Social Practice

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
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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

Two seemingly dissimilar bedfellows, Nicolas Bourriaud and a ‘digital lifestyle’ magazine, came together in an interview entitled “Your Assignment: Art.” The interview by Leah DeVun with Andrea Grover, concerned Grover’s curatorial efforts around crowdsourcing (previously mentioned here).

Although I’m unconvinced by the precedents that she’s claimed (Matta-Clark’s Food), the contemporary work that she selects is quite interesting when taken as a group: ‘Learning to Love you More‘, ‘Found Magazine‘, ‘Sheep Market‘, ‘Signs That Say What You Want Them to Say, Not Signs That Say What Other People Want You to Say‘ and ‘We Feel Fine‘ (to name a few).

This selection forces some intriguing questions. What is the distinction between something that is truly ‘crowdsourced’ and work that is produced by a more traditional notion of an artist collective (an interesting test case might be Andrea Grover and Jon Rubin’s show Never Been to Houston)? In the interview, DeVun asked bout the role of the editor in crowdsourced works– Grover points to a preference for “the way the assignment is conceived at the beginning” rather than editing after the fact. But she never really answers if, and in what way editing can be part of a successful crowdsourced artwork. The interview also focuses on what makes crowdsourcing fail, and what contributes to effective projects. Grover concludes that clear and well-considered parameters are key, but also fostering a sense of community between participants– a feeling that they are contributing to something greater and larger than anything that they could accomplish alone. [read the entire interview here]

–> An interesting aside: This interview was selected for publication in “Wired” from the opensource (crowdsourced) journalism experiment “Asignment Zero.”

In the fall of 2006 the Banff Center for the Arts hosted a residency called “The Future of Idea Art.”  One outcome of this gathering was a “Relational Aesthetics Song” (produced on their wiki, naturally).  Here’s a little snippet of a verse:

“
Oh there won’t be any evidence that anything happened when we’re done
Or maybe there will, like someone could leave
A crumpled up kleenex or something like that on the floor for when we’re gone”

Of course, if you don’t like the lyrics– you can always re-write them.

A new web-based (and occasionally physical space) curation project just opened its doors in Berlin (and beyond). SocialDesignSite intends to open the discussion about what ‘Social Design’ is and what changes it might bring about. Their motto, “We cannot not change the world,” is based in the belief that every action we take shapes our social interactions and has broader consequences for the world around us. They describe their role as connecting projects undertaken with a similar Social Design perspective across the globe.

Within the categorization structure that they’ve set forth, ‘art based’ is just one mode out of many that Social design can inhabit. Most categories are a little slim in projects, so it’s hard to get a read about the distinctions (or usefulness) of these divisions. They have also built a ‘discussion’ feature that will allow a message board style conversation about an individual project. They do appear to be soliciting submissions for exhibition on the site, so it will be interesting to watch the growth of their exhibition over the next few months.

They’ll be having their official launch as part of ‘DESIGNMAI 2007′ in Berlin from May 14th to 18th.

A group of elementary school students and the teachers at their after-school program started a pedagogical exploration of social justice and resource management. A communal set of Lego building blocks launched this investigation an reflection on privilege, democracy, and self-organisation. Here’s a little excerpt of a conversation between the kids:

Carl: “We didn’t ‘give’ the pieces, we found and shared them.”

Lukas: “It’s like giving to charity.”

Carl: “I don’t agree with using words like ‘gave.’ Because when someone wants to move in, we find them a platform and bricks and we build them a house and find them windows and a door.”

“These children seemed to squirm at the implications of privilege, wealth, and power that giving holds. The children denied their power, framing it as benign and neutral, not something actively sought out and maintained.”

Read all of the essay “Why We Banned Legos” by Ann Pelo and Kendra Pelojoaquin (originally published in “Rethinking Schools“)

Dave Beech presents an alternate take on some of Nicolas Bourriaud’s theories:

Postproduction does not match the emphasis on cultural contestation and collaborative independence that is so conspicuous in the networks and projects of the new socially oriented artists. True, Bourriaud argues that “art can be a form of using the world”, but when it comes to the details, Bourriaud converts these social events back into those of an encounter “between the artist and the one who comes to view the work”. His new artist is a ’semionaut’ (the DJ, the programmer, the web surfer), whose ‘collaborations’ with the social world are reduced to exchanges of signs.

. . .

We are not semionauts; we are, if anything, socionauts. Socially oriented artists do not demonstrate any inclination today to reduce social encounters to semiotic encounters. At the same time, such social encounters are not typically those between an artist and a viewer mediated by the object that is made by the former for the visual pleasure of the latter. If the contemporary artist contests culture by, among other things, contesting the role of the artist, then it follows that the contemporary artist contest culture by contesting the modes of attention of the viewer (the artist’s traditional collaborator). In fact, contemporary artists seem to be in the process of converting the viewer into a doer, an active participator in the events and actions set up by the socionaut. (excerted from “Independent Collaborative Hospitality“)

During last year’s Conflux festival in New York, Mushon Zer-Aviv presented the collaborative project “You Are Not Here,” an “urban tourism mash-up” allowing participants to explore Bagdad while walking around the streets of New York City. Now, he’s working with Kati London, Thomas Duc, and Dan Phiffer (some of the original collaborators on “You Are Not Here”) to put together a similar experience for two cities that are geographically much closer. Participants will be able to walk through the streets of Gaza while physically in Tel-Aviv.

He has also been collaborating with Dan Phiffer on ShiftSpace, an open source project that attempts to do with the web, what “You Are Not Here” does with New York. They have built (are building) tools to allow a second layer to be created on top of the current world wide wibe that we see with our regular web browsers. Inspired in part by the democracy of Wikipedia, they want to give the entire web a layer that is editable by anyone. This project arose from their

[concern] about the main paradigm of the web, namely privatization. While the discourse about the web is full of superlatives implying freedom and sharing, we find ourselves constantly bouncing into new walls and boundaries online. The web is built as a huge set of private spaces - while the internet protocol is indeed distributed, the DNS (Domain Name System) protocol is totally centralized - meaning the control of the page content (no matter how interactive or web 2.0-ish it is) always in the hands of a single private power holder.We are trying to challenge this approach and make a point by not just questioning the web’s power structures, but prove that we can build an interesting and useful tool. ShiftSpace is an open source platform for the social extensions of websites. It is if you will, a transparent layer above any website where users can leave notes, discuss, protest, create art, and deeply explore the interactive potential of the web. (via an interview with Regine Debatty)

Google bought YouTube, but why?

The social aspect of television is the reflection: to see others seeing what you’re seeing. To share the experience of watching. Well, we don’t often watch television that way any more. Sharing couches and armchairs, turned and tuned into the same network broadcast, primetime, dinner tray, dog splayed out on the floor thinking it’s all about him. We live in a play-shifted, time-shifted day and age in which communication is as likely to happen asynchronously as it is to happen at all: that is, over the internet and not face to face. YouTube is about watching socially, but of course from one’s own computer, out of synch in time, but in synch in terms of the content.

Google missed this because Google saw video as indexable, searchable, categorizable and taggable content. Flickr misses this because photos aren’t social (they’re a show and tell, which is a bit different because it takes the form of speaker/audience, not broadcast/audience). I watch you watching television. Television directs vision to itself but in the social context of watching together. There’s always at least a peripheral perception of others watching (Not in film — room’s too dark. Social’s not the point there. In fact movies open with a warning to turn off your cell phone. Most definitely not social…ah, but the experience is social, yes. But not the medium.).

The new generation doesn’t sit down to watch prime time tv together. It’s on YouTube, which provides the asynchronicity of experience, personaliz-ability of tags, uploading, favorites lists, channels, and a play duration much better suited to consumption than tv. Content in minutes, not half hour blocks. And played, of course, over the medium that’s mine, that’s mobile, that’s interactive, and that’s connected: the computer.

(Via this longer post by Adrian Chan from P2P Foundation)