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Now. Not now. And now: Toward a feminist critical envisioning of social practice
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Now. Not now. And now: Toward a feminist critical envisioning of social practice
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NOW. NOT NOW. AND NOW:
TOWARD A FEMINIST CRITICAL ENVISIONING OF SOCIAL PRACTICE
by
Melinda Guillen
A Thesis Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC ROSKI SCHOOL OF FINE ARTS
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
MASTER OF PUBLIC ART STUDIES
May 2011
Copyright 2011 Melinda Guillen
ii
EPIGRAPH
“Criticism, like history, is a form of fiction.”
-Lucy Lippard, 1967
iii
DEDICATION
To my family, especially my father, Porfirio Guillen.
iv
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
My sincerest gratitude to my thesis committee: to Rhea Anastas for your invaluable
insight and belief in my critical voice and to Grant Kester for your encouragement and
for providing an important critical framework that has inspired my own.
Special thanks to Sue Bell Yank, it’s been a pleasure working as your teaching assistant,
your commitment to this expanding field is inspiring. To Elizabeth Cline, whom I worked
with at the Hammer Museum, for granting me access to the institutional context of this
work and having fun while doing it. Also, to Mark Allen of Machine Project for his
openness and suggestions received way back in the beginning of the process that have
undoubtedly influenced its outcome.
Last but not least, thank you to the MPAS program and my colleagues, especially Zemula
Barr, Jennifer Lieu and Chlöe Flores for being great, supportive friends throughout this
process.
v
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Epigraph ................................................................................................................................ ii
Dedication ............................................................................................................................. iii
Acknowledgements ............................................................................................................... iv
Abstract ................................................................................................................................. vi
Introduction ........................................................................................................................... 1
Chapter 1: Collaboration: In Theory and in Practice ............................................................ 13
Collaborating with whom and for what? .............................................................................. 19
Feminism and collaboration .................................................................................................. 26
Chapter 2: The (continuing) Problem of Criticism ............................................................... 37
Remnants of modernism ....................................................................................................... 49
Collaborative criticism .......................................................................................................... 52
Conclusion ............................................................................................................................ 63
Bibliography ......................................................................................................................... 72
vi
ABSTRACT
This paper is an urgent call for a collaborative form of art criticism in the assessment of
social practice as a contemporary feminist issue. This study evaluates the recent
institutional inclusion, increasing popularity and expanding theorizations on socially
engaged practices by elucidating a relationship between feminist art critical
methodologies and the current conception of social practice art, focused on the attribution
of collaboration this form of practice purports. Through a comparative analysis of
collaboration in two art historical precursors to social practice, evidenced by texts from
Arlene Raven and Suzanne Lacy from the Los Angeles Woman’s Building in the 1970s
and 1980s and Lucy Lippard and the Art Workers’ Coalition from 1969; to the 2004
moment of elevated discourse by art historians and critics Claire Bishop, Grant Kester
and Miwon Kwon. This study endeavors to bring explicit feminist art critical
methodologies to bear on recent discursive activity comprising social practice.
1
INTRODUCTION
The Spring 2008 issue of Grey Room published a discussion between artists,
critics and historians Miwon Kwon, Mignon Nixon, Ulrike Müller, Senam Okudzeto, in
conversation with the discussion organizers, Aruna D’Souza and Rosalyn Deutsche. The
discussion, edited and published under the title “Feminist Time: A Conversation,”
focused on the topic of art and feminism in reference to the 2007 tagline “The Year of
Feminism” in the United States, evidenced by two major survey exhibitions, Global
Feminisms at the Brooklyn Museum in New York City and WACK! Art and The Feminist
Revolution at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, in addition to the
Museum of Modern Art’s conference titled The Feminist Future. The discussion moved
through various themes, from concepts of difference and splintering within the feminist
movement; globalism and the inclusion (or exclusion) of postcolonial theory; war and
apathy; and the generational divide, perceived and real. Artist Ulrike Müller, on the topic
of war and the recent attention of feminism in institutions asked:
“Where does the current feminist wave come from? Why have feminism and
feminist art been taken up by so many institutions and curators this year? Why is
this history being written and rewritten now?… Is feminist art just easier to fit
into museums than the politics that informs and surround it?”
1
This set of questions represent a larger concern regarding the negotiation of
representation, a central tenet in feminist movements but also, requires an examination of
the motivations behind institutional forms of inclusion. Illuminating this point further, art
1
Rosalyn Deutsche and Aruna D’ Souza, “Feminist Time: A Conversation,” Grey Room, vol.31 (2008),
51.
2
historian and critic Miwon Kwon posed, “Exhibitions of art and feminism on the
spectacular scale… signal not only institutional legitimation (or containment) but also
viability in the marketplace. Is this a problem or a sign of accomplishment?”
2
“Feminist Time: A Conversation” raised a series of significant questions
regarding the critical issues within current feminist discourse. It is my ambition to
interrogate the apparent disconnection between feminist methodologies and the strategies
and practices grouped together, in recent years, under the term “social practice,” reflected
by its critical discourse and formulations throughout institutions and to frame this
disconnection as a pressing, contemporary feminist issue.
“Social practice” is commonly described as a type of art practice that is
collaborative, participatory, interdisciplinary, socially engaged and community based.
Additionally, the circulating descriptive language of social practice echoes that of
activist-oriented work, and some in particular, resemble feminist collaborative strategies,
such as dialogue-based forms of collaboration. However, at the present moment, there
does not appear to be much clearly identified, connective tissue through the diverse
practices contained under the umbrella term in regard to feminist practices. Why might
that be? What are the social and political issues that inform these practices today and how
are they addressed? And how do they relate or distinguish themselves to feminism?
Throughout the 2000s, particularly in the later half, and similar to the 2007
moment where feminism was revisited, museums and graduate art programs also opened
their doors to forms of social practice. Curator Nato Thompson’s 2004 exhibition during
2
Rosalyn Deutsche and Aruna D’ Souza, “Feminist Time: A Conversation,” 52.
3
his tenure at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MOCA), The
Interventionists: Art in the Social Sphere, elevated not only Thompson’s status as a
curator but also drew attention to forms of collaborative, socially-engaged art (what
social practice was often referred to in the 1990s) on an institutional level. The practices,
both individual artists and collectives, featured in the exhibition varied greatly from each
other and were presented under four conceptual categories, with some projects existing in
multiple categories: “Nomads,” practices that offered “tools for a mobile society” often
in the form of vehicles or portable structures as seen in the work of artists William Pope
L., Krzysztof Wodiczko, and the collective Haha; “Reclaim the Streets,” described as
public interventions often sited in places like malls, parks and sidewalks, represented by
the Institute for Applied Autonomy, Reverend Billy and Alex Villar; “Ready to wear” or
“artists that produce tools or clothing for specific political uses” such as Krzysztof
Wodiczko and the Yes Men and lastly, “The Experimental University,” or practices that
explore scientific disciplines for the purposes of artistic production, represented by
projects such as the Critical Art Ensemble and The Atlas Group.
3
The exhibition was
significant in Thompson’s curatorial approach to representing socially engaged art
practices in an institutional context enlivening the relationship between art and utility,
suggested in the language of the text, referring to many practices as “tools.”
Since The Interventionists, and on the west coast in particular, art schools are
offering areas of concentration and degree programs in social or public practice while
3
For more information, I refer the reader to the exhibition catalog: Nato Thompson and Gregory Sholette
ed., The Interventionists: Users’ Manual for the Creative Disruption of Everyday Life. (Cambridge: MIT
Press, 2004).
4
museums and galleries are increasingly finding ways to include social practice artists into
exhibitions, with some institutions offering residencies. This is indicative of a specific
and accessible packaging of social practice to cast a wider net to expand audience
membership. I’m thinking here of the recently concluded residency of the Los Angeles
based art collective, Fallen Fruit at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA)
that culminated with a day long series of food focused events called “Let Them Eat
LACMA” in November 2010, in addition to the Hammer Museum’s, University of
California, Los Angeles’ contemporary art museum, newly established Curatorial
Department of Public Engagement, now at the tail end of its first residency with Machine
Project, artist Mark Allen’s ongoing collaborative project established in 2001. Fallen
Fruit and Machine Project are just two names that often come up when discussions of
social practice arise. Additionally, artist Harrell Fletcher, a frequent name at the forefront
of social practice, currently serves as co-chair of Portland State University’s MFA
concentration in Social Practice, just one a few programs offering areas of emphasis in
social or public practice.
Despite the activist language attributed to or originating from practices under the
umbrella term, the social and political issues at the core of feminist art from the 1970s
forward, and represented today in some social practices today seems reduced, removed or
overly projected. For example, what are the similarities and distinctions between Los
Angeles based artist, writer, activist and chair of Otis College of Art and Design’s MFA
in Public Practice, Suzanne Lacy and Harrell Fletcher? Both are discussed under the
umbrella term of social practice but it seems easier to identify diverging points than
5
commonalities between them. This is indicative of both the complexities of their
practices but also, perhaps, some of the conceptual problems with social practice as a
category. This raises another issue of criticism. Where does a critic begin in a process of
determining the intersections and extreme points of divergence in such contrasting
practices while simultaneously attempting to demarcate what social practice actually is?
Additionally, the reservations attached to the institutional inclusion of feminist art
practices, or practices influenced by various forms of feminism rather, is important to
note. Historically, the institutions of art – the museum and universities – operated in a
manner predicated on a patriarchal system that excluded work by women. There is a
distinction that must be made here to not conflate all work by women with feminism but
rather, to show that the system of power embodied by museums and universities excluded
women and also, represents a set of rigid masculinist values that are not specific to one
gender. The museum as an institutional entity itself has been a site of contention,
historically challenged in a number of ways including interventions into exhibitions
excluding women and other socially marginalized groups, critiqued from within its
parameters as seen by the practices of artists engaged in institutional critique, to the
development of alternative art spaces that aimed to serve the interests of groups outside
of the conventional gallery and museum model.
4
It is then curious at the present moment
to experience museums and institutions lauding social practice given their contentious
4
There’s a significant amount of literature on the historical lines of institutional critique, alternative art
spaces and interventionist tactics. For additional reading, I suggest Julie Ault ed., Alternative New York,
1965 – 1985. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002) and Alexander Alberro and Blake
Stimson ed., Institutional Critique: An Anthology of Artists’ Writings (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009).
6
historical relationship and the conscious decision by many artists to work outside of
museum and gallery contexts. This merger requires critical pressure.
Some artists, such as the Guerilla Girls, aimed to centralize larger social and
political concerns and continued the traditions of conceptualism and performance,
especially that of artist Allan Kaprow and the Beuys’ concept of “social sculpture.”
5
Other artists and collectives of this caliber also followed closely the historical trajectory
of alternative art spaces and institutional critique and utilize strategies present in activist
movements to engage in a form of durational practices outside of the confines of the
gallery. One pivotal observation by feminist artist, writer and activist Suzanne Lacy (also
a prominent figure in social practice discourse currently) states, “It is precisely the desire
to address a broad populist audience and to explore the self in the context of others that
connects seventies feminist art to the present time, laying the foundation for current
theories in performance and public art.”
6
Lacy’s reflection signifies the important
relationship between contemporary forms of public art, coming from a feminist informed
methodological approach. This is tethered to the history of dematerialized, conceptual
performance art and practices intended to engage larger and diverse audiences in a
collaborative setting. I’d like to complicate the loose but prodigious parameters of social
practice to locate where the overlap between social practice, feminist methodologies and
activism exists, in full cognizance that the term itself may prove more problematic than
5
An expansion of Beuys’ concept of “social sculpture” can be located in multiple essays by the artist in
Claudia Mesch and Viola Michely ed., Joseph Beuys: The Reader. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007).
6
Suzanne Lacy “Affinities: Thoughts on an Incomplete History” in Leaving Art: Writings on Performance,
Politics, and Publics, 1974-2007. Suzanne Lacy ed., (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010),
192.
7
useful. Additionally, there are, of course, multiple forms of feminism that have and
continue to manifest through a complex system of interaction, proclamation, activist and
critical discourse. It’s discursive and at times, paradoxically, at odds with other forms of
feminism.
In this essay, I explore the relationship between feminism and social practice from
its critical theorization and institutional formulations through an analysis of conceptions
and uses of collaboration. To do this, I focus on criticism and the crucial role of the critic
as a generator of discourse and bring forward the feminist art historical precedent in
which critics often worked with artists collaboratively, using text as a platform to actively
theorize and advocate for feminist practices that bear striking similarities to the present
conception of social practices. I focus on two art historical precursors, the Los Angeles
Woman’s Building (LAWB) and the Art Workers’ Coalition (AWC), selected based on
their contrasting activist goals, the former a fully functional space that spanned decades
and the latter, a generative but brief coalescing of artists and activists set against one
institutional entity. Another significant aspect to underscore is that both historical
moments possessed active participation by critics throughout their collaborative
processes. Because it is entirely beyond the scope of this project to write a complete
history of feminism, account for all its (presently) shifting manifestations in addition to
writing a detailed account of all the Los Angeles Woman’s Building activities and or
even the emergence and dissipation of the Art Worker’s Coalition, I instead describe both
groups in a general sense and focus on the texts, both reflective and historically
8
positioned in their moments by feminist critics, to construct the LAWB and AWC’s
conceptions of collaboration.
The first chapter provides a brief overview of the definitions of social practice,
devised largely through its recent institutional inclusion and leads into the two art
historical examples that evolved out of a contentious relationship to museums and art
institutions, the Los Angeles Woman’s Building (1973-1991) and the Art Workers’
Coalition (1969). These examples represent collectivities of varied forms but are also
historical precursors that are not centrally linked to social practice. Offering a connection
between these disparate art historical moments provides a new way to examine the
current understanding of social practice, its use of collaboration and its relationship to
feminism. I’d also like to use the example of the Los Angeles Woman’s Building,
particularly their goal of the redefinition of art and culture and the AWC’s activist
strategies as a way of confronting the confusing position that social practice, or art in
general, can, in some way, operate in a de-politicized manner, disconnected from
structural and social power dynamics and exist as merely a gesture or simple comment.
The generalized understanding of social practice only advances the problematically
fraught terrain of “art for art’s sake” and more over, emphasizes a simplistic
understanding of the ways in which artistic production functions in a larger social
context. The word “activist” repels many artists and critics in contemporary art,
supposedly because it carries the implication that art can and perhaps should “do
something” but also because an alignment with activism directly challenges the
modernist paradigmatic position of the critic as “the trained eye” or “decoder” of high art.
9
The reluctance to apply an activist lens (and critically assess it) exemplifies this remnant
of modernist critical models because activism brings to bear the consideration of content
in a broad political context. I’m not suggesting that all art must have a clearly delineated
political goal or conform to some linear didacticism but rather, I’m interested in the
inescapable fact that art, particularly social practice, is doing something and what that
something is can be dynamic, discursive and beyond the dichotomous success and failure
model of efficacy.
7
As a starting point to uncover what social practice can do, we must
understand previous forms of collaborative artistic and activist practices, through their
redefinition of the critic’s role, and as I argue, look to the rich, complex histories of
feminist art critical methodologies and collaboration to make the ambiguities of social
practice palpable.
In the second chapter, I focus on the role of the critic in the generation of
discourse and broader social understanding of forms of artistic production. Beginning
with a focus on the contemporary critical context, the discursive activity of 2004’s
published texts by art historians and critics Claire Bishop, Grant Kester and Miwon
Kwon, examined by the critical models they employ. The critical reception and theory on
social practice is just as vast as the artists and collectives in the category itself. By
comparing key contemporary critical texts based on their motivations and deepened by an
examination of how, to varying degrees, contemporary criticism is still imbued with
compulsions established from the formalist mode of criticism, championed by the likes of
7
The intersection of aesthetics and politics has been addressed by many artists, activists and critics and
will not be explored deeply here. For further reading on this I recommend Jacques Ranciere’s Aesthetics
and its Discontents. Second Edition. (London: Polity Press, 2009) and Gerald Raunig, Art and Revolution:
Transversal Activism in the Long Twentieth Century, (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2007).
10
Clement Greenberg in the postwar era. As a counter to the tropes of modernist criticism,
I move into examples of selected feminist art critical methodologies as a way of perhaps,
alleviating or shifting the current critical paradigm in assessing social practice towards
models that require a type of emulation of the practices they examine. Feminist art
criticism has broadened the space for criticism through collaborative critical
engagements, driven by an interdisciplinarity that, as I argue, is essential in the
assessment of social practice. I explore the methods of Los Angeles Woman’s Building
co-founder and critic, Arlene Raven, also the editor of two salient feminist art criticism
anthologies in addition to selected works by AWC collaborator, critic and activist Lucy
Lippard and artist and writer Suzanne Lacy. I also bring useful theorizations by art
historian and critic Rosalyn Deutsche on concepts of feminist revisionist history and
interdisciplinarity as a method. The dynamics of collaboration and dissolution of
authorial processes has long been discussed in feminist critical methodologies. The focus
in this section is to make my motivations clear. I am invested in placing critical pressure
on social practice through a bridging of its attached conceptual element of collaboration,
rooted in historical precedents and feminist critical methodologies. I also aim to
highlight the ways in which these writers responded to the constraint of art criticism at
their given moments by moving away from the desire to create totalizing models of
criticism and instead, engaging collaboratively in the critical process.
What is at stake here is the possibility of social practice replicating hackneyed art
critical devices, still heavily tinted with aspects of modernist critical compulsions that
aimed to canonize certain artistic practices over others, motivated by an exclusive, elitist
11
and patriarchal value system and to the systematic marginalization of practices that give
equal or more consideration to conceptual, political content. That form of critical
modeling functions more as a theory competition, an authorial exercise of claiming, than
a collaborative critical process. Moreover, this form of artistic practice, with roots in
feminist and social movements, discussed as a new or recent phenomena, removes it from
its precursors, which only further reduces and undermines the political intentions of the
work. It also simultaneously rules out critical methods, particularly feminist, that are not
vested in reinventing the wheel of modernist criticism. Simultaneously, the reduction of
critical content makes this form of practice exceptionally appealing for museums to
repackage into event-based forms of programming.
The present moment represents the continued expansion of institutional inclusion
for social practices. This inclusion and packaging of social practice into museum
programming and graduate level art degree programs calls for a necessary reevaluation of
what constitutes social practice, in consideration of its art historical precedents rooted in
activist and collaborative art processes. This study aims to investigate how the current
problems of social practice, its critical reception and broader theoretical formation can be
honed by first elucidating this estrangement as a significant contemporary feminist issue.
Then explicating the intrinsic relationship between social practice and feminist
collaboration, and identifying the possibilities of the current moment to narrow this
disconnection by adopting nuanced feminist critical methodologies. It’s also important to
explore how feminist art critical methodologies, in theory and practice exemplified
through historical collaborative models, have informed the present conceptualization of
12
social practice to prevent the consistent revisionist approach, made necessary by the
persisting erasure, oversight and disregard that feminism has received historically and
instead, make feminist contributions present and accessible in the evolving discourse on
social practice.
13
Chapter One
Collaboration: In Theory and in Practice
What is “social practice?” If this practice is social, are others not? How can we
write about these practices in ways that keep their social analyses and political stakes
meaningful? The term alone is ambiguous and like its frequently used counterpart –
“public practice” – does not indicate much beyond some sort of art occurrence and even
that indication is contingent on its use in an art context. The slightly more specific use of
terms such as “socially-engaged” and “relational” imply an action but still the
mechanisms of artistic production remain unclear. This is not a new concern and many
artists, critics and curators have theorized social practice to identify conceptual
categories, in order to critically assess the work. The perspectives emphasize different
concerns. For example, throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s, artist Suzanne Lacy
discussed the work as “new genre public art” as a distinct form of practice, more complex
than the forms of public art – sculptures or installations in outdoor locations, frequently
referred to now as “plop art” – that dominated the conception of art in public places. New
genre public art was conceived as “visual art that uses both traditional and nontraditional
media to communicate and interact with a broad and diversified audience about issues
directly relevant to their lives [and] is based on engagement.”
8
French theorist and curator
Nicolas Bourriaud’s text on “relational aesthetics” published in 1998, remains one of the
leading concepts on relational, dematerialized art practices noting that relational art is
based on social relations and structure, reflecting the moment in which they occur,
8
Suzanne Lacy. “Cultural Pilgrimages and Metaphoric Journeys” in Mapping the Terrain: New Genre
Public Art. Suzanne Lacy ed.,. (Seattle:Bay Press, 1971-1985) 14.
14
“[Relational art] arises from an observation of the present and from a line of thinking
about the fate of artistic activity.”
9
Art historian Miwon Kwon emphasized the spatial,
political and social dimensions of public art, setting up a critical framework for site
specific public art and art historian and critic Grant Kester’s 2004 book Conversation
Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art focuses on a specific method in
social practice – the generation of dialogue across various constituencies – in what he has
conceptualized as “dialogical aesthetics” as a move towards specificity in the field.
10
The
theoretical and critical contexts of social practice will be addressed comparatively in the
next chapter.
The emphasis in this section is in the popular circulating rhetoric of social
practice, primarily the language purported in institutional contexts such as museums and
graduate programs that retains an open-ended formulation, often citing diverse forms of
practice, collapsing the limited number of theoretical distinctions and uniting them under
the ambiguous term “social practice” or “public practice” followed by a list of other
theoretical terms that have previously been used to distinguish this seemingly disparate
set of practices. The critical context of social practice certainly informs and is informed
by the institutional frameworks adopted by museums and graduate level art programs.
My decision to examine them separately is to identify some of the problematic gaps
between these forms of theory and critical writing but to also establish a point of entry
from a broader, popular perspective cognizant that what is purported through museums,
9
Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics. (Paris: Les Presses du Réel, 2002) 44.
10
Grant Kester. Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art. (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2004).
15
graduate level art programs and academic, critical discourse possesses distinct audiences
but with unavoidable overlap.
For museums and graduate level art schools, the descriptive language of social
practice is much broader and malleable than the theory and critical texts mentioned
above. Portland State University’s MFA concentration in Social Practice program
describes its structure as a place for “students to develop and utilize their artistic skills to
engage in society” maintaining an interdisciplinary curriculum that “retains the intention
of creating significance and appreciation for audiences in a similar way to more
conventional art.”
11
Otis College of Art and Design’s MFA in Public Practice can be
considered more specific, ironically, through its listing of diverse forms of practices in
which it draws upon describing its conceptualization of public practice as, “Public
practice – also called participatory art, community art, public art, situational art or social
sculpture – can consist of a variety of media including video, performance, drawing,
photography, sculpture and web-based projects.”
12
Artist Harrell Fletcher is a name at the forefront of social practice. His projects
are what I would characterize as fun and easily accessible in intention, such as 2006’s
Corentine’s Turtle, where Fletcher worked on the full realization of a sculptural turtle
conceived by and in collaboration with an eight year old boy named Corentine Senechal
in Brittany, France as part of the Fletcher’s residency in the city’s art center. His work
11
Portland State University Online. “About,” PSU MFA Social Practice – The Program ,
http://www.psusocialpractice.org/ (accessed 11, Jan. 2011).
12
Otis College of Art and Design website. “Graduate Public Practice,” Graduate Public Practice – Otis
College of Art and Design, http://www.otis.edu/academics/graduate_public_practice/index.html (accessed
08, Jan. 2011).
16
often embodies aspects of relational aesthetics and toes dangerously close to the fraught
terrain of the so-called “parachuting artist” due to the “town as exhibition” element in his
practice; while simultaneously earning Fletcher currency in the growing attention paid to
social practice.
13
In 2010, Portland State University’s MFA in Public Practice hosted a
largely attended national conference (attendance exceeded capacity) on socially engaged
practices called Open Engagement, a series of lectures and discussions by artists such as
Mark Dion, Amy Franceschini and participation by other frequented names in social
practice, curator Nato Thompson, artist Ted Purves and collective InCUBATE, among
many others.
14
Museums, particularly those in Los Angeles, have brought social practice projects
into their programming and residencies. For example, in 2009, the Hammer Museum,
based on the recommendation of the museum’s artist council, a group of 12 nationally
and internationally known artists that advise the museum’s curatorial departments on
issues and concerns relating to the museum’s schedule of programming and exhibitions,
developed a department dedicated to social practice called the Curatorial Department of
Public Engagement. The department offered its first yearlong residency to the Los
Angeles based project space, Machine Project, conceived by artist Mark Allen. The
13
This assertion is made based on a lecture and roundtable discussion Harrell Fletcher participated in at the
University of Southern California’s Masters of Public Art Studies Program lecture series in which the artist
presented on his work that I attended in March of 2010. A handful of audience members asked Fletcher
about art historical references and his views on art criticism, to which Fletcher responded with deep
ambivalence. It is curious in comparison to the artist’s reflection of his collaboration with Correntine
Satchel “We also went to see the art in the galleries there at the time, which was a Jonathan Monk show
offering great examples of collaborative, conceptual, and assisted approaches to making art which we
discussed with Corentine,” http://www.harrellfletcher.com (accessed 20, Jan. 2011).
14
Open Engagement has scheduled its second conference for May 13-15, 2011.
17
museum describes the program as one that “seeks to create a new kind of interactive
museum: an artist-driven visitor engagement program that encourages contact among
visitors, artists, and museum staff, and activates spaces in imaginative ways.”
15
Machine
Project is a “non-profit community space”
16
and collaborative effort created by artist and
educator, Mark Allen. The space is located in the Echo Park neighborhood of Los
Angeles and has had a number of projects occur outside of the physical confines of its
location. The Public Engagement Department at the Hammer is a unique bridging of
visitor services, educational programming and artist projects that fall under the umbrella
term “social practice” – or projects that are collaborative and/or relational in nature, with
little to no material anchoring by the production of an object as the outcome. The
residency of Machine Project at the Hammer took the form of a series of events that
would occur approximately a few times a month. The events were all related to Mark
Allen’s playful interrogation of the relationship between the museum and its audience,
reflective of the curatorial bend in his artistic practice. Allen also invited other artists
from around Los Angeles, both involved directly or close friends of Machine Project, to
develop projects resulting in a series of events including a sleepover at the museum titled
the “Dream In;” a re-enactment “larp” (or “live action role play”) of 1970s self-
actualization seminars throughout the museum courtyard; free admission to all visitors
15
Hammer Museum. “Public Engagement,” Programs – Hammer Museum,
http://hammer.ucla.edu/programs/programs/cat/17 (accessed 12, Dec. 2010).
16
“Machine Project is a non-profit community space in the Echo Park neighborhood of Los Angeles
investigating art, technology, natural history, science, music, literature, and food. In our Echo Park
storefront, we produce events, workshops, and site-specific installations using hands-on engagement to
make rarefied knowledge accessible.”Machine Project Website. “About,” http://machineproject.com/about
(accessed 12, Dec. 2010).
18
wearing a bell around their necks; developed by Machine Project’s sound curator; and a
Houseplant Vacation, where people were invited to drop off their houseplants for a one-
month stay at the museum. Taking in the sum of all the parts, the intentions of the Public
Engagement Department to generate an “interactive” museum experience succeeded, or
at least satisfied the museum’s goals. Those that participated in the events through the
duration of the residency, primarily members of Machine Project’s growing network of
art and music educated, young people hailing heavily from one of Los Angeles’ northeast
and more recently gentrified neighborhoods, frequented the museum more often than they
would have when considering other forms of conventional museum programming outside
of the large opening nights for exhibitions – panels, lectures, film screenings and tours.
The “quirky” impact of Machine Project’s events benefited the museum both financially
and socially and successfully brought in younger audiences for the duration of the
residency. However, the level of reciprocity that Machine Project received from the
museum has yet to be revealed, if it will at all.
The language used to describe Machine Project’s residency and also the vague
descriptive offerings by Fletcher on his own practice is precisely what makes Machine
Project and Fletcher adaptable to institutions that laud social practice and aim to bring
fun, event-based practices that do not, on their accord, possess the intention to deeply
critically interrogate the museum, its motivations or its social and political implications
when working with diverse publics. This is what constitutes one popular facet of the
amorphous conceptualization of social practice. However, there are other artists and
critics engaged in the necessary unpacking of the supposed recent phenomena and the
19
complex characteristics it brings to bear. The promises, as I refer to them, that social
practice makes, when framed in various institutional contexts, require a continuous
critical analysis to both generate a deeper understanding of these typically immaterial,
process-driven art practices but also to unveil the systems of power, complication and
areas of improvement intrinsic to complex social forms of art. The examples included
here do not represent an attempt to replace the popular projects currently representing the
core of social practice discourse but rather, it represents my goal of testing its present
formulation based on collaboration, extrapolated from its own descriptive language,
assessed through a historical lens of collaboration in feminist practices.
Collaborating with whom and for what?
The idea of collaboration is one particularly enticing as it carries the implication
of some dissolved hierarchal structure and the promise that those working collaboratively
will be given equal space to contribute and voice theirs ideas, critiques and grievances.
It’s the general use of the term that makes it malleable but also difficult to chart as it’s
happening. However, to use collaboration instead of notions of “community” (the two
often appear together) is a strategic move on my part, highlighting that while there is
much theoretical work on community formation, it is my contention that the word
indicates a lining or sectioning off of a group of people, united by unclear criteria and
often, is muddied by its frequent use.
17
Feminist art historian and critic Arlene Raven
17
For a deep theorization of “community” I refer the reader to Jean Luc-Nancy’s seminal text, The
Inoperative Community” which is quite illuminating for its position on the overuse and subsequent
convoluted widespread use of the word “community.” Jean Luc-Nancy, “The Inoperative Community,”
20
wrote, “The use of community is often symbolic – rather than actual or activist – when it
is segregated from general usage and placed into an art vocabulary. The meaning of
community has, in this specialized language, become narrowed to near uselessness.”
18
For this reason, I chose to explore collaboration over community, as collaboration
requires a consciousness of action and a sense of individual and collective agency,
although that is not without its own shortcomings. The emphasis here is to show how
collaboration has been used in feminist art practices and compare it to its opaque use
regarding social practice today.
Collaboration is also a central tenet in social movements rooted primarily in the
general desire to bring together large groups of people to achieve a common goal with a
sense of self-identification and reflexivity. It is as much a methodology as it is an
identification. For the feminist movement, particularly what is often referred to as the
“second wave,” a period in the United States from the early 1970’s lasting through the
mid-1980’s, collaboration was a focused organizing principle in addition to the concept
of consciousness-raising, or “CR,” that equally characterized the movement.
19
The Redstockings, a feminist group founded in 1969 and considered to be a
radical (though radicality itself is dependent on historical moment) feminist organization,
(1986) Participation, Claire Bishop ed,. (Cambridge and London: MIT and Whitechapel Press, 2000) 54-
70.
18
Arlene Raven. "Word of Honor." In Mapping the Terrain: New Genres in Public Art. Suzanne Lacy ed.,
(Seattle: Bay Press, 1996) 165.
19
This is a synthesis of the detailed description of the evolution of second wave feminism. Jennifer
Baumgardner and Amy Richards. Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism and The Future, (New York:
Ferrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000),13-14.
21
was founded by activists Ellen Willis and Shulamith Firestone, who, in the following
year after forming and quickly disbanding from the Redstockings, went on to publish the
seminal, second-wave feminist text, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist
Revolution. In a document titled “Redstockings Manifesto” from 1969, the group called
for a development of “female class-consciousness” through a process of consciousness-
raising:
Consciousness-raising is not ‘therapy,’ which implies the existence of individual
solutions and falsely assumes that the male-female relationship is purely personal,
but the only method by which we can ensure our program for liberation is based
on the concrete realities of our lives.
20
Consciousness-raising sessions typically consisted of a small group of women that came
together, loosely moderated to discuss issues, concerns and observations formed from a
gendered perspective and ultimately, to create a sense of connectivity that the isolating
system of patriarchy prevented. Renowned black feminist activist and scholar bell hooks
reflected on the process of consciousness-raising, noting that, “In small groups,
individual do not need to be equally literate or literate at all because the information is
primarily shared through conversation, in dialogue which is necessarily a liberatory
experience.”
21
It’s imperative to understand the process of consciousness-raising as a
methodological feminist activist principle, based on the desire to create a sense of unity,
achieved through a procedure of shared, purposeful conversation vested in a collaborative
analysis of their lived conditions. While arguably all historicized social movements use
20
Redstockings. “Redstockings Manifesto” (1969) in Feminist Theory: A Reader. Wendy K. Kolmar and
Frances Bartkowski eds., (New York: McGraw-Hill 2005) 220-221.
21
Bell hooks. “Feminist: A Transformational Politic,” in Feminist Theory: A Reader. Wendy K. Kolmar
and Frances Bartkowski eds., (New York: McGraw-Hill 2005). 467.
22
collaboration or collaborative methods to achieve their aims, it’s important to note the
dialogue focused approach of feminist consciousness-raising as a way of resisting and
collectively moving towards their desired outcomes from the plight of gender inequality
and how it directly counters patriarchal social relations.
Sociologist Steven M. Buechler has written extensively on the methodologies
employed by social movements, mostly in the United States, in a post-WWII context.
It was not that women settled for what they saw as an inferior mode of
organization because they lacked resources or opportunities; it was rather that
they consciously sought a form of organization that was consistent with the larger
visions of their movement and they maintained a commitment to those
organizational forms even if they decreased the chances of movement success as
measured by conventional instrumental criteria.
22
This is certainly not without its own problems that have lead to various forms of
infighting and splintering within the movement, which, as I argue, should not be viewed
solely as signs of failure and should be understand as both organic and generative aspects
of social movements and grassroots organizing. What is important here is the division
(and possible reconciliation) between feminist collaboration and notions of collaboration
purported in social practice.
Artist and writer Greg Sholette’s 2007 edited volume, Collectivism After
Modernism: The Art of Social Imagination After 1945, is an excellent exploration of the
intersections of collaboration, art and activism in a postindustrial, globalized context. In
Sholette’s introductory essay, he discusses his use of collectivism as a modernist ideal but
with unique manifestations beginning after World War II. There needs to be a distinction
22
Steven M. Buechler, Social Movements in Advanced Capitalism: The Political Economy and Cultural
Construction of Social Activism, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000) 205.
23
between collectivism that runs closely to the ideas and goals embodied in the nation-state
use of it which reduces the individual in its ambition to create a massive yet faceless,
political body as subject to the rules of a primarily patriarchal form of leadership from its
counterpart; where the motivations specifically challenge the moves towards cultural
hegemony by a reconfiguration or shift in the dominate perception of how collectivities,
or collective identities, are forged. This is what Sholette refers to as the “social
imagination” which is a product of modernism and where he places critical pressure to
make such distinctions.
23
The critical discourse regarding social practice and notions of collaboration are
varied but do focus on the collaborative relationship between artist and the “community.”
For Miwon Kwon in her book One Place After Another: Site-Specificity and Locational
Identity, a text offering a critical framework in which to assess site-specific public art and
community-based practice, she zeros in on the process that artists use to produce a sense
of community, however faulty the intention or outcome, and interestingly alludes to a
desire extended from a Marxist informed perspective of labor. She writes, “ For now, I
can simply propose that the drive toward identificatory unity that propels today’s form of
community-based site specificity is a desire to model or enable unalienated collective
labor, predicated on an idealistic assumption that artistic labor is itself a special form of
unalienated labor, or at least provisionally outside of capitalism’s forces.” Kwon’s
speculation is interesting. The connection between art and its potential to embody a form
23
Gregory Sholette “Introduction: Periodizing Collectivism,” in Collectivism After Modernism: The Art of
Social Imagination after 1945, Gregory Sholette and Blake Stimson eds., (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2007) 5-7.
24
of unalienated labor has also been explored by anthropologist David Graeber in his essay,
“The Twilight of Vanguardism” noting that, “There would appear to be a direct link
between the experience of first imagining things and then bringing them into being that is
the experience of certain forms of unalienated production – and the ability to image social
alternatives; particularly, the possibility of a society itself premised on less alienated
forms of creativity.”
24
Kwon evokes an important theoretical framing, taken up and
expanded by Graeber, regarding artistic production and the Marxist conception of
alienated labor understood as a system of capitalist production in which the laborer
producers commodities and in turn, becomes a commodity, “The product of labor is labor
embodied and made objective in a thing. It is the objectification of labor.”
25
Although
Kwon was only speculating at this relationship, it is significant in revealing her
theoretical scope, set broad in the structural functions of the art economy within an
advanced capitalist system.
For Grant Kester, collaboration is one aspect of community-based art practices.
His conception of collaboration, diverging from Kwon, follows a historical trajectory
through an unlikely exploration of collaborative models in community-based art
practices, framed by a connection to Victorian models of reform. Kester explains the
tenets of Victorian social policy and welfare reform models dating to the late-19
th
and
early 20
th
centuries throughout America and Europe which functioned as an outgrowth of
24
David Graeber, “The Twilight of Vanguardism.” In Possibilities: Essays on Hierarchy, Rebellion and
Desire. (Oakland: AK Press, 2007) 301-312.
25
Karl Marx. “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts (selections).” (1932) in Karl Marx: Selected
Writings. Lawrence H. Simon, ed., (Indianapolis: Hacket Publishing, 1994), 58.
25
evangelical paternalism, demonstrated through the settlement system, where relationships
between the “enlightened reformer” and those residing in a settlement, perceived as poor,
were based on a model of personal transformation passed through, however well-
intentioned, paternalistic systems of charity intertwined with religious agendas. The
ultimate mark of transformation achieved, according to Kester, came in the form of the
spectacle surrounding the moment in which the “repentant subject who accepts personal
responsibility for his or her sinful condition through the recitation of a conversation
narrative.”
26
One was able to validate themselves and move into the hierarchal class
structure of evangelism only after reciting the narrative of faith, thus effectively creating
a sense of “community.” Kester makes an important link between the Victorian model of
transformation and community identification with the ethos of many community based
art practices.
Kwon and Kester’s perspectives assist in understanding how artists use
collaboration as a tool in practices that are intrinsically social, durational and immaterial.
For artists like Lacy or critics like Arlene Raven, collaboration came in the form of
identifying with other artists, critics and activists, indicative of the consistent attention
paid to inter-group power dynamics. In the next section, I explore how artists and critics
have engaged in the collaborative process with one another, challenging the modernist
privileging of individual authorship through the Los Angeles Woman’s Building and the
Art Workers’ Coalition, through a selection of reflective texts by active members from
both historical moments.
26
Kester, Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art, 135.
26
Feminism and Collaboration
The Los Angeles Woman’s Building was a group of artists, activists and writers
that formed in 1973 and lasted for eighteen years on the edge of the Chinatown
neighborhood in Los Angeles. Founded by artists Judy Chicago, Sheila de Bretteville and
art historian and critic Arlene Raven, all of which served on the faculty at the California
Institute for the Arts (CalArts), the LA Woman’s Building was described as “a public
center for women’s culture.”
27
The building was originally established inside the
Chouinard School’s (currently CalArts) Grandview Building and later moved to its
Spring Street location in 1975, which caused a split between those that wanted to
maintain the small network “haven” aspect and those that wanted to expand its public, a
problem that would remain throughout the duration of the LAWB.
28
Taking its cue from
the feminist protest surrounding the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s 1970
exhibition Art and Technology that featured no women artists and also Judy Chicago’s
Feminist Art Program at California State University, Fresno, the LA Woman’s Building
was a space for exhibitions, workshops, performances, a feminist and non-sexist
bookstore and a site for the consciousness-raising, collaborative organizing methods of
the second wave feminist movement in the United States, including hosting meetings for
27
Terry Wolverton. “Introduction” in Insurgent Muse: Life and Art at the Woman’s Building. (San
Francisco: City Lights Publishing, 2002) xv.
28
This is lifted from Laura Meyer’s succinct historical overview of the Los Angeles Woman’s Building in
her essay “The Woman’s Building and Los Angeles’ Leading Role in the Feminist Art Movement” in From
Site to Vision: The Woman’s Building in Contemporary Culture. Sondra Hale and Terry Wolverton eds.,.
(Los Angeles: The Woman’s Building, 2007), 86,
http://womansbuilding.org/fromsitetovision/pdfs/Meyer.pdf, (accessed 21, Jan. 2011).
27
the National Organization of Women (NOW). It also served as a hub for two concerns
within the feminist art movement, “the push for better inclusion of women in the
mainstream art world and the utter redefinition of art and culture within a feminist
context.”
29
The LA Woman’s Building was conceived as a collaborative in all of its
efforts. Collaboration, in this particular feminist art context is related to the rise of
performance and video as mediums and in particular, the relationship from performance
to theater. Terry Wolverton, artist and active member in the LA Woman’s Building
reflected, “… Collaboration was a more radical idea, a challenge to the myth of the lone
genius who creates in solitude. Within the feminist art movement, collaborative process
was highly regarded as a means to create support, share powers and expand the vision of
a given work.”
30
This understanding of collaboration extends beyond a singular moment
and contains within it the desire to construct an alternative feeling of connectedness
through difference and the feeling of “otherness” attributed to female artists and the
individualism perpetuated in conventional art training. I’m not suggesting that
collaboration originated in feminism but to not discuss its longstanding prevalence in
feminist art and social movements is a problematic oversight. Artist, former student and
eventual teacher at the LA Woman’s Building, Suzanne Lacy echoed Wolverton’s
perspective on the intentions behind collaborative processes at the building writing, “The
transition from a model of individual authorship to one of collective relationship
suggested in this work is not undertaken simply as an exercise in political correctness… a
29
Terry Wolverton, Insurgent Muse: Life and Art at the Woman’s Building, xv
30
Terry Wolverton. Insurgent Muse: Life and Art at the Woman’s Building, 101.
28
desire for connection that is part of the creative endeavor in all its forms.”
31
This is a
form that would live throughout the organization of the building, the practices associated
with it and reflected in its critical texts.
The members of the Los Angeles Woman’s Building used the consciousness-
raising processes in many of their activities. In 1983, artist Faith Wilding, revisited her
crochet installation, The Womb Room from the 1971 Womanhouse exhibition, an
outgrowth of Judy Chicago’s Feminist Art Program that was described as a “large-scale,
site-based, collaborative project” of over twenty-five students from the program, Chicago
and artist Miriam Shapiro.
32
Wilding’s revisitation consisted of four painted panels and
was titled Scriptorium. This work eventually led to another transition in medium for
Wilding as she went on to make a series of illuminated books, citing precedence in the
combination of image and texts by the like of Judy Chicago and Frida Kahlo. Arlene
Raven wrote on the piece stating, “The capacity to reproduce this one to one experience
many times over in as many places at once makes the artist’s book an accessible medium
for a social art… artists writing is a version of feminist ‘speaking,’ which itself was the
basis for the consciousness-raising process.”
33
As I’ve demonstrated, the form of collaboration at the LA Woman’s Building was
directly related to the feminist organizing strategy of consciousness-raising and was a
31
Suzanne Lacy. “Introduction” in Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art. Suzanne Lacy ed.,.
(Seattle:Bay Press, 1971-1985), 36.
32
Terry Wolverton. Insurgent Muse: Life and Art at the Woman’s Building, 29.
33
Arlene Raven, “At Home,” In Crossing Over: Feminism and Art of Social Concern. (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Research Press, 1988), 118.
29
sustained presence throughout the building’s lifetime. There are, of course, other uses of
collaboration that are not rooted in performance or the evolution of experimental theater
and are more closely related to activist or issue-based forms of action, where
collaboration means forming new social constituencies and often appears as a form of a
temporary, negotiated solidarity rather than a lasting formation. This is evident in the
activities of the Art Workers’ Coalition, which, unlike the Los Angeles Woman’s
building, represents a particular moment of collaboration, set against an institutional
entity, the Museum of Modern Art in NYC (MOMA). The collective identity of the Art
Workers’ Coalition, as noted by art historian Julia Bryan-Wilson, was rooted in their
name “art worker” that stemmed from an insistence of art as both a form of cultural
production but also a legitimate economy, deeply entrenched in and constitutive of just
one prong of the profit-driven goals of capitalism and its exploitative labor structure.
Additionally, it was important for the members of the AWC to make the complex
structure of art economies palpable, which included established artists such as Hans
Haacke, Carl Andre, the frequent collaborators Carole Condé and Karl Beveridge and
also other types of art workers, whose labor was vested in art contexts but not as artists
including feminist writer Lucy Lippard whose involvement was integral to the critical
advancement of the AWC’s goals. “Primary among the AWC’s ambitions was the public
redefinition of artists and critics as workers: these art workers asserted that their practices
were located within specific social relations, subject to economic imperatives and
exacting psychic costs.”
34
The Art Workers’ Coalition formed in 1969 in response to the
34
Julia Bryan-Wilson, “From Artists to Art Workers” in Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam
30
kinetic sculptor Vassilakis Takis removal of one of his sculptures from the exhibition The
Machine at the End of the Mechanical Age, at The Museum of Modern Art in New York
City. Takis did not want his work in the show because he felt it no longer represented him
as an artist or his practice. However, the piece was part of the museum’s permanent
collection and Takis was enraged at the lack of congeniality in communicating his
concerns to the museum staff. This ultimately resulted with Takis removing the work,
with some friends, from the museum’s sculpture garden. Using the incident at The
Museum of Modern Art as a chance to come together and address the complex concerns
of artistic production, ownership and agency, the Art Workers’ Coalition held a meeting
at the School of Visual Arts on April 10, 1969 called the “Open Public Hearing on the
Subject: What Should Be the Program of an Open Art Workers’ Coalition” where
hundreds attended and over seventy artists, writers, critics, photographers and activists
spoke on a range of issues including the Vietnam War, sexism and racism. In her
statement at the Open Hearing, Lucy Lippard expressed her critical stake, as an advocate
for “artists civil rights” in the collective efforts of the AWC noting that the group, at that
moment, was “very loosely knit” and “constantly changing,” but nevertheless, necessary
in moving the conversation forward regarding museums’ collection policies.
35
Lippard’s critical advocacy extended beyond her participation in the Art Workers’
Coalition and remained as a guiding method in her writing, curatorial work and activism.
War Era, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 14.
35
Lucy Lippard, “Open Hearing (audio transcription),” (1969) in Art Workers’ Coalition: Documents and
Open Hearing, (Spain: Editorial Doble J, 2009), no numeration.
31
As noted by Bryan-Wilson, Lippard’s co-organized 1982 exhibition with artist Candace
Hill-Montgomery that contained the work of Lorna Simpson, Mierle Laderman Ukeles
and others, Working Women/ Working Artists/ Working Together, “prefigured the trend
in ‘relational aesthetics’ some years later… exhibits such as [this one] demonstrate that
relational art had significant early roots in the feminist movement of the 1970s… though
this aspect is not theorized as such by Bourriaud.”
36
Bryan-Wilson alludes to the problem
field at hand, by pointing to the disconnection between feminist methods and the
inherited concepts that constructed social practice discourse. Additionally, Bryan-
Wilson’s characterization of relational aesthetics as possessing roots in the feminist
movement of the 1970s is not a declaration of co-optation or appropriation, as both
accusations tend to be misled assertions that ignore the complex network of channels that
such methods, strategies, ideas and forms flow through historically. This understanding
does, however, raise a number of problems regarding originality, authorship and
notoriety.
Lucy Lippard has defined political art as any art that “is issue-based and
organized at a grassroots level.”
37
The simplicity of this direct statement is useful as there
could be no discussion of collaboration without an understanding of its intrinsic
relationship to activism. If collaboration is a method, activism is the intention. It can be
understood as the occurrence of an action, with collaboration as one of the forms the
36
Julia Bryan-Wilson, “Lucy Lippard’s Feminist Labor.” In Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam
War Era, 170.
37
This was stated in a public lecture held at Otis College of Art and Design on November 10, 2010.
32
action takes. It may also be useful to think of activism in a plain, reductive sense; one can
be an activist but to be a collaborator requires a set of relations between at least two
individuals. Additionally, activism has functioned as, at best, a repellant in the
contemporary art world despite what should be understood as its inherent social and
political implications. Other conceptions of activism run that gamut of naïveté to an
unfortunately idealistic throw back to the albeit misguided perception against the utility
of art. As Bourriaud noted, “There is nothing more absurd either than the assertion that
contemporary art does not involve any political project, or than the claim that its
subversive aspects are not based on any theoretical terrain.”
38
To many this seems like a
given but what is not clear is the space for critical reflection of the issues addressed in art,
as an inherently social and political mode of cultural production. In order to understand
the activist aims of any social movement, it’s necessary to identify the historical context.
Returning to the political climate that produced the AWC, which was deeply entrenched
in the fluctuating social and political terrain of the late 1960s, from the Vietnam War to
the second wave feminist movement and also the civil rights movement, among others.
Conversely, the Los Angeles Woman’s Building was less situated in one singular
historical moment and more vested in a continuation of the historical models Judy
Chicago’s Feminist Studio Art Workshop, a feminist model of alternative pedagogical
approaches and offered conditions of producing and critiquing work that greatly differed
from what was offered in most art degree programs.
38
Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, 14.
33
The theorizations of what constitutes activism are quite expansive. Steven M.
Buechler defines the formation of a political social movement and activism, with little
distinction between the two, as it pertains to a particular form of individual agency
affected by larger social institutions across categories.
My proposal to view movements as engaged in contestatory symbolic forms…
exemplifies movement ideology as cultural process of collective and reflective
self-awareness; it supports a view of social movements as cultural laboratories or
learning mechanisms within hierarchically structured social systems.
39
Buechler contends that activism in advanced capitalism will always occur within the
capitalist structure as one cannot escape its parameters. Given this understanding, it’s
useful to think of activism as a form of continuous negotiation. Recalling Kwon by way
of Marx, collaboration can be viewed as a negotiation set against a system of alienation in
advanced capitalism.
For the Art Workers’ Coalition, negotiation came in the form of exploring the
various manifestations of undermined agency through museums as an institution. While
there are certainly class considerations that are too great to ignore that for many would
appropriately categorize the AWC’s point of contention, the museum, as a primarily
upper middle to middle class concern, the implementation of free admission days and
contractual agreements for artists in residence and its residual effect on organizing efforts
for museum support staff to push for labor unions are certainly significant and lasting
impacts from the AWC activities. The Los Angeles Woman’s Building is closely related
to the history of alternative art spaces and was located in Chinatown near Los Angeles
39
Steven M. Buechler. Social Movements in Advanced Capitalism: The Political Economy and Cultural
Construction of Social Activism, 202-203.
34
Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE) prior to LACE’s relocation to Hollywood which also
shared a building with the headquarters of the art publication High Performance. The
proximity of these art outlets, situated outside of the mainstream institutions should be
understood as a strategic creation of space to house forms of practices devalued, ignored
or misunderstood in contemporary art. This negotiation of space, creating a center for
those excluded from it, is one of the unifying forms of activism for the LAWB. As
Arlene Raven recalled, “Our activities created a community which artists working in
isolation were drawn to join.”
40
Through its interdisciplinarity in pedagogical
programming, service hub, feminist/non-sexist bookstore and of course, exhibitions and
performances, the LAWB functioned as a physical site to house feminist forms of
collaboration.
Both groups, despite their shortcomings and subsequent disbanding, which is too
often erroneously received as a mark of failure, should actually be viewed as generative.
Members from the Art Workers’ Coalition went on to form more specific, identity-based
groups include Women Artists in Revolution (WAR) and Guerilla Art Action Group. The
LA Woman’s Building members during and after its run formed groups such as Feminist
Art Workers. The various activities of the Los Angeles Woman’s Building, Art Workers’
Coalition and other politically aligned groups, whether sustained or brief, both groups
were in their united desire to create change. There’s a long history of issue-based, activist
art that is hardly captured here but what we can distill is that the rhetoric of social
practice today uses the language of collaborative, politically-engaged art but in many
40
Arlene Raven. “The Last Essay on Feminist Criticism,” in Feminist Art Criticism: An Anthology, Joanna
Frueh, Cassandra Langer, Arlene Raven eds., (University of Michigan Research Press, 1988), 231.
35
instances, particularly visible in practices that are at the forefront, (such as Harrell
Fletcher) the space of criticality and necessary interrogation falls short.
Feminist collaboration implies an awareness of those within it. A group of people
cannot work collaboratively without knowing it and are not a collaboration based only on
proximity or interest. There’s an intentional use of collaboration that captures those
engaged and places them on a path towards a desired outcome, set in opposition to or a
means of achieving some form of transformation. For the Los Angeles Woman’s
Building and its members, collaboration was a principle pulled directly from the
members’ active participation in the larger feminist movement. The Art Workers’
Coalition represents a coalescing of individuals around one particular institutional entity
in order to use this moment of collaboration as a way of generating discursive forms of
action. Collaboration necessitates an end goal or at the very least, the identification of a
problem in which the effectual manifestations vary and yet can come together and
employ a specific methodology towards an intended end or step forward. Reflections by
founders and long-term participants of the Los Angeles Woman’s Building and Lucy
Lippard’s participation in the AWC, show how feminists endeavor to apply models of
collaboration to all aspects of their work from within a proclaimed feminist setting and as
part of a larger, activist moment.
We have also seen that recent criticism on social practice assesses collaboration
primarily regarding “the artist to community” relationship but maintains a persisting
distance from exploring the relationship between artist and critic. Feminist art criticism
understands the role of the critic to be essential in the construction of discourse and
36
historicity of artistic practices and positions the critic as an active collaborator, a
purposeful rupture to the modernist critic, vested in the application of a fixed and
predetermined set of criteria from a supposed objective distance. If social practice is
collaborative, shouldn’t the critical process reflect that and if so, how? In the next
chapter, I explore the relationship between artist and critic, exemplified by feminist
critical methodologies as a response to modernist critical models and bring them to bear
on key selections of critical texts on socially engaged art practice from Claire Bishop,
Grant Kester and Miwon Kwon.
37
Chapter Two:
The (continuing) Problem of Criticism
In recent years, critics and art historians have entered (or perhaps reignited) the
discourse on socially-engaged practices, now diluted a bit from “socially-engaged” to the
more amenable “social” or “public” from a variety of entry points. This also coincides
with the post 9/11 political climate and comes out of the Bush Administration’s
regressive social policies and increased security measures that left a tightened grip on
public funding structures for both non profit organizations and cultural arts institutions.
This overview of selected critical positions is focused on 2004, which represents a
significant moment for the discursive activity regarding socially engaged practices. I
begin with art historian and critic Claire Bishop’s Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics,
printed in the fall issue of the critical arts journal October, where she responded to the
widespread adoption of Bourriaud’s “relational aesthetics” citing that the way relational
aesthetics is discussed signifies more of a type of installation art than what is constitutive
of a new art form. “It is basically installation art in format, but this is a term that many of
its practitioners would resist; rather than forming a coherent and distinctive
transformation of space… relational art works insist upon use rather than
contemplation.”
41
Problematizing the frame of relational aesthetics, Bishop continues
with an analysis of artist Rirkrit Tiravanija’s work discussing his emphasis on audience
involvement noting that the materials Tiravanija works with – food, kitchen utensils and
41
Claire Bishop, “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics.” October 10 (Fall 2004), 55. This foregrounding
of installation art is indicative Bishop’s specific research interests and the 2005 publishing of her
dissertation Installation Art: A Critical History.
38
gas burners – are secondary to the creation of a space for interactivity and a move
towards dissolving the division between artist and viewer. For Bishop, work like
Tiravanija’s and some of his frequent collaborators, Liam Gillick and Phillippe Parreno,
also blur the “imprint of individual authorial status.”
42
Continuing on, Bishop challenges
Bourriaud’s faulty sense of superiority that relational art purports over object based
practices based on an immeasurable criteria weighing heavily on intentionality and not
specifically on the dynamics of interactivity for the transformed audience-participants.
Essentially, Bishop is dissatisfied with the inability to place any sort of structure, from
which to position herself as critic, on relational art. However, what is valuable in her
critique is what reveals her critical motivations and the conceptual categories that she
values, which actually acts as a connection between antagonistic art, from the likes of
Santiago Sierra or Thomas Hirschhorn, that Bishop declares, “tougher” and “more
disruptive” than the feel-good approach of Tiravanija and Gillick.
43
Sierra and
Hirschhorn’s work is constitutive, according to Bishop, of a more rigorous relational
aesthetics and what she describes as “antagonistic relational aesthetics.” What’s made
clear too is Bishop’s reinforcement of a particular line of critical discourse that does
emulate the work in which she champions, a type of antagonistic criticism. But I will
return to that later.
Also in 2004, Miwon Kwon, motivated by a desire to capture the complexity of
“site-specific” work in the public realm published One Place After Another: Site-Specific
42
Claire Bishop, Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics, 55.
43
Ibid., 72-79.
39
Art and Locational Identity. In it, she details the multiple layers of site-specificity, with a
history rooted in a combination of minimalism, institutional critique and conceptual art,
but with a focus shifted from arts institutions like that of the AWC or by artists such as
Hans Haacke, Michael Asher and Mierle Laderman Ukeles and towards, “the pursuit of a
more intense engagement with the outside world and everyday non-art issues (blurring
the division between art and non-art, in fact).”
44
This emphasis on the so-called “outside
world” is where the cultural framework of site-specificity comes through. At some of the
stronger parts of her analysis, Kwon reveals the limitations of intentionality, especially
well-intentioned work, in the public realm through her comparison between Richard
Serra’s Titled Arc (1981) and a smaller project by Bronx-based artist John Ahearn, South
Bronx Project (1988) that received two vastly different forms of community reception.
Serra’s intentions were to draw attention to the uninviting plaza his large, steel sculpture
occupied and the work created a whirlpool of controversy that led to an unveiling of the
political divisions and power dynamics that are at play in the public sphere, and in this
case funded by public money. It also raised questions regarding the interests of governing
bodies, their rigid structures and nominal interest in conceptual intentionality.
Conversely, John Ahearn’s project, commissioned for the South Bronx Police
Department and funded by the Percent for Art program, involved the artist creating
representational sculptures from actual casts of neighborhood occupants, in an attempt to
negate the dominant negative stereotypes of the South Bronx community. Contrasting
44
Miwon Kwon, “Geneology of Site-Specificity” in One Place After Another: Site-Specific Art and
Locational Identity, (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004), 24.
40
Serra’s institutional form of negative reception, Ahearn’s criticism came directly from his
subjects. The negativity stemmed from accusations that the artist was not a member of
the so-called “community” in which he depicted and having sculptural representations of
Latino/a and African-American youth in front of the police department almost
figuratively suspended the historically tenuous relationship between the police and the
surrounding neighborhood. As Kwon points out, feeling dejected and having to confront
the problematics of representation set against his good intentions, Ahearn removed the
sculptures just five days after their unveiling.
However astute in her comparative analysis of Serra and Ahearn regarding
intentionality, Kwon surprisingly dismissive in her assessment of Suzanne Lacy’s Full
Circle, which was part of Sculpture Chicago’s revered 2002 exhibition Culture in Action,
curated by Mary Jane Jacob. Kwon critiques the piece based on her criteria of site-
specificity but to a complete oversight of Lacy’s conceptual intention and the project’s
use of second wave feminist dialogue-based, collaborative strategies. While it is certainly
not possible to account for all aspects of the work, dismissing one of the arguably central
aspects of the piece, replicates the devaluation, and longstanding marginalization of
feminist intentionality. But how to respond to the critical impulse to elevate one set of
criteria and dismiss others?
It is also peculiar that Kwon’s conception of site-specific art assumes a point of
analysis that brings together political, social and spatial criteria focused where the site is
located and yet in her criticism of Full Circle, she does not discuss, even in part, Lacy’s
longstanding commitment to feminism that directly informed her methodological
41
approach in the selection process of the women’s names that would be represented on
sculptural rocks placed overnight throughout the city. Instead, Kwon considered the
project to be an insular drafting of a women’s history with muted monumental impact and
perceived the committees of several women that discussed the contributions to Chicago
made by the selected one-hundred commemorated women as simply a “sounding board”
to the singular author-artist Lacy, a seemingly inanimate group of women.
45
Additionally,
Kwon performs her assessment without consideration of the curatorial framework of
Culture in Action, in which Mary Jane Jacob described as a series of collaboration
between artists and various non-artist identified social constituencies.
46
Kwon upholds
the modernist perception of imagined collectivity and projects it onto the participants in
Full Circle. The assumption here is not that the women could have, through their own
individual and varying degrees of engagement, participated in the project in a
collaborative and meaningful way. This is due to an apparent leveling of their
individuality by Lacy’s “mythic” unification of the local Chicago women’s desire to see
their nominations of women from within their own broad but self-identified group (under
the artist’s loose framing of “service”) commemorated on boulders placed throughout the
city in which they reside. A questionable oversight also comes in the form of the lack of
commemoration through monumentality in the public realm, an obvious intention of the
artist that resonated with her committee members. The point of analysis for Kwon in Full
45
Kwon, 118. “But the committees didn’t function as active creative partners in the overall conception of
Lacy’s project (at best, they were sounding boards for the artist’s idea.)”
46
Deduced from the following quotation by Mary Jane Jacob, “… a lot of the decision-making happening
on the part of the constituent-collaborators who are not artistst – like students and in the case of some of the
other projects: factory workers, mothers in the public housing development, AIDS volunteers, and so
forth.” In Kester, 129.
42
Circle weighs heavily on the spatial dimensions of the work and lacks an interrogation
into Lacy’s intentionality, situated heavily in the organizing principles of feminism and
interventions into the public realm.
Despite her oversight, Kwon provides a constructive categorization of three
criteria for the critical assessment of site-specific and/or new genre public art. “[This]
might be approached critically as another form of aesthetic vanguardism, a renewed
mode of social and political activism or a new strategy of urban reform and
revitalization.”
47
This acknowledges again the various vantage points to position a
critique and is especially useful. Later in her text, Kwon discusses Grant Kester’s
conception of the “artist-delegate” focused on a self-reflexive transparency that is
necessary for artists when doing community based work. Kwon summarizes, “Kester
argues… [one of the effects of presumption] is a potentially abusive appropriation of the
community for the consolidation and advancement of artist’s personal agenda.”
48
Representative of Kwon’s second criterion, Kester is interested in the social and political
implications and their subsequent rupture into perceived or real hierarchal power
dynamics.
Kester’s text, Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern
Art is a narrowed account of a handful of case studies of art practices that are brought
together by their use of a dialogical aesthetic. Driven by a desire to deconstruct the
pervasively amorphous categories of “communication” or “exchange” that the conception
47
Kwon, 107.
48
Kwon, 139.
43
of relational aesthetics teeters on the edge from, Kester elucidates a method within a
selection of socially-engaged practices including Austria’s WochenKlausur, Lacy and
London’s Stephen Willats, centered on the facilitation of dialogue among varied social
formations with an intrinsic intentionality for the dynamics of exchange or mode of
collaboration defined as practices, “…based on an unconventional model of artistic
production: collaborative rather than individual and dialogical rather than monologically
expressive.”
49
Kester also writes on another complex Lacy piece, The Roof is on Fire that took
place in Oakland, California in 1994 and was a combination of elements that have come
to characterize, at least in part, a large portion of Lacy’s work in the 1990s. The Roof is
On Fire brought multiple levels of engagement, from the work’s intimate collaborators of
Oakland, racial and ethnic minority youth paired with local police officers discussing
various issues and concerns the teens faced daily, with both groups confronting a
longstanding historical and social tension between law enforcement and minority youth,
enacting Kester’s formulation of dialogical aesthetics. The work also hit on aesthetic
levels, the conversations took place on the roof top of a parking garage inside multiple
vehicles and also exemplified Lacy’s aptitude for creating an expanded audience via vast
media attention ensured by the artist, which is also a strategy evident in much of her
work.
A connection between dialogical aesthetics and the consciousness-raising,
feminist collaborative and dialogue-based methodology is important to make. Although
49
Kester, 139.
44
Kester begins his discussion on Lacy with a reference to her own feminist trajectory and
use of the consciousness raising methodology, what is unclear is what differentiates the
dialogical aesthetic in The Roof is on Fire from the consciousness-raising practice,
particularly when Lacy herself has written on her intention in The Roof is On Fire and
other works that evolved around that time stating, “Our model was derived from process-
based and media-critical visual art theories and grew out of strategies that had evolved
since 1970s feminist performance art.”
50
As suggested in chapter one, feminist
performances that evolved out of the 1970s from the Los Angeles Woman’s Building’s
use of collaboration was an extension of consciousness-raising.
In 2006, the discourse moved out of its primary position in art academia and into
the pages of Artforum, where critics Bishop and Kester engaged in an exchange regarding
the critical assessment of socially-engaged art practices, sparked by a response by Kester
to Bishop’s article, “The Social Turn: Collaboration and Its Discontents.”
51
In this initial
statement, Bishop framed socially-engaged, collaborative art practices as constitutive of a
new avant-garde, with, at the time, little commercial art world attention.
52
Bishop
identified conceptual commonalities in the selection of artist projects and practices she
addressed as representative of the “social turn” including the durational, collaborative and
50
Suzanne Lacy, “Cop in the Head, Cop in the Street” in Leaving Art: Writings on Performance, Politics,
and Publics, 1974-2007. Suzanne Lacy ed., (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010), 277-278.
51
Claire Bishop, "The Social Turn: Collaboration and Its Discontents." Artforum International, February
2006. 178-181.
52
Ibid., 178. After listing projects by artists Jeremy Deller, Lincoln Tobier and others, Bishop explains,
“This catalogue of projects is just a sample of the recent surge of artistic interest in collectivity,
collaboration and direct engagement with specific social constituencies… these projects have had, for the
most part, a relatively weak profile in the commercial art world…”
45
emphasis on relational exchanges, with a declarative of, “Dynamic and sustained
relationships provide their markets of success, not aesthetic considerations.”
53
In his
response, Kester challenged Bishop’s framing by zeroing in on her sweeping
generalization of socially-engaged art practices as one in the same; indicating that the
majority of the artists mentioned in Bishop’s analysis are representative of biennial
circulated artists with varying but substantial degrees of commercial art world attention,
including the likes of Tiravanija and Gillick; artists whose work are also profiled by
Bourriaud. These practices, as Kester points out, only represent a marginal percentage of
the vast category of socially-engaged art practices making the distinctions of how these
forms of practices vary conceptually and their points of reception crucial to the critical
assessment of them.
The Bishop and Kester exchange is often cited when discussions surface
concerning socially-engaged, collaborative practices. My intention here is not to
rearticulate the obvious differences of opinion but I do want to highlight its significance
in relation to the current, expanding discourse around socially-engaged, collaborative or
“social practice” art and extrapolate some key points as they relate to critical models and
socially-engaged practices. Their exchange is often treated falsely as a dichotomy of
critical positions where Bishop emphasizes aesthetic considerations and Kester attempts
to cast light on Bishop’s critical motivations and is less invested in presenting a totalizing
model of assessment. How can we begin to make sense of diverging points of view that
53
Claire Bishop, 180.
46
are vested in the same set of artistic practices and yet seem to be continuously at odds
with one another?
Kester’s formulation of “dialogical aesthetics” isn’t meant to replace the umbrella
term, referred to as “socially-engaged art” and referenced here as “social practice” art but
rather, Kester moves towards specificity focused on one aspect of work, supported by a
purposeful selection of case studies that use the production of dialogical exchanges as
central to the art piece itself. Bishop contends that Kester fails to account for the totality
of socially-engaged practices in his assessment, indicative of a critical premise that
assumes rigid criteria should stand as a rubric for all forms of this practice to even be
considered art. This assertion also represents Bishop’s misreading of Kester’s critical
undertaking that aims to develop a set of commonalities represented in one specific layer
of socially-engaged practices.
The significance of the Kester and Bishop exchange, with consideration of its
unraveling on the widely circulated pages of Artforum, is just one point on the
constellation of critical positions and attempts to grasp social practice art. As I have
illustrated in chapter one, the complexity of social practice art is difficult to capture and
can only be explored through a critical undertaking of conceptual categories. Its
significance is reinforced by its location. Useful here is the work of literary and queer
studies scholar and critic Michael Warner in his discussion of the formation and
multiplicity of publics and counterpublics through text, “Not all circulation happens at
the same rate, of course, and this accounts for the dramatic differences among publics in
relation to possible scenes of activity. A public can only act in the temporality of the
47
circulation that gives it existence.”
54
This points to both the apparent disconnection
between museums and criticism and theory but also emphasizes how deeply intertwined
our understanding of social practice, as a discursive public or, using Warner’s terms, set
of overlapping, multiple publics is contingent on not only the critical reception through a
continuous production of reflection but also the channels in which the discourse
circulates.
What this narrow selection of texts represents is a disparate set of critical
motivations all aiming to address one, multiple or all aspects of socially engaged
practices. My emphasis has been on the critical framework and how it treats the
intentionality of the work. Bishop’s totalizing dismissal of “relational aesthetics” and
reductive description of Rirkrit Tiravanija’s work only reveals her own agenda that
upholds positioning the critic in the role of a judge, a faulty objective position of
authority that dismisses work un-self-reflexively and elevates others despite their
incompatibility. Conversely, Kwon’s critical framework is much more expansive and
performs a deeper analysis of intention, execution and reception. Kwon’s formulation of
site-specificity is broad and her critical perspective is useful in that it tends to bring in
critical social theories to bear on socially engaged practices. However, her discussion of
Lacy’s work could have been enriched and perhaps she would have arrived at a different
or more thorough conclusion had she taken into consideration Lacy’s feminist informed
method of organizing that is often central in her work. It is as curious an oversight as it is
unfortunate, for it merely illustrates the continuous lack of credence feminist methods are
54
Michael Warner, “Publics and Counterpublics.” In Publics and Counterpublics. (New York: Zone
Books, 2005), 96.
48
given and how feminism is often treated as an optional framework rather than requisite,
despite its contributions to critical inquiry. Kester’s formulation of “dialogical aesthetics”
is perhaps the most amenable in its aim to discuss one aspect of socially engaged
practices and explore it through case studies and its social and political prevalence both
within and outside of the canon of art theory. By doing so, Kester connects the dialogical
aspects of the works discussed in his book to other forms of activist strategies, effectively
creating a line through diverse art practices and activism. One necessary point to place on
this line is the relationship between feminist forms of consciousness-raising and
dialogical aesthetics. It would be problematic to assert that they are both the same but it is
nonetheless important to interrogate their connection, especially when applying a
dialogical aesthetic framework to feminist practices, such as Lacy’s The Roof is On Fire.
Additionally, exploring how dialogical aesthetics is, on some accounts, informed by
feminist collaborative, consciousness-raising methods, reveals how the feminist
methodologies are related to practices that are not necessarily proclaimed as feminist but
utilize pre-existing forms of feminist strategies. Thus, creating an imperative to somehow
bridge these methodologies.
Broadly speaking, in completely diverging ways, Bishop, Kwon and Kester all
deal with the persistence of critical compulsions established in modernist criticism. Their
critical motivations vary and as I have demonstrated, open up the possibility of a
necessary reassessment of what the responsibilities and role of the critic is today but only
after understanding its evolution since its professionalization, coinciding with the
dominion of modernist criticism in the postwar era.
49
Remnants of modernism
As the familiar story goes, Clement Greenberg first introduced notions of what
was to become his formalist model of criticism in the 1939 article titled, “Avant-garde
and Kitsch” in the Partisan Review, where he conceptualized avant-garde art as
transcendental and dismissed referential work as “kitsch.”
55
During the period of the Cold
War, Abstract Expressionism rose as the highest form of art with the likes of Jackson
Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Hans Hofmann all of whom were championed by
Greenberg’s modernist critical model.
56
The prevailing critical position of Clement
Greenberg and later, Michael Fried’s formalism, was rooted in a privileging of formal
qualities – line, color, composition, material – before content and intention. Greenbergian
formalism dominated critical discourse in the post-WWII period and into the later 1960s,
where an important shift occurred as social movements – civil rights, feminism and the
anti-war movement – and the rise of minimalist and conceptual art provided a strict
countering critical position.
57
But while the 1960s and 1970s provided a formation of
other critical models, the prioritizing of aesthetic criteria resurfaced during the Reagan-
era and coincided with the rise of Neo-expressionist painters such as Sandro Chia and
55
Clement Greenberg. “Avant-Garde and Kitsch.” (1939) in Pollock and After: The Critical Debate.
(London: Routeledge, 2000) 48-59.
56
Much has been written on Greenberg and Fried and their formalist models of criticism and its
domination, particularly in the pages of Artforum. For a more comprehensive reading on the topic I suggest
Amy Newman, Challenging Artforum, 1962-1974, (New York: Soho Press, 2003).
57
The literature on the rise of minimalism and conceptualism as distinct counters to modernist formalism
is quite expansive. For a unique approach to this historical record, I recommend Lucy Lippard, Six Years:
The Dematerialization of the Art Object, 1966-1972, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).
50
Julian Schnabel and is indicative of the relationship between conservative political
backlash and the resurfacing of formalist paradigms.
In Suzanne Lacy’s 1995 edited volume, Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public
Art, an entire section is dedicated to the problematics of critical writing when the
modernist, formal paradigm does not apply. As artist, educator and Lacy’s mentor Allan
Kaprow wrote, “The means by which we measure success and failure in such fleeting art
must obviously shift from the aesthetics of the self-contained painting or sculpture,
regardless of its symbolic reference to the world outside of it, to the ethics and
practicalities of those social domains it crosses into.”
58
These concerns resonate today.
The desire to have a set of rules, guidelines and restrictions or an aesthetic checklist is
exemplified in Claire Bishop’s argument where she surveyed a selection of so-called
relational artists, dismissed community-based art, and reduced relational or collaborative
practices to mere gestures with little to no political effect and aesthetic impact. Her
anxiety, as Kester pointed out, can be read as a discomfort in the shift in critical
paradigms and representative of Bishop’s own stake in upholding inherited critical
models. Bishop echoes formalist criticism, reminiscent to Michael Fried’s lament in “Art
& Objecthood,” his 1967 defense of the rising minimalist counters to formalism. He
discussed minimalism, referring to it as theatrical and “literalist,” as a degenerate art form
because of its wider accessibility and material use.
59
Conceptual artist Adrian Piper’s
58
Allan Kaprow. “Success and Failure When Art Changes.” In Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public
Art. Suzanne Lacy ed.,. (Seattle:Bay Press, 1971-1985) 157.
59
Michael Fried. “Art and Objecthood.” Artforum International. Vol V, no. 10. (June 1967). 21.
51
work challenged the formalist mode of criticism writing, “the artist’s role was to ‘engage’
or ‘grapple’ wordlessly with the formal and material properties of his [almost always his]
medium and the critic’s role was to articulate the aesthetic rationale of the work thereby
created.”
60
Piper’s reflection is also pertinent in its implication of the gendered
masculinist aspects embodied within formalism.
But it is not only Bishop that represents the remnants of modernism. In fact, it
would be all but too easy to fault Bishop for applying an aesthetic criterion where it will
prove itself secondary to the conceptual, social and political implications of the work.
The lack of critical attention in popular and widely circulated art publications,
particularly at the moment in which the Kester and Bishop dispute was published, is part
of the reason the dispute has become so noteworthy to begin with. It is my contention that
the modernism mode of criticism is active today, operates systemically and can only be
countered consciously after its identification. The critical stakes for modernism
effectively created a form of exclusion masked as a logical set of criteria. While the rise
of conceptual and minimalist art destabilized the dominance of formalism, it’s important
to also note the contributions of feminist art critical methodologies, many of which came
out of the evolving conceptual and minimalist frameworks, that have continuously and
purposefully responded to the persistence of modernist criticism. In the next section, I
survey the critical contributions of Arlene Raven, Suzanne Lacy (both heavily involved
in the Los Angeles Woman’s Building), Lucy Lippard (critically active as a writer and
curator, in the AWC, among many other activist endeavors throughout the 70s to the
60
Adrian Piper, “The Logic of Modernism.” (1966) In Out of Order, Out of Sight: Selected Writings in
Meta-Art, 1966-1992. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999), 212.
52
present) and the productive theorizations of feminism from art historian and critic
Rosalyn Deutsche. The impetus is to bring forward some feminist art critical strategies to
the present moment as one possible solution for the problems currently facing social
practice and its critical assessment.
Collaborative Criticism
The form that collaboration embodies as an intention in organizing strategies, for
a critic is comparable to the notion of interdisciplinarity in text. This concept possesses a
similar lure that collaboration does as it brings forward a promise of representing
multiple perspectives, something that possesses much draw to those wanting to challenge
the linear canon of art history and theory. Rosalyn Deutsche has used her critical voice to
advocate for interdisciplinary practices, informed by a feminist perspective and motivated
by a productive skepticism of cultural theory that aims to totalize discourse in social
theory, urban studies, art history and film. In her essay, Men in Space, she noted, “The
interdisciplinary approach is appealing because it momentarily undermines the authority
of all knowledge that claims to know definitively the thing it studies.”
61
Deutsche’s
analysis of interdisciplinarity and the exclusion of feminist perspectives is a significant
assertion. Deutsche expands on Griselda Pollock’s analysis of TJ Clark’s seminal social
art historical text, “The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His
Followers,” highlighting Pollock’s characteristic feminist revisionist method in her
61
Rosalyn Deutsche, “Men In Space.” In Evictions: Art and Spatial Politics. (Cambridge: MIT Press,
1996), 196.
53
discussion of Clark’s “peculiar closers on the issue of sexuality” as it pertains to Clark’s
observations of Paris represented through modernist paintings as experiential
reproductions of the spatialized city.
62
In “Boys Town,” Deutsche deconstructs David Harvey’s The Condition of
Postmodernity; a text championed for its interdisciplinary approach and attempt to posit a
general theorization of contemporary culture. Deutsche cautions against the appeal of
“interdisciplinarity” approaches, noting that while interdisciplinarity can shift the
singular, authorial privileging of one discourse it can also act as a merger among
discourses and create a type of power conglomerate.
63
In the case of the former, feminism
has often been able to act as an “enhancement” to existing discourses. Problematically
reductive as that may be, feminism, as a broader social theory, has often been used as a
lens and brings to the fore questions of structural power dynamics but typically in
retrospect through case studies. Conversely, the latter, or the “power conglomerate” can
work as a merging of institutionalized disciplines that connect and exclude the tenets of
feminism, despite the prevalence of feminist concepts within those disciplines. Deutsche
explores this in the intersection of art and urban theory and ultimately, calls for a critical
assessment of various disciplines rooted, from the start, in a feminist analysis of power
and not as an afterthought or add-on. Deutsche, in this sense, creates the possibility of a
feminist envisioning of interdisciplinary critical discourse rather than a revision.
62
Deutsche, 196.
63
Deutsche, “Boys Town.” In Evictions: Art and Spatial Politics. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996). On
interdisciplinarity, Deutsche gives the example of literature on urban and aesthetic theory uniting to
exclude feminist inquiry. “Disciplines often unite to protect themselves against the intrusion of ideas
perceived as common threats…”
54
It is precisely for this reason, the persistence of modernist critical compulsions
that I turn to feminist art critical methodologies as a way of reframing the problem of
criticism as it has done so historically, particularly in regards to conceptualism and
performance work and illustrated by feminist revisions of art historical texts that have, as
Deutsche articulates, dismiss feminism as expendable rather than a requisite mode of
social critique.
64
It’s no coincidence that many forms of artistic production where feminist activism
has been historically present has also been left out of the center of the contemporary art
canon including community-based art projects, craft art, art therapy, and public arts
education – a field occupied primarily by women.
65
It isn’t just when there isn’t an object
to point to that complicates the critical reception, it’s also who is orchestrating the artistic
processes and where it takes place that ultimately draws attention to the practice as “art’
to begin with. Arlene Raven addressed some of the problems in dominant art critical
models writing, “Critical language must take its cue from the character of the
communication of the art it seeks to elucidate.”
66
This important declarative characterizes
Raven’s critical motivations and the ways in which she engaged with the artists she
frequently worked with. Some of the issues in theorizing social practice can be addressed
64
Rosalyn Deutsche, Men in Space, 197.
65
This is often referred to the “feminization of the workplace” in sociology and typically refers to the
trending of jobs in non-profit sectors, community organizations and grade school education that are
typically filled by women and possess a disproportionate amount of cultural and economic value than that
of men, as individual artists, academics and other forms of professional positions. For the arts and
literature, I refer the reader to Joanna Russ, “Aesthetics” in How to Suppress Women’s Writing, (Austin:
University of Texas Press, 1983).
66
Arlene Raven. Word of Honor. 168.
55
through a similar process of self-reflexivity regarding the type of critical methods
employed. For critics like Raven, art writers should engage in critical processes when the
conceptual frame of the work is compelling and addresses some common areas of
interest. Through this, the critic becomes engaged in a process of writing that emulates
the artistic process. This ultimately leads to the question – if social practice is thought to
be an inherently or intentionally collaborative process, shouldn’t the critical process
reflect that? And if so, how?
Activist and critic Lucy Lippard’s involvement with the Art Workers’ Coalition
and sustained commitment to conceptual and minimalist art criticism evolved into a form
of collaborative criticism as her feminist consciousness expanded. In her 1967 essay,
“Change and Criticism: Consistency and Small Minds,” Lippard discussed the role of the
critic in regards to fixed, rigid critical models stating, “Criticism has little to do with
consistency; for consistency has to do with logical systems, whereas criticism is or should
be dialectical, and thrive on contradiction and change.”
67
Lippard’s insistence on the
fluidity of the critical process remained a through-line of her own work, embracing
contradiction and loosening the grip on what is perceived as right or wrong. Lippard
possesses an open self-reflexivity in her work, an honest quality that is unafraid of
contradiction because, it is her contention that, contradiction is unavoidable. In 1976,
Lippard reflected in her essay “Changing Since Changing,” acknowledging that, “All
through Changing, I say “the artist, he,” “the reader and viewers, he” and worse still – a
67
Lucy Lippard, “Change and Criticism: Consistency and Small Minds,” (1967) in Changing: Essays on
Art Criticism, (New York: E.P. Dutton and Co., 1971), 25.
56
real case of confused identity – “the critic, he.”
68
It is also apparent in Lippard’s critical
work, profiled in detail by Bryan-Wilson, that Lippard was motivated by a desire to shift
the critical paradigm away from the dominance of formalist models, because she herself
did not feel a part of Greenberg’s critical circle. This type of exclusion coupled with her
expanding feminist consciousness and the professionalization of criticism as a legitimate
field, no doubt informed her position as a critic with a desire to engage with artists
through a dialogical process. In this case, Lippard’s feeling of exclusion effected through
gendered power dynamics enabled her to reevaluate her own role as a critic.
69
Raven, in addition to co-founding the Los Angeles Woman’s Building, also co-
authored two volumes of feminist art criticism with Cassandra Langer and Johanna
Frueh. The first, published in 1988, is titled simply Feminist Art Criticism: An Anthology.
The selection process of material was centered on casting a wide net of issues and
concerns through texts by authors that were not frequently or previously published. All
essays were arranged in chronological order beginning in the early 1970s as a conscious
attempt to capture, at least in part, feminist issues in art alongside a historical trajectory.
“The process involves continually rethinking the conditions of the art world and the
status of women and feminist art criticism within that sphere.”
70
This sentiment
68
Lucy Lippard, “Changing Since Changing,” (1984) in The Pink Glass Swan: Selected Feminist Essays
on Art, (New York: The New Press, 1995), 30.
69
This is deduced from Lucy Lippard’s interview in Amy Newman, “Schisms” in Challenging Artforum,
1962-1974, (New York: Soho Press, 2003).
70
Joanna Frueh, Cassandra L. Langer and Arlene Raven, “Preface” in Feminist Art Criticism: An
Anthology, Joanna Frueh, Cassandra Langer, Arlene Raven eds., (University of Michigan Research Press,
1988), x.
57
represents the volitional condition of the self-reflexive mode of criticism stemming from
a broader, structural reality in which women are consistently hyper-aware of their
actions; as action itself challenges the gendered expectation of passive acquiesce. The
second volume, with the same editorial team, was published in 1994 and included
contributions from Lorraine O’Grady, Adrian Piper, Mira Schor and a handful of others.
The organizing principle behind this volume ran closely with a desire to reflect the social
and political climate of the 1980s and into the early 1990s, in consideration of instances
of censorship in the arts, the increasing epidemic of homelessness, AIDS activism and
other urgent social afflictions and a reexamination of how feminist art criticism was
located in the shifting cultural terrain.
After Raven’s death in 1996 from cancer, Lacy wrote a tribute to her friend and
collaborator articulating the role of collaborative criticism to her own practice and how
integral Raven was to one particular work, Travels with Mona from 1978. “Arlene Raven
(along with Lucy Lippard, Linda Nochlin, Moira Roth, and Griselda Pollock) was one of
the earliest critics to adopt a complex intellectual advocacy for women artists and to
challenge their exclusion from mainstream critical discourse.”
71
While Lacy classifies
Raven’s role in Travels with Mona as a collaborating artist, it’s also helpful to think about
what Raven’s involvement in the piece, collaborative and dialogical, can signify for the
role of the critic.
71
Suzanne Lacy, “The Artist Arlene Raven,” Princeton: Critical Matrix. Vol. 17 (Spring 2008), 80-86,
154.
58
Raven represents just one of the varied ways in which a type of critical advocacy
can be forged through a critical process that, as she declared years before, emulates the
intentionality of the art work it seeks to address. In this case, Arlene Raven maintained a
durational commitment to Suzanne Lacy, as friends, activists and collaborators, and their
relationship reveals the way in which Lacy’s social projects unravel. This process of, as I
call it, collaborative criticism is prevalent in social practice art forms that are surprisingly
outside of the central window of social practice itself. This is not a coincidence when one
considers how criticism itself is still, despite the emergence of theorizations on
collaborative art practices within the last ten years, not interrogated for its involvement in
the conception and execution of durational, collaborative and dialogical processes. One
of the most plausible problems of attempting to write about social practice is not just the
complexity of the work but also the necessary re-evaluation of the critical stakes one
inherently encounters when writing about this type of work.
A variation of this form of critical advocacy is also evident in Deutsche’s frequent
revisitation in her own work to Krzysztof Wodiczko’s practice. Polish born Wodiczko’s
work has addressed a variety of social and political issues, from violence against women
in his contribution to Mexico-California border exhibition In_SITE 2005, to The
Interventionists’ inclusion of Wodiczko’s Homeless Vehicle project. While not discussed
centrally as a social practice artist, (perhaps indicative of its primary focus on midcareer
and younger artists and collectives) Wodiczko has consistently produced work that
remains politically salient and relevant. Deutsche makes a case for an expansion in our
understanding of “public art” and its inherent political implications through her
59
assessment of Wodiczko. An early essay, “Krzysztof Wodiczko’s Homeless Projection
and the Site of Urban ‘Revitalization’” succinctly demonstrates Deutsche’s social critique
of the role of urban redevelopment in advancing gentrification and obscuring
homelessness by emphasizing the conservative ideologically infused notions of historic
preservation and exclusive intended use of so-called “public” spaces like parks. The
Homeless Projection was sited at Union Square Park in New York City in 1986 amidst
the park’s remnants of its drastic architectural and landscape schism in the ongoing
process of gentrification and social displacement. Wodiczko projected familiar objects,
typically associated with the conditions faced by homeless people such as crutches, rags
and casts for limb ailments, directly onto the monuments of such prominent historical
figures like George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. On the project, Deutsche wrote,
“The Homeless Projection, by contrast, treats architecture as a social institution rather
than as a collection of beautiful or utilitarian objects and addresses urban space as a
terrain of social processes.”
72
Through her text, Deutsche meticulously weaves through
seemingly disparate material, especially in an art context, from architecture, urban
planning and park design and uses Wodiczko’s piece to support her call for the necessity
of critical, visual interventions into public spheres while simultaneously deepening our
understanding of their potential. Deutsche has continued to write on Wodiczko. In 2010,
she published a text from a series of lectures titled, Hiroshima After Iraq: Three Studies
in Art and War where she focused on work from artists Silvia Kolbowski, Leslie
72
Rosalyn Deustche. “Homeless Projection and the Site of Urban ‘Revitalization’” (1986) in Evictions:Art
and Spatial Politics. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996), 37.
60
Thornton and Krzysztof Wodiczko. On Wodiczko, this time on a two-day project in
August of 1999 in the city of Hiroshima, Japan called Hiroshima Projection, Deutsche
continues to use his work as an example of critical interventions in the public sphere,
stating,
Wodiczko’s Hiroshima Projection, I now want to argue, brings the feminist
challenge to such fantasies into the public sphere and into debates about the
meaning of the public sphere. Traditional critical conceptions of the public
sphere… are themselves triumphalist insofar as they posit a public subject that,
emerging from privacy, exercises a totalizing… mastering, vision of society.
73
Deutsche’s assessment of Wodiczko’s work captures, in part, the complexity of his
interventions through an intricate feminist informed perspective, utilizing
interdisciplinarity as a device. Her writing on Wodiczko has also deeply influenced our
understanding of his work and exemplifies the way in which feminist critical
methodologies are necessary to the assessment of complex, political and socially-engaged
work. It’s also important to note that Deutsche’s writing on Wodiczko illustrates that a
feminist methodology is not reserved only for practices that are labeled as “feminist.”
Rather, it is the theoretical inquires, typically vested in revealing various systems of
power that feminist critique brings to the fore.
If we are not theorizing social practice with consideration of feminist
methodologies, what are we doing? As co-editor of the anthologies of feminist art
criticism Joanna Frueh has stated, “A feminist perspective does not replace traditional art
historical methodology. Rather, the new complements and amplifies the old, for fresh
73
Rosalyn Deutsche, “Krzysztof Wodiczko” in Hiroshima After Iraq: Three Studies of Art and War. (New
York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 62.
61
analyses and interpretations of style and iconography show that art is not value-free and
that previous scholarship has not taken this into consideration.”
74
This is a valuable
assertion that is certainly applicable to the present moment, where methods frequently
used in feminist art practice and criticism are given a considerable amount of institutional
attention but without mention of their feminist roots. The cautioning of taking feminist
contributions to criticism, art and culture for granted is also apparent in Kwon’s analysis
of Lacy. What needs to happen for feminist intentionality and critique to be
acknowledged for its indispensable qualities? Or perhaps, maybe a better framing of the
question is, what exactly makes feminist intentionality and critique expendable?
There appears to be two things at work here. The first is that in the present
moment, and as Raven and Frueh suggest, a level of progressive politics in feminist
methods seems to be taken for granted or misunderstood. It seems that it’s a starting point
that is not interrogated; it’s implied and assumed. It’s taken for granted or thought to be
outdated, evidenced by the circulation of terms such as “postfeminist.” There has to be a
looking back in order to look forward. The WACK! exhibition in 2007, the first major
survey of feminist art at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art is constitutive of
a looking back but where to go from here? The second, which can only be addressed
through a cognizance of the first, is that a contemporary feminist art criticism has to be
connected to the social and structural institutions in which it operates – meaning that to
engage in this process requires a particular level of consciousness and self-reflexivity in
the critical process.
74
Joanna Frueh, “Towards a Feminist Theory of Art Criticism,” in Feminist Art Criticism: An Anthology,
Joanna Frueh, Cassandra Langer, Arlene Raven eds., (University of Michigan Research Press, 1988), 156.
62
The role of the critic and the potential for criticism to function detached from
previous critical paradigms and shift into a more conscious, active and self-reflexive
position is necessary. It can be, and indeed has in a feminist context, been a collaborative
role that transforms the perception of the critic as objective observer and into active
participant. Currently, we run the risk of losing the historical contributions of
collaboration, enacted in practices by artists and critics, to reductive forms of
malleability. The difficulty in writing about social practice must be understood as a
contemporary feminist issue.
63
CONCLUSION: At the present moment
The title of this study, “Now. Not Now. And Now” is lifted from Gertrude Stein’s
rhythmic vocal delivery of her piece “If I Told Him: A Complete Portrait of Pablo
Picasso,” – introduced to me through one of the artist and writer Gregg Bordowitz’
captivating, performative lectures in 2009. The three short declaratives strung together
refer to the temporality and complication of language. Used here the title points to my
cognizance of the perpetually shifting context and expanding discourse around social
practice. At the present moment, the work, only nominally sampled here, is in constant
flux. In January of 2011, artist and writer Gregory Sholette published his book Dark
Matter: Art and Politics in the Age of Enterprise Culture, an excellent examination of
how forwardly political art practices, the formation of artist-ran project spaces and the
experimentation of interdisciplinary practices, typically taken up by young activists and
artists, operate much closer to the commercial art economy than perceived. Sholette
makes the claim that these practices actually constitute a “dark matter” in the
contemporary art world, which has historically and through the present, exploited this
relationship.
75
This moment may also represent an instance of what Lucy Lippard characterized
in 1967 as, “Innovation can be corrupted, or hidden too. Some potentially major
contributions never become influential and are recalled long after the fact when related
75
Gregory Sholette, Dark Matter: Art and Politics in the Age of Enterprise Culture, (London and New
York: Pluto Press, 2011).
64
events occur, as prototypal.”
76
Certainly, this occurrence is what Sholette refers to as
“dark matter.” But has feminism always been dark matter? In terms of social practice,
there seems to be a continuous reliance or persisting reference to Nicolas Bourriaud’s
“relational aesthetics” despite where this formulation does not apply as a totalizing
conceptual frame. Suzanne Lacy’s continuous presence at the intersection of art, activism
and pedagogy is a significant centering of feminist art practice at the evolvement of social
practice with her current position as chair of the Otis College of Art and Design MFA
program in Public Practice. Presently, Lacy is leveraging her significance in the field to
bring the first retrospective of the Los Angeles Woman’s Building to Otis with a slated
opening date of October 2011. Returning to concerns depicted in my introduction in
Feminist Time: A Discussion regarding the WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution
exhibition; it’s possible to recreate the systems of individualization that counter the
collaborative structures of feminist activity. The WACK! exhibition was pre-determined
to survey only a selection of feminist practitioners with the cut-off date of 1979, as a way
to handle the rich, vast and tenuous feminist art historical record but that decision was not
without its problems. As I’ve illustrated here, in regards to the collaborative practices in
criticism, the case of WACK! may explicate a retooling of exhibition formats, a problem
that is no doubt running its course through curatorial departments presently as capturing
the dynamics of collaboration counter conventional survey exhibition models focused on
following linear historical timelines with the individual presentation of work. Ultimately,
this leads into the paradox of notoriety and feminism. How can credit, if that’s what
76
Lucy Lippard, “Change and Criticism: Consistency and Small Minds,” (1967) in Changing: Essays on
Art Criticism, (New York: E.P. Dutton and Co., 1971), 29.
65
notoriety is after, be awarded to practices that through their own rhetoric, reject
individual authorship?
It is my contention that feminist art critical methodologies should function
presently as models for a collaborative criticism as a way of putting pressure on the use,
proclaimed and in its implementation, of collaboration in social practice. But I also want
to bring to the fore that feminist art criticism has its own contentious and contradictory
historical record. The model of consciousness-raising that I explore in this text is rooted
in a second wave feminist moment and has been criticized as prioritizing and reifying the
experiences of women, particularly middleclass, educated, heterosexual, white women.
Critic and queer activist Craig Owens wrote in his 1987 essay, “Outlaws: Gay Men in
Feminism,” articulated some of the exclusionary tactics that are enabled through identity
categories, particularly dichotomous ones, such as the pervasive and opposing, labels
attached to sexuality and gender. Owens, through a deep analysis of critical queer
theorist Eve Sedgwick, writes about the divisions between homosexual men and women
in the feminist movement that evolved out of systemic homophobia. “Homophobia is not
primarily an instrument for oppressing a sex minority; it is rather, a powerful tool for
regulating the entire spectrum of male relations.”
77
In this sense, feminism has replicated
many of the patriarchal power structures it aims to resist. I don’t, however, find this
historical occurrence, and its permeation today, to be restrictive, impervious to change or
a justification for the perpetual dismissal of feminist perspectives, although that often
seems to be the case. Instead, I find embracing contradiction, as Lucy Lippard has
77
Craig Owens, “Outlaws: Gay Men in Feminism,” (1987) in Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power
and Culture, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 221.
66
articulated, to be a necessary component in the adoption, development and application of
feminist critique. Owens also sees the replication of patriarchal power and exclusion as
pivotal moments of critical reflection. “… Sedgwick has effectively transformed the fear
of homosexuality from an isolated political issue into a central concern of any left
political coalition today.”
78
Transforming contradiction into a reflexive form of
identifying the directive of collaboration diametrically counters patriarchal notions of
perfection and totalizing accuracy and instead, permits for a self-reflexivity that can
extend beyond an individual and operate at systemic levels. Where second wave
feminism, needed to expand to consciously and critically open up to the narratives and
experiences of queer men and women, people of color, class inequality, postcolonialism,
among many other experiences previously unaccounted for, now represented particularly
in the current evolving third wave; similarly, contemporary art requires the crucial
identification of the distance between social practice discourse and feminist art critical
methodologies as a political issue with significant implications.
As we’ve seen, an attempt to resolve the problem in the assessment of social
practice and its theorization should start from a point of intentionality of the artist and be
executed through a process of self-reflexivity on the part of the critic. The importance of
intentionality can certainly direct audiences, critics and others towards a point of analysis
that yields reciprocity from the scope of the artwork. Meaning, where intention is first
understood, not as an authoritative move to heavily direct the reception but as integral to
generating a dialectical mode of reception. If social practice is thought to be political art,
78
Craig Owens, 232.
67
collaborative among other things, assessments can only begin where the artist/s intend
them. Miwon Kwon’s misstep in Full Circle could have produced a much different
reading had she considered Lacy’s feminist intentionality in the work. Perhaps, Claire
Bishop would have felt less tied to upholding dichotomous success/fail models and Grant
Kester’s formulation of dialogical aesthetics would reveal a deeper relationship to
consciousness-raising methodologies of the feminist movement.
Another aspect of intentionality that could help rectify the confusion that social
practice generates, is the erroneous projection of intentionality – where projects are
thought to possess radical intentionality infused with political agendas when in actuality,
they are themselves, small gestures produced in relational event type settings. This is by
no means a dismissal of these practices. Beginning with a consideration of intentionality,
the critic engages in a dialogue, through text, with not just the receptive audience but also
the artist and is then able to set the scope of the work to prevent the over projection of
radicality and other misguided assessments, especially when many of these attributions
are unwanted. This is only further complicated by museums’ specific packaging of social
practices, making the structure of the residencies opaque. For example, setting the scope
of assessment too broad for one of Machine Project’s event-based, often subtle or
eccentric projects that took place during their residency at the Hammer Museum in 2010
may lead one to either devalue the work based on a set of criteria that does not apply or
attach explicit notions of radicality to the work. Both circumstances are problematic, as
they do not assess the work extending from its own intentions. Considering intention also
requires the critic to possess a degree of self-reflexivity throughout the critical process,
68
placing the critic somewhere along the lines of ethnographer and investigator, away from
the pretense of critical distance. If dialogue is the central factor of a work, is should also
be in the critical process.
In Arlene Raven’s essay that concluded the first volume of Feminist Art
Criticism, she included a quote from Lucy Lippard, “Feminism and the changes it has
wrought, are taken for granted by most of the younger generation – either dismissed as
accomplished or dismissed as irrelevant to their lives (which of course they’ll find out it
isn’t but later…).”
79
This statement is complicated. As a “young” feminist, I read this
first as to be constitutive and perhaps reifying of the generational divide that frequently
experienced in many activist circles tends to valorize movements based on a historical
looking back. But how to look forward? How to identify feminist issues in the present
moment?
I have, for the most part, evaded centralizing the discussion on politics and
aesthetics and the history of political art that are addressed by writers such as Jacques
Rancière, much of Rosalyn Deutsche’s work in the late 1990s forward and more recently
Gerald Raunig in his text, Art and Revolution: Transversal Activism in the Long
Twentieth Century. I also had to take out critical theorizations from noteworthy artists
and critics from in and outside the United States on collaborative work, including the
texts by artist Ted Purves, curator Maria Lind, and the Austrian collective,
WochenKlausur (discussed at length by Grant Kester in Conversation Pieces: Community
79
Lucy Lippard qtd in Arlene Raven. “The Last Essay on Feminist Criticism,” in Feminist Art Criticism:
An Anthology, Joanna Frueh, Cassandra Langer, Arlene Raven eds., (University of Michigan Research
Press, 1988), 237.
69
and Communication in Modern Art). Additionally, I could not explore to the depth that is
needed, the contributions of feminist and queer activist artists, critics and collectives but I
hope that their omission here leads me to another study where they can receive the
necessary attention their practices deserve. In the context of the aforementioned,
perceived generational divide, I would like to take this opportunity to at least list some
practices that I find compelling, complex and constitutive of present collaborative
activities that foreground their social and political intentions and capture my feminist
interest. Many of which are not in the popular scope of social practice but are important,
perhaps, as our dark matter. The Journal of Aesthetics and Protest is a Los Angeles / New
York City based collective that publishes a journal, produces exhibitions and participates
in various activist endeavors operating without the distinction between artistic production
and political activism. LTTR, (Lesbians To The Rescue) is a NYC-based, feminist,
genderqueer artist collective that also produces an art journal and organizes
performances, events and film screenings. Formed in 2001 the collective is currently
comprised of artists Ginger Brooks Takahashi, K8 Hardy, Emily Roysdon and Ulrike
Müller. Also from New York City and with some shared membership with LTTR, is the
group WAGE or Working Artists in the Greater Economy. WAGE has carried the plight
of artists as legitimate workers in capitalist economies and place pressure on cultural
institutions for transparency in their funding structures and also, a contemporary
outgrowth, in part, of the Art Workers’ Coalition. Chicago’s Temporary Services,
established in 1998, is another important collective that challenges the insular,
individualist and elitist notions of contemporary art by producing projects, exhibitions
70
and publications that challenge individualism and competition through collectivity and
support systems. Additionally, the ongoing projects such as Houston’s Project Row
Houses, started by artist Rick Lowe in 1993, John Malpede’s Los Angeles Poverty
Department from 1985 and more recently Los Angeles based, queer performance artist
and activist Wu Tsang’s, now defunct exhibition space Imprenta, that also functioned as a
service to the trans and queer community, offering free legal consultation and HIV
testing; all of which are highly involved collaborative efforts that take place outside of
conventional arts institutional settings. I deeply encourage further investigating on these
artists, writers and projects, as they are all ones I hope to write about in a mode
emblematic of the collaborative forms of criticism that they warrant.
In closing and at the present moment, I write from a position of great concern,
filled with a sense of urgency that I can only imagine (or hope) is comparable to that of
which propelled the feminist art movement towards collaborative action and deep,
insightful, honest reflection in drafting criticism. I went back and forth in conceiving the
parameters of this study, frustrated with the condensed timeframe of which to produce
this text but also through a confrontation with my own educational training, that is
heavily influenced by a desire to simply deconstruct current models of criticism until
there is nothing left, dismiss them entirely and replace them with a new term and or
criterion to assess any and all work from. However, while conducting my primary
research, it is important to distinguish here, I began with the work of Grant Kester and
Miwon Kwon on socially-engaged art practices and then jumped back historically to
Lucy Lippard and others, and eventually I began reading these diverse but incredibly
71
indispensable texts together at the same time. By doing so, I felt that much of the writing
on social practice art seemed to have some commonalities with the art practices that
feminist art critics wrote about. It then became important for me to move beyond the
compulsion to create a new model and to instead, explore the connective tissue between
the growing popularity and critical attention paid to social practice with the historical
reflections of feminist art and collaboration. Of course, the connections that I attempt to
make would not have been at all possible without the continuous presence of Suzanne
Lacy’s art, activism and writing and her position here as an important through-line artist
from the Los Angeles Woman’s Building to the contemporary critical and institutional
context of social practice.
Writers such as Lucy Lippard, Arlene Raven, Rosalyn Deutsche and Suzanne
Lacy are just a few of those that have attempted to redefine the role of the critic as one
based on integrity without the persisting pretense of so-called critical objectivity.
Additionally, their critical motivations were vested in a collaborative form constitutive of
a feminist envisioning rather than revision, although some of them worked in both
modes. It is not that feminist art criticism itself inherently possesses openness and self-
reflexivity but rather, it comes alive in the writers that have elected to position
themselves as an active and subjective participant within the work. This is not an act of
cowardice based on indecision or the inability to stand alone. It’s the quite the opposite.
Collaborative criticism is an audacious endeavor as it rejects the system of individualist
training that is an outgrowth of art history and instead, propels the critic towards
assuming a level of responsibility that yields reciprocity. It is a political gesture.
72
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Abstract (if available)
Abstract
This paper is an urgent call for a collaborative form of art criticism in the assessment of social practice as a contemporary feminist issue. This study evaluates the recent institutional inclusion, increasing popularity and expanding theorizations on socially engaged practices by elucidating a relationship between feminist art critical methodologies and the current conception of social practice art, focused on the attribution of collaboration this form of practice purports. Through a comparative analysis of collaboration in two art historical precursors to social practice, evidenced by texts from Arlene Raven and Suzanne Lacy from the Los Angeles Woman’s Building in the 1970s and 1980s and Lucy Lippard and the Art Workers’ Coalition from 1969
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University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses
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Asset Metadata
Creator
Guillen, Melinda
(author)
Core Title
Now. Not now. And now: Toward a feminist critical envisioning of social practice
School
School of Fine Arts
Degree
Master of Public Art Studies / Master of Arts
Degree Program
Public Art Studies
Publication Date
05/03/2011
Defense Date
03/28/2011
Publisher
University of Southern California
(original),
University of Southern California. Libraries
(digital)
Tag
Art Workers' Coalition,collaborative art,feminist art criticism,Los Angeles Woman's Building,Lucy Lippard,OAI-PMH Harvest,social practice art,Suzanne Lacy
Place Name
USA
(countries)
Language
English
Contributor
Electronically uploaded by the author
(provenance)
Advisor
Anastas, Rhea (
committee chair
), Decter, Joshua (
committee member
), Kester, Grant (
committee member
)
Creator Email
guillenm@usc.edu,melinda.guillen@gmail.com
Permanent Link (DOI)
https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m3861
Unique identifier
UC1461912
Identifier
etd-Guillen-4538 (filename),usctheses-m40 (legacy collection record id),usctheses-c127-456578 (legacy record id),usctheses-m3861 (legacy record id)
Legacy Identifier
etd-Guillen-4538.pdf
Dmrecord
456578
Document Type
Thesis
Rights
Guillen, Melinda
Type
texts
Source
University of Southern California
(contributing entity),
University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses
(collection)
Repository Name
Libraries, University of Southern California
Repository Location
Los Angeles, California
Repository Email
cisadmin@lib.usc.edu
Tags
Art Workers' Coalition
collaborative art
feminist art criticism
Los Angeles Woman's Building
Lucy Lippard
social practice art
Suzanne Lacy