I Features or I

Larne Abse Gogarty on the uses and abuses of social practice

entrification

Sam Durant's We Are the People 2003installed at Project Row Houses in Chicago

renovation of Houston's Northern Third Ward aspart of Project Row Housing c1993

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If social practice is 'gentrifying' communityart, as claimed by African-American artistRick Lowe at the 2013 Creative TimeSummit, what is at stake in these two artforms and how is gentrification conceived as

mediating between them? Gentrification pointsto something more specific than recuperation,or co-option, watchwords we commonly associatewith the ability of capitalism to claim that whichdeclares an opposition to it, a process particularlypronounced in art and culture through thedomestication of various avant-garde movements.In describing social practice as a 'gentrification'of community art, Lowe seems less concernedwith evoking Situationist sensibilities than withidentifying how successful artists who take socialrelations as their material are required not onlyto satisfy the state but, increasingly, to approachthe market uncritically. If gentrification involvesthe displacement of oppressed social groupsusually delineated upon class or race lines inorder to increase property values in previously'undesirable' parts of the city, how does thisserve as an analogy for recent developments insocial practice?

To begin with it is worth asking what is at stakein the use of the term 'social practice' and whatthis development represents in the field variouslylabelled as participatory art, relational art, dialogicalart, new genre public art, socially engaged art,collaborative art, place-making and, less fashionablyas Lowe points out, community art. These rapidnominal shifts represent an array of attempts byscholars, artists and curators to stake their claim toidentifying and defining a growing area of art sincethe early 199os. However, it is dear that the currentgamut of artists, writers and curators at its forefrontare associated with a deepening codification andinstitutionalisation of the field, characterised bythe growth of social practice MFA degrees, theheightened art-world visibility of pioneers suchas Suzanne Lacy and the commercial success ofartists such as Theaster Gates. The slick, TEDTalk-style atmosphere of the packed Creative Time

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Summit, compered by its cheerleading chief curator NatoThompson, 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, alongsideoccasionally anti-state politics.

Lowe's stake in these questions is as the founder ofProject RowHouses (PRH) , a series of renovated 'shotgunhouses' in the mostly African-American Third Ward ofHouston, Texas. PRH includes community spaces, artists'residencies and a young mothers' programme, and ispartnered with a Community Development Corporationwhich acquires property in the neighbourhood andmaintains it as low-income housing. PRH is viewed as anexemplary project bymany, and Lowe is a well-establishedfigure. I visited the project last year and was struck byhow it seemed to act as a nerve centre, or world-unto-itself, abundant with possibilities for experimentation forboth residents from the Third Ward and the artists whotake up residencies and studios there.

In recent years, comparisons have been made betweenLowe and Gates, most notably in a December 2013 NewYork Times article. The comparison rests on Gates'savowal of PRH as an inspiration, as well as on theirshared choice of medium in renovating public spacesand housing. Though not explicitly addressed so far, onecan also see points of commonality in their shared visionof art acting as the metabolism to reimagine what Gatescalls 'black space'. However, the differences betweenthe work of Gates and Lowe tell us much more aboutwhy gentrification is a helpful metaphor to describe the

current state of social practice. Gates was recently described by Art Review asa '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 ContemporaryArt's 'Emerging Artists' show in 2009. Gates's social practice work beganwith refurbishing buildings on Chicago's South Side and hosting culturalevents, which subsequently grew into the Rebuild Foundation, a non-profitredevelopment agency with satellite projects in Omaha and St Louis. Thiswork is linked to Gates's lucrative studio practice through what he describesas a 'circular ecological system' with the renovated buildings partly financedby his commercial success, and the material from those buildings frequentlyappearing in his sculptures. In contrast, PRH recently scaled back its propertyholdings as Lowe felt increasingly disconnected from the aesthetic aspect ofthe project and frustrated by the knowledge that they could never solve thehousing crisis in Houston - not that this was what he set out to achieve. Lowehas described Gates as a wildcat businessman and in contrast explained thatPRH 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 theusual ethics versus aesthetics debate due to his success in the mainstream artworld, his practice readily invites criticism that the 'usefulness' of his RebuildFoundation is based on compliance with a system that perpetuates the socialissues it attempts to improve. Put cynically, Gates's 'ecological system' involvesthe Rebuild Foundation acting as a kind of feel-good money laundering facilityfor the commercial art world and corporate developers, and this is what enableshis status as a 'populariser'. Furthermore, Gates's description of his practice as'real-estate art' signals the artist as property speculator; a very different formof work to the usual comparisons made between social practice artists andsocial workers, educators or researchers. I do not wish to turn Gates from theposter-boy of social practice into the whipping boy; for all its faults, his workdraws compellingly on interesting counter-histories and the texture of Chicagoacross performance, sculpture and.installation. Instead, it is important to think

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through what his prominence tells us about the currentstate of the field as a whole.

Coming back to Lowe, his talk at Creative Time alsotouched on how long-running organisations and projects arefrequently overlooked in favour of wealthier social practiceartists with better resources, educational credentials andaffluent networks. In his account, this class differential isstrongly racialised in the US and frequently presents theproblem of white social practice MFA graduates launchingprojects in African-American communities withoutvalidating the cultural activity already present. In relationto this, the South Side Community Art Center in Chicagohas been open non- stop since 1940, acting as an exhibitionspace, cultural hub and host to art classes. Its roots are inthe black radicalism of 1940S Chicago and the New Dealart programmes. It sits roughly five miles away fromGates's Dorchester Projects and, when I visited in 2012,

was run primarily by volunteers on a budget that did noteven appear to cover basic repairs. What does it mean whena project like Gates's establishes a pipeline to profitablefinancial resources and a cosy relationship with the city'sreactionary mayor, Rahm Emanuel, just down the road?Not to deal with the discrepancy of assets and politicalclout between similar projects in such proximity involvesunwittingly subscribing to the redundancy of trickle-downeconomics while being blind to the uneven dispersionof power and privilege that operates in the purportedly'progressive' world of social practice. To be sure, this looksverymuch like gentrification.

Clearly there is nothing inherently radical in thepolitics of social practice, and instead the present momentrepresents a troubling shift towards the banal, 'post-

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I to rartists and supporters in front of the South Side Community ArtCenter building in Chicago 2004

Theaster Gates's Rebuild Foundation's Dorchestester Avenue projectunder 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

political' smoothness that typifies the art world at large. This, Ibelieve, epitomises the codification of the field into a mediumrather than an experimental strategy or practice, and how thistranspired needs further examination. In particular, we needto recognise that the further retrenchment of state provisionand deepening recession since 2008 have pushed frequentlywell-meaning socially engaged artists towards plugging thegap in providing social services where they risk endorsing thelogic of austerity. Alternatively, one may be compelledtowardscloser complicity with private funding and the requirements ofcapital. At best, in order to have spaces and resources to maketheir work artists will acquiesce to the utilitarian demands ofstate and capital; at worst, they will do so through ignoranceand apathy. These issues face almost all artists attemptingto make a living from their practice today, but are perhapsmore intractable for those who produce socially engaged workthrough a sense that a practice that relates solely to the artworld is politically insufficient.

Cuban artist Tania Bruguera has recently made thetransition from a performance- based practice within the circuitsof the art world to emphasising usefulness in art, seeminglyin frustration at the above-stated problem. Her latest project,Immigrant Movement International (IMI), outwardly declaresits usefulness and is described as an 'artist-initiated socio-political movement'. Funded by Creative Time and the QueensMuseum of Art, IMI began in 20IO and has been largely basedat a community space in Corona, Queens. As distinct fromsocial practice, Bruguera titles IMI 'Arte Util', or useful art, andhas founded the Asociaci6n de Arte Util, which lays down eightcriteria that projects must meet if they are to be useful. Thislevel of rationalisation serves to obscure the aesthetic meaningor political orientation of IMI and other 'useful art' and does

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

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risk endorsing the logic of austerity.

lillie to explain what is special, interesting or better about artists providing socialservices. Furthermore, Bruguera makes the crucial blunder of failing to clarifywhat or whom this usefulness is directed towards. The move towards utilitythus suffers from the same level of abstraction as 'ethics' or 'aesthetics' thatdominated earlier debates on socially engaged art and fails to pay attention to themateriality of any given project.

However, the main problem with the Asociaci6n de Arte Ut.il manifesto is thepoverty of utilitarianism. Presumably outlining the criteria for artworks thatact in the service of those more oppressed than the artist, the benchmarks aremostly 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 indeclaring what it is we desire and what we wish to see destroyed. This may alsopresent one opportunity for unifying what is now an unwieldy field. I suggest westrive for a critical agenda which emphasises the importance of works that holda negation of the presently existing world at their core without merely offering amimesis of exploitation and alienation. This might be by virtue of just existingin the world as a tentative contradiction to all that surrounds it - PRH would fitthat bill- or through being more directly confrontational with the~rocesses thatproduce the necessity for art that attempts to better social relations.-

I will close with some questions: how has this trajectorr of'Participatoryart - relational aesthetics, new genre public art, dialogical art, socially engagedart, social practice - unfolded in different environments? What does its currentiteration tell us about our present moment? Here, I have only consideredexamples from the US;how different is the current state of affairs in the UK?Toget closer to answering these questions we need a better history that goes beyondthe affirmation or negation of social practice within an avant-garde lineage; onethat pays serious attention to the conditions that make these works possible and

how older forms continue to resonate in the present. Todo so would hopefully lead us down a route that worksless at the level of analogies - that the critical potential ofsocial practice lies in its ability to reflect either negativelyor positively our current reality - whether that be thebrutality of contemporary capitalism or the possibility fornew forms ofsociality. Bruguera has stated that: '1 don'tlike 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 losingsight of the compelling proposal in the Asociaci6n deA,te Util criteria to 're-establish aesthetics as a system oftransformation'. That transformation, at its best, mightcreate dynamic fantasies of abolishing the system thatproduced those aesthetic experiences. As a starting point,it is important to recognise that at present it is difficultto wrest any concept of use value from that of exchangevalue, an imbrication which social practice artists will beincreasingly compelled to uphold if they do not questionthe very logics and material realities which currentlysustain the field. I

LARNE ABSE GOGARTY is a writer and research student in thehistory of art department at UeL.

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