A Note on Socially Engaged Art Criticism

Abstract

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 in-

Life Chances: thinking with art to generate new understandings of low-income situations

“…This creates an incongruity in the book and is a way of disrupting and transgressing hegemonic Life Chances as an artwork has, however, provided a nuanced rendering of community participatory art in a politicised, reified space, that has been both reliant on relationships and a mutual knowing, as well as respecting individual stories and experiences and there are elements of the ethical turn in participatory art in our work (Bishop, 2012). Commentators on participatory ethical arts practices argue that the norms for judging the quality of art might be seen to shift away from individual sensory judgment to those of 'dialogic exchange and negotiation' (Bishop, 2012, p.23) or have a focus on the relational bases of arts practices that are described earlier by Rasmussen (2017).…”

“…Art that leaves the art institution and performs different kinds of interventions or artistic social work, often intended to create some kind of dialogue in conflict-ridden urban space (Rasmussen, 2017).…”

Child-dog faeces assemblages and children’s engagements in activist art

“…As we explain later, the Poo Patrol activist art builds on a tradition of socially engaged, participatory art practices intent on disruption or dissensus (Rancière 2010), which enables an understanding of art as a space of difference: 'To create some kind of dialogue in conflictridden urban space' (Rasmussen 2017). How child-faeces assemblages were enacted are explored through the activist artworks produced by the children understood as attempts to both foreground the phenomena as a social spectacle and to reify knowledge of faeces as matter that matters (Barad 2003) in children's immediate environs.…”

The Performative Arts and Pedagogy Project – Towards the Development of an International Glossary

“…While there has been considerable critique of SEA (Bourriaud, 2002;Francis, 2014;Rasmussen, 2015;Kester, 2015 and, particularly around notions of passive participation and a lack of reflexivity and criticality which can result in instrumentalisation (Helguera, 2011), there has been little discussion of this in applied theatre. Critical SEA (the word critical having been added more recently) works in social ecosystems not just for the advancement of humanity and to support the ethical principles of social justice, human dignity and moral values, but to use art to problematise them, create tensions, set up different points of view, form challenges and ironies, etc.…”