rk of social sculpture in the two-year project Touch Sanitation (1978-80), in which she shook hands with each of the hundreds of sanitation workers of New York City. Ukeles later became an artist in residence with the Department of Sanitation, and has been closely involved in the remediation of the giant Fresh Kills landfill.
Leslie Labowitz and Suzanne Lacy also made dramatic cultural activist work with In Mourning and In Rage (1977). This demonstration project culminated in a lineup of women in mourning on the steps of Los Angeles city hall in protest at official mishandling of the Hillside Strangler case, a serial killer who targeted women. Lacy subsequently developed numerous complex projects of socially engaged cultural work, giving specificity to the idea of the citizen artist, or one who works in pursuit of direct social benefit. The Roof is on Fire (1993) was a year-long project in which Lacy put together youngsters and police officers in a series of dialogue events designed to increase understanding and ease tensions on the streets of Oakland. Lacy called her works of creative social utility and the social sculpture of others “new genre public art,” a formulation which would catch on with curators.
That was in the 1990s. By then, the theoretical discussions that arose around U.S. social sculpture were based on the already thick discourse over activist art and the uses of performance from the 1970s and ‘80s. This discourse was largely confined to magazines of art and politics little known outside their communities, like PADD’s Upfront, Cultural Correspondence, Cultural Democracy, Left Curve and Heresies, and the somewhat better known journals High Performance and Afterimage.
Heavy Reading List
As many of the artists active during those years moved into academia and art schools, theory became increasingly important. As densely written analyses of the subjective states of authoritarian and institutional societies by historian Michel Foucault, of patriarchal sexuality derived from psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, and the erosion of the public sphere by political philosopher Jürgen Habermas ascended in academia, their ideas came to inform the work of many artists concerned with social conditions.
The generation of postmodern artists and educators who went into academia did not, like the Bauhaus teachers with their Ruskinian values, attempt to reform public taste, and smooth the way to rationalist, scientific modernist design. Instead they strove to preserve the ethical imperatives that had driven their work, and the theoretical backgrounds that had inspired them. These philosophies, and the critical methods called postmodernist, became predominant throughout the humanist academy during the 1980s and ‘90s.
By the 1990s a neoconceptual way of working had taken hold among a group of nomadic professionalized artists, working mainly in Europe, which came to be called institutional critique. Art institutions, faced with mounting demands to reflect diverse constituencies in a globalizing world, often turned to artists to perform modernizing analyses and exhibitionary exercises on their institutions. This phenomenon led Andrea Fraser, together with a number of artists working in this way, to specify the conditions of their new role. Fraser wrote of this in a text she called “How to Provide an Artistic Service.”
The often brilliant work of artists involved in institutional critique has been and continues to be an important impetus for change in attitudes of the public and the personnel of art and cultural institutions. Fred Wilson’s work is a clear example. However the inventive work these artists did with the particular social worlds of art institutions was fully accepting of what Robert Smithson called “cultural confinement.” This problem is a hangover for the more recent formulation by French curator Nicolas Bourriaud of relational art.
Artists who critique institutions are seen more than artists who work outside them. The Thai artist Rirkrit Tiravanija, who cooks meals in carefully constructed situations in galleries and muse