INTRODUCTION

By Helen Reed

On August 28, 2011 the “Social Practice” entry on Wikipedia was tagged for deletion. The Wikipedia community suggested that the term provided nothing more than “a vague method of describing a number of practices that are covered elsewhere”[1] as the primary rationale for the removal. It is true enough that the term Social Practice has been applied to an incredible diversity of artworks that traverse multiple disciplines, from community farming projects to activist organizing initiatives, and from antagonistic public interventions to alternative education models. The common threads that are often cited as linking these practices include: engaging with or collaborating with a public, working across a variety of disciplines, and instigating works that have relevance to both an art and a variety of non-art audiences.

 

While these criteria may appear hazy, the value of the term comes into focus when we think about art and social practice in the context of art education. In fact, the term “Social Practice” (in relation to art) emerged in an educational context. The California College of the Arts (CCA) was the first institution to launch a Social Practice program in 2005.[2] This program formed as a way to develop an arts curriculum around collaborative practices and work in the public realm, without the weight of association with terms such as “community practice,” or “relational practice.” The term was adopted from Marxist and social theory, and took on slightly different connotations in the context of art education.[3]

Shortly after the development of the CCA program, Harrell Fletcher began the Art and Social Practice at Portland State University. And a similar graduate program under the leadership of Suzanne Lacy, with the title Public Practices, arose at the Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles. All of these programs strived to offer an alternative model of art education that privileged qualities such as community collaboration, cross-disciplinary research & decentralized practices of artistic engagement.

The designation of Social Practice within the art academy attempts to create a space to frame out an alternative discourse around art production & reception. We hope that this journal will function as an extension of this space, as a site of dialogue for issues and themes pertinent to the students and faculty of the Art & Social Practice program at PSU. As Rick Lowe noted in his concluding remarks at the Open Engagement Conference closing panel of 2011, when socially engaged art is written about solely within the bounds of artistic discipline, it loses a great measure of it’s value, which is located in the transgression of these boundaries. Through the frame of Art & Social Practice, a work may never enter a gallery or receive acclaim from international art publications, but may instead find an enthusiastic audience of obscure sports enthusiasts or environmental activists. 

For the purposes of this journal we concieve of art and social practice as a just loose enough framing device to shift our evaluative focus towards the cross-disciplinary intersections and encounters of art works, drawing out it’s value across multiple fields of knowledge.

The PSPJ Editorial Committee consists of Katy Asher, Crystal Baxley, Ariana Jacob & Helen Reed.

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[1] Wikipedia contributers, "Social Practice," Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_practice (Accessed August 29, 2011).

[2] Lydia Matthews, email to author, November 20, 2011.

[3] Ted Purves, telephone call to author, November 26, 2011.