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Larne Abse Gogarty on the uses and abuses of social practice

entrification
f social practice is 'gentrifying' community
art, as claimed by African-American artist
Rick Lowe at the 2013 Creative Time
Summit, what is at stake in these two art
forms and how is gentrification conceived as
mediating between them? Gentrification points
to something more specific than recuperation,
or co-option, watchwords we commonly associate
with the ability of capitalism to claim that which
declares an opposition to it, a process particularly
pronounced in art and culture through the
domestication of various avant-garde movements.
In describing social practice as a 'gentrification'
of community art, Lowe seems less concerned
with evoking Situationist sensibilities than with
identifying how successful artists who take social
relations as their material are required not only
to satisfy the state but, increasingly, to approach
the market uncritically. If gentrification involves
the displacement of oppressed social groups
usually delineated upon class or race lines in
order to increase property values in previously
'undesirable' parts of the city, how does this
serve as an analogy for recent developments in
social practice?
To begin with it is worth asking what is at stake
in the use of the term 'social practice' and what
this development represents in the field variously
labelled as participatory art, relational art, dialogical
art, new genre public art, socially engaged art,
collaborative art, place-making and, less fashionably
as Lowe points out, community art. These rapid
nominal shifts represent an array of attempts by
scholars, artists and curators to stake their claim to
identifying and defining a growing area of art since
the early 199os. However, it is dear that the current
gamut of artists, writers and curators at its forefront
are associated with a deepening codification and
institutionalisation of the field, characterised by
the growth of social practice MFA degrees, the
heightened art-world visibility of pioneers such
as Suzanne Lacy and the commercial success of
artists such as Theaster Gates. The slick, TED
Talk-style atmosphere of the packed Creative Time

Sam Durant's We Are the People 2003

installed at Project Row Houses in Chicago
renovation of Houston's Northern Third Ward as
part of Project Row Housing c1993

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Summit, compered by its cheerleading chief curator Nato

Thompson, is also emblematic of this. In Lowe's account,
this corporate professionalism would seem to come at the'
expense of gentrifying the histories of community art,
previously more associated with ever-threatened resources,
amateurism and anti-market sentiment, alongside
occasionally anti-state politics.
Lowe's stake in these questions is as the founder of
Project Row Houses (PRH) , a series of renovated 'shotgun
houses' in the mostly African-American Third Ward of
Houston, Texas. PRH includes community spaces, artists'
residencies and a young mothers' programme, and is
partnered with a Community Development Corporation
which acquires property in the neighbourhood and
maintains it as low-income housing. PRH is viewed as an
exemplary project by many, and Lowe is a well-established
figure. I visited the project last year and was struck by
how it seemed to act as a nerve centre, or world-untoitself, abundant with possibilities for experimentation for
both residents from the Third Ward and the artists who
take up residencies and studios there.
In recent years, comparisons have been made between
Lowe and Gates, most notably in a December 2013 New
York Times article. The comparison rests on Gates's
avowal of PRH as an inspiration, as well as on their
shared choice of medium in renovating public spaces
and housing. Though not explicitly addressed so far, one
can also see points of commonality in their shared vision
of art acting as the metabolism to reimagine what Gates
calls 'black space'. However, the differences between
the work of Gates and Lowe tell us much more about
why gentrification is a helpful metaphor to describe the

current state of social practice. Gates was recently described by Art Review as
a 'populariser' and the 'Mick Jagger of social practice'. His rise to prominence
- he is represented by White Cube (Reviews AM36I, Features AM370) has been swift since appearing in Chicago'S Museum of Contemporary
Art's 'Emerging Artists' show in 2009. Gates's social practice work began
with refurbishing buildings on Chicago's South Side and hosting cultural
events, which subsequently grew into the Rebuild Foundation, a non-profit
redevelopment agency with satellite projects in Omaha and St Louis. This
work is linked to Gates's lucrative studio practice through what he describes
as a 'circular ecological system' with the renovated buildings partly financed
by his commercial success, and the material from those buildings frequently
appearing in his sculptures. In contrast, PRH recently scaled back its property
holdings as Lowe felt increasingly disconnected from the aesthetic aspect of
the project and frustrated by the knowledge that they could never solve the
housing crisis in Houston - not that this was what he set out to achieve. Lowe
has described Gates as a wildcat businessman and in contrast explained that
PRH is not an entrepreneurial venture.
Gates's 'circular ecological system' exposes the vexed nature of 'usefulness'
within discussions of social practice. Though Gates has largely eluded the
usual ethics versus aesthetics debate due to his success in the mainstream art
world, his practice readily invites criticism that the 'usefulness' of his Rebuild
Foundation is based on compliance with a system that perpetuates the social
issues it attempts to improve. Put cynically, Gates's 'ecological system' involves
the Rebuild Foundation acting as a kind of feel-good money laundering facility
for the commercial art world and corporate developers, and this is what enables
his status as a 'populariser'. Furthermore, Gates's description of his practice as
'real-estate art' signals the artist as property speculator; a very different form
of work to the usual comparisons made between social practice artists and
social workers, educators or researchers. I do not wish to turn Gates from the
poster-boy of social practice into the whipping boy; for all its faults, his work
draws compellingly on interesting counter-histories and the texture of Chicago
across performance, sculpture and.installation. Instead, it is important to think

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artists and supporters in front of the South Side Community Art
Center building in Chicago 2004
Theaster Gates's Rebuild Foundation's Dorchestester Avenue project
under construction in Chicago October 2013
poster promoting Theaster Gates's Carver Bank project
Theater Gates leading a workshop session at Stony Island Bank,
South Side Chicago in November 2012

through what his prominence tells us about the current

state of the field as a whole.
Coming back to Lowe, his talk at Creative Time also
touched on how long-running organisations and projects are
frequently overlooked in favour of wealthier social practice
artists with better resources, educational credentials and
affluent networks. In his account, this class differential is
strongly racialised in the US and frequently presents the
problem of white social practice MFA graduates launching
projects in African-American communities without
validating the cultural activity already present. In relation
to this, the South Side Community Art Center in Chicago
has been open non- stop since 1940, acting as an exhibition
space, cultural hub and host to art classes. Its roots are in
the black radicalism of 1940S Chicago and the New Deal
art programmes. It sits roughly five miles away from
Gates's Dorchester Projects and, when I visited in 2012,
was run primarily by volunteers on a budget that did not
even appear to cover basic repairs. What does it mean when
a project like Gates's establishes a pipeline to profitable
financial resources and a cosy relationship with the city's
reactionary mayor, Rahm Emanuel, just down the road?
Not to deal with the discrepancy of assets and political
clout between similar projects in such proximity involves
unwittingly subscribing to the redundancy of trickle-down
economics while being blind to the uneven dispersion
of power and privilege that operates in the purportedly
'progressive' world of social practice. To be sure, this looks
very much like gentrification.
Clearly there is nothing inherently radical in the
politics of social practice, and instead the present moment
represents a troubling shift towards the banal, 'post-

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political' smoothness that typifies the art world at large. This, I

believe, epitomises the codification of the field into a medium
rather than an experimental strategy or practice, and how this
transpired needs further examination. In particular, we need
to recognise that the further retrenchment of state provision
and deepening recession since 2008 have pushed frequently
well-meaning socially engaged artists towards plugging the
gap in providing social services where they risk endorsing the
logic of austerity. Alternatively, one may be compelledtowards
closer complicity with private funding and the requirements of
capital. At best, in order to have spaces and resources to make
their work artists will acquiesce to the utilitarian demands of
state and capital; at worst, they will do so through ignorance
and apathy. These issues face almost all artists attempting
to make a living from their practice today, but are perhaps
more intractable for those who produce socially engaged work
through a sense that a practice that relates solely to the art
world is politically insufficient.
Cuban artist Tania Bruguera has recently made the
transition from a performance- based practice within the circuits
of the art world to emphasising usefulness in art, seemingly
in frustration at the above-stated problem. Her latest project,
Immigrant Movement International (IMI), outwardly declares
its usefulness and is described as an 'artist-initiated sociopolitical movement'. Funded by Creative Time and the Queens
Museum of Art, IMI began in 20IO and has been largely based
at a community space in Corona, Queens. As distinct from
social practice, Bruguera titles IMI 'Arte Util', or useful art, and
has founded the Asociaci6n de Arte Util, which lays down eight
criteria that projects must meet if they are to be useful. This
level of rationalisation serves to obscure the aesthetic meaning
or political orientation of IMI and other 'useful art' and does

I Features

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We need to recognise that the further retrenchment of state

provision and deepening recession since

2008

have pushed

frequently well-meaning socially engaged artists towards

plugging the gap in providing social services where they
risk endorsing the logic of austerity.

lillie to explain what is special, interesting or better about artists providing social
services. Furthermore, Bruguera makes the crucial blunder of failing to clarify
what or whom this usefulness is directed towards. The move towards utility
thus suffers from the same level of abstraction as 'ethics' or 'aesthetics' that
dominated earlier debates on socially engaged art and fails to pay attention to the
materiality of any given project.
However, the main problem with the Asociaci6n de Arte Ut.il manifesto is the
poverty of utilitarianism. Presumably outlining the criteria for artworks that
act in the service of those more oppressed than the artist, the benchmarks are
mostly set depressingly low along the lines of, for example, a project's ability to
'be implemented and function in real situations'. What kind of a 'real situation'?
It is in recognition of this impoverishment that I argue for social practice artists,
alongside curators and critics sympathetic or involved in the field, to be bolder in
declaring what it is we desire and what we wish to see destroyed. This may also
present one opportunity for unifying what is now an unwieldy field. I suggest we
strive for a critical agenda which emphasises the importance of works that hold
a negation of the presently existing world at their core without merely offering a
mimesis of exploitation and alienation. This might be by virtue of just existing
in the world as a tentative contradiction to all that surrounds it - PRH would fit
that bill- or through being more directly confrontational with the~rocesses that
produce the necessity for art that attempts to better social relations.I will close with some questions: how has this trajectorr of'Participatory
art - relational aesthetics, new genre public art, dialogical art, socially engaged
art, social practice - unfolded in different environments? What does its current
iteration tell us about our present moment? Here, I have only considered
examples from the US; how different is the current state of affairs in the UK?To
get closer to answering these questions we need a better history that goes beyond
the affirmation or negation of social practice within an avant-garde lineage; one
that pays serious attention to the conditions that make these works possible and

how older forms continue to resonate in the present. To

do so would hopefully lead us down a route that works
less at the level of analogies - that the critical potential of
social practice lies in its ability to reflect either negatively
or positively our current reality - whether that be the
brutality of contemporary capitalism or the possibility for
new forms ofsociality. Bruguera has stated that: '1 don't
like art that points at a thing. I like art that is the thing.'
In being 'the thing', the possibility of imagining 'things'
we don't yet know about is reduced and we risk losing
sight of the compelling proposal in the Asociaci6n de
A,te Util criteria to 're-establish aesthetics as a system of
transformation'. That transformation, at its best, might
create dynamic fantasies of abolishing the system that
produced those aesthetic experiences. As a starting point,
it is important to recognise that at present it is difficult
to wrest any concept of use value from that of exchange
value, an imbrication which social practice artists will be
increasingly compelled to uphold if they do not question
the very logics and material realities which currently
sustain the field. I

is a writer and research student in the

history of art department at UeL.
LARNE ABSE GOGARTY

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