Art & the Public Sphere - Volume 4, Issue 1-2, 2015

This article shifts the conversation around ethics in social practice art from a focus on individual artist’s engagements with particular communities towards a critical exploration of the discursive practices that are bringing ‘socially engaged art’ into being as a field. Drawing from social theories of work and labour, and traditions of institutional critique in art practice, along with providing an analysis of the author’s own artistic research projects in Moscow and New York, this article addresses the ethical implications of the means by which socially engaged art is produced as a profession, or a form of skilled labour. The article presents socially engaged art as defined by particular habitual interactions, often within the context of institutions, and proposes practical ways by which to address ethics in the production of socially engaged art.

The twenty-first century has seen a burgeoning swell of artists seeking to make a difference/to engage with their neighbours/or with someone else’s neighbours/to be activists/to be urban planners/to ‘make places’ and ‘build bridges’/to connect more directly with the people who would otherwise serve as anonymous audience to their work. But among those notable ambitions, what is painfully absent is an ethical framework to guide all involved. Artists who have been doing this kind of work for generations may bring with them a personal history of being radicalized and mentored in justice- and community-based work. But an adequate compass is missing for those who are endeavouring to make a positive change, equipped with skill sets derived from MFA programmes and their personal supplies of empathy. The absence of a shared set of professional ethics, or at least a standard set of questions for all involved to consider, stands in the way of good practice and ultimately the larger goal of creating a better world sought by these artists and their projects. Exploring issues of power and privilege, collective generosity, and the full range of support needed for artists and communities to work together equitably and effectively, this article introduces a range of instances where ethics are implicated but too often are missing.

In late December 2014, the artist Tania Bruguera was arrested after attempting to carry out an unsanctioned performance centred on freedom of speech in Revolution Square, Havana, Cuba. She was released after three days but held in the country indefinitely until a decision regarding legal action by the government was determined. In the weeks and months that followed, Bruguera dealt with legal issues and additional arrests, diplomatic contestations surrounding her confiscated passport, along with interrogations and intimidation by the Cuban government. It was not until July 2015 that her passport was returned. In mid-August, with a letter securing her diplomatic status as a Cuban citizen in hand, she returned to the United States. Due to her detention, Bruguera participated remotely as a speaker at the College Art Association session, The Ethics of Social Practice, reading a paper through a cellphone on Arte Útil and Aest-ethics (taken, along with other belongings by the Cuban authorities). I invited her to revisit her position on ethics and Arte Útil, and her work generally, in the form of an interview for this journal, to which she graciously agreed.

The artists at Studio REV-, along with their allies in the broader non-profit sector, address domestic workers’ rights in the United States. As a social practice art project, NannyVan works to improve how information about domestic rights is disseminated to these workers, whether nannies, elder caregivers or others. As part of a larger project named CareForce, the NannyVan project shows an ethics of care by using design traces as tactics and transversal methods as strategies.

Whilst ideas of ‘morality’ and ‘ethics’ are used almost interchangeably in everyday conversation, this article seeks to make a clear distinction between them: morality is about social interaction whilst ethics is about fidelity to a truth. This distinction is used to inform questions around social practice. The temptation for social practice is to justify itself in terms of morality: the pragmatic difference it makes in the public sphere by way of its virtuous interventions. The downfall of this temptation is that it can lead, in fact, to a depoliticization of art. It is my contention that politics proper (in art, as elsewhere) is about radical change rather than manoeuvring within the bounds of what already exist. This is the register of the ethical.

Nato Thompson, Chief Curator at Creative Time, served as the moderator for the session, ‘The Ethics of Social Practice’, at the 2015 College Art Association annual conference in New York City. We invited him to respond to a series of questions focused on ethics, social practice and his role as a curator in the form of an interview for this issue.

This text provides an overview of artists working in Chicago between 2000–2015 who responded to a lack of affordable housing or democratic control of public space.

Exhibition as Social Intervention: ‘Culture in Action’ 1993 (Afterall Exhibition Histories), Joshua Decter and H. Draxler (2013) Köln: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther Koenig, 192 pp., ISBN: 978-3-86335-448-0, p/bk, €16.80

Interactive Contemporary Art Participation in Practice, Kathryn Brown (ed.) (2014) New York: I B Tauris, 297 pp., ISBN: 9781780765518, h/bk, £60.96

Dehydrated Landscape of a CONDITION, Reto Pulfer, The Technosphere SEMINARS and Cell texts: Books Written in Prison, Ines and Eyal Weizman, Haus der Kulturen der Welt (the House of World Cultures), Berlin (as part of ‘100 YEARS OF NOW’), 30 September–4 October 2015