What Is?
- Definition
Socially Engaged Art: Addressing social issues by the means of creativity. Scenes that are set up in the community call for responses and absorb the responses as parts. The audience shares the authority to criticize and create. To question, propose, or invite; not to trick, manipulate, or incite.
- Reading
Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship, Claire Bishop, Introduction
1. Evaluation Lens
Bishop points out the lack of criticality for community participatory art and addresses the reason for the extraordinary goals of community art. Aesthetic and artistic value is not centered in this art form. Critics may feel they have lost the framework for using their usual regulations. The involvement of ethical issues in art urges a change in the role of critics.
When evaluating community art that decentralized aesthetics, should aesthetic quality be considered?
Rancière defines aesthesis as an autonomous regime of experience that is not reducible to logic, reason, or morality, a practice that is independent of the centralized concern of community participatory art production. Bishop values the openness of aesthesis and believes it also frees the interpretation of the work. I quite do not get the logic involved. So, what is spectating without aesthesis like? Why does it limit the interpretation?
2. Viewer Centered
Viewers are centralized. They are not the objects whose behaviors are being observed and analyzed. Now the critics evaluate by standing on the viewpoint of the viewers. How the work is implemented is no longer the focus. Artists go behind the practice or event. It does not matter if the scene is set up on purpose or not.
3. Temporality
Participatory/socially-engaged projects are usually not exhibited as it is happening. Exhibitions usually reform and archive the projects in a somehow static "final" mode. For the exhibition visitors, experiential immediacy is absent. Some performative exhibitions attempt to extend the temporality of the practice by letting the project process in the show.
The contradictoriness in the showcase and production of participatory arts relates to the ultimate goals of the practices: to make changes as it is happening, not to be archived as a still production. Adequate methods of documentation are put forward: What medium of secondary record extracts the idea of the project best and can trigger more responses?
4. Differences and Commons
Bishop concluded that it made no sense to include practices that spring from entirely different artistic traditions. This confused me. As mentioned before, aesthesis is not reducible to logic, reason, or morality, so it opens the interpretation of the work. Cultures also bring diversity in interpretation.
Rancière's “politics of aesthetics” leaves one without a critical safety net: each individual instance must be considered in the context of the dominant forms of power in its own time and place. What do the dominant forms of power in its(the work's) own time and space mean? How to determine the dominant?
Socially Engaged Art in Contemporary China, Meiqin Wang, Introduction
Wang pointed out that socially engaged practice does not merely critique the condition, it advances new conditions, too. This article also highlights the importance of drawing lines and establishing principles for both producing and perceiving practices.
- Notes and Defense
The author gives personal judgments without proof and leaves no material for the readers to decide whether they agree with the author.
Socially engaged artists are collectively described as "conscientious";
a time period is "coercive";
the features of a society are simplified as "post-totalitarian but still authoritarian".
Compared with Bishop's statement that socially engaged art should be evaluated case by case, Wang integrates Chinese artists as a whole and overlooks the difference between practices, as if they share the same position, goal, and ideology.
"Many art professionals find themselves in troubled living conditions",
"Many transformed that concern into the representation of reality",
"Many socially engaged art practitioners based in Beijing and became increasingly disappointed with the direction Chinese contemporary art is taking ".
The author draws subjective conclusions about social issues.
Urbanization transformed agriculture producers into landless cheap laborers or drifters. (Wang)
However, according to Factory Girls (Leslie, T, Chang), a non-fiction work based on follow-up investigations of migrants in China from 2001 to 2007, many young people insist on working in the city for better living conditions and more opportunities, object to their parent's wishes for them to return home.
Wang shows little neutrality nor criticality when evaluating the works.
artists advance ideas for developmental strategies that are fairer, more just, and more constructive to the life of underprivileged people.
- Regulations
Socially Engaged Arts are Challenges for Both Artists and Audience
⚠️ Artists have a great passion for participation in social issues, however, they are amateurs in sociology.
🔵 Socially engaged practice is to put forward rational critiques or arouse logical speculation by the means of creativity.
🔵 The intellect wrestle between the rational constitutes the value of public participation and performs the negotiations on the question that to what extent should the artist's ideas be referred to.
🔵 A qualified participant of modern socially engaged art must stay sober and keep critical thinking and prevent being by the appealing artistic presented statements.
❌ No Tricking mass involvement in reinforcing personal prejudice.
🔵 The artists have obligation to be considerate when framing issues and selecting methods.
For example, the act to occupy public spaces does not justify an appeal, it expresses only how strong the will is, and how many people shared that opinion. The number of participants does not prove the appeal is reasonable and powerful either. There is a large number of people who want free money, but it doesn't make it proper to gather and occupy a public space for this appeal.