Social Practice

The most curious element in The Gatherers: Greening Our Urban Spheres, at San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, is “The Gatherers Timeline,” an extensive ‘root system’ located toward the base of the gallery walls. Originating in a corridor off of the main gallery and feeding a stump, a kind of bizarrely truncated stem, these orange and brown mottled vinyl roots spread throughout each of the center’s second floor galleries and are punctuated by small text boxes, contextualizing and textualizing the exhibition with various historical facts, reflections and anecdotal information from both the artists and the curators. However, the timeline’s dates are not organized chronologically, instead forming a field of information that literally underlies the works. Indeed, with their unnatural coloration, patterning and abstract form, one is encouraged to forget that the timeline is intended to represent roots at all.
If to gather is to some degree the act of assembling parts in to a whole, the timeline, as awkward as it is visually, accomplishes this task, serving as a visual indicator of consistency in an exhibition otherwise lacking formal cohesion. It is thus that the movement between the rural and the urban is shown through the operative logic of the rhizome, with its networks of crabgrasses and fungi spreading horizontally throughout knowledge systems and the ‘global village.’ The rhetoric of sustainability is a rhetoric of scale, a collection of semi-autonomous nodes, creating various networks across disciplines and practices. The institutional focus has shifted from one of aesthetic experience and contemplation to one of networking and knowledge sharing; a kind of farm, one might say. Yet unlike a farm, the exhibition offers little in the way of either productive resources or practical knowledge.
And while it can be said that the works in The Gatherers explore non-traditional methods of distribution, challenging the ways we engage with art and indeed where that engagement might take place, the content of the work remains philosophical; a collection of research-based projects that are largely non-conclusive. The majority of the works in the exhibition are text driven, offering histories, dialogues and project narratives while giving viewers the opportunity to take one of the multiple newspapers and text-based posters that appear throughout the show. The exhibition that, according to curators Berin Golonu and Veronica Wiman,  “brings together a diverse group of practitioners who combine art with cultural activism to explore questions of to explore questions of how we ensure sustainability for our growing urban populations,” is weighted on the side of activism. Yet, if ensuring urban sustainability is what is at stake, the number of works that actually forward a strategic vision are surprisingly few.
Of those that do, the installation from Public Matters, a collective based in Los Angeles, proposes one of the more socially engaged or ‘activist’ practices. Featuring three monitors of programming from three media channels (Neighborhood Network News, Market Makeover TV and YumTV), the installation documents part of an ongoing collaboration with youth in South Los Angeles to create a Television Network dedicated to issues surrounding food ecology and healthy eating. Indeed, public Matters has been working with the community in Los Compadres for the last two years in an attempt to address local concerns surrounding the area’s status as a “food desert.”
Equally relevant is a video documentary about the “Slow Food Nation Victory Garden at City Hall,” a collaboration between Slow Food Nation USA, artists John Bela (Rebar), Amy Franceschini (Futurefarmers) and several local not-for profit community groups and urban farming initiatives that took place in San Francisco during the fall of 2008.  Drawing on tradition of victory gardens, a New-Deal era government supported agricultural initiative whose aim was to increase domestic food production, had the broader aim of increasing awareness of sustainable farming practices among the general public. The video is displayed on a small monitor and viewers are encouraged to sit on one of many stacks of cardboard sheets donated by one of the city’s informal recycling programs.
Ted Purves and Susanne Cockrell’s “The Meadow Network,” a series of broadsheet newspapers distributed free in the gallery and other public spaces, is based around interviews with city residents from varied backgrounds in an attempt to examine what rural traditions (such as growing, preserving, festival and bartering) persist in their daily lives. The installation by Turkish collective Oda Projesi (which translates to ‘Our Project’) titled “Please Don’t Step on the Green!” features a collection of several postcards each with an image, map and story of informal green spaces throughout Istanbul. The postcards, which are laminated hang on industrial strength steel hooks alongside place names that are crudely painted in black and arranged to approximate a map of the mega-city. Nearby several plywood shelves house stacks of the postcards, while a text entreats the viewer to take their favorite. The postcards carry information directing viewers to the project blog where visitors are able to download and print the postcards themselves.
Similarly, Fallen Fruit, a collective from Los Angeles whose work revolves around informal fruit economies throughout the city, presented “Double Standard,” a video of one of the group’s nocturnal fruit harvesting tours that was posted on YouTube. The video was re-edited with the wide range of user comments appearing across the middle of the screen as subtitles while the video plays on loop. Rebar, a group of artists and designers based in San Francisco, contributed an installation of several of their “Bushwaffles,” pink modular inflatable outdoor furniture pieces that can be assembled in to quasi-architectural arrangements. The “Bushwaffles” are arranged in various ways, creating a space for what the group calls “social greening,” the softening of urban environments through practices of togetherness and play.
With The Gatherers, the urban context, with its zones of conflict, emergence and ‘becoming’, is a surface on which rural practices are not so much reconciled but rather, overlaid.  The wanderers of late-capitalism’s global village have adopted a local and pastoral practice. In an attempt to ensure the sustainability of our cities, it appears that the Deleuzean fetish for the nomad has ‘re-territorialized’ itself as a fetish for the farmer.

of momentary interest

http://barackobamaisyournewbicycle.com/

The Distributed Exhibition Call for Site-Specific Artwork

The Distributed Exhibition asks: What might happen when artwork is created for a particular person, family, or living situation? What if private residences became display spaces? What if the occupants became gallerists? What if the viewers became guests?

Create a new site-specific artwork in a private residence or local business as part of an exhibition by the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art. Artists should be interested in responding to the unique layout, architectural features, personal display, or social dynamics of the space.

For full description of submission requirements and project, visit:
http://borro.ws/distributed_ex/
Or email: distributed_ex AT borro.ws

A project initiated by Sara Thacher, hosted by the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) from March 28 – May 17, 2008.

Deadline for Submissions: February 1st, 2008, by 5:00 pm. Submissions may be hand delivered.
Artists Notified: February 11th, 2008

Mail submissions to:
San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art
“The Distributed Exhibition”
560 South First Street
San Jose, CA 95113

Original Source and full text found here.

“The principal defect of all materialism up to now … is that the external object, reality, the sensible world, is grasped in the form of an object of an intuition; but not as a concrete human activity, as practice, in a subjective way. This is why the active aspect was developed by idealism, in opposition to materialism - but only in an abstract way, since idealism naturally does not know real concrete activity as such.”
- Karl Marx, Theses on Feuerbach

“I have been a selfish being all my life, in practice, though not in principle.”
- Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
-
What do we practice, and what do we consider a practice? How does practice function in an art historical, theoretical context?

In a general sense, the word “practice” elides between action and state of being. For instance, the OED defines the noun “practice” as: “The habitual doing or carrying out of something, usual or customary action or performance, action as opposed to profession, theory, knowledge, etc. … A custom; a habit; a habitual action.” As a verb, the OED defines “practice” as “Repeated exercise in or performance of an activity so as to acquire or maintain proficiency in it; activity undertaken to this end. … The action of doing something; performance, operation; method of action or working. … An action, a deed; in plural, doings, proceedings.” [1]

Practice is where the dialectic between thought and action plays out. In the Symposium, Plato says, “And the true nature of going, or being led by another, to the things of love, is to begin from the beauties of earth and mount upwards for the sake of that other beauty, using these steps only, and from one going on to two, and from two to all fair forms to fair practices, and from fair practices to fair notions, until from fair notions he arrives at the notion of absolute beauty, and at last knows what the essence of beauty is.” Here, practice mediates between two different, seemingly opposed realms: Practice is a necessary step on the path leading from objects in the world to ideas — the only way to reach the idea(l) of absolute beauty. Interestingly, in Plato’s paradigm, the path leads from the physical world to abstraction, while typically practice is thought to be the implementation, the practical embodiment, of theoretical, or abstract, concepts — thus reversing this order.

For instance, the OED also defines “practice” as “the practical aspect or application of something as opposed to theoretical aspect. … In Marxism, the social activity which should result from and complement the theory of Communism.” [2] In fact, according to Catherine Bell, [3] current uses of the term “practice” or “practices” in social and cultural anthropology originate with Karl Marx. She notes multiple, sometimes contradictory uses and definitions of “practice” arising in cultural and anthropological theory as a result of Marx’s “flexible” use of the term. Notably, he used the word both descriptively and prescriptively. In a descriptive sense, Marx sees practice as practical activity. “In this framework, practice mediates or reintegrates subject and object (consciousness and reality), which is to say that these polarized constructs are thought to exist only as they exist in and through practice.” [4] In a prescriptive sense, Marx thought practice should test theory while simultaneously providing data for new theory. “This dialectical unity of theory and practice was meant to indict the inadequacy of abstract thinking, knowledge and truth. At the same time, it gave theory an important place in the practice of political activity.” [5] Marx considered the practice of the class struggle to be fertilized by theory.

In analyzing practice as a way of approaching notions of ritual, Bell sees practice as “inherently strategic, manipulative and expedient,” [6] constantly changing and improvising in response to particular situations. She notes that according to Pierre Bourdieu, the contexts of particular practices are usually ambiguous and indeterminate rather than clear and definite…

Raymond Williams considers the relationship between social or cultural practices and the media in which they are manifest. He notes that mediation usually denotes “an activity: an active relationship or, more interestingly, a specific transformation of material.” [11] This idea of transformation via specific media echoes and relates to Althusser’s point that practices are continually “transforming” the situations in which they operate.

Williams discusses the change from use of the word “medium” to use of the word “practice” in an art historical context. He notes that the word “medium” in relation to paint originally meant the liquid with which pigments are mixed to produce paint itself. The meaning of medium “was then extended to the active mixture and so to the specific practice.” [12] But he also points out that interpreting the medium’s properties as defining the entire practice “then suppressed the full sense of practice, which has always to be defined as work on a material for a specific purpose within certain necessary social conditions.” [13] Williams traces the history of art making as it relates to work within capitalist production. Ultimately art and knowledge became commodities — like any other product, for sale. As industrial workers become alienated from their own labor and what they produced, art as skill or craft was idealized. The material objects artists produced began to take on the higher, displaced meaning and significance “of work — that of using human energy on material for an autonomous purpose.” [14] This idealization of art as well as the perception of art as defined by its medium (such as painting or sculpture) would have been threatened if art had been seen, rather, as “a particular case of conscious practice.” [15]

Changing technologies have generated the need for artists and writers to develop new skills and techniques. Williams points out that “A new technique has often been seen … as a new relationship, or as depending on a new relationship. Thus what had been isolated as a medium, in many ways rightly as a way of emphasizing the material production which any art must be, came to be seen, inevitably, as social practice.” [16] Art making thus becomes a practice. Rather than focusing on a particular medium, art as practice incorporates cultural, political, aesthetic, social and economic dimensions. It involves a systematic, methodological set of strategies that imply an ideological stance incorporating literary theory, feminist, art, scientific, psychoanalytic, linguistic, anthropological sources.

This notion of art as practice was influenced by the rise of conceptual art in the early sixties, with its political overtones and close ties to the history of the avant-garde (e.g., Dadaism, Surrealism, as Hal Foster points out in The Return of the Real). In this light, art making becomes process- rather than object-based. Marxist, structuralist, anthropological and semiotic thought now permeate what had been defined as a strictly material realm. The requisite academic training for artists has taken on theoretical rather than practical aspects. An artist engaged in a practice is conscious of the many social dimensions of his or her activity, which ostensibly bridges gaps between, artistic, curatorial, critical, research and conceptual study. It is temporal, experiential and contextual rather than medium-specific…

Jennifer Roberts
Committee on the Visual Arts
Winter 2003

encounters
an interesting link that i came to sort of tangentially while researching the urban think tank.

look towards the bottom for ‘all real living is meeting - encounter and relation’ and the discussion of the work of martin buber.

Just when I thought it was safe to talk about free universities or free schools, having just posted about the Mountain School of Art to the SoPr blog, and through my ongoing research into the history of alternative education for the FREEB event December 10, not to mention witnessing Matthew Rana’s fiendishly engaged skype, instant message, dialog with Jon Rubin, founder and creator of the art project/school the Independent School of Art, I get an eflux email about another Free University as art project, the Night School at the New Museum an artwork by Anton Vidokle.

In the case of Anton Vidokle who is famous for launching and running eflux, this interest in free universities is tied closely to his involvement as one of the 3 curators, with Mai Abu ElDahab and Florian Waldvogel of the ill fated Manifesta 6 (2006), a biennial that before its cancellation was meant to be transformed into a temporary art school (read the letter from the curators here http://www.e-flux.com/shows/view/3270). His most recent project The United Nations Plaza as well as this current project Night School have both been attempts at continuing the temporary art school concept that was left incomplete with Manifesta 6.

But with all of these projects, from the mountain school of art, to the Independent School of Art to Night School, I question why all this fervor over free schools as art works. Is this going to be another art movement, I hope not, although I am sure someone is working on the book right now. Or should I assume that artists are purely interested in other more democratic forms of education. But is the democracy of a schools formation not challenged or replaced by a hierarchy, by emphasizing the school as an artwork or a school produced by an artist(s). Would the dubiousness of an artist(s) as figurehead or the claiming of the educational institution as artwork detract from the freedom and real role that students might feel in shaping the school. Can a school really be a school if it is called an artwork? Does this decription change its efficacy and if not then what does it do?

Anthony
————————–

Night School at the New Museum: application deadline December 15

New Museum
235 Bowery
New York, NY 10002
http://www.newmuseum.org

Benji Okuda instructing a life drawing class, an adult night school group at the Heart Mountain Relocation Center, Heart Mountain, Wyoming. Image courtesy of the National Archives, Records of the War Relocation Authority, 1941-1947.

Night School is an artist commission in the form of a temporary school. For this project, artist Anton Vidokle is organizing a yearlong program of monthly seminars and workshops that use the New Museum as a site to shape a critically engaged public through art discourse. Night School takes place on the last weekend (Thursday-Sunday) of each month, January 2008 through January 2009.

Night School is comprised of eleven seminars organized around three thematic tracks. The program begins with three series of seminars, workshops and film/video screenings conducted by Boris Groys, Martha Rosler and Liam Gillick that examines possibilities for progressive cultural practices. During the spring and summer months, the focus of the program turns to artistic agency today, and includes seminars with Walid Raad & Jalal Toufic, Paul Chan, Maria Lind and Owkui Enwezor. The fall program considers self-organization in the field of cultural production, presenting seminars and workshops with Rirkrit Tiravanija, Zhang Wei and Hu Fang, Natascha Sadr Haghighian and Raqs Media Collective. All topics will be addressed from the perspective of ongoing research and production, and as such will constitute the core structure of the school. Lectures, screenings, and conversations will take place in the New Museum theater, the 5t h Floor Museum as Hub space, and informal locations throughout the
local neighborhood.

In the tradition of free universities, many of Night School’s events are open to all those interested to take part. A core group of 25 participants will be selected by application, to participate in additional private workshops and discussions, and will be offered complimentary New Museum membership for one year. The Night School is now accepting applications from cultural producers including visual artists, architects, writers, filmmakers, journalists, curators, composers, performers, and others who can commit to participating in the full program throughout the year. Accepted participants will be expected to attend all monthly seminars and be present in New York for the duration of the project. To download an application form, please go to http://www.newmuseum.org/events/night_school
Application deadline: December 15th, 2007.

Night School is the second in a series of art projects organized around a temporary school format and initiated by Anton Vidokle. Vidokle initiated research into education as site for artistic practice for Manifesta 6, which was cancelled. In response to the cancellation, Vidokle set up an independent project in Berlin called Unitednationsplaza–a twelve-month exhibition as school involving more than a hundred artists, writers, philosophers, and diverse audiences. Located behind a supermarket in East Berlin, UNP’s program featured numerous seminars, lectures, screenings, book presentations and projects including the Martha Rosler Library.

Founded in 1977, the New Museum is the first and only contemporary art museum in New York City and among the most respected internationally, with a curatorial program unrivaled in the United States in its global scope and adventurousness. With the inauguration of the Museum’s new, state-of-the-art building at 235 Bowery on December 1, 2007, the New Museum will be the destination for new art and new ideas.

For further information please write to nightschool@newmuseum.org

for more information on the FREEB event, click here

Matthew,

Prompted by your email I have been thinking that we need to evaluate the links between Metal music and social practice. I think metal might be the perfect musical style as it looks to give voice to the dark, taboos and mysteries of mankind. I think Dio really said it best “Between the velvet lies there’s a truth that’s hard as steel”.

Here is a link to the album frail words collapse by As I Lay Dying. They are I think what you would refer to as “New Metal”. Pretty rediculous music but good for practicing with your nun-chucks or cleaning your bathroom.

Best,

Anthony

http://socialpractice.org/uploads/As I Lay Dying.zip