Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics - Notes

Introduction to Social Works

Shannon Jackson's book, Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics, explores the intersection of performance, aesthetics, and social support.
The book questions how art contributes to interdependent social imagining, where freedom and expression depend on obligation and care.

Case Studies in Social Art

Oda Projesi (The Room Project): Artists in Turkey rent an apartment, inviting neighbors for dinner, creating a playroom, and organizing parades.
Paul Ramírez Jonas's Key to the City: Distributes custom-made keys to New York City landmarks to ordinary citizens, democratizing civic honor.
Wochen Klausur's Intervention: An art collective in Zurich invites sex workers, politicians, journalists, and activists on a boat ride to discuss solutions for drug-addicted women.
Temporary Services: A group explores Chicago, interacting with public infrastructure to highlight and exceed planned civic design.

The Social Turn in Contemporary Art

Contemporary art has seen a "social turn," emphasizing inter-relational, embodied, and durational art events.
"Social practice" combines aesthetics and politics and parallels cross-disciplinary collaboration in performance.

Imprecision in Terminology

Terms like "social practice" and "performance" are imprecise catch-alls for various post-studio and postdramatic practices.
Festivals and exhibitions gather diverse artists with different goals and medium-specific skills.
Artists may emphasize real-time presence or use remote and digital means, creating objects described as craft, sculpture, or props.

Heterogeneity in Social Practice

Social practices vary in their social models, ranging from explicit political change to aesthetic exploration of time, collectivity, and embodiment.
Some seek collaboration, while others disrupt the social and artistic radicality through disruption.

Political Engagement and Sustainable Institutions

The book questions models that measure artistic radicality by anti-institutionality, focusing instead on art forms that imagine sustainable social institutions.
Time and collectivity serve as mediums for exploring interdependent support systems like labor, sanitation, welfare, and urban planning.
Performance requires systemic coordination, stage management, and speculative thinking about sustaining human collaboration.

Autonomy and Interdependence

An emphasis on social interdependence in art risks censorship and can encumber the work.
Autonomy is defined as "self-governing," opposing heteronomy, which is being "governed by external rules."
Performance's interdependence with ensembles, technologies, and audiences makes the language of autonomy conflicted.

Challenging Divisions in Performance

Performance's formal parameters include the audience relation, making inter-subjective exchange the material of performance itself.
Performance challenges strict divisions about where art ends and the rest of the world begins.
Performance aligns with movements challenging the bounded integrity of the art object, questioning divisions between aesthetic insides and social outsides.
Fred Moten suggests the parergon (accessory) cannot be strictly divided from the ergon (work) of aesthetic autonomy.

Social Aspirations in Art

The book explores the social aspirations of engaged projects less as an extra-aesthetic milieu and more as the unraveling of the frame that casts "the social" as "extra."
Questions of autonomy gain urgency when considering sustaining the lives of both art and artists.

Sources of Artistic Support

Artists find support from curators, booking agents, community center directors, foundation officers, arts commissioners, presenters, and collectors.
Variation in support highlights different economies and networks of commissioning, hiring, touring, granting, political mobilization, and do-gooding.
Artists' livelihoods interact with larger governance models, including federal support, public health, and neoliberal government influences.

Anti-institutionalism and Neoliberalism

Progressive artists and critics echoing anti-institutionalism may collude with neoliberal impulses that dismantle public welfare institutions.
Richard Sennett's The Fall of Public Man worried about diminishing capacity to imagine interdependent connection.

Ambiguity in Art and Politics

Ambiguity exists in interdisciplinary aesthetics and generalized leftism in social practice.
Lack of clarity about differences in community claims, public/private funding, and state welfare models is a key issue.
The book seeks to bring different genealogies into high relief and foreground conflicting assumptions behind collaboration, efficacy, intelligibility, freedom, etc.

Allegiances and Kinships in Art

The term "social practice,"or the phrase more and less specific, "socially engaged art" is defined and identified in experimental visual art, social movements, and theatre and performance studies
Terms related to social practice include activist art, social work, protest performance, collaborative art, performance ethnography, community theatre, relational aesthetics, and action research as well
There are other other terms for social practice that do not enjoy triumph: literal art, functionalist art, dumbed-down art, social realist art, victim art, consumable art.

Accessibility and Intelligibility in Art

Skepticism arises when considering art's accessibility and intelligibility when combined with social practice.
Another direction wonders if any art form is free from social engagement, questioning unintended consequences of social or political designations.

Considering Relational Autonomy and Heteronomy

Such questions can engage a long history of debate on relational autonomy and heteronomy of the art event.
This engagement has implications for medium-specific histories of aesthetics and social theory.

Medium-Specificity and Unspecificity of Social Practice

Analyzing social practice involves various artistic practices, including sculpture, painting, theatre, dance, film/video, and photography.
Social practices extend inherited art forms in space, duration, embodiment, and collectivity, inducing varied responses.

Reader Response Theory Relating to Art

Different viewers' responses depend on experiences with prior art forms; a relational art work may revise sculpture, theatre, or dance.
An artist's body in a gallery can be formally innovative or perceived as "bad acting."
The dispersal of art practice can be de-materialization or blocked site lines.
Responses vary from seeing innovation to seeing nothing at all, with the social being figural or literal.

Challenges in Curation and Production

The social extension of the art object challenges curatorship, installation, and performance production methods, requiring pragmatic expertise and support.
Art curators learn from presenters, stage managers from gallery installers, set designers from digital artists, and painters from social workers.
Responses depend on assumptions about art forms and the social function of artistic practice, and medium-specificity appears across cross-medium experiments.

Medium-Specificity's Implications

Medium-specificity structures perceptual apparatuses, causing disagreements about intelligibility, spectacle, alienation, reference, and pace.
It can have a chiasmic quality as disrupting one medium requires re-skilling in another.
Social Works emerges from performance studies, addressing expanded art forms with differing investments in disruption and disciplinary re-skilling.

Theatricality in Visual Art Criticism

Theatricality has been a figure for medium un-specificity in visual art criticism, prompting new conversations across visual and theatrical domains.
The question of theatricality raises its head repeatedly in art history. The gap between art historian and theatre historian can be due to different understandings of theatre and theatricality.
Even amid boundary-breaking, ambivalence remains about "theatrical."

Anti-Theatrical Discourse

We can continue to ask why