A Brief Genealogy of Social Sculpture
By Alan W. Moore (author's note)
Eight years of neocolonial war and neoliberalism on steroids did wonders for the always uneasy relationship between art and politics in the U.S.. The rampant drive to privatize all that once was public left the realms of culture, especially the spaces of art, as some of the few remaining areas in which an open public discussion is still possible, at least among the bourgeoisie and intelligentsia. Many in the cultural sphere realized that they may have been custodians of some of the precious shreds of our remaining democracy.
At the same time, long-term reactionary governance has empowered authoritarian and regressive tendencies in bureaucracies across the land. Among thinking people there has arisen a great pent-up demand for world-changing creative initiatives to address the crises of global warming and persistent poverty.
Artists today, inspired by the example of the global justice movement, are working in ways maybe difficult to comprehend as art. Many of these methods and the actual works of artists suggest ways in which a berserk and broken hyper-capitalist global society might be reorganized. This article is intended to sketch some art historical background on the practice of what has long been called social sculpture – variously named more recently as relational, dialogical, and most broadly participatory art – and to posit its utility to today’s social movements.
“Social sculpture” is a term promoted by the German artist Joseph Beuys through a series of very public lecture tours beginning in the early 1970s. It named a kind of artwork that takes place in the social realm, an art that requires social engagement, the participation of its audience, for its completion. For Beuys, the concept was infused with both political intention and spiritual values. As spectators became participants he believed, the catalysis of social sculpture would lead to a transformation of society through the release of popular creativity.
Social sculpture, as a politically motivated usage of ways of artmaking developed by post-war avant garde movements, is a form best positioned to answer the question of utility: that is, What good is art?
This is the classic question asked of visual art practice by activists in social movements. The answer which prevailed during the modernist period (mid-19th century to 1945), when art and social movements were closely allied, was that art served the purpose of propaganda – to agitate opinion, and mobilize the masses in support of revolutionary action.
How this was done, the forms used to achieve it, were realistic imagery, photographic collage and posters, and narrative film and theater. These were the forms employed most influentially by the artists of the Soviet Union and the socialist states. They were also the forms used by capitalist democracies and fascist states. They are the forms of advertising and popular art.
But artists continually develop new forms of art. The most experimental new forms developed during the modernist period – the late 19th and early 20th century – were not approved by political parties. Abstract art, non-narrative performance, “noise” music, and sound poetry from “trans-rational” language – none of these forms of artistic practice, pioneered by Futurists, Cubists, Dadas, Surrealists and others, were condoned by the modernist political movements. In fact, many artists who practiced in these modes were persecuted by the Nazis and Communists alike.
So what changed? How was political art reinvented?
Artists did not forget the radical new forms of expression invented by the classic avant garde, nor the exhilaration of bold experimentation. After World War II, the avant-garde of experimental artists slowly began to reconstitute itself. The artists of the day who looked beyond object-making developed their theories in full consciousness of the perceived failures of earlier movements. They laid the groundwork for the form (or method) Joseph Beuys was to label “social sculpture.”
The postwar avant-garde movement