Collective Action in the New Millennium: From Euphoria to Catharsis

2017

is American sociologist who is interested in sociology of art and one of his theories is understanding and explaining art as 'collective action'. The sociologists like Becker analyze how the aesthetic judgements and values are constructed socially. They mainly focus on the production and creation processes, institutions and organizations.

SAGE Handbook of Frankfurt School Critical Theory, 2018

Within critical theory and beyond, many of the debates about the status of art turn, explicitly or implicitly, upon the concept of participation. Avant-garde movements of the 20th century linked themselves to emancipatory political movements through practices and rhetorics of mass participation, opening art to new audiences, lowering the barriers to participation for creators, and sometimes eliminating the distinction between makers and audiences altogether. Though the debates between Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, György Lùkacs, Bertolt Brecht and others are often discussed through concepts such as autonomy, totality, and mimesis, this chapter argues that we might usefully reorganize our understanding of such debates by thinking through the links between aesthetic and political participation. Articulated in this manner, continuities between critical theory and later theorizations – such as those of the Situationist International – become visible. Finally, this chapter will consider the potent critiques of participation as an aesthetic and political ideology as well as the impasses that participatory theory and practice encounters over the course of the twentieth century. These impasses, it will be argued, are especially prominent within the social movements and cultural practices of the new century.

Art & the Public Sphere, 2011

The increased interest in the art collective over the last decade has been part of a movement of activist concerns towards a position of greater visibility in artworld debates. Whilst this development is to be welcomed it also involves a certain risk, where different conceptions of the politics of art lose their specificity and the tensions existing between the terms 'art', 'politics' and 'activism' are lost. This study explores these tensions through consideration of recent work on the art collective by Gregory Sholette and John Roberts. Sholette's theoretical work on the collective is underpinned by his participation in two important art collectives of the 1980s and 1990s, PADD (Political Art Documentation / Distribution) and REPOHistory. Roberts' work over the last decade has developed a powerful Marxist reading of collaborative art, which stresses a connection to the historical avant-garde and to theories of Communism.

This essay was written for the book Gulf Labor: High Culture /Hard Labor (OR books, 2015, Andrew Ross editor). It offers a brief historical sketch of artists who, in response to external, political events, chose to abandon their studio practice in order to engage in direct actions, cultural boycotts, strikes and other militant tactics. One aim of the text is to situate the activity of Gulf Labor Coalition and G.U.L.F. within a genealogy of committed art, suggesting that there is a definite continuity between present and past politicized artistic practices. But the conclusion is also made that something new is also underway in so far as the once robust cultural politics of the cold war era have now become just politics, plain and simple. And artists, who once earnestly sought to identify with workers in the 1930s and 1960s, have in fact become, despite their creative virtuosity, just one more precarious worker amongst others.

2000

Rhetoric, Social Value and the Arts, Palgrave McMillan, 2017

This paper aims to reinvigorate a debate between two seemingly opposed approaches of socially engaged art. In the first part,

In this essay, we reflect upon the highly celebrated notion of creativity in activist practices, especially during the dispersal of the alter-globalization movement. We neither attempt to homogenize a rich cluster of activist practices, nor to dismiss an act’s diverse social, cultural and political impacts. What we do discuss is the need to be alert to, and critical of, the reification of creativity which, when detached from the materiality of resistance practices, is in danger of becoming a goal in itself. We argue that this tendency in fact resonates strongly with the embrace of art and creativity by the creative industries. However, our aim here is not to focus on the critique of the creative industries per se, which cunningly co-opt creativity as an individual merit and a commodity fetish, but rather on that very logic which mischievously leaks into the capillary vessels of activism itself; a topic that has, as of yet, not been fully explored.

If you were to take an overview of the most important critical artistic practices from the mid-1990s onwards and the attempts by art theory to analyse them, forgetting both the most applause-hungry provo artists such as Damian Hirst—whose critique of the art institution is almost non-existent—and spectacular, willingly instrumental creative city artists such as Olafur Eliasson, I think we would have to distinguish four overlapping practices: relational aesthetics, institutional critique, socially engaged art, and tactical media. It is evident, of course, that we are trying to account for phenomena whose identities are in no way fixed but are in movement, and that, for instance, former oppositions between the avant-garde's anti-institutional " over-politicization " and anti-aesthetic institutional critique are gradually changing. Relational aesthetics would have to be the starting point for such an account of politicized contemporary art from the mid-1990s onwards. Nicolas Bourriaud's plaidoyer for an " art of social interstices " that is open in its formal composition and invites the spectator to participate in some way was trendsetting on both sides of the Atlantic and still appears—even after the October-led bashing—as the most important way out of the 1980s critique of representation (and out of the reappearance of expressive or meta-expressive painting).[1] In his description of such artists as Rirkrit Tiravanija, Pierre Huyghe, Jens Haaning, and also the late Félix Gonzáles-Torres, Bourriaud developed a persuasive vocabulary that referred to the avant-garde's transgressive experiments but also distanced itself from them, and picked up insights from postmodern philosophy and its analysis of the disappearance of " grand narratives. " The new art Bourriaud wrote about and curated was characterized by working on and producing " inter-human relations, " he argued. Relational aesthetics was not a new artistic style or a particular theme but, instead, a particular way of using the art space with a view toward creating social relations. Through the use of aesthetic objects, the artist creates temporary social relations, Bourriaud explained, arguing that the new art was a response to a historical development characterized by the appearance of new forms of alienation and control. Relational art continued the avant-garde in a diminished form by creating small-scale, open utopias, by setting up alternative temporary free zones in which it was possible to interact differently. That was the argument, at least. Claire Bishop and others criticized Bourriaud for his seriously flawed understanding of the idea of the openartwork, arguing that it is, in fact, not the work itself but its reception that is open, questioning Bourriaud's fairly loose use of terms such as participation, relations, and interstices in his analysis of works such as Tiravanija's various food projects (Thai soup or sausages served at openings).[2] The inflation of words such as " creativity " and " participation, " which played a role in the expanded and bloated so-called experience economy that was part of the last phase of the neoliberal economy of speculation in which fictive capital kept a hollowed-out economy floating, casts a critical perspective back on Bourriaud's theory. However, we should bear in mind that the theory of relational aesthetics was formulated in the early 1990s: before Richard Florida and his cohort wrote about the creative class, before every art institution " ordered " participatory artworks, and in a period when the Internet still somehow had an emancipatory aura.