A group of artists in Turkey rent an apartment together in a diverse, intergenerational neighborhood; instead of using the space to paint or display, they invite their neighbors to dinner, create a playroom for children, and organize a neighborhood parade. They call their work Oda Projesi (The Room Project).

An African-American visual artist, William Pope L., known for an unusual gallery practice, decides to crawl from lower Manhattan to Harlem in a Superman costume, talking or not talking to New York inhabitants who have to make room for him on the sidewalk.

In a commissioned art piece in Zurich, the artist collective WochenKlausur invites sex-workers, politicians, journalists, and activists to take a boat ride on Lake Zurich; gathered around the table of a main cabin, they are instructed to “have a conversation” in a piece that will be titled Intervention to Aid Drug-Addicted Women.

In Richmond, California, community artist Shannon Flattery and her team conduct oral histories with a variety of residents in preparation for a multimedia, site-specific oral installation and performance that promises to engage UC Berkeley and Richmond in central questions about neighborhoods, schools, race, violence, food, and health, as well as how to raise children and grow flowers.

The list of examples that exemplify “social practice” in the contemporary arts and humanities is only increasing, and indeed, such examples could be positioned in a much, much longer genealogy of experimentation and debate on the relationship between aesthetics and politics. In the Townsend-sponsored G.R.O.U.P. seminar, Social Practices: Art and Human Environments, we will explore a range of art practices that attempt to make a “social” turn in both the content and form of their practice, linking this much-debated turn to a range of movements and debates in 20th-century philosophical and artistic histories ranging from Adorno to Rancière, from Brecht to Situationist International, to the most recent experiments variously called social practice, activist art, conversation pieces, littoral art, relational aesthetics, community arts, and performance ethnography, among many other terms.

The critical reaction to these efforts is varied and often quite contradictory. Some wonder how art can contribute meaningfully to an effort in politics or social work, accusing a work of serving only a decorative and largely useless function. Meanwhile, different constituencies are concerned about the opposite problem, about the ways in which a social mission can “over-functionalize” an aesthetic process, neutralizing its formal imagination and capitulating to a kind of over-intelligible do-gooderism, or worse, feel-goodism.

In many ways, current debates around Social Practice in October, Artforum, Critical Inquiry, Public Culture, and other publications in the arts and humanities repeat long-standing debates around very familiar issues. But this contemporary manifestation is also an opportunity to reflect on our contemporary condition and on the place of affect, sociality, and critique in our current moment. It is also a chance to think about the very different artistic and social histories that are engaged in these multi-disciplinary forms. Some experiments locate themselves in a post-Minimalist conversation around the autonomy of the art object and its interdependent relation with the space of its production. From within cultural studies, environmental studies, and anthropology, social practice emerges to locate research in the local and everyday experience of urban space as supplement to cartographic or quantitative methods of understanding communities.

Meanwhile, these and other movements might find themselves entering the domain of performance—the social, spatial, embodied, gestural, sonic, spectacular, and verbal medium whose allegiances to activism and social work (from New Deal theatre to Bread and Puppet to Augusto Boal to Anna Deavere Smith) also run deep, are complicated, and are ongoing. As we take up these investigations throughout the seminar, we will have the privilege of engaging with a number of Bay Area artists and organizations that are asking similar questions. We will study, attend, and anticipate performances and exhibits at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the Berkeley Art Museum, the Museum of the African Diaspora, California College of the Arts, San Francisco Art Institute, and numerous experimental performance spaces.

Most importantly, we will have the opportunity to work with the Arts Research Center’s artist-in-residence and Touchable Stories founder, Shannon Flattery. The Touchable Stories project began in 1996 with the idea of using the talents of contemporary artists to help individual communities define their own concerns and give them public expression. The conversation with each neighborhood involves exhaustive research, hundreds of hours of recorded interviews, and participation in the day-to-day life of the community. Touchable Stories has been the center of multi-year neighborhood art projects in several Boston communities, such as Central Square, Allston, Dorchester, Roxbury, and Fort Point.

Flattery is currently at work on a large-scale installation involving Berkeley and Richmond, as well as a smaller installation in the Free-Speech Movement Café. Her interactive installations are based on oral histories offered by the Richmond community, a complex city containing everything from verdant gated condominium complexes to the Iron Triangle neighborhood, one of the most culturally diverse and economically challenged inner-cities in the nation. This seems a propitious moment for such a project at UC Berkeley, a campus whose Chancellor has declared his own interest in promoting programs that seek to understand the conditions that help diverse communities to thrive in California.

Flattery’s practice is one in which she and a team of artists collect over 100 oral histories from inhabitants and civic leaders over the course of a year. Flattery moves into neighborhoods to meet police officers, mayors, homeless activists, YMCA teachers, teenagers, elders, and community inhabitants of all varieties to get their perspective on place. After archival research and interviews, she gathers local artists to create installation environments and living mazes that mix image, gesture, sound, motion, and embodiment to take a critical and affective stance on the issues that press most heavily on particular urban neighborhoods: past projects have included installations on the process of gentrification, racism, the experience of immigration and exile, spirituality, the environment, aging, violence, food, health, longing, and more.

There are many things that I have found compelling about Flattery’s art practice. First, it involves a process that is itself a collective act of deliberation and cooperation between diverse community participants, joining the project of art-making to the goals of action research in community development. Second, it seeks to understand the memories and emotions that surround a community, using art’s historic ability to attend to the affective realm of local knowledge to find out how people feel about where they are. At the same time, it makes use not only of art’s affective function but also of contemporary art’s critical function, its tendency to ask questions and to see otherwise, to ask often impertinent questions of why the world is shaped as it is—and to wonder how it might be shaped differently. With Touchable Stories, it seems to me, the personal moment of the aesthetic encounter simultaneously produces an expanded moment of social and political encounter. The local and the systemic, the compassionate and the ironic, the micro and the macro, the artistic and the social are brought into a scene of reciprocal reflection.

Shannon Jackson is Chair and Professor of Theater, Dance and Performance Studies and Professor of Rhetoric. She will teach Social Practices: Art and Human Environments (Rhetoric 240G) with Shannon Flattery during fall semester on Tuesdays 1:30-4:30 pm.

This article can be found in the September 2006 newsletter.