Social practice art

"Tania Bruguera, a New York artist who is known for helping immigrants and has been supported by the Queens Museum and Creative Time, sometimes explains social-practice art with an anti-Modernist call to arms: 'It’s time to restore Marcel Duchamp’s urinal to the bathroom.'"

That is a quote from an article in yesterday's New York Times that I assume to be considered deliberately provocative. The article, titled "Outside the Citadel, Art that Nurtures," is about art that is being called social practice. Its practitioners are artists whose work straddles the fence of aesthetics and activism. According to some prominent critics, it even falls over to the side of activism more often than not. Along the way the familiar question is raised--the one that usually is generated by purely aesthetic or conceptual avant-garde artists: Is it art?

I was delighted to read this and to hear the question raised in this context because it resonates so strongly with my own motivations as an artist and activist.

I spent 30+ years teaching art and I can explain Modernism and Conceptualism and everything in between. (I'm particularly fond of introducing DuChamp to newbies.) I'm grateful for the grounding and the vocabulary this has provided me. But I've long been uncomfortable with the continued perpetuation of some ideas that, frankly, in my opinion, have had their day, particularly the apparently endless desire for novelty--often of a self-indulgent bent.

I get Conceptual Art. (I actually consider my work conceptual, though not perhaps in the pure way that the capitalized term usually denotes. In fact I question whether art is art--as opposed to craft--if there is no conceptual component to it.) I also certainly understand and value the importance of aesthetics. But when I am making art, my motivation extends to, as it is put in the article, making "a difference in the world that is more than aesthetic."

My social practice and activism generally relates to environmental issues (although not exclusively.) If you are familiar with my work at all my use of the term "Urban Wilderness" comes as no surprise. I have long recognized that not everyone is comfortable with the marriage of these disciplines, something that is mentioned in the article. "Leading museums have largely ignored it," for example, referring to social practice art. In fact, as many of my readers know, I write two blogs, one about the arts (this one) and one about the environment (Urban Wilderness.)

The two blogs, in my perspective, are not separate disciplines but an acknowledgment of the usually distinct audiences that they attract. It is a dichotomy, like the term urban wilderness itself, that embodies the paradox of mutuality. I invite you to read the rationale for keeping two blogs that I have posted on my website: click here.

I also invite you to check out the rest of the story about social practice art: Outside the Citadel, Art that Nurtures

Commanding the View

 A recent addition to my ongoing Icon Series, more of which can be seen on my website.

Food vs. Art?

I learned to cook during my college years when I lived in a house off campus with a group of friends. We shopped at the local natural foods coop and we took turns making healthy dinners. It was the mid-70’s and we didn’t call ourselves hippies or foodies. We just liked to cook and eat good food.

I was studying art at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. I would never have confused my studies of painting, ceramics, or printmaking with what I made for supper. I certainly wouldn’t have called it art.

I have been cooking – and making art – ever since. Never once have I considered either activity as being a substitute for the other.

When my wife is at work I like to read the newspaper while I’m eating my lunch. Yesterday, I settled down to a large tossed salad of spinach, red leaf lettuce, chopped kale, grated carrots, cherry tomatoes, sliced avocado lightly sprinkled with cumin, and crisped free-range turkey bacon, garnished with slivered roasted almonds, diced scallions, and crumbled Gorgonzola, drizzled with fresh lime, and dressed with balsamic vinaigrette. I opened the NY Times to an opinion piece called “A Matter of Taste?”

In the article the author, William Deresiewicz, asserts that Americans have been on a foodie fad for a couple decades now that has led them to abandon other aesthetic pleasures, specifically art:

“Foodism has taken on the sociological characteristics of what used to be known…as culture. It is costly. It requires knowledge and connoisseurship, which are themselves costly to develop. It is a badge of membership in the higher classes, an ideal example of…conspicuous consumption. It is a vehicle of status aspiration and competition, an ever-present occasion for snobbery, one-upmanship and social aggression.”

As I continued to read my curiosity turned to dismay. Had my 30-year career teaching art been for naught? Could my former students even now be finding in food as much satisfaction as in art? One that I know of is currently owner of a fine, upscale restaurant in a hip part of town.

The parallels continue: “Like art, food is also a genuine passion that people like to share with their friends. Many try their hands at it as amateurs — the weekend chef is what the Sunday painter used to be — while avowing their respect for the professionals and their veneration for the geniuses. It has developed, of late, an elaborate cultural apparatus that parallels the one that exists for art, a whole literature of criticism, journalism, appreciation, memoir and theoretical debate. It has its awards, its maestros, its televised performances.”

I found myself so absorbed, if appalled, by the author’s thesis that I didn’t notice the blood dripping down my fork. Finally alerted by a widening dark red stain on the newspaper, I applied a Band-Aid to the cut on my finger that was producing this gusher. I must have sliced it while dicing my scallions.

Only then did I notice the pain. The obvious metaphor loomed: here was an unconscious expression of my distress at the ideas I was reading.

Bandaged and thus fortified, I turned back to the Times to discover that Deresiewicz feels the same way I do about the situation. “Food is not art,” I read with relief. “A good risotto is a fine thing, but it isn’t going to give you insight into other people, allow you to see the world in a new way, or force you to take an inventory of your soul.” (There’s more: check it out.)

All the while I was absorbed in this personal, almost existential drama, my one-year-old granddaughter, whom I babysit, had been in her highchair, absorbed in her own distinctly aesthetic food experience. I had given up the spoon to her for the first time and she was busily figuring out which end held the Gerber lasagna. She alternated fiddling with the increasingly sloppy spoon and gumming the slice of real, farm fresh apple in her other hand. Some of both even ended up in her mouth.

She was proof, although it wasn’t needed, that food is not only an aesthetic experience but also a visceral, tactile one. As she gets older I hope she will learn to discriminate between the real food and the processed kind. Oh, and the very real and important difference between food and art.

Photography: Art vs. Reality rears its head again

Since its inception in 1839, photography has lived a dual life: is it art or a representation of reality? That it can be both doesn’t seem to quench the question, which has been answered many times but seldom to the satisfaction of the general public (as opposed to the art establishment and collectors willing to pay significant sums for some photographs.) Like a wildfire that seems to have been brought under control, every little breeze makes it flare up again.

With each new technological advance, the question returns in some form. In an article in this week’s New York Times Magazine by Virginia Heffernan, the question has been turned around. If it’s not meant to be art, how does the new photographic technology of HDTV divest itself of artifice? (Click here to read the article.)

“Reality TV” has always been an emperor without clothes. Even in science, much less art, it is understood that an experimental outcome is always affected by the role of the experimenter. A subject is at the mercy of the photographer and the photographer limited by the technology. Even back in the classic black and white days of Walter Cronkite “the news” as presented in print or on TV has always been different than the reality it reports.

Now we have HDTV, which renders reality with a “staggeringly fine-grain resolution” that reveals every pore, blemish, and wrinkle in its subject. Do we still have to ask if this is reality or not?

René Magritte used paint, but his famous image (below) would be just as true as a photograph. The words in the painting translate into the paradoxical “this is not a pipe,” but Magritte pointedly titles the piece “The Treachery of Images.” It also would be just as true in HDTV today as it was in 1929 when he painted it.