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

Shannon Jackson's superb new book is, in a very challenging way, about vocabulary. Bypassing —even eschewing —language sometime dissed as "jargon," Jackson forces readers to think and think again about basic terms such as "performance," "social practice," "art," "politics," and "public"—terms she calls "resolutely imprecise" (13). Her topic is ideologically committed artmaking that uses performance; her concern is the relation between such artmaking and the institutions that support both the aesthetic activity and the life it values.

Jackson leads with the reminder that, while leftists have encouraged a belief that socially concerned art is at its most purposeful when it is being disruptive, a disavowal of state support and social welfare systems can play right into the hands of neoliberalism. For those still convinced that the state is bad and the individual is good, she has this to say:

The perception of autonomy is achieved through a kind of disavowal of the tax breaks, military pensions, public schools, wifely labor, housekeepers, off-shoring, and capitalist alienation that allows persons to believe themselves unfettered and individually responsible for their private success.

(36)

And if the state vs. marketplace/socialist vs. capitalist/individual vs. collective standoffs are not challenging enough, Jackson throws into the mix a forceful reminder that artists and most audience members generally come to interdisciplinary work more schooled in the values and vocabulary of one discipline than another. Action, she notes for instance, is a relatively recently embraced tool for visual artists; for theatre practitioners, Brecht's skeptical view of action as too conventional has been around for three-quarters of a century. What's an activism-friendly artist (or viewer) to think? Judgments may depend less on one's politics than on where one cut her arts teeth.

In six chapters of case studies, Jackson's readings offer dialectical critiques of an international roster of artists' socially engaged work. Chapter two, titled "Quality Time," contrasts the work of Santiago Serra, who lives in Mexico City and enjoys an international reputation in the contemporary art world, with that of Shannon Flattery, who is known for her Boston-based community arts projects. Serra reworks Minimalist experimentation; Flattery meets with neighbors and collects oral histories as the nucleus of her projects. Both are concerned with people on the losing end of social services and legal rights, but is the work of one sophisticated and the other largely a "feel good" effort? Does hands-on engagement with disenfranchised people that is designated as art do more social good than displaying that disenfranchisement in a dramatic way via distanciation to an elite who are supposedly in a better position to take action? Might the answer depend upon who you are or whom you ask? Do institutional critics know best?

The most overtly feminist chapter, "High Maintenance" (chapter three), looks at works by Mierle Laderman Ukeles and Martha Rosler to ask "why certain conceptual barometers prompt us to mistake their form for content[...], their explorations of redistribution as pleas for recognition, their re-enactments of labor as essentialism" (78). Rosler hit the charts in 1975 with Semiotics of the Kitchen, a video showing an ordinary woman in a confined space become one with the sign system of food preparation. Ukeles specializes in "maintenance art," which puts the labor of cleaning front and center. Housework is little different from the janitorial work it takes to keep a museum going, and Ukeles turned both into displays aimed at exposing the repetitive labor propping up the putatively independent worlds of painting, activism, or even arts administration.

In "Staged Management" (chapter four) Jackson parses Andrea Fraser's witty performances as a museum guide. Fraser's work, emerging from her 10 years with the V-Girls, continues their tradition of staging institutional critique to show not just "the seams of acting, but [...] the seams of the art institution" (121), performing not only a character but that character's context. The goal was "to reveal the institution to...