Framing current practices

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Global politics and global art from the street to the gallery

Susan N Platt reviews two new books

Throughout the seven essays of Living as Form, a book that celebrates artists that take on political and social issues in the public sphere, there is a pervading anxiety about and sometimes dismissal of concepts such as ‘relational aesthetics’, ‘social aesthetics’, ‘social practice’, ‘tactical media’, ‘dialogic art’, and ‘new genre public art’. Since the 1990s these terms have been the standard vocabulary for analysing public practice art.

This anxiety reminds us that, in fact, immediately after this book was published, in the fall of 2011, the Occupy movement in Wall Street and the City of London burst through traditional patterns of protest.  It had complex roots in various ideologies, including anarchism, Socialism, pacifism, anti-capitalism, and many others. It became a worldwide embodiment of living as protest. As both an aesthetic and political statement in public space, it has forced a new and multifaceted analysis of the constantly changing relationship of art and politics, particularly in the public sphere.   

Nato Thompson, as chief curator at Creative Time, presciently adopted what he calls the ‘cattle call’ method in his introduction, which includes projects initiated by both artists and non-artists.  He suggests that non-profit organizations themselves can be ‘artworks’. This idea is both provocative and timely. Unfortunately, the cattle call also extends to his enumeration of political and social crises, which he lumps into a single paragraph, as well as to the all-too-brief discussions of artists and projects.

Other authors in the book include theorist Clare Bishop, who sets up a relationship between the ‘social discourse’ and the ‘artistic discourse’ that can be ‘unseated’ by participatory art works. Maria Lind, a curator, emphasizes projects that include people in social and political change, while Carol Becker offers ‘microtopia’ or small solutions to big problems. Brian Holmes, a philosopher involved with the international social justice movement, and Shannon Jackson, director of the Arts Research Center at University of California, Berkeley, emphasize the 1930s Federal Theater Project as a precedent for political art in the community.

By far the most radical essay, though, is by Teddy Cruz, trained in architecture and design, and a dynamic thinker who up-ends these issues by placing the real world at the forefront. He begins with an eloquent critique of our current state: ‘a critical juncture in history, defined by unprecedented socio-economic, political and environmental crises across any imaginable register’.  For him, ‘our institutions… have atrophied’. His refreshing analysis of the relationship of art and economics concludes with the idea that marginal communities of immigrants are the real sites of creative thinking.

The rest of the book is an alphabetical listing of just over 100 artists, groups, and projects in public spaces that engage with a range of issues. The book is a valuable point of departure for its subject, although the elite cultural position of the authors limits its scope. Certain topics are popular here (those relating to urban renewal or alternative economics, for example), and other areas are barely covered, such as immigration (there is no reference to the border art of the last 50 years).

Terry Smith’s Contemporary Art: World Currents, as suggested by the title, is an even more ambitious project.  Smith does indeed go all the way around the world looking at contemporary art, although of course he cannot include every country (strange omissions are Turkey and Lebanon). He vaguely distinguishes between ‘contemporary’ and ‘modern’ with the definition that contemporary art has ‘qualities of freshness, recentness, uniqueness, and surprise’. He avoids limiting himself in any way. In contrast to the exclusive focus on politically engaged art in public spaces in Living as Form, Smith gives equal weight to all places and types of art.

The book has three themes. The first is art in metropolitan centres of modernity and the subcultures related to them that are a ‘continuation of styles in the history of art, particularly Modernist ones’. Second come ‘movements toward political and economic independence in former colonies and on the edges of Europe’ (this section is organized by country). The third theme is younger artists with ‘concerns that they feel personally’, which they share with other artists around the world (and which translate into specific political issues). Buried within all these currents is the fact that modernism was, and still is, a global movement produced by a trained elite based within secular democracies.

Smith’s book is succinct and helpful in his introductory summaries, which cover not only the history of modernism but also, for particular countries, selected historical and political backgrounds (an outstanding example is Cuba). There is a definite male bias in the choice of artists (women are discussed, for the most part, only in the context of feminist art until he moves beyond the ‘history of art’ in Europe and the US.  Smith wisely opts for detailed discussion of a few artists, rather than an attempt to cover many artists briefly. Nonetheless, a Eurocentric bias is inevitable in a single-author book about global art. It would have been enriched by contributions from critics from other parts of the world.

Living as Form: Socially Engaged Art from 1991–2011 edited by Nato Thompson is published by MIT Press, 2012. 263 pp., 315 colour and 60 mono illus, £27.95/$39.95.  ISBN 978-0-262-01734-3 (hardback)

Contemporary Art: World Currents by Terry Smith is published by Lawrence King, 2011.  348 pp., 377 colour illus. ISBN 13-9780205034406 ISBN 10 0205034403, Hardcover with jacket; ISBN 13-978020578919 and ISBN 10 0205789714  paperback.