Brett Alton Bloom
This is a really good read. Gregory Sholette continues to lead the discussion and actually provides criticism and reflection that is relevant to those that practice this kind of work.
Saturday at 5:08am · Like · 2

Heath Schultz
I found myself wondering, or perhaps missing, a discussion of the ‘materiality’ or ‘thingness’ of concepts and institutions that dictate or at least guide Occupy. Abstract concepts like ‘public opinion’ or the ‘community’ come to mind, as conceptual concerns that have very real effects on the kinds of actions and rhetoric Occupy deploys, who does them, who doesn’t, etc. Or, the elephant in the room for me, at least with the discussion of the division between ‘social engaged’ and ‘traditional’ art production was the university itself, as the enforcer of these kinds of practices. ‘Socially engaged’ work seems manifest ‘materially’ for the purposes to reporting back to academic discourse, at least in large part. In thinking about the ‘limits of the social’ in relationship to art or social movements, I wonder if we can speak to its thingness without also speaking to the thingness of its disciplinary or institutional boundaries and how we can overcome them? I’m not sure… It could use another read.

Here is my favorite moment: ” In this sense, Zuccotti Park, along with all other OWS encampments, embodies an archive avant la lettre, that is to say, a collection of materials, biopolitical practices, and everyday concrete documents waiting to be recognized as an interpretable text.”
Saturday at 12:50pm · Like · 1

Brett Alton Bloom
We need to remember that this work didn’t start in academic places. It has been brought into them and it has simultaneously been colonized by capital and brought into commercial galleries (this is the story in the US – slightly different in the UK or even still different in Scandinavia). The two things have happened almost simultaneously. Not enough distinctions are made between making Thai food in a commercial gallery or growing bacteria free greens with people living with HIV/AIDS pre-protease inhibitors in a non-commercial, far from the art world space. The politics and specifics of this shit matter and are often completely ignored by awful people like Claire Bishop. — Now this work is starting to be used as nationalist propaganda, or “soft power as Frances Stoner Sonders calls it in her book about how the CIA used Ab Ex painting exhibitions in foreign lands to demonstrate “free market” ideals to the world, via the Bronx Museum’s SmartPower initiative with the State Dept. You all know folks involved with this. Really creepy, deeply irresponsible shit. — Some of the limits of the social are the limits of the discourse around it. Greg makes some good steps with this text. He is one of the few people though actually who gets it and can articulate what this kind of work is actually dealing with. I have to say, though, that I really don’t like the term “social practice art” as it definitely turns what was, and still is, a really diverse, wide ranging, and when it started very anti-academic-critical- theory, often very anti-capitalist, field of practice into something much more banal and formal. Bringing it into the institution and creating social practice degrees is also a big part of the problem. I think what Greg might be talking about in referring to the materiality of the social is that every single social situation has a set of conditions that make it what it is – makes it recognizable to us as distinct things or experiences. Socially/politically-engaged art often takes a social situation and plays with its given constraints – the things that make it up or its materiality – and attempts to reconfigure them. OWS definitely creates ruptures in the received situations we all find ourselves in and momentarily disallows them from functioning normally. This is its profound transformative power that has been so moving and movement making.
Saturday at 1:19pm · Like · 1

Marc Allen Herbst
I’ve been thinking along the lines of Heath all day.
The article is good, I’ve been thinking about it all day. But I fall on the side of the social when it comes to the divide Greg makes… the limits of the social within the social. There are far less clear limits to the social outside of the institutions of representation and reproduction and scholarship that Greg refers too. He makes, I think, far to quick a jump from the more organic sign-making of the protesters (who follow a socialized procedure, not a professional impulse) to the archive for which the work is not primarilly intended. This is the social that I find myself more currently attracted- out of an understanding that it is organic social capacity which made OWS or any other social movement… not a reverence to an archive, political procedure or mediatic impulse.

I am reading “the devil and commodity fetishism in south america” right now and it is ringing very deeply- one basic thesis is that work in the mines of Bolivia is associated with the devil and transformation, heat, potency and power. Organic, pre-columbian life is associated with fluidity and light, justice and all things sane. While Greg ends the piece “rather than thinking of social practice art as a strategy for unlikely survival against the forces of neoliberal enterprise culture and its strip-mining of creativity, we could inscribe this still-emerging narrative with a stubborn sense of materiality and a vibrant itness , that if nothing else would challenge unspoken hierarchies, and divisions of labor, because a critical, social practice should above all acknowledge the limits of the social within the social itself.” I disagree. I disagree because he normalizes social practice art with sociality… I agree that the itness of social practice art is necessary for its professional survival- a necessary devilish thing.
But for the social is not in the thing, it is in the organic flow of more normal social procedures. This should not be overlooked.

One more thing. I would refuse the binary that I and greg are laying out. I have heard talk of artists who work outside of living as form. Who don’t make their work a public document, but instead a normal procedure, something they do. The most stunning political example was an annectdote someone told me of an “artist” who for years would attend both IRA and Royalist meetings in Derry in order to bridge the gap. If anyone knew about the project, it would be over.

The social is very different from social art.
Deep respect to all.
Saturday at 2:13pm · Like · 1

Gregory Sholette
I was not assuming or hoping that people would seek to fall on one side or another of some divide Robby, quite the opposite, my aim was to begin disturbing the apparent line between “the social,” and the “material,” or between the so-called institutional and so-called organic production of art. But I appreciate these comments a great deal, as well as those of Heath, and Brett (and I agree, the label social practice art sucks, still, its what has stuck). Only just one more comment/provocation for Robby: are you sure your not trying to re-inscribe the divide at the very moment it might be erased, a bit like the prisoner who soon returns to jail after being freed? -gs
Saturday at 2:53pm · Like · 1

Marc Allen Herbst
I’m sure I’m not trying to re-inscribe. Its “professional necessities” first the market second that can only do that sort of inscribing.

I want a writing that goes into this distinction, and I’m glad you do. The reality is, I think that people do fall on one side or the other, that social practice in Boise Idaho is different then a gallery based social practice, one is more a hobby, the other a carreer. I know these are false distinction, but they are important distinctions none-the-less. One acts within a less commodified social field, the other acts within a neo-liberal field. I know these are impossibly not hard and fast distinction, and to make them so would be very wrong. Very wrong. As I said, the devil is necessary. I’m a pagan that way.

I don’t have any problem with the term social practice… its just a name.
Saturday at 3:12pm · Like

Gregory Sholette
Ps for more on the link bet. OWS and archive see: http://artjournal.collegeart.org/?p=2395
OCCUPOLOGY, SWARMOLOGY, WHATEVEROLOGY: the city of (dis)order versus the people’s archive | Art Jour
artjournal.collegeart.org
The Occupy Wall Street People’s Library, Zuccotti Park, October 1, 2011, prior to the police raid (photograph © the author)
Saturday at 3:17pm · Like

Marc Allen Herbst
I do really like Raunigs discussion of machines in his 1000 Machines. The movement is a thing outside of ourselves. But also the objet de’ arte is a thing outside of its creation… it has its own life and its own logic independent of its creator and the context of its creation. We write about objects (institutions, art, agit-prop, laws, elections) as necessarily flawed objects (because they are cast-offs from a machine with its own logic.. things that escaped in moments of difference to have their own lives and motions.)
Saturday at 4:24pm · Like

Marc Allen Herbst
Thinking more about this article (note, its Marc, not Robby writing).

What I’m getting at are two basic questions…

1. We need to really be clear about what distinguishes the social from the neo-liberal social that social practitioners participate in creating? What is the difference between these two socials (admitting that its a question of minor differences and not clear lines). What is the potentials and differences of these two positions?

2. What is the nature of the object in the art world that allows it to participate in a different way then a disembodied “social object”, from a political/cultural tactical position?

This quote begins that look, “The recognition of a resistant thingness at work within the social, including those human-originated technologies that have gone on to operate virtually independent of us…” and your look at the formal play of the early socialist world is right on. In the new issue 8 of Joaap, Victor Tupitsyn’s article has a very interesting take on this- making (in my mind) an importatn point of the power of the state and distribution machines to define the meaning of an object beyond itself… I clearly believe in objects. And do think your direction right on. Lets go deeper.

What is the social? What distinguishes, by degrees, the social from the neo-liberal social that envolves either of data-mining peers for professional choice or using peers partially as a mutually(?) acknowledge flesh for self-mediation. Its a basic research rule in sociology, physics and anthropology that the research has a great effect on their research. This really needs to be considered.
I mean this too, not as a dismissal but as a critical question that we really should get much deeper in to.

” let’s say that Wright’s un-framed usership is conceivably already taking place; just think of the explosion of informal, noisy cultural activity associated with Occupy Wall Street”
“a mix of the archaic and the new as if beneath the internet there is cardboard….All this complicates the classroom context.”

I’ve been out of the US for the most part, but was up at CalArts for some time while the OLA was going on. The mass of students were not involved in any meaningful way with ows.The folks at OLA weren’t by and large artists who have made the choice that Wright suggests. Most OLA folks didn’t seem to be making this choice…”Prior to that day of liberation, any failure to reproduce one’s own academic field simply amounts to professional suicide.”

If we are to more deeply appreciate the social and its very real power to constitute very inventive movements (with the help of artists), this needs to be very clear.

This is a great direction.

As a constant target of propagandists I have insulated myself to their arrows. Propaganda comes with the territory of political and social activism and is exploited unscrupulously by both sides of an argument.

By the way, I personally saw to it that the Mountain Minutemen, the group responsible for the video portraying minutemen shooting and burying an illegal alien, were broken up and dismantled.. That group was a rogue conmposition of wild extremists and it deserved to be dismantled.

Sincerely Yours,

Jim Gilchrist, Founder and President, The Minuteman Project