Social Concoctions And Educational Potential
By Marion Breinhorst. Bachelor of Fine Arts: Critical Studies, Stage Two. Grade: A.
“If art is to ever play a role in the construction of shared social experience, it must re-examine its pedagogical assumptions, reframing strategy and aesthetics in terms of teaching.”
The role of social art has undergone exponential development following technological advances and changes within rights of minority groups. Contemporary artists like Luca Frei and Suzanne Lacy are able to incorporate design, networks, and education into their social and installation practices which can now be analysed using a critical language appropriate to the works. This essay explores a range of texts, dating between 1969 and 2007, which display the contextual specificity of opinion on matters such as the role of a designer, optimal educational models, and the idea of the art world as a system and network. These evolved threads of concepts have been pulled together to illustrate the credibility and potential within Luca Frei and Suzanne Lacy’s practices. Frei’s use of spatial design, information distribution, and networks follows a more conceptual format than Lacy’s significantly public and social performance practice, which is highly collaborative and informed by the feminist activism performances of the 1970s.
Both Frei and Lacy are focused on audience engagement within what can be said to have begun as ‘New Genre Public Art’, which differs from installation and sculpture in public places.[2] Various complications specific to public art have given Frei and Lacy developed sensibilities “about audience, social strategy, and effectiveness”.[3] These constraints enable their work to be viewed as design which addresses goals and design problems with calculated solutions. This understanding of audience as a dependent element within designed situations and installations is a contemporary development and enables an appropriate critical analysis. Norman Potter’s proposed role of design marks the historical understanding of design and shows that Frei and Lacy’s practices would not have been happily accepted during the 1960s as design-driven. In his 1969 text, ‘Is a Designer an Artist?’, Potter notes that a designer exercises his specialised skill and operates by an ethical code, thus they are accountable for design choice and consequence.[4] I believe that due to a contemporary acceptance of the breadth of the labels ‘social art practice’ and ‘design’, Luca Frei and Suzanne Lacy can be acknowledged as designers of social installation and performance. This ambiguity is supported by Vilem Flusser, Czech-born philosopher and theorist, who relays the definition and etymology of the word ‘design’ in ‘On the Word Design’, 1993. ‘Design’ is understood as an “intention, plan, intent” or the act of concocting or simulating.[5] Frei and Lacy’s practices pivot on their planning and intent, which are informed by their field experience: Lacy’s placement in Oakland with the youth, and Frei’s experience from his oeuvre of public installations. Their archives of experience enable their simulations and plans to solve identified design problems.
The critical approach to decision making in Frei’s installations can be seen in the installation design of The Search For the Spirit (2009). The floor plan adds significance to the overall exhibition and displays Frei’s passive and symbolic communication of his intended dynamics. The movement of people around the space eludes a specific centre, the search for which highlights the exhibition’s concept. The title derives from an exhibition of show cards by artist group General Idea, which captured the group’s conceptual framework for their output during the 1970s. Frei’s exhibition design considers the balcony view and acknowledges the architectural space of the 20th-Century Catholic Boys School Theatre Hall. Knowledge of the psychology behind architecture and human behaviour moving through his designed exhibition is a skill which Frei exercises in his capacity as exhibition designer. The consequences of decisions during the design process would have been carefully considered, due to the religious connotations and sentiments of the local school community.
Luca Frei, Exhibition Design for Search for the Spirit, 2009. http://lucafrei.info/search-for-the-spirit-2009/
Lacy, in collaboration with Oakland youth and numerous artists in the 1990s, designed and actualised many performances, strategic installations and activities to address misunderstandings between Oakland youth, the public, and the police, and various issues such as “schooling, neighbourhood safety, youth leadership and civic participation”.[6] The first of these were small panel discussions between six youth and six police officers which effectively cleared up many prejudices and enabled open discussion about possible solutions to community issues. Following this, a police-training tape, ‘Youth, Cops and Videotape’ was created in 1995 to express opinions on current youth-police relations. This video tape echoes youth opinion and is the first product of a decade of creative output geared towards solving the multiple issues raised by the community and youth. Lacy and her design team put significant effort into early discussion, planning and observation to outline the design-problem which the future body of work hoped to solve. Additional activities such as workshops on team building, public speaking, literacy, video and photography and anti-racism, supplemented the larger performances.[7]
Suzanne Lacy, video still from film ‘Youth, Cops and Videotape’, 1995. http://www.suzannelacy.com/the-oakland-projects/.
Both artists utilise networks; the art world network, communication networks, media networks and cultural networks. Lacy’s practice utilises mass media, educational models and engagement with local community audiences. In 1991, Lacy organised a symposium titled ‘Mapping the Terrain’ to discuss appropriate critical language for this singularly unique art genre, which actively engages multiple networks to both political and aesthetic ends. From this beginning, the Oakland series continued to utilise information and social networking. Eight years later, Code 33: Clear the Airways! (1997-99) was a three-year performance project to “explore institutional intervention through visual performance art concepts”[8] aimed at reducing violence within police-youth relations and giving youth access to skill-development programmes. Code 33 was set on the rooftop of the City Center Garage with red, black and white car’s headlights illuminating the site. Divided into small groups, 100 police officers and 150 local youth discussed “crime, authority, power and safety” with an audience of approximately 1000 community members as witnesses. [9] Framed in the community context, the spontaneous dialogue on reality and stereotypes was carried through the local network. This network formed by the relation between the public and the art and the extended relationship between the artist and audience, becomes the artwork itself.
Luca Frei, installation diagram for Untitled (Tree) installation, 2004. http://lucafrei.info/untitled-tree-2004/.
Frei’s installation Untitled (Tree) (2004) similarly explores an extended gallery network which touches varieties of people and taps into their opinions or ideas. Untitled (Tree) consists of a central iron tree form adorned with twelve plexi-glass hexagons and surrounded by six differently coloured benches. The space plays with ideas of individualism and a collective which Craig Saper, contemporary theorist, explores in his text ‘Networked Art’. Audience members are the activating element of the space reminiscent of a group discussion circle and which invites a contemplation on the concept of common ground, information and discourse. Such practices utilise the motivation, production and distribution of “intimate bureaucracy”, meaning the creation of intimate and personalised, aesthetic scenes with procedural aspects, with bureaucratic in this instance regarding meetings or organised debate which take place in most public settings.[10] The resulting network of insiders who share specific “code systems”,[11] reflect trends of society relating to topical concepts. Frei’s Untitled (Tree), is better understood in terms of network elements; processes, systems and situations. Such concepts challenge both the gallery system and corporatised world and communicate new networks within the intimate and the corporate.
Luca Frei, installation photograph of Untitled (Tree), 2009. http://www.lucafrei.info/untitled-tree-2004/.
International art critics and curators discussed aspects of ‘Systems Theory’ within texts like ‘Network: The Art World Described as System’, 1972, written by English art critic Lawrence Alloway.[12] Although Alloway expresses networks in its modern cybernetic context, the underlying concepts can be applied to the social installation practices of Frei and Lacy who use the concept of network as medium itself. Lacy’s Code 33 and all of its preparatory works operate on distribution of opinion and information which then informs later works. Code 33 not only required Lacy to research the context for her practice, thus utlising information which would become part of her work, but also required social networks to cooperate in distributing information about the work, which itself was constantly under assessment by local community and authority networks.
Frei’s works often deal explicitly with information and diagrammatic installations of elements such as Keywords (2013). The installation for Keywords functioned on dynamic engagement with the space and the accompanying lecture program which explored the definition dynamics behind words and text. The installation furniture was sourced from the participating artists network. The content itself gathered people of similar interests in the concepts outlined in Raymond Williams’ book, ‘Keywords: a vocabulary of culture and society’. Alloway proposed that distribution was the real output of the art world rather than art.[13] This includes discourse and a dynamic audience, requiring their participation and engagement. Art becomes part of the code of symbols and signs populating any specific environment. Frei’s installation elements are themselves the codes and symbols pertaining to the work’s concept.
Networks not only deal with information but location and proximity. Both Lacy and Frei’s networks operate with site specificity which lends significance in political and social contexts. Theorist Noortje Marres explores site specificity, objects, participation and social- political relations in her text ‘There is Drama in Networks’, 2007. The tendency of art networks, moved to a public stage, to adapt any place to suit their purpose belies an “opportunistic relation to location”[14] which distinguishes them from other forms of organisation. The participants within Lacy’s work during the 90s illustrate politically antagonistic relations and opposing attachments within a personally significant setting. The civic site of Code 33 overlooked City Hall thus elevated street life and generated metaphorical links to agency within the cultural network. Marres notes that these degrees of agency are part of critical discourse in analysing political and social art works.
The resulting installations and works focus on ranges of education; enabling discussion and debate on issues of contention, running workshops, platforms for activities and learning, pushing individual thought and agency in simulations and installation. Frei’s use of installation including the interior design, educational spaces, diagrammatic layouts following cognitive reasoning and grouping, enables audience individual thought and learning through spatial arrangements. Frei opens and directs space to mediate knowledge and potential for social change. The mediation of knowledge is an issue in many nations where information is harboured and only granted to elite groups or chosen networks. Frei made efforts in 2004 to disseminate such “collective energies” resulting in the public reading group Gruppo Parole e Immagini which was focused on the free appropriation, elaboration and distribution of textual and visual materials.[15] Previously mentioned, Frei’s Keywords installation is another example of enabling education in an alternative environment founded on a creative framework. The open lecture series automatically provided the support of a ‘class’ or group which moved together through the presented information and later discussion. Often accessibility is the main obstacle to education and learning and by providing a positive, public environment for it, Frei gave the public a valuable opportunity.
Suzanne Lacy, photograpf of public performance The Roof is on Fire, 1993-4. Oakland, California. http://www.suzannelacy.com/the-oakland-projects/.
Lacy recognised the lack of understanding and a lack of social justice awareness within the Oakland community. To encourage positive developments, Lacy’s social justice goals became her aesthetic strategy by infiltrating the content of educational performances and activities. A basketball game between police officers and Oakland youth called No Blood/ No Foul (1996) publicly supported Oakland’s first Youth Policy. The teenagers know they are objects of a judgmental, “racially charged gaze” and they respond in likeness of expectation, knowing they won’t receive any help or empathy.[16] Through her volunteering experience and personal encounters with the youth in an Oakland highschool, Lacy’s own perception became refined in an appreciation of culture and life surrounding the teenagers. Lacy recognised the educational potential of experience and relationship and forced audience members of No Blood/ No Foul and later works like Code 33, through challenging developments in politics of perception, toward intimacy. The encounter of real people playing their roles within the performances communicate authentic tensions and reservations in the event.
The broadly “non-representational” approach to information and communication found in Lacy and Frei’s works shows characteristics of an educational context.[17] As a practicing theorist with a contemporary fine arts background, Jorella Andrews’ regard for performance and social installation art practices recognises their relevance, to the distribution of information in relation to design, architecture, phenomenology, continental aesthetics and systems of communication. In personalised and participatory engagement with unregulated display of materials, such as in Lacy’s The Roof is on Fire (1993-4) and Frei’s Space Jockeys (2002) there is strength in the situation’s openness and flexibility. The Roof is On Fire enabled freely chosen discussion topics, relevant to youth and their life-education journey, gave audience intimate access and empowered the participants to engage without strict regulation. Frei’s Space Jockeys consists of an overhead projector on a table presented alongside transparent coloured plastic shapes and tactile and formal objects. Frei invites audience members to participate and learn in a basic tactile and sensory way which people rarely engage in after leaving school. Andrews notes the potential for such situations to encourage “independence of thought and individual agency”, but adds that such participatory practices should not be idealised in and of themselves, as there are many other applications of information communication which have alternative benefits that cater to the range of human learning processes.[18] We can see Frei incorporating these more traditionally ‘academic’ frameworks and processes in the lecture series for Keywords. Andrews’ understanding of learning as a questioning and possible departure from embedded patterns, is observable in both secure settings, like the ‘Keywords’ learning environment, and also the unstable and shifting ground navigated through discussions between police officers and Oakland youth in Lacy’s The Roof is On Fire. Frei and Lacy’s ‘learning outcomes’ could be phrased as aiming to “immerse us [the audience] in difference”.[19] The differences exist between people and ideas, which the audience’s subconscious analyses and learns from.
Luca Frei, installation photograph of Keywords, 2013. http://www.lucafrei.info/keywords-2013/.
Fourty years ago, artists like Tamara Krikorian, a pioneering female time-based artist, understood that a lack in reference points for the audience results in frequent dismissal of contemporary art. In ‘Art Spaces and Social Contexts’, 1976, Krikorian proposes the potential in providing activities and information the exhibitions to bridge the gap.[20] In our contemporary context, both Frei and Lacy have adopted this supplementation within a well-developed framework of social installation and performance art which strives to bring relevant ideas into a new creative mode. Frei’s spatial design, free offering of content and information, and cultivation of empowering situations and networks, aid audience members navigating the space and journeying to gain more understanding of the space’s symbolic potential. Lacy’s similar dedication to site, networking, design, collaboration and actualisation, provided a strong foundation for the intense decade of generous and personal community based performances which formed her Oakland series. The past four decades bear testament to a developing regard for social and political performance and installation based practices. Through discussion of an expanded understanding of design, valued education and networks, seen in Frei and Lacy’s works, readers can see that the interdisciplinary nature of art is evolving to include external fields which best assist the nature of the work without harbouring ideas of professional or academic hierarchy. I believe there is further great potential within social practices to address many political, social, phenomenological and theoretical issues which elude strict categorisation or the classical mode of linear reasoning.
[1]Lacy, ‘Cultural Pilgrimages and Metaphoric Journeys’ in Mapping New Terrains, 39.
[2]Ibid., 19.
[3]Ibid., 20.
[4] Potter, ‘Is a Designer an Artist // 1969’, 29-33.
[5] Flusser, ‘On the Word Design’, 55.
[6] Lacy, ‘Activism in Feminist Performance Art // 2006’, 88.
[7] Ibid.
[8]Lacy, ‘Cultural Pilgrimages and Metaphoric Journeys’ in Mapping New Terrains, 20.
[9]Ibid.
[10]Saper, ‘Networked Art // 2001’, 33.
[11]Ibid.
[12] Alloway, ‘Network’, 46-51.
[13] Ibid.
[14]Marres, ‘There is Drama in Networks // 2007’, 101.
[15]Larsen, “Luca Frei//2006”, 204.
[16]Lacy, ‘Activism in Feminist Performance Art // 2006’, 89.
[17]Andrews, ‘Critical Materialities // 2006’, 216.
[18]Andrews, ‘Critical Materialities // 2006’, 217.
[19]Ibid., 218.
[20] Krikorian, ‘Art Spaces and Social Contexts’, 47-8.
Bibliography:
Alloway, Lawrence. ‘Network: The Art World Described as a System // 1972’. In Networks. Edited by Lars Bang Larsen, 46-51. London: Whitechapel Gallery, 2014.
Andrews, Jorella. ‘Critical Materialities // 2006’. In Education. Edited by Felicity Allen, 216-218. London: Whitechapel Gallery, 2011.
Flusser, Vilem. ‘On the Word Design // 1993’. In In Design and Art edited by Alex Coles, 55-57. London: Whitechapel Gallery, 2007.
Lacy, Suzanne. Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art. Seattle: Bay Press, 1996.
–––. ‘Activism in Feminist Performance Art // 2006’. In Education. Edited by Felicity Allen, 87-91. London: Whitechapel Gallery, 2011.
Krikorian, Tamara. ‘Art Spaces and Social Contexts // 1976’. In Education. Edited by Felicity Allen, 47-48. London: Whitechapel Gallery, 2011.
Marres, Noortje. ‘There is Drama in Networks // 2007’. In Networks. Edited by Lars Bang Larsen, 100-106. London: Whitechapel Gallery, 2014.
Potter, Norman. ‘Is a Designer an Artist // 1969’. In Design and Art. Edited by Alex Coles, 29-33. London: Whitechapel Gallery, 2007.
Saper, Craig. ‘Networked Art // 2001’. In Networks. Edited by Lars Bang Larsen, 203-204. London: Whitechapel Gallery, 2014.
Tooby, Michael. “Tamara Krikorian | Video Artist | Obituary.” The Guardian. August 06, 2009. https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2009/aug/06/tamara-krikorian-obituary.
About the Author:
I’m currently studying a BFA/BA conjoint, with a Major in Art History, through which I am focusing on New Zealand and global contemporary art discourse. This pairing of practical and theoretical learning across my conjoint has inspired me to develop a multidisciplinary art practice within New Zealand’s expanding contemporary art field.
