Social Practice

of momentary interest

http://barackobamaisyournewbicycle.com/

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

Another book that I had mean to to put down on our reading list for the year:
Magic Moments: Collaborations Between Artists and Young People,
Anna Harding (Ed.), Black Dog Press, London, 2005

Additionally, I had thought it might be a good idea to use the website to track our reading activity, both to let each other know what books we are currently reading, and also to recommend new books for the list. For example, it would be great to know who has picked up a copy of the various books on the list or who may have borrowed something from the Workshop Library.

Also it might be a good idea to use this website to keep track of online articles, pdf downloads, etc… For example, I found the first four chapters of “Pedagogy of the Oppressed” and the entirety of “Empire” online.
Pedagogy of the Oppressed
Empire

Should this be done through the ‘blog or the Wiki? If we used the blog, it might be good to keep a single, common tag, like Pedagogy (or some such) so that we could quicky track things down.

The semester is drawing to a close, and the first group of students who entered into the Social Practices program are now graduating! Congratulations of course are in order to Jen Durban, Carly troncale, Bridget Barnhart, Amanda Herman and Anne Devine. Watch for future posts detailing a PDF book that was produced to give an overview of the work they made while in the program.
There has been a lot of interest and excitement about the incoming group for fall of 2007. Not only will it be the first group to fully step into the new curriculum and the workshop, but it is the largest group we have admitted (7 people). I will be posting images, links and project descriptions for the various people over the next few posts, starting with links to pre-existing websites.

Welcome to Forrest Lewinger, Lynne Mccabe, Anthony Marcellini, Boris Chesakov, Matthew Rana, Ella Watson and Piero Passacantando.

Links to websites and project information:

Ella Watson: Ella Watson videos
Matthew Rana: matthewrana.net, Guerre Atelier Website

Anthony Marcellini : portfolio download
Also It Can Change Website

Phantom Captain:
Art and Crowdsourcing
curated by Andrea Grover

October 18 - November 25, 2006

Artists: Harrell Fletcher and Miranda July, Jeff Howe, Davy Rothbart, Allison Wiese, and others

*This exhibition will feature several live performances and events, and we will post the schedule here as details are confirmed. Please check back for updates.

Phantom Captain explores art collaboration that involves amateur groups of individuals responding to “crowdsourcing” initiatives created by artists. The term crowdsourcing was coined by Jeff Howe and Mark Robinson of Wired Magazine and describes “user-generated content,” or outsourcing labor to armies of amateurs. Crowdsourcing is the methodology behind websites like Wikipedia, Threadless, Ebay, Flickr, Youtube, Blogger, etc., where without the user, all that exists is the conduit for sharing media. User reviews and recommendations are the driving force behind websites like Netflix and Amazon. While crowdsourcing is becoming common practice in business (see Howard Rheingold’s Smart Mobs), its potential is also being harnessed by artists to create communal artworks.

Andrea Grover is the founding director of Aurora Picture Show, a 501(c)(3) non-profit center for film, video and new media housed in a former church building in Houston, Texas.

Apexart

291 Church Street
(between Walker and White)
New York, NY 10013 USA

tel. +212 431 5270

Image:
Harrell Fletcher and Miranda July, Learning
to Love You More, Assignment #18: Recreate a
poster you had as a teenager, report submitted
by Danny Martin, Thorsby, Alabama USA.