USE AND ARTIFICE
by stephanie bertrand (art theorist, curator, Onassis Foreigners Fellow 2015-2016)

This essay was commissioned in order to examine a question that continually emerges in relation to the project at hand, namely: what distinguishes socially engaged art from social work? The matter of art’s singularity is not limited to socially engaged practices but extends to the whole of contemporary art, which is in fact, ontologically and artistically identical to everyday life. In a recent series of lectures given at Artists Space[1], writer Suhail Malik demonstrated how the readymade generates a new condition for art – what we know as contemporary art qua the proliferation of differences – by eradicating any objective criterion to distinguish art from non-art, based on Thierry De Duve’s totalizing account from his book Kant after Duchamp. According to Malik, the readymade surpasses the art/non-art distinction as art by absorbing its own negation. This conflation gives rise to a condition whereby the designation of something as art no longer rests upon an objective determination. Instead, it becomes predicated on a subjective dissensual judgment rooted in the experience of the work. Art’s power of negation is replaced by dissensus through an operation that sees the indeterminacy of art after the readymade stylized into a universal address that invites a subjective judgment of performative nomination – “this is art” – based on a feeling[2].
 
Nonetheless, while contemporary art as a whole lacks any distinguishing features, the question posed at the outset of this essay takes on a new dimension with socially engaged practices, for the latter surpass another attribute typically associated with art: its autonomy or lack of functionality, championing instead its potential efficacy. Summing up the position of one of the central proponents of the movement, curator Nato Thompson, Ellen Feiss observes that socially engaged art is no longer concerned with whether something is art, but whether it is useful.[3] Artist Tania Bruguera’s call to put Duchamp’s urinal – the quintessential readymade – back into the restroom[4] is emblematic of this move. It shifts the matter of singularity to a question of use.
 
There are two divergent ways in which the move from singularity to use might be interpreted based on a consideration of art’s artificiality. The first is to read this move as an attempt to reintroduce a criterion by which to identify and evaluate art beyond the inherent indeterminacy that sets up its reception in terms of a modern Kantian judgement based on generality rather than taste. An examination of the merits of ‘usefulness’ as just such a criteria is beyond the purview of this essay. What is significant here is that according to this interpretation, reception becomes predicated upon an evaluation of the objective effects generated by the work, instead of a subjective judgment. It holds the work to task according to laid claims, thus instrumentalizing art.
 
The second possible interpretation of the shift from singularity to use corresponds to a further move in the direction of what Malik identifies as the anarcho-realist maxim of contemporary art. According to Malik, this maxim refers to an idealist tendency within contemporary art that attempts to overcome art’s artificiality in order to engage with the real. It stems from a desire to surpass this inherent trait in order to generate an art that is more social, more collaborative, more real: an art that intervenes directly into the social fabric beyond its institutional stronghold; in Malik’s words, “an art that is effectively political, a genuinely public art”. The anarcho-realist maxim is a remnant of the avant-garde within contemporary (post-negational) art, which seeks to elude capture mechanisms; in other words, to escape institutional structures that instrumentalize the work.[5]
 
It is rather this second interpretation that appears to correspond to the discourse around socially engaged art. In his book “Living as Form”, Thompson dismisses the difference between socially engaged work and non-profit organizations. He deliberately opts to include instances of both rather than draw a distinction between artistic and non-artistic practices.[6] This choice suggests a deliberate move on Thompson’s part to relinquish art’s artificiality in a bid for a more “real”, more engaged art that intervenes on equal footing with activism and social work.
 
This tack is also apparent in Bruguera’s concept of Arte Útil (Useful Art). In her text “Reflexiones sobre el Arte Útil"
[Reflections on Useful Art], Bruguera suggests that the distinction between socially engaged art and social work lies in the former’s ability to create and implement a project that does not exist, within a context where the necessary conditions are not automatically in place. “The sense of Arte Útil (Useful Art) is to imagine, create, develop and implement something that, produced in artistic practice, offers the people a clearly beneficial result. It is art because it is the elaboration of a proposal that does not yet exist in the real world and because it is made with the hope and belief that something may be done better, even when the conditions for it to happen may not be there yet”.[7] Here creativity, or the ‘art’ of social engaged art, is pegged as inventiveness, as the ability to imagine and implement change in the form of a ‘feasible utopia’. It is social because it operates in the civic; it occurs outside of its own institutions: “Just as images based on visual art at times live like part of shower curtains, tea cups or tee shirts, for socially committed art, popular distribution should be society itself, civic institutions, civic behaviour, the daily life of the people”.[8] While Bruguera’s text suggests the inklings of an instrumental conception of art by invalidating the prospect of failure[9], she ultimately remains devoted to an immersive withdrawal from art’s institutional condition into the real: “All art is useful, yes, but the usefulness we are talking about is the immersion of art directly into society with all our resources. (…) we have to enter people’s houses, people’s lives, this is where useful art is”.[10]
If we examine Bruguera’s claim in relation to the question posed at the outset of this essay, it rapidly emerges that inventiveness and imagination are not the privileged domain of the arts. They cannot be said to mark its distinctiveness as art for the type of creative manoeuvring suggested by Bruguera can also be used to describe strategies deployed by numerous non-art social groups and organizations; which is why Thompson chooses to include both in his anthology of socially engaged practices. What in fact distinguish non-art groups and organizations from artists, curators and artistic collectives is the resources at each one’s disposal: the structures of visibility, legitimization and critique, as well as the privileged access and immunity afforded by the art world. While willingly mobilizing these resources, Bruguera simultaneously distances herself from their modalities. Her conception conscribes art to tangible action measured in terms of ‘a clearly beneficial result’ that forgoes artifice and institutionality in favour of a direct involvement in society. It refuses art’s indexical dimension to embrace a result-oriented approach as a means to insure art’s public service via an intervention in the civic. In Bruguera’s words: “art’s function is no longer to be a space for “signalling” problems, but the place from which to create the proposal and implementation of possible solutions”.[11]
Within a wider debate around socially engaged practices, the novelty of this avowal of use and its corresponding emphasis on more tangible procedures becomes clear against a discourse primarily rooted in context specificity and exchange. As O’Neill observes: “Collaboration, in the form of socially networked projects, is associated with contextual and dialogical procedures rather than material outcomes. Terms such as conversational art (Homi Bhaba), dialogue−based public art (Tom Finkelpearl), dialogical art (Grant Kester), new genre public art (Suzanne Lacy), new situationism (Claire Doherty), and connective aesthetics (Suzi Gablik) have all attempted to encapsulate the discursive qualities inherent in more immaterial forms of collective artistic co−production predominantly experienced beyond the art institutional setting or the gallery frame”.[12] However, the fact remains that no matter the depth of the incursion into the social real – “Art Útil functions directly with/in reality”[13] – such moves are always in art, from the perspective of art; thus the ideality of their exit strategy.
In sum, with respect to the two possible interpretations of the move away from art’s singularity in the direction of art’s usefulness, while Thompson and Bruguera’s accounts aim to gage art’s effectiveness in the face of its inherent indeterminacy, both deliberately forgo its artificiality. Their stances further undo art’s distinctive artfulness, its artifice, for the purposes of effectively acting – gaining traction – upon the real. However, in doing so, they fail to position use as a criterion to track the ways in which art institutes, thus inadvertently perpetuating the framework and mechanisms by which power reproduces and expands within the cultural field. While the projects that Bruguera and Thompson describe may well function in a manner commensurate with their aspirations, the discourse in which they camp such practices is inadequate to seizing the means by which art gains an operational effect.
 
It stands to reason why models of socially engaged practices tend to follow the anarcho-realist maxim; or to put it another way, why they seek to take a distance from art’s artificiality – associated with a Debordian conception of the spectacle – and exit art institutions – perceived as a context that depoliticizes art. Indeed, the impetus behind numerous socially engaged works to turn towards life is often supported by a reference to Guy Debord’s seminal book The Society of the Spectacle. In it, Debord argues that the Spectacle has become the dominant model for social life, defining it as “a social relationship between people that is mediated by images”.[14] He further affirms that: “all that once was directly lived has become mere representation”.[15] With this theoretical framework in mind, a number of artistic practices gradually come to reject art’s artificiality qua representation to immerse their work in life as part of a project to repair the social bond. 
Meanwhile, art’s institutionality – in every way tied to its artificiality – is seen as the site where hegemonic power absorbs and neutralizes critique. The argument in this direction can be traced to thinkers such as renowned sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, who warns that art institutions, in their hermeneutic presentation, recode practice as discourse, reducing “social relations to communicative relations and, more precisely, to decoding operations”.[16] More recently, Jerome Glicenstein has suggested that institutions are responsible for art’s lack of traction, describing how museums depoliticize artworks the moment they are sanctioned. Foregrounding practices that operate illicitly, Glicenstein posits art institutions as heterotopic entities removed from society, which insure the visibility of even the most transgressive acts by converting their unlawful intervention into a symbolic critique.[17] Given this state of affairs, as Nato Thompson puts it: “Getting out of the museum or gallery and into the public can often come from an artist’s belief or concern that the designated space for representation takes the teeth out of a work”.[18] Historically, this gradual exodus from art institutions sees the legacy of the 1960s and 70s’ move towards more social and situational forms of artistic practice converted into “a relational art intent on transcending the autonomous symbolic space for art”.[19]
Today, perhaps more than ever, artists and curators are painfully aware of the extent to which the visibility networks, funding sources and legitimacy structures associated with the art world are susceptible to hegemonic power, which proliferates, not in spite of, but rather under the guise of critical content and ‘constructive’ social interventions. While Thompson insists upon socially engaged works’ symbolic dimension in the face of the often-limited scope of their actual concrete effects[20], he also concedes the extent to which the meaning of such practices can be made to support conflicting interests. As he notes: “A constant battle (which is difficult to resolve) is the matter of efficacy and pedagogy between the symbolic, the mediated, and the practical. When is a project working? What are its intentions? Who is the intended audience? When is an artist simply using the idea of social work in order to progress her career? Are these socially engaged works perhaps a little too sympathetic with the prevailing values of our time and, thus, make themselves vulnerable to state instrumentalization? Again, socially engaged art can easily be used as advertising for vast structures of power, from governments to corporations. Determining which forms of social engagement truly lead towards social justice is a constant source of debate. Knowing this, in itself, is useful”.[21] By foregoing art’s artificiality in favour of life, practitioners remain saddled with the problem of the symbolic as an indeterminacy that opens art up to dominant power, in the face of which intentionality and implementation are incapable of halting its slippage.
 
Before returning to this predicament, there is another conception of use, derived from the now fashionable idea of the commons, which we might briefly consider in framing the discussion of socially engaged art vis-à-vis social work. By contrast to Bruguera’s insistence upon use as a value, a genre and a barometer to appreciate artistic practices and gage their accomplishments in terms of concrete benefit, the notion of ‘use’ within the commons is positioned as a defining modality. The commons identifies a logic of distribution based on use rather than ownership. Here, use is not understood as a tool for social change, or the implementation of a project for social good, but as the determining feature of a series of existing practices and agreements among specific groups that share a common resource or knowledge. What an analysis of specific instances of the commons reveals is the extent to which they are tied to a particular set of values and customs imbedded in an intangible heritage; in other words, in a symbolic understanding of what is shared and how it is shared: a given repartition, established over time through repetition. As a nexus of intangible culture, the commons is located in the realm of the symbolic, but to very real effect. It shapes and transforms modes of engagement, not in a revolutionary manner – as a full break with history – but in an institutional manner, through the establishment of a law or practice.
 
This temporal accumulation of communal uses is reminiscent of another view of socially engaged practices recently advanced by curators, including Paul O’Neill and Maria Lind, which privileges durationality or sustained engagement, over “’touch-down’ projects that intervene only temporarily in a given situation – not unlike catastrophe relief”.[22] O’Neill conceives duration as “a term for artistic interventions, in which artists, curators and commissioners contribute to sustaining a practice−in−place for a period of static, immobile time, with a view to leaving something behind that could not have been anticipated”.[23] Such a view entails a shift from a spatial to a temporal understanding of the modes of participation associated with socially engaged practices, transforming the viewer-participant into a producer. But while durationality addresses the “discontinuity of the unitary time and place”[24], it encounters the same deadlocks that Thompson outlines in his text. Duration within a goal-oriented framework may yield a social contribution, for instance a neighbourhood park; but it remains an isolated accomplishment with limited impact when considered from a wider socio-political perspective. Meanwhile, projects that focus on agency through social engagement run the same risk of co-option that Thompson describes. Indeed, the types of sociality involved closely resemble the immaterial labour that fuels capitalist models. As Maria Lind acknowledges: “social practice work is very close to today’s ideal entrepreneurial work”, as it entails “social competence, teamwork, and collaboration” as well as “self-organization, flexibility and creativity”.[25] Moreover, the latter is often performed on a voluntary basis under the aegis of community engagement.
 
Like intentionality and implementation, durationality understood as the accumulation of encounters and actions over time, is not enough in and of itself to gain traction upon the real, i.e. to generate the necessary operational effects. It requires the backing of more official structures capable of standing guarantor for the overall significance of the sum of its immediate discrete practices, gatherings and yields, as well as for their lasting continuity. Durationality understood through Bergson[26] as a guarantor of change is a formal approach to the question of intervention. A transformation or an amassing can just as readily correspond to the proliferation of differences that perpetuates power under a different morphology. To be effective, temporal accumulation must be directed beyond implementation and sustained sociality towards a more just institutionalization, which involves the stabilization of meaning, without which artworks remain open to unwanted co-option as a vehicle for the proliferation of hegemonic power, too easily recuperated owing to the vacuum left behind by the loss of an institutional apparatus capable of securing its value and semantic charge.
 
This consideration brings us back around full circle to the initial question and reference point for this essay. The proposition here, based on Malik’s argument, is that contrary to the anarcho-realist tendency in contemporary art – which insists upon social intervention, implementation and ongoing collectivity – what might lend traction to socially engaged art and simultaneously distinguish it from social work is an avowal of its inherent artifice. Indeed, affirming art’s artificiality, according to Malik, can be a means to gain traction upon the real by conferring onto art a negative power of judgement through the construction of new criteria for the negation of causes of indignation beyond dissensus. This semantic and deontological move recognizes that by absorbing its own negation (the avant-garde moment), contemporary art has operated a systematic critique of institutions by continuously destabilizing the criteria for their semantic security. However, in performing this necessary critique, it has also foregone the equally crucial process of their re-institutionalization into more just entities by entrenching these deregulatory mechanisms into its operative modality. For Malik, avowing art’s artificiality and institutional condition is a way to stabilize meaning in order to formulate an effective negation.  By contrast, any escape into the real that renounces art’s artificial construct is tantamount to forgoing the institution that underwrites the conditions of its intervention, in the same way a speech act like the act of marriage is underwritten or secured by an institution without which the words “I do” are stripped of all effect and left up for grabs. Thus, in contradistinction to approaches that tend towards a more “real” implementation, Malik argues in favour of instrumentalizing art without escaping its institutional dimension[27].
 
The result of socially engaged practices’ continued attempts at immersion into the real has not only been a public reception that begs the question “is this art?” or, in this case, “how is this different from social work?” on account of their inherent indeterminacy. Such institutional abrogation has also opened these works up to the type of instrumentalization they forever try to elude through their super-idealization of the real. In effect, as Malik demonstrates, the real of art is its artificiality, its status as an institutional practice imbedded in a set of power dynamics that can be affirmed or negated, once acknowledged, without recourse to dissensual judgment. To make his case, Malik cites sociologist Luc Boltanski who argues that by providing criteria and semantic stability, institutions inscribe into reality: they make non-existing being real.[28] As previously observed in relation to Bruguera’s statement, a moment of inventiveness in art is not one that imagines and implements change. Instead, as Malik aptly formulates, it is one that constructs:  “the identification, understanding and negation of causes of indignation to insurrectionary effect” via work that acknowledge its inherent artificial and institutional condition without fetishizing the present.[29]
 
With regards to Artecitya for which this essay was commissioned, the hope is that this long-term project might not only respond to social urgency through praxis, but also act as an institution capable of stabilizing meaning in a bid to negate local causes of indignation. This past year, we have all experienced first hand the difference between a moment of dissensus and an effective NO backed by institutional structures with the referendum on the bailout package in Greece, which has yielded very little actual change. As a local resident and freelance curator, my response to this commission has not only been to try to answer the given question, but also to formulate my own demands on the project from the position of both a stakeholder and addressee. Rather than stage a series of self-congratulatory moments of “good” civic contributions and the rehearsal of dissensus, Artecitya might contribute more than its token examples of concrete social interventions: the greening of space, the production of alt-socialities, the transfer of skill-sets and so on. Posing as an Agency, it has the horizon to do what art does best as an artificial construct: to fix sense and provide value in order to hold to account. Thus, beyond its advertised roles as a middleman facilitator, a tailored social remedy, and an agitprop public relations campaign, it might also perhaps ideally serve as an institutional guarantor and instrument of accountability, putting all of us to task.

[1] Suhail Malik, (2013). “On the Necessity of Art's Exit from Contemporary Art”. Talk series at Artists Space, New York [Online]. Available: http://artistsspace.org/programs/on-the-necessity-of-arts-exit-from-contemporary-art [2015, December]

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ellen Feiss, (2012). “What is Useful? The paradox of rights in Tania Bruguera’s ‘Useful Art’” [Online] Available: http://www.artandeducation.net/paper/what-is-useful-the-paradox-of-rights-in-tania-brugueras-useful-art/ [2015, December]

[4] Tania Bruguera, (2011). “Introduction on Useful Art” [Online]. Available: http://www.taniabruguera.com/cms/528-0-Introduction+on+Useful+Art.htm [December 2015]

[5] Malik, “On the Necessity of Art's Exit from Contemporary Art”.

[6] Nato Thompson, “Living as Form”, in Living as Form: Socially Engaged Art from 1991-2011, ed. Nato Thompson (New York: Creative Time Books; Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 2012), 27.

[7] Tania Bruguera, (2012). “Reflexiones sobre el Arte Útil” [Online]. Available: http://www.taniabruguera.com/cms/592-0-Reflexions+on+Arte+til+Useful+Art.htm [2015, December]

[8] Ibid.

[9] Bruguera states: “For Art Útil, failure is not a possibility. If the project fails, it is not Art Útil.” Ibid.

[10] Bruguera, “Introduction on Useful Art”.

[11] Ibid.

[12] Paul O’Neill, (2010). “Three stages in the art of public participation: The relational, social and durational” [Online]. Available: http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2010-08-12-oneill-en.html [2015, December]

[13] Bruguera, “Reflexiones sobre el Arte Útil”.

[14] Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, transl. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Zone Books, 1995), 12.

[15] Ibid, 12.

[16] Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, transl. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 1.

[17] Jérôme Glicenstein, L’art: une histoire d’expositions (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2009), 135-137.

[18] Thompson, “Living as Form”, 22.

[19] O’Neill,  “Three stages in the art of public participation: The relational, social and durational”.

[20] Thompson writes: “And yet, symbolic gestures can be powerful and effective methods for change”, in “Living as Form”, 18.

[21] Ibid, 22.

[22] Maria Lind, “Returning on Bikes: Notes on Social Practice”, in Living as Form: Socially Engaged Art from 1991-2011, ed. Nato Thompson (New York: Creative Time Books; Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 2012), 50.

[23] O’Neill,  “Three stages in the art of public participation: The relational, social and durational”.

[24] Ibid.

[25] Lind, “Returning on Bikes: Notes on Social Practice”, 49.

[26] O’Neill,  “Three stages in the art of public participation: The relational, social and durational”.

[27] Malik, “On the Necessity of Art's Exit from Contemporary Art”.

[28] Luc Boltanski, On Critique: A Sociology of Emancipation, cited in Malik, “On the Necessity of Art's Exit from Contemporary Art”.

[29] Malik, “On the Necessity of Art's Exit from Contemporary Art”.