ollective creation.
Talking in the Gallery
Between 1987 and 1990 Group Material produced a project called “Democracy” in New York, seeking to represent a kind of ideal public sphere. This complex event included frequent roundtables within a multimedia exhibition, climaxing in town meetings. The gallery space of the Dia Art Foundation became a center for meeting and discourse around matters of political and social concern.
Years later Doug Ashford of the group said he thought this exhibition format was Group Material’s principal achievement. The format of an active continuously utilized exhibition space was adapted by Martha Rosler for her 1989 exhibition around the issue of homelessness, “If You Lived Here.” The crowded installation was like a little village, including setups and booths by artists, media producers, photographers, architects and planners, homeless people, squatters, activist groups, and schoolchildren. This exhibition format was emulated by engaged curator Nato Thompson in the 2008 “Democracy Convergence” produced by Creative Time in the cavernous Armory on 68th Street in New York.
When Mary Jane Jacobs put together her “Culture in Action” show in 1993, she could draw on a prominent body of artists working in the genre of social sculpture. Among these, Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle produced a video workshop and street exhibition block party with Chicago gang members. The collective HaHa built a hydroponic garden in a storefront to grow organic vegetables for AIDS patients. Both these art projects, intimately involved with community groups, rolled forward after the exhibition was over.
During the 1990s, ideas and initiatives that had become almost commonplace in the world of community art became the concern of mainstream curators of public art, both in the United States and abroad. Curators and cultural administrators in the United Kingdom dedicated substantial resources to community art, recruiting many new artists into this way of working. Still community art, unconnected to the marketplace and museum galleries, is a largely unhistoricized byway of art. This disjunction is a lasting problem for any analysis of social sculpture as a continuous way of working in art.
The sudden visibility of the global justice movement with the resistance to the World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle, 1999 brought fresh energy into the left, both political and cultural. While the imposition of war conditions on the U.S. suppressed it within institutions, international interest in forms of social sculpture and the work of collectives directly engaging political issues has continued high.
The reinvention of the exhibition as a place for discussions and encounters exemplified in Group Material’s work of the late 1980s received a world-scale reiteration in 2001. The curator Okwui Enwezor organized Documenta 11 as a series of five “platforms,” discursive events and exhibitions on five different continents. The yearlong series of events sought to cross theory with practice, culminating in the final exhibition in 2002. This show included such social sculpture projects as Thomas Hirschhorn’s Bataille Monument, a kind of library and activity center built amidst an immigrant housing project. In 2003, Martha Rosler and others produced the Utopia Station, another kind of platform focusing on utopian schemes and communities, at the Venice Biennale.
These large international institutionally supported exhibitions contest the global art fairs rather like NGOs (nongovernmental organizations, like Greenpeace) contest capitalist corporations. The regular big exhibitions do the job of giving content, shape and form to contemporary art initiatives today, especially those with social content, as compared to the sheer roar of the market as in the art fairs.
The problem of cultural confinement has begun to be addressed by the waves of creative collectives, viral activist cultural work, and new forms of sheer resistant and transgressive fun devised by artists close to or influenced by the global justice movement. What Nato Thompson and Gregory Sholet