Project Row Houses 1
By aligning individuals of different professional expertise, the art projects look forward to creating hybridous, experimental communities instead of taking over the postponed duties of the national social institutions. The contemporary art practices outweigh the modernistic concepts of the ready-made and the appropriation, entering the domain of cultural production which emphasizes collaboration, sharing, exchanging and interhuman relations. There are no more artworks which are concluded entities, but they rather divergently exhibit and present themselves, being multipresent and intervolved in the public sphere of cultural exchanges.
The social art practice challenges the art market, offering inventive forms of authorship. The critic and curator Andy Horvitz discusses the “re-invention” of this form in his essay about social practice. He claims that the trend of this art form speaks to two fundamental shifts in American culture: one, a broad re-thinking of the role of the arts in society and two, a rejection of corporate capitalism’s demand that citizenship is predicated on being a consumer, not a creator or empowered participant in civic life. (Horwitz, 2012)
Apart from art itself, the social and political theories also fail to offer solutions or projections concerning the future. Standing in such uncertainty regarding the future, the citizen revises the offered possibilities to act in the social reality and tests the methods of impact in the sociopolitical discourse and inside the institutional system. The citizen-artist uses his/her creative capacities to find a model through which he/she will utilize the methods of the system for her/his own cause. The question over art’s social role in the society, according to Shannon Jackson, names the Russian artist group Chto Delat (What is to be done?), discussing what should be done in the 21st century, what art can do, what would that “doing” globally refer to in the 21st century? (Jackson, 2012, p. 89)
References:
Bishop, C. (2012). Artificial Hells:Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship. London/ New York: Verso.
Bishop, C. (2012). Participation and Spectacle:Where Are We Now? Во N. Thompson, Living as Form (p. 34-45). Cambridge: MIT Press.
Finkelpearl, T. (2000). Dialogs in Public Art. London: The MIT Press.
Helguera, P. (2011). Education for Socially Engaged Art: A Materials and Techniques Handbook. New York: Jorgo Pinto Books.
Horwitz, A. (2012, 08 28). On Social Practice and Performance – Culturebot. Aug 15, 2015, од http://www.culturebot.org/: http://www.culturebot.org/2012/08/14008/on-social-practice-and-performance/
Jackson, S. (2012). Living takes many forms. In N. Thompson, Living as Form (p. 86-93). New York: Creative Times.
Kwon, M. (1997). Public Art and Urban Identities. 06 05, 2017 од http://eipcp.net/: http://eipcp.net/transversal/0102/kwon/en
Marek, K. (2011). Aesthetics as a Participation Concept. Во F. Wappler, New Relations in Art and Society (p. 255-263). Zurich: jpr/Ringier.
Miranda, C. A. (2014). Changing the World, One Row House at a Time. ARTnews, 58.
Mouffe, C. (2007). Artistic Activism and Agonistic Spaces. Art&Research:A Journal of Ideas, Contexts and Methods.
Ransijer, Z. (2010). Emancipovani gledalac. Beograd: Edicija Jugoslavija.
Thompson, N. (2012). Living as Form. Cambridge: MIT Press.
WochenKlausur. (2016, June 21). WochenKlausur-method. July 03, 2016 from www.wochenklausur.at: http://www.wochenklausur.at/methode.php?lang=en
Wright, S. (2013). Toward-a-lexicon-of-usership.pdf. 05 28, 2017 from http://museumarteutil.net/:
http://museumarteutil.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/Toward-a-lexicon-of-usership.pdf