HeadTalk 2

The second of the headtalk series of art focused discussions took place on the 8th of November 2007, at the Leopard Hotel in Burslem, Stoke-on-Trent. It was yet another interesting experience as a few weeks previously the 17th Century Building had played host to TV's Most Haunted program, whose ghost hunting antics were mimicked (although in a more clumsy, stumbling round in the dark fashion) by the guests at headtalk following the discussion.

    What is the place of theory in art practice? Is everyone an artist?

 The discussion this time was kicked off by a showing of an episode of "The Simpsons". Mom and Pop Art is an episode in which Homer is pulled from the pits of diy barbecue hell, to the heights of "high" art and back down again.

 Introduction: ‘Mom and Pop Art’ episode of the Simpsons.

Topic questions: What is the place of theory in art practice? And

Is everyone an artist?

The following is a collation of connected notes made up of questions, examples and statements, so some link clearly and others are floating but arranged to open up spaces for critical thinking.

The terms artist, art and other related terms are in single quotes where their meaning is up for debate. The focus of the terms is the visual arts, but slippage across all art forms is taken for granted.

Notes:

What is the moment or setting when an individual is affirmed as an ‘artist’? One answer is that this status is the result of certain kind of institutional recognition, a consensus or affirmation by any one or more of universities, galleries and critics

As when Homer is told he is an artist.

Does self-identification matter? As with Homer, someone can confer artist status when you never saw the activity falling within that description. An interesting real example is the trajectory of ‘graffiti’ which is an example of subversive outsider activity that has now become differentiated to include strands affirmed as ‘art’. The trajectories of ‘Banksy’ or Basquiat to gallery visibility are standout individual examples.

So if ‘art’ only exists when people with the authority to designate it as ‘art’ give that status to an activity, is there ‘art’ outside that approval?

‘Art student’ is a category of conferred status that has a probationary character and also points to the institutional role in deciding on who is an artist.

If having the status of artist relies on some kind of social or institutional recognition, then does Beuys statement that everyone is an artist make sense?

“Only on condition of a radical widening of definitions will it be possible for art and activities related to art [to] provide evidence that art is now the only evolutionary-revolutionary power. Only art is capable of dismantling the repressive effects of a senile social system that continues to totter along the deathline: to dismantle in order to build ‘A SOCIAL ORGANISM AS A WORK OF ART’… EVERY HUMAN BEING IS AN ARTIST who – from his state of freedom – the position of freedom that he experiences at first-hand – learns to determine the other positions of the TOTAL ART WORK OF THE FUTURE SOCIAL ORDER.”

Beuys statement dated 1973, first published in English in Caroline Tisdall: Art into Society, Society into Art (ICA, London, 1974), p.48. Capitals in original

One interpretation of Beuy’s theory is Homer’s fantastic enactment at the end of the episode.

Although Beuy’s own activity was performance centred, he developed these thoughts into a conception of “social sculpture” (ibid.1973), where certain conditions were set (rules of the game) that involved a number of participants whose actions created the unpredictable dynamic of the work and a shared creative experience.

This approach (not as ambitious as Homer’s and collaborative before the event) has grown into a substantial strand of art practice in public spaces where art is about an exchange between a community or group and the ‘artist’, with an unpredictability of result, unlike individual performance or object art. As Nicolas Bourriaud in Relational Aesthetics (1998) puts it,

"art is the place that produces a specific sociability," precisely because "it tightens the space of relations, unlike TV.”

If everyone is not the artist in a collaborative work, then who is the person who initiates the work and where does authorship reside? The idea of authorship is a feature in the historical narrative of the ‘artist’ and is still so in contemporary settings, so how does this aspect of the status, ‘artist’, mesh with a shared authorship? Parallel examples of collaborative work are in film or theatrical production, where there is arguably an ensemble of creative practice, but where the status of one role, director or playwright, is given the primary status. Is this an increasing role for the visual artist?

Or does the ‘artist’ engage in some form of denial of authorship while enacting the collaborative work?

Moving on, the following account of Allan Kaprow offers a related frame through which to see the term ‘artist’

“When I was Allan's student at CalArts during the '70s, women students were drawn to the history and practices of what he termed "lifelike" art, where artmaking was a function of a reflective life, not a skill set. As he described it at a symposium on public art in 1991, artists from the late '50s and '60s "appropriated the real environment and not the studio, garbage and not fine paints and marble.... They incorporated behavior, the weather, ecology, and political issues. In short, the dialogue moved from knowing more and more about what art was to wondering about what life was, the meaning of life."Suzanne Lacy(Artforum International, Vol. 44, Summer 2006. recollections about Allan Kaprow)

Where does art theory come into this?

So far, it is clear that the status of ‘artist’ is tied up with an activity recognised as ‘art’. It is an unstable symbiotic relationship where the status looks like it is defined by the activity and the activity is defined by the status, all in play with the discourse surrounding both. The example of Bueys, Kaprow and ‘relational’ art, redefining parameters of ‘art’ and ‘artists’, is just one stream of thinking that exchanges with practice.

Other actors come in here; they conduct the discourse around the ‘art’ activity that is its focus. It is an exchange with each other, if not directly then through peer journals, magazines, forums or conferences. Some of these individuals may also be ‘artists’ themselves. Their influence is in direct proportion to their institutionally conferred or created status as theorists (university based usually), curators or critics.

Are they needed and if so, why? One possibility is that, if anything can be art, then it is important for the ‘art world’ (Danto) that there is an authoritative voice to proclaim why one thing is art and the other, a same thing, is not.

"the only sense in which there is a difference between the appreciation of art and the appreciation of nonart is that the appreciations have different objects. The institutional structure in which the art object is embedded, not different kinds of appreciation, makes the difference between the appreciation of art and the appreciation of nonart". ‘Art and the Aesthetic’ George Dickie,1974

Arthur C Danto has a related take on what is ‘art’

“Given two things which resemble one another to any chosen degree, but one of which is a work of art and the other an ordinary object, what accounts for this difference in status?” ‘Madonna of the Future:Essays in a Pluralistic Art World’, Arthur C Danto, 2000.

The seminal work being Warhol’s Brillo boxes.

And

“to see something as art at all demands nothing less than this, an atmosphere of artistic theory, a knowledge of the history of art” ‘The Transfiguration of the Common Place, A Philosophy of Art’ , Arthur C Danto, 1981

If contemporary visual art is about ideas or theory as much as about media or material practices, then are the terms ‘artist’ and ‘art’ social constructs that give permission to a certain kind of activity?

That permission is premised on a shifting ground of interpretation (theory) that is shaped by a number of interest groups. Apart from artist, theorists, curators, there is also government, via arts bodies, and investors. How do they shape thinking and practice?

Each ‘artist’ has to mediate with the interpretation and consequent parameters of what is regarded as ‘art’ in order to maintain a status as an artist.

This is Dickie’s revised version of the quote earlier

“An artist is a person who participates with understanding in the making of an artwork”

George Dickie,The Art Circle (New York: Haven Publications, 1984), p. 80.

But they also mediate with the world and their social settings as an affected and affecting individual. ‘Art’ is the social permission to offer new interpretations or insights about our social and individual experience. These include our status as ‘artist’ and that of current interpretations of ‘art’. In this sense, artists are also boundary participants.

Explaining, affirming, denying, and advocating the parameters of ‘art’ means making judgments about ‘art’.

The term ‘contemporary’ is an example of an evaluative term with judgments built in, setting a boundary between relevant ‘art’ that is also now, and ‘art’ that is not now but may also have lost its relevance.

As we have seen, relevance is determined through the exchange of practice with theory through the net of players who elaborate the explanatory boundaries to include or disclude, differentiate, oppose, and affirm.

How do these questions or issues impact artists working now?

Some idea can be had by looking at the earlier example of public art. It is an area of practice that has come under scrutiny by theory and government, two major players as well as artists.

On the theory side of the public art arena, is the “social sculpture” or “relational aesthetics” model. Submissions to public art projects have to usually conform to this parameter.

"Artists are increasingly judged by their working process — the degree to which they supply good or bad models of collaboration,"

and

“There can be no failed, unsuccessful, unresolved, or boring works of collaborative art because all are equally essential to the task of strengthening the social bond," she continues. "While I am broadly sympathetic to that ambition, I would argue that it is also crucial to discuss, analyze, and compare such work critically as art.” Socially Engaged Art, Critics and Discontents: An Interview with Claire Bishop (Leverhulme Research Fellow in the department of Curating Contemporary Art at the Royal College of Art, London)

By Jennifer Roche http://www.communityarts.net/readingroom/archivefiles/2006/07/socially_engage.php

Can the relational or ‘social sculpture’ model mean if everyone is an artist, then nobody is an artist? Does the term ‘artist’ become redundant or is its meaning (parameter) changed for the public space into something else, like ‘social therapist’?

Is the idea of the individual ‘artist’ with a personal body of work

“the naive ideal of the bourgeois public sphere and its paradigms of artistic autonomy” ? Public Art: Avant-Garde Practice and the Possibilities of Critical Articulation

Journal article by Philip Glahn; Afterimage, Vol. 28, 2000.

The relational model in ‘the social therapist’ sense is arguably one that goes hand in hand with the last decade of Government intervention

“New Labour uses a rhetoric almost identical to that of socially engaged art to steer culture toward policies of social inclusion. Reducing art to statistical information about target audiences and ‘performance indicators’, the government prioritizes social effect over considerations of artistic quality”

‘The Social Turn: Collaboration and Its Discontents’ Magazine article by Claire Bishop; Artforum International, Vol. 44, February 2006.

Does this thinking influence the grant policies of arts bodies and application criteria? The answer to this question is a practical consideration for artists wishing to extend their practice or centre their work in this space.

This example highlights how an established narrative about an ‘art’ activity can shape engagement in passive conformity or instead provide the boundary that energises resistance, reevaluation and innovation. Here the role of the ‘artist’ as risk taker comes into focus.

End notes

The term ‘artist’ and ‘art’ do not offer easy definition. Are they more like signifiers for certain kind of ongoing narrative? If as an aspiring artist, you can find a place in that story with permission of the gate holders, which include artists as well other boundary managers, then you are a now a relevant ‘artist’ and your activity is ‘art’. If theory is a story paradigm, then where does the truth component come in?

We hope these notes, which by necessity are short and so give the bare bones only of some of the questions make a start to stirring up a lively discussion. The forum is for all to contribute as everyone has a unique viewpoint.

Feedback

The discussion is recorded and a written summation of the findings will be circulated, enabling the outcome of the forum to act as an ongoing resource for reflection and engagement with the visual arts.

Brian Holdcroft and Bernard Charnley 2007

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