lleries, 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 Sholette called “interventionist” art in an important exhibition of 2004 represents a rather pure form of social sculpture – issue-oriented creative work with the potential to reshape society.
The flood of work in modes of social sculpture in the last 10 years would require an article at least as long again to detail. I have also ignored work on the internet, which in a mere ten years has spawned its “2.0” version in the many platforms for social media. This new technology has reframed the previously neglected work of media artists and activists using video tools.
Joseph Beuys would be pleased that directly engaged social art practice is again at the top of the contemporary agenda. Art work that seeks to discharge a mission, to undertake work in the world like education, consciousness raising and political tasks, is finding space in art institutions. As we move forward into an uncertain future, social sculpture is working to regenerate the social capital depleted by the long extractive regime of neoliberalism.
References, Further Reading:
Classic early books; most are now rare, but are in many libraries:
• Eva Meyer-Hermann, et al., eds., Allan Kaprow: Art as Life (Los Angeles : Getty Research Institute, 2008) – Major new survey exhibition catalogue of his work. Not only the classic early works but the later more analytical ones as well.
• Deborah Cullen, ed., Arte [no es] Vida : Actions by Artists of the Americas 1960-2000 (New York : El Museo Del Barrio, 2008) – A survey exhibition of politicized performance work in Latin America during the period of the dictatorships and after. Many country-specific essays.
Notes to the text (all online citations as of 12-08)
“Richard Kostelanetz lists 15…” in R. K., The Theatre of Mixed Means: An Introduction to Happenings, Kinetic Environments, and other Mixed-Means Performances (1968).
“participatory art…” This is a contemporary name for this kind of work which was being celebrated as this text was written in a major exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. See Rudol