ums, appears on everyone’s list of social sculptors. In her succinct online essay “Notes on Social Architectures as Art Forms” (2003), Sal Randolph also fingers Ben Kinmont, Rainer Ganahl, and Christine Hill. Oakland-based artist Ted Purves has located the key to this kind of work in the gift economy.
Bourriaud’s clearly written and engaging aesthetics has been widely influential since the turn of the century. Happily, according to one critique, he emphasizes “process, performativity, openness, social contexts, transitivity and the production of dialogue over the closure of traditional modernist objecthood, visuality and hyper-individualism.” Yet Bourriaud’s conception is only vaguely political. Grant Kester’s formulation of a dialogical aesthetics, on the other hand, privileges political work. For Kester, evaluation of dialogical art is ethical, based in the social relationships it produces. His roster of artists who use dialogical practices includes the collectives Wochenklauser and Park Fiction, and the artist Adrian Piper.
Kester is at University of California, San Diego, an academic center of socially directed cultural work. Herbert Marcuse put a strong early stamp on the school. The émigré Frankfurt School philosopher, who conceived the idea of “repressive tolerance” and wrote An Essay on Liberation (1969), was so beloved of 1960s student radicals that the governor of California, Ronald Reagan, tried to fire him from his tenured position. Among Marcuse’s students were the artist and theorist Martha Rosler and the transgressive writer Kathy Acker.
Lately UCSD faculty have tackled issues around the U.S.-Mexican border, starting with Fred Lonidier, an artist closely identified with the union movement. Lonidier tackled the issue of the exploitative polluting maquiladora factories through collages, billboards, and recently a circulating info-center truck. Lonidier is an artist who has moved between generations, between different conceptions of political art, from the modernist to the postmodernist, from agitation propaganda to social sculpture. Also on the faculty at UCSD are the media artist Ricardo Dominguez, who has done work around the Zapatista movement as well as locative media for border-crossing immigrants, and the innovative architectural activist and artist Teddy Cruz.
But we are getting ahead of the story. Lacy’s notion of a new genre public art had an important curatorial representative in Mary Jane Jacobs. Her landmark show in Chicago “Culture in Action” (1993) brought together mainstream public art with the subducted left-inspired currents of community art at the beginning of the Clinton presidency.
In Europe in 1991, the artistic team of Clegg and Guttman began their Open Library project, placing unprotected bookcases in grassy lots around Graz, Austria. This participatory work of social sculpture continues as they have refined and developed aspects of the project for gallery spaces.
The path towards institutional acceptance of social sculpture in the U.S., of course, had been smoothed by social activism, and by a reevaluation of the role of public art in society. Throughout a long and bitter struggle over the high modernist sculptor Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc (1981-89), a federally commissioned public artwork protested as alienating and finally removed, Serra had argued steadfastly for his avant garde prerogatives. While Serra was generally supported, many U.S. public art advocates were cast into a reflective mood by the controversy. At the same time, culturally-based activism underwent an extraordinary amplification with the agitations around the AIDS crisis.
“We Are Living in Wartime”
As the death toll from the disease mounted during the Reagan years, the epidemic turned a civil rights crisis for gay people into a struggle for survival. Resistance by the broad ACT-UP coalition and its numerous action cells of media and graphic artists – like Gran Fury and DIVA-TV – used sophisticated means and dramatic interventions to reach a broad public. These artists gave examples of collective cultural production 