Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics by Shannon Jackson (review)

Like Shannon Jackson’s previous books, Lines of Activity and Professing Performance, Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics interrogates theories and practices, explicit propaganda, and unacknowledged habits that mark and unmark the boundaries between disciplines. As the titular word-play suggests, this book examines the “social turn in contemporary art” and seeks both to clarify the discomfort many art critics express with practices that exit the gallery to tackle problems in the society outside, and to resolve this discomfort by providing critical and historical support that buttresses the value of such practices as art, as performance, and as social work in the most generous sense. Jackson argues that evaluating art as social practice requires us to give less value to transgression and more to “art forms that help us to imagine sustainable social institutions,” thus highlighting the importance of “inter-dependent support” (14), including the coordinated labor of planning, building, and social repair through institutions of art and community. Focusing on institutional determinants of artistic form and reception, Jackson aims to persuade art critics to look beyond purist notions of artistic autonomy to the necessarily social dimension of even formalist art, and to encourage theatre scholars to value performance, even in apparently gallery-bound installations.

The first two chapters provide both theoretical coordinates and key case studies that challenge art critics who have expressed doubt about the social work that art performs. Jackson draws on theories of the theatre, especially Brecht’s, on theories of social engagement, such as Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s notion of “antagonism,” as well as Jacques Rancière’s “rupture,” and on theories of art and social practice, such as Nicholas Bourriaud’s reflections on the social turn in art in Relational Aesthetics. Jackson cites the English translation, but worth noting is Bourriaud’s French title, Esthétique relationnelle, which emphasizes more directly the sense of “in relation to” and thus an impulse to connect art to social practice, even in those cases where artists and critics profess art’s strict autonomy from society. Relational aesthetics thus opens up the object of art to include performance and other apparently ephemeral practices, and expands the disciplines of art criticism and curatorship, which have resisted the alleged impurity of embodied practices. To emphasize the force of these debates, Jackson quotes Theodor Adorno’s emphatic defense of autonomy in the polemical “Commitment” essay, but his more tempered argument in Aesthetic Theory would be a better source here because it asserts at the outset that autonomous art is always a social practice and returns, in the final section, to an acknowledgment that Brecht’s conception of commitment was more complex than a mere assertion of political will. Noting that Brecht’s theatrical ideas, especially Verfremdung (best translated as “estrangement” rather than “alienation”) “may not be appropriate” for the discussion of art institutions (50), Jackson misses the opportunity to highlight Brecht’s comments on the institutional determination of art, to be found in English in Brecht on Art and Politics and Brecht on Film rather than John Willett’s limited selection in his edition of Brecht on Theatre.

Nonetheless, the opening chapters make persuasive use of the theoretical coordinates of autonomy and heteronomy, formal resistance as against social engagement, to map the boundaries between art and work and performance and ordinary activity in which to plot the work of very different artists. International artist Santiago Sierra’s post-minimalist social sculpture, such as 90 cm Bread Cube (2003), has sought to engage minimalist experiments in elemental forms with the social obligation to feed Mexico City’s homeless people, for example. Jackson’s coordinates also invite us to reassess an earlier series of Sierra’s experiments in which laborers were paid to “remain inside cardboard boxes” or for “360 continuous working hours”—experiments that art critics like Michael Fried and Claire Bishop dismissed as theatrical (68). Against Sierra’s project, which might be considered “dehumanizing” even if it exposes “the asymmetries of capitalist economics” in the labor value of...