An Ethic of the End: How Planning and Evaluation Make Art Political

There is a diverse array of artists who see themselves as engaged in a deeply political service, employing art to raise awareness of or directly address social-justice issues. While acknowledging a shared lineage, many curators and art theorists cast aside community practices in the evaluation of socially engaged art. At best, community practices are seen as being in need of a new name to differentiate themselves from art per se; at worst, they are seen as well-intended but quotidian homilies that have more in common with arts education, applied arts or activism than with contemporary art. However, I feel that the more important formal difference lies not in the sophistication of their artfulness, but in the sophistication of their approaches to planning and the evaluation of their activities toward the ends of social justice.

The debate over the ethics of the process versus the quality of the work as art often fails to address the necessity of an ethic of the end, which requires a clear vision of the purposes of investigating or engaging in political or social issues through art making. Artwork that seeks validation in terms of its political aptitude must be accompanied by a system of evaluation, of a set of heuristics to define its use to the communities it serves, what goals the work seeks to achieve, and a way of anticipating and measuring the impact of the work. The general failure of leading art theorists to address the problem of evaluation points to the unsettling possibility that many artists, arts historians and curators fail to see a clear relationship between art making and social justice. Recent formalist reactions to collaborative art making and the renewed demand that collaborative art be interpreted and evaluated as art may have much to do with providing an academy-centered means of evaluation in response to this incapacity.

In my own case, I have gravitated away from working in arts collectives, toward working in community arts programs that owe much of their design to arts education and nonprofit management models. I have taken this course partially because of the frustration I experienced in not being able to evaluate the impact of my activities when involved in more experimental modes of community-based art making. I readily agree that my work in community has become more formulaic, and may also be more easily appropriated by institutions for their purposes. However, my work has also become clearer, and the tangible benefits of my collaborations have become more recognizable.

What follows are observations and reflections on how contemporary art theorists have addressed collaborative art and how an ethic of the end, attentive to questions of utility, achievability and assessment, as developed by community arts practitioners and institutions, must be a part of any art practice wanting to be of use to social justice.

What Isn’t Socially Engaged?

With the failure of modernity to universally emancipate humanity, the modernist ideal of art as an expression of individuality has fallen out of favor for many schools of art theory. As the role of art in the improvement of life has been rewritten, some art theorists have placed emphasis on collaboration and the “social turn,” in which the social aspects of making and viewing artwork are an integral part of the artwork. By employing discourses interested in the social aspects of artworks, curators and art theorists are able to provide an image of art as useful and meaningful to the public, even as this rhetoric also functions, by association, to provide a similarly humanistic image to work that is not at all collaborative or that is collaborative but not really interested in being useful to the ends of social-justice issues.

In leading arts publications and contemporary arts institutions, artwork that deals with political questions in the innovative and sensational terms of contemporary art routinely take precedence over practices that use the arts as tools for the political organizing, community development and coalition building that are necessary for addressing social-justice issues. Some art theorists, such as London-based art critic Claire Bishop, have argued that collaborative art must be evaluated as art, rather than as social work. This discrepancy between the “high-” and “low-” art way of addressing the conditions of life are all the more curious because of their striking similarities. For much of contemporary art, the assumed role of a gallery or museum has shifted away from a venue for appreciation to a setting for civic engagement and response. Multiple arts disciplines now justify their activities, in whole or in part, through the use of academic language describing the social aesthetics of contemporary arts: dialogic, process-oriented, connective, relational, etc. In many ways the “social turn” in contemporary art points to the general acknowledgement that art should enter into and in some way improve the lives of the public. Despite mutual interest in social engagement, when collaborative practices are also evaluated in terms of their quality as art, the art establishment is clearly able to produce hierarchies that are not based on the benefit the work provides for the communities involved in its production.

In resisting evaluation based on the ethic of the process and of the results, there is a legitimate interest in preserving aspects of art that cannot make the jump to being socially relevant. At the same time, however, creating a bifurcation between socially engaged high arts and community arts practices serves to provide a more easily controlled system of valorization for artistic capital by and for arts institutions. By assessing everybody who includes anybody in their art making process, Claire Bishop renders social engagement as a formal aspect, thereby, in effect, laying a groundwork for returning to mainstream canonical criteria for declaring what good and bad socially engaged artwork looks like. The latter category largely includes community arts practices that lack creative dynamism, fail to render new interpretations of culture, and err too close to social work and pedagogy. The division in methods of assessment is clear in Bishop’s pejorative categorization of these types of work as art that “prioritizes social effect over considerations of artistic quality.”

I think that we can understand demands for artistic quality to be the primary criterion for critiques of collaborative work as a reaction to critics of collaborative work such as Stephen Wright. For Wright, “art, in short, is the chief obstacle to artistic collaboration” (535). He takes “relational aesthetics” as an example of how

artists make forays into the outside world, “propose” (as artworlders like to say) very contrived services to people who never asked for them, or rope them into some frivolous interaction, then expropriate as the material for their work whatever minimal labor they have managed to extract from these more-or-less unwitting participants (whom they sometimes have the gall to describe as “co-authors”). In so doing, they end up reproducing within the symbolic economy of art the sort of class-based relations of expropriation that Marx saw at work in the general economy: on the one hand, those who hold the symbolic capital (the artists), and on the other, those whose labor (such as it is) are used to foster the accumulation of more capital. And this is precisely what is usually passed off as “collaboration” (534-535).

In artistic collaborations where this criticism is accurate, the art world is unable to justify its interaction with the public in terms of either the ethics of the process or the ethics of the ends. In these cases the heuristic of choice defaults to “art as art.” This is a tautology since the artwork in question has an implicit recognition and value “as art” by virtue of its attachment to whatever arts institutions are supporting it. Interpreting the quality of a project in terms of the opinions of arts institutions allows power to circulate internally within the institutional system of art, rejecting from consideration the question of how collaborative interaction empowers communities. Merely engaging in the language of collaboration and civic engagement allows institutions to renew their role of providing cultural benefit to the public; this cultural capital is also maintained in public perception by the historical association of the arts with high culture.

When working as an assistant curator at the Contemporary Museum in downtown Baltimore in the summer of 2006, I became a participant in a local arts collective that worked collaboratively with various Baltimore organizations and communities; I was most actively involved as an assistant curator and an artist during an exhibition titled “Headquarters: Investigating the Prison-Industrial Complex and the Formation of the Ghetto.”[1]

My collaborators and I made up something of a link between the exhibition at the Contemporary Museum in downtown Baltimore and the various communities involved. From what I observed, for the museum[2], the means of evaluation were: 1) press reception and reviews of the show; 2) number of visitors to the show; 3) that the grant money spent on the exhibition resulted in the production of real artwork (many projects ended up as “sculpture” in the final evaluation). For an exhibition dedicated to productive and active civic engagement, the museum’s measures of success were really no different than they would have been for any other exhibition. A story about that: The exhibition acted as a launching pad for many public tours led by local community leaders and activists; on one occasion the prison-abolition group Critical Resistance led a walking tour around the outside of several prison and jail buildings in downtown Baltimore, in order to facilitate a discussion on the role of prisons in our society. As we passed some guards outside of one of the prison buildings, our guides noticed that one of the audience members pulled a guard aside and said something to him privately. When questioned about it, the man admitted to working for the correctional system and to having been ordered to investigate the exhibition. When the museum director was informed of the incident, she declared that this was a great sign — that word about the exhibition was really getting around town!

The terms by which the relevance and the quality of socially engaged artwork is determined often reduces the matter of social engagement to a question of numbers — how many people attended? How many people participated? In the absence of means to evaluate the actual impact of an artwork on that public, we evaluate the impact of the public on the artwork. This again suggests that the introduction of concern for social engagement in arts institutions may be motivated by the need to provide evidence of public involvement; this discrepancy may well be the result of the best of intentions on the part of artists and institutions, but a failed collaboration usually still has benefit for the institution, as art.

Much as we find in these numerical appreciations of civic engagement, many interpretations[3] of the role of collectivism in modern art run the risk of reducing the issue of social engagement to a formal question. Explaining collective and community-based arts practices through comparisons to the lineage of Dada cafés, Situationist interventions, Fluxus happenings, and Beuys’ “social sculpture” has illuminating merit, but also turns the social aspects of the artwork into a formal or thematic element, ignoring many of the pragmatic and political goals of community arts projects. Artwork in danger of appearing too formulaic, too much like arts education or art in the employ of a particular service industry is absent from most art-historical surveys on the subject of artistic collaborations. Also absent are programs per se, since many community arts programs, in attempting to address local concerns through durable and accessible arts projects, appear to exist too close to service and nonprofit industries for recognition and interpretation as art.

Why Collectivity?

Part of Claire Bishop’s critique of community arts programs extends from her belief that being instrumentalized by the state (e.g., by becoming a quasi-service industry) is likely to be more problematic than to be appropriated by arts institutions. In working in and around artists’ collectives, I have found that, for artists interested in social justice, the impetus to form a collective is largely a response to fears of co-optation and the perception that such appropriation is the greatest threat to using art in productive and meaningful ways.

In the introduction to their book, “Taking the Matter into Common Hands,” editors Johanna Billing, Maria Lind and Lars Nilsson argue that “collaborations often constitute a response to a specific, sometimes local, situation and they often run a constant risk of being incorporated into the system they are reacting against” (8). Reflecting on my participation in an artist collective in Baltimore, I feel that my collaborators and I were teetering between a range of perceived threats; some were about being too close to institutions (attending to museum obligations, the disconnect between the museum and communities, being instrumentalized by arts institutions) and being too far removed from institutions (lack of funding, visibility, and other resources). Although the very notion of “collectivism” appears to contain an implicit critique of individualism, I feel that on many levels artist collectives, certainly the one I took part in, represent an attempt to construct a space of austere artistic and political autonomy. In my experience, we sometimes reproduced the alienating conditions of the gallery within our “noninstitutional” practice. While my peers and I may have avoided (to an extent) being instrumentalized by questionable agencies and institutions, we also failed to instrumentalize our own practice, leading to a fairly constant confusion as to what our purposes and goals were.

Although our projects[4] were collaborations with communities and informed by their desires, the way in which our practice was influenced by art theory and philosophy resulted in work that was typically difficult for communities to access or make use of. I think that our work also sometimes fell into another stereotype of art-activist collectives, in that we saw the accumulation and reproduction of information and theory as an integral component of our practice. At times, arts collectives tend to structure their activities in a pattern reproduced from the academy — conferences, reading groups and other forms of accumulating and synthesizing information — with the assumption that information on an issue has the power to encourage its redress.

I think that, at the time, my conception of the role of our collective was somewhat in line with the notion of an “oppositional device.” Put forth by Brian Holmes in his essay “The Oppositional Device or, Taking Matters into Whose Hands?” the oppositional device is defined as “something between a prop and a performance, it’s a flow of relations in which distinct objects stand out and take on momentarily important roles. This combination of objects and flows becomes a social tool: a device to produce or provoke public speech” (Billings, et al. 35-41). From there Holmes cites examples from as diverse a range of activities as Fluxus performances and Cindy Sheehan’s encampment outside President Bush’s Texas property. For the oppositional device, the artistic mandate is to provide or provoke a forum for discourses antagonistic to the status quo, to create eruptions of public discourse that gesture to the possibility of other ways of living. However important the task of encouraging people to think of other ways things could be, the mere stance of opposition is reactionary and has no real means of impacting the life of the public, save by disseminating information within a few narrow circles related to the arts — without any means of evaluating the reception of that information.

I think that many artists attempting to make socially relevant work bring with them the primary model that arts institutions have put forth for understanding their civic engagement: people will see the work, become aware of a contemporary issue in a new way and talk about the issue, and the work will influence them to make change in whatever way they can. Hans Haacke’s famous declaration that his hope was simply to change the topic of dinner conversation comes to mind. Information may be a prerequisite of political mobilization, but my collectivist practices were based on the incorrect assumption that distributing information would automatically result in such larger developments.

Problems in the Evaluation of the Avant-Garde

Contemporary artists engaging in collectivist modes of production, but who lack a pragmatic evaluation system based on attainable goals and outcomes, also tend to validate their projects by depicting them as experiments. Part of what gives artists license to make work is the general assumption that artistic innovation is related to other forms of innovation in business and science, and that all innovation is geared toward the improvement of society. As artists have rejected the classical canons and idealization of the relationship between high art, progress and high cultural values, artists and art theorists have adapted ideas from other disciplines, including scientific rhetoric, in order to envision the relationship between an artwork (or experiment) and the general improvement of society. In much the same way as an experiment is assumed to provide useful information even when wildly incorrect in its initial assumptions, artworks that appear to serve no useful purpose are still considered as useful to informing the development of art, and by association, the development of culture. However, without a clear set of goals by which to evaluate the results of an experiment, the pathway between present practice and the amelioration of the vast social ills identified in the work remains unresolved.

The term “avant-garde” has fallen out of use in the wake of postmodernity, but I think that the myth is still very much with us. If not pushing culture forward from the tops of institutions, artists and related practitioners see their work as ever more radical in its relationship to dominant culture precisely because it works at the margins of society, divorced (in theory) from institutions of power. In being privileged with a “visionary” role in society, artists are often given latitude to engage in an imaginative process where it is acceptable to propose alternative models of living and of human relations in ignorance of the relationship between the place that is imagined and the material reality of its production; in short, these experiments are not reproducible or sustainable. Without a system for evaluation, the idea of the experiment is an end-game rhetorical strategy for envisioning meaning and relevance for practices that may be deployed with the intent of subverting dominant cultural perspectives, values and systems of meaning.

What is problematic is that the artwork does not really share the life of its referents, the community with whom the work is made. While contemporary art has largely dispensed with classical notions of timeless art, artworks still seem to exist as art in a different time and space. Attempts to consider work as art, in effect, remove the project from the world and from real relationships. When a collaborative project ends, whether on good or bad terms, the breath of a curator can pump it full of value again as art. In this migration to the art world, what was once primary (i.e., the subject, the community, etc.) becomes secondary to its status as art, and the work again becomes discursive — intending to communicate ideas to a viewer rather than to facilitate actual change within the group involved in its production. Lurking in every project related to the arts is the latent possibility of exploitation, of being beholden to a system that exists apart from the community and the social purpose envisioned for the artwork

An Ethic of the End

It is rare that you get to see change shaped by your own hands. For me, the feeling of control I receive from making something new is a key component of what I enjoy about the artistic process. I think this is also why I feel a more consistent sense of fulfillment from my community-based work than I did in my work in artist collectives; at that time I had the pleasure of making art with others, but ultimately I experienced a great deal of dissatisfaction and frustration in not being able to discern the influence of our collective hand on much of anything. For me, the move toward community arts, even toward what plenty of self-respecting art theorists would probably see as formulaic projects and, god-forbid, arts education, has helped me to find a greater sense of personal satisfaction as a result of being able to work toward tangible outcomes.

For the past year, I have tried to be mindful of developing an ethic of the end in my work with youth from the Baltimore Algebra Project, a local branch of a nationwide math-literacy and tutoring program founded by Civil Rights leader and mathematician Robert Moses. The organization sees our math literacy as the primary gateway that deters youth from developing into economically mobile citizens and makes them eligible for jobs paying an adequate wage; over the past few years, youth at the Baltimore branch have put considerable time and effort into public protests, civil disobedience and lobbying to advocate for additional funding for youth education and employment. I work with the organization as a media-literacy teacher, helping the youth to produce fliers, newspapers, videos and other media to help with this advocacy.

In this work, art making is always closely tied to political purpose. Stylistic decisions and matters of artistic quality do not disappear when we use art as part of political activity, but they do become bound to specific goals. Much as in communication arts or advertising, the youth have to make artistic decisions that support their political goals, and their artwork has to be closely aligned with their efforts in organizing, activism and lobbying. This sometimes requires the ends of our work to be very specific. During a hunger strike for youth jobs that occurred in June of 2008, I worked with youth to produce a daily video diary that tracked the development of the strike. This project was designed to keep supporters informed, to allow the youth to make a record of their struggle in their own words, and to publicize the youths’ goals to mainstream news outlets and politicians. We decided to work in video because it was cheap, reproducible and easily distributable (DVDs, online distribution, blogs). We made different versions of different lengths for different audiences (i.e., supporters enjoyed seeing a longer documentary, while we cut DVDs for City Council members down to 60 seconds).

Although the goals of this work are much more modest, the concrete nature of these projects makes it altogether easier to see how these activities feed into my personal intent to engage in fights for social justice through community arts. While the actual mechanics of arts evaluation have been detailed by practitioners with much more experience than I[5], I can attest that my present modes of community arts practice have not just made my actions clearer to me, but to the public as well — at times fostering a better quality of civic engagement.

It is imperative that artists genuinely interested in employing art to the ends of social justice introduce systems of planning and evaluation into their practice. The Italian political philosopher Giorgio Agamben has said that contemporary politics produces apathy because it is “means without end.” I see a similar problem for art if it fails to provide and employ clear methods of demonstrating its utility to the public, and not just those portions of the public most likely to be museum patrons.

This essay is part of the Community Arts Convening & Research Project, 2008, funded by a Nathan Cummings Foundation grant to the Maryland Institute College of Art.  The essay was reviewed and selected by the project's Editorial Board: Ron Bechet, Xavier University of Louisiana; Lori Hager, University of Oregon; Marina Gutierrez, Cooper Union; Ken Krafchek, Maryland Institute College of Art; Sonia Mañjon, California College of the Arts; Amalia Mesa-Bains, California State University Monterey Bay; Paul Teruel, Columbia College Chicago; and Stephani Woodson, Arizona State University.

David Sloan is currently pursuing a graduate degree in the Masters of Arts in Community Arts (MACA) and the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), where he obtained his BFA in sculpture in 2007. Sloan has exhibited internationally and served as co-curator of the “Headquarters” exhibition at the Contemporary Museum in Baltimore, Md. Over the past two years, David has worked increasingly with local community organizations and activist collectives in the City of Baltimore. Through the MACA program, David works with Wide Angle Youth Media, a media-literacy and video production program, and the Baltimore Algebra Project, where he also teaches media literacy.

Notes

[1] For a brief overview of the exhibition and its participants: http://www.contemporary.org/past_2006_04.html

[2] not to be confused with the hopes of the artists, communities, and curators involved.

[3] My opinion has been informed by my readings of Greg Sholette, Blake Stimson, Grant Kester, Claire Bishop, Nicolaus Bourriaud, Stephen Wright, Christian Kravagna, Suzy Gablik, and Suzanne Lacy.

[4] These included building a mobile trailer for hosting community events, organizing exhibitions and presentations, producing documentary videos, and other arts projects designed to inform and stimulate dialogue. For more information on this see Volume 14 of Critical Planning: http://www.sppsr.ucla.edu/critplan/past/volume014/Berzofsky_UCLA_Crit_Plan_v14.pdf

[5] Notably, in Susan Callahan’s Singing Our Praises: Case Studies in the Art of Evaluation. Washington, D.C.: Association of Performing Arts Presenters, 2005.

Works Cited

Agamben, Giorgio. Means Without End: Notes on Politics. Trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2000.

Billing, Johanna, Maria Lind and Lars Nilsson, eds. Taking Matters into Common Hands. London, England: Black Dog Publishing, 2005.

Bishop, Claire. “The Social Turn: Collaboration and its Discontents.” ArtForum International. Feb. 2006.

Wright, Stephen. “The Delicate Essence of Artistic Collaboration.” Third Text 18.6 (2004): 535 November, 2004. Page 535.

Original CAN/API publication: September 2008