Moving Beyond the Studio: Art and Social Practice

 

Moving Beyond the Studio: Art and Social Practice

Art, while traditionally made in the studio and intended to exist in the art gallery, has moved its way into the public sector as contemporary art has progressed. This has been necessitated by the integration of activism in art. Of course, artists have always been activists, but the art world changed drastically due to the radical ideas of postmodernism. Postmodernism challenged our traditional approaches to art, including our approach to activism in art. Additionally, postmodernism encouraged activism, as it prompted us to challenge any and every institution of power in existence. Due to this conceptual and methodological shift in art, social practice was born.

Social practice is not a way in which art is used as activism, but rather how the process of creating art becomes activism. Essentially, social practice is an art medium. Traditionally, the community interacts with the artist solely through art. Social practice mitigates that disconnect through the use of social work, journalism, or anthropology. When considering social practice as a medium, it’s important to recognize the difference between humanitarian art and pragmatic art. Pragmatic art is art that uses a practical application of ideals, while analyzing results and confirming effectiveness; whereas, humanitarian art is art that conceptually approaches these ideals, rather than implementing a solution. Both of these approaches can be considered social practice, depending on the situation; they are simply two different methods.

Social practice did not develop overnight, and it actually has only been defined for about fifteen years. However, that does not mean that aspects of social practice weren’t being implemented before this. Artists such as Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Rirkrit Tiravanija, and Mierle Laderman Ukeles were precursors to the social practice movement.  Christo and Jeanne-Claude, while not necessarily approaching societal issues, worked to bring art into the community, thereby making art a collective experience. Rirkrit Tiravanija addressed issues of poverty while simultaneously sparking community engagement with his pieces Cooking Up an Art Experience and The Land Foundation. In Cooking Up an Art Experience, Tiravanija converted a gallery space into a soup kitchen. In The Land Foundation, he and several other artists prevented a large plot of land from being sold to a development company and instead converted it into a community garden, which not only fed community members but also allowed the process of tending the land, together, to be part of the art. Mierle Laderman Ukeles spent numerous years creating her piece Touch Sanitation, in which she shook the hands of, and thanked, every sanitation worker in New York City. After her performance, the NYC sanitation department offered her a permanent residency, in which they granted her a studio space and access to all of the department’s tools and equipment.

 

When talking about social practice, often sustainability ends up being part of the conversation. Social practice and environmentalism in art go hand-in-hand, due to environmentalism/sustainability in art’s reliance on land art. One of the most famous artists to work with land art is Robert Smithson, who created the piece Spiral Jetty, which was a spiral made out of soil and rocks that extended into the ocean. Spiral Jetty is a tangible representation of the earth’s inevitable reclamation of anything that inhabits or exists on it. After a few years, this piece began to erode and the sides of the piece became coated by salt sediment. Eve Mosher, a contemporary artist, created her piece High-Water Line using social practice as her medium. After learning that the land within 10ft above sea level in Manhattan and Brooklyn, her hometown, was in danger of being flooded every forty years, rather than the usual one hundred years, she decided to take action. She marked out any area within 10ft of sea level, and along her journey, she spoke to people about the issue. So, while there is a physical piece of art, being the white line that spread across Manhattan and Brooklyn, the art actually lies in the conversations that she had along the way. Social outreach is often the first step to creating a solution for a problem.

 

Social practice is inherently collaborative, so organizations such as Rural Studio and FutureFarmers enlist artists for various projects that engage the community. Each project depends on the artist and the context but works to better the community. Rural Studio enlists artists to create sustainable housing in poor, rural communities. While creating these houses, artists have the opportunity to engage with the community members and educate them on sustainability while also learning about the community. FutureFarmers works to uproot and challenge many of the systems that we rely on, such as food policy, public transportation, campus design, and rural farming networks. Often, the process of creating their art is collaborative, but the final product ends up in a gallery. Diana Weymar utilizes social practice in the midst of a pandemic by working through social media. Her project, Tiny Little Pricks, began on Instagram when she chose to embroider an absurd quote from Trump. The piece was well-received, so she continued to embroider quotes from him. Eventually, people began making their own, so she asked people to submit their own embroidery regarding the Trump administration. Now, she has a collection of 3600+ “Tiny Pricks”, as she calls them, made by hobbyists, upset people, and fellow artists. There is no standard for quality, just that they share an experience. By collecting these pieces, she brings light to the collective suffering and discomfort that many have experienced throughout Trump’s presidency.

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