creative Time Summit: Of Homelands and Revolutions

Open Engagement: Sustainability

Denouement

Notes

Sujets

Arts visuels

ART

General

General officer

Social practice

Popular Culture

Informations

Publié par	Intellect Books
Date de parution	29 janvier 2021
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781789383249
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	18 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,1700€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

THE LURE OF THE SOCIAL
First published in the UK in 2021 by
Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK
First published in the USA in 2021 by
Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street,
Chicago, IL 60637, USA
Copyright © 2021 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Copy editor: Newgen KnowledgeWorks
Cover designer: Aleksandra Szumlas and Gretchen Coombs
Cover image: Aleksandra Szumlas and Gretchen Coombs
Production manager: Aimée Bates
Typesetter: Newgen KnowledgeWorks
All images by Gretchen Coombs unless otherwise noted
Print ISBN 978-1-78938-322-5
ePDF ISBN 978-1-78938-323-2
ePUB ISBN 978-1-78938-324-9
To find out about all our publications, please visit our website.
There you can subscribe to our e-newsletter, browse or download our
current catalogue, and buy any titles that are in print.
www.intellectbooks.com
This is a peer-reviewed publication.
THE LURE OF THE SOCIAL
encounters with contemporary artists
Gretchen Coombs

This book is dedicated to the loving memory of Ted Purves.
Contents
Acknowledgements
A Letter to the Preeminent Feminist Art Critic Lucy Lippard
Introduction: Art & Social Practice
Art & Social Practice: A Constellation of Influences
Encounters
Contemporary Artists (and One Curator)
Ted Purves
Come Together (Harrell Fletcher)
Jen Delos Reyes
Amy Spiers
Aaron Hughes
Gregory Sholette
Fallen Fruit: Austin Young and David Allen Burns
Chloë Bass
Gabrielle de Vietri
Carol Zou
Astra Taylor
Bek Conroy
Aaron Gach
Robby Herbst
Marisa Jahn
Nato Thompson
Institutions
California College of the Arts
Otis Public Practice
The Shape of a Conference
Field Notes
Spectres of Evaluation, Rethinking: Art/Community/Value
Open Engagement: Life/Work
A Lived Practice
Creative Time Summit: Stockholm
Open Engagement: Place and Revolution
Creative Time Summit: The Curriculum
Civic Actions: Artists’ Practices Beyond the Museum
Creative Time Summit: The Curriculum
ENGAGE MORE NOW! A Symposium on Artists, Museums, and Publics
Open Engagement: Power
Creative Time Summit: Occupy the Future
College Art Association
Creative Time Summit: Of Homelands and Revolutions
Open Engagement: Sustainability
Denouement
Notes
Acknowledgements
My stellar editor, Jillian Steinhauer, who asked the hard questions, pushed me to clarify, and waited patiently for each section. Susanne Cockrell for her support, comments, and friendship. A special thanks to Karen Fiss and Stephen Duncombe for the invaluable feedback on my manuscript and for talking me through ideas over the years.
The artists who gave their time and feedback: Chloë Bass, Rebecca Conroy, Gabrielle di Vietri, Harrell Fletcher, Fallen Fruit (Austin Young and David Allen Burns), Aaron Gach, Robby Herbst, Aaron Hughes, Marisa Jahn, Suzanne Lacy, Ted Purves, Jen Delos Reyes, Greg Sholette, Amy Spiers, Astra Taylor, Nato Thompson, Carol Zao.
For those who read versions and gave such generous feedback, or just offered their thoughts and helped me think through the process of writing a book: Marnie Badham, Amy Balkin, Manjima Bhattacharjya, Laura Edbrook, Miseal Diaz, Chris Dyson, Douglas Glover and the Banff emerging writer’s cohort (2017), Alan Heathcote and Mont Blanc writer’s cohort (2016), Jennifer Fiore, Berin Golonu, Lori Gordon, Sam Gould, Ashika Harper, Pablo Helguera, Sophie Hope, Larissa Hjorth, Eva-Lynn Jagoe and Gretchen Bakke and Jackman Institute for the Humanities writer’s cohort (2019), Tracee Johnson, Melanie Jordan, Kevin Killian, Chris Kraus, Eleanor King, George Marcus, Lydia Matthews, Cariadne Margaret Mackenzie, Tara Mahoney, James McAnally, Christian KP McMahon, Chelo Montoya, Kerry Morrison, Jacqueline Millner, Peta Murray, Justin O’Connor, Laurie Peake, Courtney Pedersen, Grant Kester, Sara Reisman, Larry Rinder, Allison Rowe, Richard Shapiro, Sarah Smith, Sally Szwed, Susannah Thompson, Lexa Walsh, Fiona Whelan, Alexandra Winters, Sue Bell Yank.
My love goes out to the Shanks and Coombs family who had unimaginable patience and never-ending support for me while I researched and wrote this book.
The research for this book was partially funded by the Australian Academy of the Humanities and the Women in Research Grant at Queensland University of Technology.
The Lure of the Social: Encounters with Contemporary Artists has been written on the unceded land of the First Peoples of Australia. I acknowledge the Traditional Custodians and their Ancestors of the lands and waters across Australia and the world where I conducted research. I respectfully acknowledge their Ancestors and Elders, past and present.
A Letter to the Preeminent Feminist Art Critic Lucy Lippard
Dear Lucy,
In 2003, you spoke at Tate Modern, at the conference “Fieldworks: Dialogues Between Art and Anthropology.” Your distinguished eyebrows bounced along with your incisive tone. Your analysis of art and anthropology’s troubled relationship was prescient and inspired me to liberate myself from traditional academic writing. It was a game changer, and I am grateful to you for instigating this pivot.
Over the years, I’ve been inspired by your aphorisms about art and activism and your suggestion that they be packed away in a Trojan horse, ready to be unleashed on an unsuspecting outside world. When I’ve heard you speak, you’ve positioned us, the audience, on a fluctuating timeline, with your words to help stabilize the shift, while imagining for us how this Trojan horse might function. I have seen fans gather around you. I’ve watched you impart humility and deflect your central position within the art world, suggesting that everything you learned about art came from the artists and activists you’ve known. I think one time you called them heretics.
My writing about art aims to be a precise exercise of your feminist methodology. In this book, my narrative and dialogue move backward and forward, landing in the dialectical present with a polyvocal past not far behind. I slide uneasily between distance and intimacy, and each chapter negotiates uncertainty with outcomes that are fragmented, indeterminate, and maybe even a bit irreverent. I hope that works out all right. Academics can be so serious.
Many people continue to follow your legacy. I am but one performative traveler animating your ideas, trespassing across visible and invisible barriers. My writing contains traces of your approach to art and resists any simple rendering of a cultural form. I wrote to you to ask permission to use “lure” in the title of my book—I wanted to make a pun on your Lure of the Local . You graciously said you didn’t own the word and to send a copy of the book when it’s done.
Wishing you all the best,
Gretchen
Introduction: Art & Social Practice
If the last two decades of social practice have presented artists with different methods of confronting social and political issues—of imagining new ways of being in the world and with each other—then considering the lives of these artists and the institutions that support them is crucial to understanding the significant role they play in culture, and how their art shapes different experiences of the world.
The term “social practice” has roots in psychology and refers to how one’s practice engages with social contexts through activities and critical inquiries; it’s a methodology, a way of doing things. Coupled with “art,” social practice takes the “social” as its medium, engaging in form and content with a wide range of pressing societal, economic, and political issues such as the climate crisis, displacement, gentrification, and debt. It involves finding new, meaningful ways to work with communities, audiences, and publics on short- and long-term projects. 1 It stems from a desire to create art that makes a difference, to be relevant as an artist, and to find an alternative to the highly commercialized art world. Yet, as art historian Grant Kester has pointed out, it has also become the institutionalized version of socially and politically engaged artwork and arguably the community arts tradition as well. 2 While there are fine distinctions between social practice and socially engaged art (SEA), I, like most in this field, use the terms interchangeably.
Both have made quite a splash in the art world since the turn of the millennium. Starting in the late 1990s and early 2000s, artists and art collectives began increasingly exploring alternative economies, performative interventions, and creative forms of activism with communities. Alternative spaces began popping up, like 16 Beaver in New York City, where artists and activists gathered to read, debate, exchange pedagogical strategies, and share struggles and concerns. Picking up on these trends, art schools, museums, galleries, and residencies began to explore the social turn in artistic practice through their programming, curricula, and curatorial efforts, testing out how they could display and structure such projects, which are often ephemeral. Residencies, fellowships, awards, and grants, and art centers devoted to the form followed: see the Guggenheim Social Practice initiative and Blade of Grass’s Fellowship for Socially Engaged Art, the Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation’s grants for art and social justice, as well as the Annenberg Prize for Art & Social Change and Bard College’s Keith Haring Fellowship in Art and Activism. At the same time, conferences such as the Creative Time Summit and Open Engagement emerged to offer physical and discursive sites for showcasing such projects.
As SEA’s visibility grew, so did the number of curators taking notice. Some of the touchstone exhibitions and