Claire Bishop’s short paper begins with a curious quote from Dan Graham: “All artists are alike. They dream of doing something that’s more social, more critical, and more real than art” (60). A brazen comment, this generalisation gives Bishop’s discussion a provocative start. It also anticipates her assumption that all “real” art is necessarily concerned with aesthetics. This helps to explain her interest in discussing “the social turn” as Art—or, more accurately, a lack thereof.
After briefly describing both the recent proliferation of publicly engaged art practices and their value as therapy for repairing the social bond, Bishop maps prevailing perceptions of this art as polarized. There are the “non-believers,” the aesthetes who dismiss the art as uninteresting, and there are “the believers” the zealots, the activists who, according to Bishop, “…reject aesthetic questions a s synonymous with the market and cultural hierarchy” (61). Curiously, Bishop fails to identify a third group: that is, the ambivalent believers, who, like Bishop and myself, sit between these two positions. Our group is comprised of art lovers and makers alike who wonder why we ask so little of art? Why can it not be both politically charged and aesthetically interesting at the same time?
Unfortunately, this is not a question being asked enough by critics, in part because critics aren’t asking many (if any) questions of socially engaged practices these days (Though it could well be argued this symptomatic of the death of criticism more generally). Bishop offers two complimentary explanations for this. On the one hand, there is the problem of authorial renunciation. Still rooted in a romantic notion of art, contemporary criticism is easily disorientated by the absence of a single and clearly defined author. Without this figure on which to peg their discourse, critics have instead turned to the intention of the work, specifically its so-called ethical intentions. Forgoing discussion about aesthetic quality, they instead explore the work’s therapeutic value evinced through its working processes. It is this emphasis on process over product that seems at stake in Bishop’s critique.
Indeed, it this issue of therapeutic value that leads Bishop to lampoon Maria Lind and Grant Kester for their failure to define work by artists like the Turkish collective Oda Projesi as Art and not something else. And what's a more compelling example of socially engaged Art readers might wonder? For Bishop, the work of Phil Collins (They Shoot Horses, 2004), Artur Zmijewski (Them, 2007), and Jeremy Deller (The Battle of Orgreave (2001) exemplify “good” socially engaged Art because the artists' engagement not only attempts to “unfold a…complex knot of human concerns about pleasure, visibility, engagement and the conventions of social interaction,” (65) it also “thinks the aesthetic and the social/political together, rather than subsuming them both with the ethical” (65).
Absent from Bishop's valorization of these practitioners is any discussion around their identity as white male artists whose monologic works may address the subject of social engagement but generally fail to critically wrestle with its significance at the level of the artwork's form.
Claire Bishop’s Chapter 1 “The Social Turn: Collaboration and Its Discontents”, in her book, Artificial Hells Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship, is a rather heavy but very thought provoking read. In the chapter, she discusses the ‘social turn’ a term, which describes participatory art movement. Participatory art relies on the audience being directly engaged in the art making process, acting as a co-collaborator alongside the artist. Bishop argues that two elements are at the heart of participatory projects: 1. collaborative activities which “work against dominant market forces “diffusing single authorship” and 2. “a channelling of art’s symbolic capital towards constructive social change” which resists art being understood as a commodified material object.
Bishop highlights that participatory art has proved problematic because “socially collaborative practices have been perceived as equally important artistic gestures of resistance”. However, Bishop argues it is important to critique participatory projects as art because it is this “institutional field” in which participatory art is “endorsed and disseminated”. She also argues that without finding “a language to” describe the participatory art we focus will only on its “demonstrable impact”.
Bishop discussed how participatory art can be seen as a political tool through its ability to create social change. An example, she refers to is Suerflex’s Tenantspin 2000 project which built a stronger sense of community in a run-down Liverpool tower block.
Bishop also highlights some of the ethical issues at stake in participatory art. One ethical issue is the status between the artist and the artist’s collaborators. Should both parties have equal status (or control) or is it ok for there to be a power imbalance favouring the artist?
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