Social Practice Then and Now

In 2012, the interns at Creative Time, inspired by the Sh*t People Say videos, made one about the art world. Shit Art World People Say (which can be viewed on Vimeo) follows a male and female intern around the streets of New York City while they energetically converse in non sequiturs about contemporary art and theory. At one point the male intern, an aspiring artist, says of his work, “My medium . . . installation . . . new media . . . video . . . photography . . . Can Life be Art? . . . social media . . . Social Practice.” “SoPra!” the female intern exclaims happily. “Have you read the new Claire Bishop article in Artforum?”

Social practice art was quite trendy in 2012 — and why not? The extraordinary events of 2011, including the Arab Spring, which resulted in widespread protests and uprisings across the Middle East and the overthrow of the governments in Tunisia and Egypt, and Occupy Wall Street, a grassroots movement that begin in New York and quickly spread across the U.S. and the world, demonstrated that grassroots resistance could produce revolutions. The goal behind SoPra art, which can include participatory art, interventionist art, agitprop, institutional critique, interactive installations, collaboration, happenings, actions, meetings, seminars, eco-art, crowd management, and street theatre, is to remove the art from the gallery and put it back in the street in order to reach audiences that might not ever set foot in an art museum. SoPra art is premised upon a DIY philosophy of barter, exchange, and shared labor. Artists become community organizers, farmers, scientists, facilitators, and sociologists, often in the name of wresting power away from the neoliberal, capitalist state and returning that power to the people. SoPra art replaced product with process. Although leftist politics are not a prerequisite for making SoPra art, it is generally the case that artists and artist collectives whose work falls under the “SoPra” heading are committed to egalitarian politics and the rights of those who traditionally hold little power.

The three books reviewed here all deal with art and artists whose work could be considered social practice art, or SoPra. Artifical Hells, by Claire Bishop, takes its title from André Breton’s 1921 Dada text. It is by far the most historical of the three, a genealogical study of participatory art that includes Futurist theatre, Dada interventions, Czech Fluxus, the Artists Placement Group, and, not surprisingly, the Situationist International. Artificial Hells calls for a consideration of social practice art from the standpoint of aesthetics, although what Bishop has in mind when she discusses aesthetics is very different than what Clement Greenberg had in mind when he championed aesthetic properties over content. The book builds upon Bishop’s two seminal essays on participatory art, “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics” (October 110, Fall 2004) and “The Social Turn: Collaboration and its Discontents” (Artforum International, 44, 6 February 2006). The former was a scathing response to the feel-good impasse of relational aesthetics, which essentially valorized the convivial relationship in the gallery as an end in itself. By contrast, Bishop proposed the concept of antagonism, based on Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau’s assertion that a democratic society is one in which relations of conflict are sustained. Bishop thus champions artists such as Santiago Sierra and Thomas Hirschhorn, who set up relations that are “marked by sensations of unease and discomfort rather than belonging, because the work acknowledges the impossibility of a ‘microtopia’ and instead sustains a tension among viewers, participants, and context.”

Bishop refined her arguments vis-à-vis aesthetics and participatory art in “The Social Turn,” an oft-cited article written two years later. Taking on what she termed “the ethics of authorial renunciation,” Bishop argued against perceiving all collaborative art as equally effective gestures of resistance simply because they strengthen the social bond. Bourriaud is mentioned here, but only in passing. Instead, Bishop reserves most of...