COMMON LAB MANUAL: KEY THEORETICAL CONCEPTS
SOCIALLY ENGAGED ART
​WHAT IS ART & SOCIAL CHANGE?

Text: Sotirios Bahtsetzis

Florida’s theory on "creative cities", which is centred on the idea that attracting and retaining talents (professionals, people from cultural and artistic communities and from the education and training sectors) is a key process for economic development, is a valuable resource. However, for many authors (Moulaert et al. 2004; Markusen 2006; Tremblay and Pilati 2013), what matters is the integration of all groups of society and quality of life in general. These are necessary to an inclusive city and are essential conditions for developing collective projects that are socially innovative (Klein and Tremblay 2010). Social innovation through art aims at empowering individuals from all sectors of society, regardless their income, level of education or availability. Many authors such as Throsby (2001) and Sacco (Sacco et al. 2007) have argued that the purpose of a creative city goes beyond the economic dimension and can include social and various other forms of innovation. This is all the more true given that culture depends on a degree of attention to local and global concerns while not being destructive of local solidarity. Socially engaged art is the principal way to achieve these goals.

Many artists today are deeply committed to making work that addresses pressing social issues and wants to change the way we perceive the world. Some artists use traditional forms and media of visual, literary, or performing arts to make work that comments on, responds to or advocates for the need for change, meaning art which operates in the symbolic realm. Others are exploring new forms of “social practice” that engage participants in a meaningful exchange. Nominal or symbolic interaction (the type of viewer engagement offered by the white wall display system of the museum and the gallery) cannot be equated with an in-depth, long-term exchange of ideas, experiences, and collaborations, as their goals are different. For these artists, an artwork might take the form of a store, a garden, a meal, a website, a street performance, a story exchange or an urban planning project (Thompson 2012). Socially engaged art can ignite outrage and demands for change, and/or provide a platform for reflection, collaboration, and building community. It can focus on the residents of a single city block, or reach out to "communities of interest" within a global audience. Best practices for Art for Social Change include the enhancement of collaborative participation, the hijacking of top-down gentrification to the advantage of the neighbourhood and the empowering of stakeholders through non-formal learning, self-organisation and collective action. The ultimate goal of socially engaged art practices is to provide the opportunity to practice leadership and self-expression while contributing to the well-being of a community. 

Socially engaged artworks are often participatory. These practices are often characterised by the activation of members of the public in roles beyond that of passive receptor. Critics such as Bishop (2005; 2012) have pointed out that socially engaged art also has to expand the circle of their audiences beyond the usual gallery-goers to include people who are not exposed to art. One factor of socially engaged art that must be considered is its expansion to include participants from outside the regular circles of art and the art world. Projects directly engage with the public realm — with the street, the open social space, the non-art community. As Helguera (2011) and Thompson (2017) maintain, artists need to earn the trust of a community. It is important to understand the mutual respect, inclusivity, and collaborative involvement that are the main tenets of social work. Artists operating in the context of socially engaged art gather knowledge from a combination of disciplines and practices other than art — for instance, pedagogy, theatre, ethnography, anthropology, and communication, among others — from which they construct their own practices in different combinations depending on their interests and needs.

Socially engaged art doesn’t act only through representation and various signification practices but is based on prompting communication among participants as well as instigating social action. Socially engaged art often avoids evocations of both the modern role of the artist (as an illuminated visionary) and the postmodern version of the artist (as a self-conscious or even ironic critical being). This entails a detachment from other forms of art-making (primarily centred and built on the personality of the artist) — dependent on the involvement of others besides the “instigator of the artwork”. Also, socially engaged art is specifically at odds with the capitalist market infrastructure of the art world — it does not fit well into the traditional collecting practices of contemporary art. 

The contemporary art milieu is most distinctively about exclusion, not inclusion, because the structure of social interactions within its confines are based on a repertory of cultural codes, or passwords, that provide status and a role within a given conversation. Instead, the term “art for social change” democratises the construct, making the artist into an individual whose specialty includes working with society in a professional capacity. One might as well maintain that socially engaged art operates with no preconceived notions of the “public” or the “audience”. In art, the awareness of others’ perceptions is valuable in that it gives the artist tools to upset expectations either in positive or negative ways.

Standard education practices — such as engagement with audiences, inquiry-based methods, collaborative dialogues, and hands-on activities — provide an ideal framework for process-based and collaborative conceptual practices. Indeed, parallels can be found between the processes of art and education within the context of socially engaged art. However, socially engaged art is not didactic, or even patronising (Helguera 2011). An artist, in contrast to a social worker may subscribe to the same values but make work that ironises, problematises, and even enhances tensions around subjects, such as the betterment of humanity or social justice and the strengthening of human relationships, in order to provoke reflection. Socially engaged art does not push art in the direction of what Helguera (2011) calls "relational eugenics".

In this regard, to argue, for instance, that effective socially engaged art creates constructive personal relationships is wrong: an artist's successful project could consist of deliberate miscommunication, in upsetting social relations, or in simply being hostile to the public. Such works reveal the antagonistic nature of human and social relations. Also, socially engaged art does not fill in the void left behind by a failed welfare state (Bishop 2012). It is not a substitute for a neoliberal management of society which is not able to protect and promote the economic and social well-being of the citizens.

How does socially engaged art relate to other disciplines? Socially engaged art functions by attaching itself to subjects and problems that normally belong to other disciplines, moving them temporarily into a space of ambiguity. It is this temporary snatching away of subjects into the realm of art-making that brings new insights to a particular problem or condition and in turn makes it visible to other disciplines. This is why the outcomes of such art-making cannot be or at least shouldn't be anticipated by other disciplines. In this regard, socially engaged artists can never be “amateur” anthropologists, sociologists, city planners, educators or social workers, who always operate with conditioned disciplinary boundaries. Socially engaged art, by definition, should not have particular goals when it comes to engaging a community.

Most artists who produce socially engaged works are interested in creating a kind of collective art that affects the public sphere in a deep and meaningful way. The development of the global justice movement, or movement against neoliberal globalisation since the late 1990s, has played a significant role. Social struggles which call for better democratic representation, advancement of human rights, fair trade and sustainable development have found their way into the arts. Socially engaged art is successful inasmuch as it builds community bonds. Socially engaged art’s emphasis is less on the act of protest than on becoming a platform or a network for the participation of others, so that the effects of the project may outlast its ephemeral presentation.

According to Helguera (2011), strategies of socially engaged art focus on the following:

• The construction of a community or temporary social group through a collective experience (temporary micro-communities).
• The construction of multi-layered participatory structures. 
• The promotion of “virtual” participation in the construction of community by means of social media.
• The investment on time and effort to secure longevity.
• The questioning of preconceived assumptions about the audience.

Socially engaged art project operates within three registers: one is its immediate circle of participants and supporters; the second is the critical art world, toward which it usually looks for validation; and the third is society at large, through governmental structures, the media, and other organisations or systems that may absorb and assimilate the ideas or other aspects of the project. For this reason, the team of CoL devised the following set of questions addressed to the participants that shape the profile of the project:

• How do you understand the interrelations between social innovation and cultural-artistic activities?
• Do you observe such social innovations in your own city, country?
• Do you think that concrete social objectives can deter the creative-artistic dimension of projects, or make them too “realistic”?
• Are creative-artistic projects the best solution to city development and reconversion today? Why or why not?

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RELEVANT CONCEPTS

Community Art Projects
The typical community art project (for instance, a children's mural project) is able to fulfil its purpose of strengthening a community's sense of self by lessening or suspending criticality regarding the form and content of the product and, often, promoting “feel-good” positive social values. Socially engaged art aims at controlling a social situation in an instrumental and strategic way, in order to achieve a specific end. The work doesn’t act only through representation and various signification practices but is based on prompting communication among participants as well as instigating social action. Some work within participatory art, at the opposite end of the spectrum, exploits individuals with the goal of denouncing exploitation – a powerful conceptual gesture that openly embraces the ethical contradiction of denouncing that which one perpetrates. Santiago Sierra’s community of participants is financially contracted; they participate in order to get paid, not out of interest or for their love for art. Everything in such a work revolves around the personality of the artist in its postmodern version as a self-conscious if not self-serving critical being.

Historical Predecessors
​The social movements of the 1960s (largely associated with counter-culture) led to greater social engagement in art and the emergence of performance art and installation art, centering on process and site-specificity, which all influence socially engaged art practice today. In previous decades, art based on social interaction has been identified as “relational aesthetics” and “community”, “collaborative”, “participatory”, “dialogic”, and “public” art, among many other titles. In some conceptual art, the role of the participant is nominal; he or she may be an instrument for the completion of the work (for Marcel Duchamp, for example) or a directed performer (in a Fluxus piece).

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION
About Common Lab
​Background
Timeline

ACTIVITIES RATIONALE 
​Tale of X Cities & media competences for community building
State of the Arts & the digital public spheres

KEY THEORETICAL CONCEPTS
​Social innovation through art
​Art for social change
​Post-industrial design
Cultural and creative industries
Bibliography

CASE STUDY: TALE OF X CITIES
​About the case study
​Tale of X Cities key results & findings
​Lessons learned & recommendations 
Model project flow
​Media productions as evaluation tool
​Digital events and communication formats

VIDEO LECTURE: ART FOR SOCIAL CHANGE
Dr. Sotirios Bahtsetzis