“THE SOCIAL TURN: COLLABORATION AND ITS DISCONTENTS” (Claire Bishop)

Claire Bishop sets her reflection on social art against a quote from Dan Graham:

“All artists are alike. They dream of doing something that’s more social, more collaborative and more real than art”

Bishop gives examples of different types of collaborative projects, ranging around the world with examples of art being created from a radio station for the elderly in a home in UK, through art workshops in slum regions of south Africa, to bringing together people around social action in the Americas. She suggests that the drive to create art from social contexts like these could be the front line of art today, with artists pushing out the limits of what could be considered art into difficult social and political contexts. She says they “carry on the modernist call to blur art and life”.

She goes on to consider the politics of social art and seems to suggest that political approval and monitoring of social art steers it towards political policies of inclusion, which may be completely against the need for art to be able to express anger, discontent, challenge and contradiction. So maybe political support of collaborative art stops it being art.

Bishop gives several examples of how the events are perceived by others and often rips into them, saying that they are often not collaborative, but rather conceived and directed by one person, so executed rather than achieved. She finds, for example, some work by Jeremy Deller re-enacting the miner’s strike to be just historical documentation rather than comment. By contrast, she likes the work of Phil Collins in Jerusalem more inspiring. His “they shoot horses” had teenagers dancing against a backdrop of pop hits and patterns in a marathon, capturing their enthusiasm then boredom then exhaustion, that could be related to the tensions of the middle east.

Using examples from other writers, Bishop brings out other views. For example, Kester argues that collaborative art should not be viewed as we are used to by visual and sensory means, but as an exchange or negotiation. Bishop does not agree with this as she says it does not allow frustration or eccentricity to shine though, which is necessary for art to evolve and comment.

She ends her piece by drawing on the work of Lars von Trier’s 2003 film “Dogville”, which she says
“allows us to confront darker, more painfully complicated considerations of our predicament”.