Andy Horwitz
The question of aesthetics in socially engaged art is as fraught and enduring as our varied understandings of what constitutes critical discourse.
In a society so fully enveloped by the market-driven logic of Late Capitalism it is nearly impossible to relate to any work of art in a non-transactional context. We are told we are consumers purchasing experiences at a premium. “Cultural Authorities” tell us we are incapable of assessing the value of “art product” ourselves and so are provided with “reviews” that are little more than consumer advocacy, in newspapers such as the New York Times that are little more than lifestyle guides for the privileged.
Arts organization marketing departments encourage us to tweet from our seats, to “like” them on Facebook, leveraging their cultural capital to enforce a singular narrative that brooks no dissent, denies the possibility of real conversation or interrogation. True criticism is as rare and undervalued as civic virtue and belief in the public good.
In this atmosphere, a legitimate discussion about the role of aesthetics seems unimaginable, and yet because of these conditions, is absolutely necessary. Art has a profound social function outside the marketplace; it can spark transformational insight and provoke action in the world. It can help us see beyond the illusions of the market; to think, feel and observe ourselves as part of a vast continuum of life across time and space. Art empowers us to experience community. It offers us a way into knowledge and complexity, compassion and insight.
In his seminal essay “Art as Technique,” the 20th century Russian critic Viktor Shklovsky introduced the idea of “defamiliarization”: presenting common things in an unfamiliar way to enhance the audience’s perception of the familiar. Rainer Maria Rilke’s poem “Archaic Torso of Apollo,” concludes with the words, “you must change your life.”
Art serves this same social function across all times and cultures. Whether originating in religious ritual in Latin America, or a sharecropper’s shack in the Mississippi Delta; whether we’re at a soukous rave-up in Congo, or in a Viennese opera house, art is about creating ecstasy, gaining perspective and insight.
And so the question of aesthetics exists wherever art exists, across all cultures and eras. And aesthetic frames are always useful because they are an essential element in delineating the cultural context in which work is situated.
The real question is not whether aesthetic frames are useful at a moment when more art is socially engaged, but rather how do we expand the aesthetic frame— and who is culturally legitimated as a critic—to embrace expanded art practices and introduce more diverse frameworks for critical evaluation.
Michael Rohd makes a useful distinction between “civic practice” and “social practice.” As I understand it, Civic Practice is where a community identifies a problem or challenge and invites an artist to use artistic strategies to work with the community to engage with the challenge. Social Practice is where an artist has an idea for a project that is created in and with a community.
In the case of Social Practice, the “beneficiaries” and/or “subjects” of a given art project may be a certain target population, but the “audience” writ large is the Art World. In this context it seems incumbent upon us to assert that “real” impact—economic, social, individual empowerment—are as legitimate critieria for evaluation as more conventional aesthetic benchmarks, and issues around the means of production must be equally open to critique.
In the case of Civic Practice, it seems that the Art World—meaning the established cultural infrastructure in its widest sense—is a secondary audience. The primary audience is the community itself, many of whom are probably the art-makers as well. But the aesthetic questions for art created in traditionally disenfranchised communities or through civic practice are no less important than in other works of art. And this is where I will offer two challenges that I believe are necessary to create real change.
The first challenge is to develop more critical voices in traditionally marginalized communities. Surely we can build a more widely inclusive, equitable yet rigorous critical community to help advocate for, build context and value for artists outside the mainstream and merely commercial?
My other challenge is to stop lowering our aesthetic expectations of community based work, whether it is identified as civic or social practice.
I moderated a panel on Social Practice and the Arts as part of Ping Chong + Company’s Undesirable Elements Festival in 2012, shortly after Philadelphia’s Headlong Dance Theater had completed their ambitious project This Town Is A Mystery, in which they worked with a diverse group of Philadelphia households to make performances in each home, performed by the (non-professional) members of the household.
During the panel Headlong co-founder David Brick recalled, “The households did not share our aesthetic concerns … What I found was, when we’d share our aesthetic values with the households and they would push back and share their aesthetic values, we got into really great conversations. That really clarified a lot of things.”
The lesson I took from David’s comment was that, rather than avoiding discussions of aesthetics in socially engaged art, or minimizing the value of aesthetics, we should encourage those discussions and provide our constituencies with tools for critical discourse and platforms where they can be heard.
In order to do so, we, as cultural workers, must be willing to interrogate our own assumptions and practices. Even as we work to widen the aesthetic frame and critical considerations of the mainstream arts and culture sector, we are called upon to widen our own perspectives and understanding of the work we do. Are we willing to deconstruct our own methodologies and preconceived notions, to move beyond known and familiar forms into the unknown, to embark on a learning journey alongside the multiple communities with whom we work, educating each other as we move into the undiscovered country of re-imagined beauty and infinite complexity? I certainly hope so.
