Definitions of Art-based Social Practice
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Social Practice can be quite a nebulous term. Even if a concise definition remains out of reach, we can at least understand its shape get a sense of its borders.
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Defined as a medium, not a genre or movement
Social Practice engages any number of issues via its vast medium of the ‘social.’ The social most commonly includes people, their relations to one another, their relations to their surroundings, and their relations to the structures that constitute their surroundings and themselves.
The work/project takes social interaction as its primary medium of manufacture or investigation.
Concerning contemporary art practice
Social Practices connects the symbolic realm of fine art directly to communities and social networks. Communication is not mediated through an image but presented directly from artist to public. Within this structure, there is an ease between the positions of artist and audience, where a dialogical interchange can create a space where all are audience and all are artist.
In the context of Contemporary Art, Social Practice is one of many categories of art production. It seems to have developed as a mode of art production by way of distanciation from Post-Modernism. It maintains the pragmatism of Critical Theory but pushes beyond Marxian roots towards a call to direct-action politics in art.
Social Practice as I would describe it to my mother
Social Practice is a term designated to describe a new kind of art. This new art is tempestuous in nature as it evades traditional art forms and materials, parameters for critique, modes of presentation and audience reception.
It can be argued that Social Practice builds on a lineage of contemporary art movements including public art, institutional critique, interactive art, performance art, and environmental art. Although Social Practice grows out of and belongs to an art context, it employs non-art activities with aims to critique those very art constructs, as well as the economies and practices that sustain and define art systems. Social Practice art might not always look like art and often borrows languages and forms from any variety of non-art fields including but not limited to: activism, architecture, organizational structuring, event planning, science and engineering.
Social Practice always seeks to assert some new terrain where art might temporarily reside. Social Practice always engages some form of “the public” in collaboration, critique, the receipt of services, or the activation of new situations. It is not always important that Social Practice art be recognized as art by its audience. Its impact can be measured twofold: both its success among the non-art realms from which it borrows and also its problematizing of evolving contemporary art practice. As a realm of activities and forms, this burgeoning field not only necessitates new terms, it implores new ways of thinking about art, its peripheral characteristics, and the power of art in changing the world.
