People power - Museums Association

Conference 2024: The Joy of Museums booking open now – Book before 31 March 2024 for a 10% discount

Conference 2024: The Joy of Museums booking open now – Book before 31 March 2024 for a 10% discount

People power

As the Artes Mundi prize and exhibition opens in Cardiff, Simon Stephens talks to artists who are inspired by working closely with communities
The sixth Artes Mundi exhibition and prize opens later this month (24 October 2014–22 February 2015) in Cardiff with a number of shortlisted artists whose work is the result of close collaboration with individuals and communities.

Among them is Theaster Gates from the US, an artist and curator who is known for combining art, social engagement and urban regeneration, most notably on the Dorchester Projects on Chicago’s South Side.

Sharon Lockhart, another American on the shortlist, works with individuals and groups to make images that are visually compelling and socially engaged.

Past Artes Mundi artists have included Tania Bruguera from Cuba, who uses performance to explore the role art can play in the politics of daily life, and British-born Phil Collins, whose work is based on close engagement with place and community.

“Artes Mundi does not have an overarching theme, other than a very broad one of the human condition, and how art relates to the social, political and cultural sphere,” says Karen MacKinnon, the director of Artes Mundi.

“Because of that broad theme, many of the artists are working in the sphere of socially engaged practice. And one of the things that makes Artes Mundi really distinctive is that we don’t shy away from work that is really, really challenging.”

Challenging or not, socially engaged art is a difficult term to pin down. Some artists whose work could be described as socially engaged do not like the term because they don’t find it a useful way to describe their art. Others disagree about what the term actually means.

Sally Tallant, the director of the Liverpool Biennial (which includes an exhibition by Lockhart at the Foundation for Art and Creative Technology this year), is among those who are unenthusiastic about the term.

“I have been involved in these debates for a long time – I don’t like calling it socially engaged art,” Tallant says.

“I think that the work artists do relates to the world and is of the world and I just call it art. Some artists have practices that necessitate engagement with people and some artists don’t. I want to put all those practices together.”

What can fall under the banner of socially engaged art is certainly wide-ranging and difficult to define.

“The field of socially engaged practice as ‘participation’ is broad, spanning everything from face-painting to Occupy – this is both a strength and a weakness,” says Stephen Pritchard, the executive director of Dot to Dot Active Arts, an artist-led organisation involved in socially engaged and participatory arts.

“The interdisciplinary nature of some practices means that boundaries are often blurred between art, science, politics, environmentalism etc.”

Pritchard also says there are problems with top-down projects that attempt to bring about social change through art and culture.

“The type of social change being sought here is always state-led and so fraught with political and economic agendas,” he says. “The arts and culture in such cases can be seen as tools for manipulating the type of soft power underpinning neoliberal agendas.”

Another factor is that many in the art world tend to look down on socially engaged practice, dismissing it as community art that is without artistic merit.

“Many see the practice as not art, or as amateurish, political, radical or as an instrument for soft state control,” Pritchard says. “All these condemnations are on occasion undoubtedly true.”

Despite these factors, a number of artists are happy for their work to be seen as socially engaged. And many reject criticisms about the quality of the art and believe that the close contact that they have with communities enriches their practice.

“There’s often a problem with socially engaged art practices where they may be good as social engagement, but sometimes the artwork that comes out is rubbish,” says Jordan McKenzie, who co-curated Lock Up Performance Art (Lupa), a series of events that took place on a council estate in east London in 2011-12.

“I’m an arts practitioner and I want a level of quality. Lupa had to be a work that was artistically engaging and interesting.”

Range of practices

Like lots of socially engaged art, the Lupa project grew organically. McKenzie says one of the reasons the project came about was the lack of performance spaces for mid- and early-career artists such as himself in London.

“It was very strange because although I’ve become more and more located in terms of social engagement, Lupa didn’t start out to be a socially engaged piece of work,” he says.

“It was quite naive and actually started out partly from three people getting a bit drunk and deciding it would be hilarious to have a curated performance space out of a lock-up garage on a council estate.”

McKenzie was living on the estate where the performances were held, countering the criticism that socially engaged artists often don’t have any long-term links with the communities they are working with.

“I live on my estate and I was really interested in this whole idea of being an artist in residence and a resident,” McKenzie says.

“And I think it’s very difficult for people who just go into those kind of social situations to make work without having any kind of history or context – artists that just parachute in, do a social engagement and parachute out again.”

Obviously, various issues are raised by living with the communities that artists are working with, both positive and negative. And not everyone is convinced that this is the best way of working.

Perhaps these contrasting views reflect the variety of socially engaged practices that artists are involved in and the different approaches available. But it also seems to be true that artists can have a big impact on communities where they have a direct stake in their futures.

Examples include I Am Here, a response to Hackney council in London putting up bright-orange boards over the windows of vacated and empty flats on the Haggerston & Kingsland estate in 2007 prior to their demolition.

It was developed by Andrea Luka Zimmerman and Lasse Johansson, two artists who are also residents. Their project replaced the orange boards with large photographic portraits of the people living on the estate.

Another artist working in Hackney is photographer Tom Hunter. One of his early projects was Persons Unknown, which centred on a series of photographs taken in 1997 in a street where Hunter lived as part of a community fighting eviction as squatters.

“I went to lots of meetings about what we were going to do and I found them very frustrating,” Hunter says. “I thought actually the main thing I could do would be just to document it, to show people the situation of where we were living.”

Hunter says he was actually quite pessimistic about the future of the street and thought the bulldozers were coming in. But then his art started to have an impact.

“The work got such media attention that suddenly Hackney council wanted to speak to us and housing associations wanted to speak to us,” he says. “So I realised that art could be a vehicle to head the campaign and to get our voices out there.”

Hunter has since gone on to work on various housing-related projects across Hackney, including the Holly Street and Woodberry Down estates.

“I’ve just found Hackney an endless source of inspiration,” he says. “There’s always something interesting to talk about because it is so varied, so interesting and so diverse and there are always dramas going on.”

The inspiration that artists get from working with communities is often a two-way thing, and involves give and take on both sides.

For the Liverpool Biennial, Sharon Lockhart is showing works related to children growing up in Poland, where she has spent a long time filming. Past projects include Lunch Break, a series of films and photographs produced through a long-term collaboration with the shipyard workers of the Bath Iron Works in Maine.

Inspired by the past

“The most enjoyable part of my work for me as an artist is this engagement with a community,” Lockhart says. “I love meeting and getting to know people and one of the great things about art is that it often provides a structure that people can identify with and it opens people up to a discussion.

“I think where I’ve really been successful is that I see this conversation as reciprocal – I have as much to learn from them about image-making as they do from me,” Lockhart continues.

“The lunch-box photographs I made in Lunch Break were a perfect case. The workers knew that their lunch-boxes were interesting representations. Everyone in the shipyard would come up and tell me about so-and-so who has a really interesting lunch-box. It is just a matter of being open to a discussion. As long as you are open to it, others are just as willing.”

For Lockhart, it is a way of working that is linked to her upbringing. For both Lunch Break and Double Tide, which can be seen at Artes Mundi in Cardiff, Lockhart immersed herself in the lives of workers.

“I grew up in a large extended family that was very open and inviting to all kinds of people,” Lockhart says.

 “People were often visiting for extended periods of time and became part of the family. I think this was the start of my interest in engaging communities that I was not initially familiar with.

"As I started working as an artist, I found it was a great facilitator of my natural predilections to engage with people. I also saw that there were communities that were underrepresented or represented in ways that I found insufficient.”

Hunter’s work is also inspired by his past. As well as living as a squatter in Hackney, he was a union member for many years while working for the Royal Parks.

“I’ve always liked the words socially engaged and politically engaged,” Hunter says. “When I was at the Royal College of Art, politics was a thing that everyone was trying to avoid, which came out of the whole YBA scene. Socially engaged and political art was seeing something of the 1980s, quite boring in fact.

“When I got involved in doing the project on my street and Holly Street it was because I thought housing was such an incredibly important subject to deal with,” Hunter continues.

His work also comes out of a strand of social-documentary photography, where figures such as Bill Brandt in the 1930s and 1940s were exposing the harsh conditions that many communities had to endure.

“There’s a strong tradition in photography to inform people, to show people what things are like and to try and generate change,” Hunter says. “Most people think that’s old-fashioned – they’re cynical about it and believe it doesn’t work. I still believe in it.”


Leave a comment

You must be to post a comment.

Discover

Advertisement
Join the Museums Association today to read this article

Over 12,000 museum professionals have already become members. Join to gain access to exclusive articles, free entry to museums and access to our members events.

Join