Some artists don’t want their work to hang around
Will cutting-edge galleries and museums have nothing for us to see in 50 years? I ask only half in jest. People will always paint and make things. That old argument about the death of painting is, oh, about 150 years old now.
But some of the most exciting work being done by 21st-century artists is social practice — nonphysical art or activism that the average person might not describe as creativity since it rarely yields tactile objects you would drive across town to see or collect. The web tends to be a better vehicle for exploring it.
The conundrum about how to display this kind of work has been evident lately at several Houston institutions.
Art League Houston’s recent show “with/in: blurring the line between art and education” documented how five artists from across the U.S. are using education as a “medium.”
The most memorable things to see included a T-shirt and graphic art from Patricia Vázquez Gomez’s project in Portland, Ore., that commissions posters from day laborers; Hannah Jickling and Helen Reed’s wall of funny emoticons, rendered in vinyl, created by students who were responding to the taste of unfamiliar foods; and a shelf of zines made by LGBTQ youth who have participated in Christopher Kennedy’s “I Don’t Do Boxes” project.
Organizer Zachary Gresham, the league’s education director, also produced a nicely designed and written booklet that pairs the show’s artists with social practitioners from Houston. It’s a fascinating read that requires some time on the couch to absorb. Workshops were also part of the show — but, well, you had to be there.
Gresham said the most common response to the exhibition was, “Whoa, it’s a lot of information.”
“It totally is,” he acknowledged. “But as an educator I want all the information out there.” Viewers can take away as much or as little as they want, he said.
“Galleries are usually the worst place to show social practice art. It can be incredibly boring, like looking at a science project or reading a school report,” said Pablo Helguera, whose first Houston show, “The Fable Is to Be Retold,” is up at DiverseWorks.
Helguera, a conceptual artist from Mexico who combines performance, visual art, community outreach and political activism, has had day jobs at some of the largest museums in the U.S. (he’s currently the New York Museum of Modern Art’s education director), so he is concerned about “the museum experience,” as he called it.
His DiverseWorks show engages viewers with videos, two suites of collages, a huge, interactive sculpture and an installation labeled “Museo de la Vida Escolar” (The Museum of School Life). Essentially, it’s a show of objects.
The first thing you see is “Mock Turtle,” from 2001, a wall installation consisting of a small wooden box construction with a peep-hole (with nothing inside) and a bunch of explanatory labels that anticipate viewers’ thoughts about what they’re seeing — including the nature of mock turtles, their place in literature or what makes “Mock Turtle” conceptual art.
Helguera’s tonguein-cheek attitude is fun, and his new “Secret Garden” video, made with still images and a hypnotic voice-over, is an evocatively dreamy meditation on coming to grips with mortality.
“I’m interested in hypnotism,” he said. “It’s a kind of social practice … there’s the possibility of communicating with somebody on a different level.”
For the show’s opening, Helguera and an actor performed an existential play in the big sculptural piece, “Pedro and the Wolf Captain,” that you can watch on video. But you can also climb onto the piece — a trapezoidal optical illusion room that makes you look much larger or smaller than you are — and create your own play. Or at least take pictures. Helguera has even provided an iPad, encouraging visitors to share their experience on social media.
The week the show opened, he collaborated with local dancers, a young musician and actors to perform in one of the theaters adjacent to DiverseWorks. It would have been easy to record it and subject viewers to the reruns on video. Thankfully, Helguera and curator Xandra Eden, the DiverseWorks director, honored the performance’s ephemerality.
Cuban “artivist” Tania Bruguera, one of the first internationally known social practitioners, gave the 2016 Mitchell Artist Lecture last Thursday. She creates work that’s not so easily tamed.
Early in her career, when she was more easily identifiable as a performance artist who also made sensational sculptural objects, Bruguera began to question what it means to “produce” art. Not interested in making objects for collectors to acquire and sell, she felt compelled instead to inspire change in people.
These days, Bruguera rarely has anything physical to show for her politically motivated projects. She has championed undocumented workers, even living with them to understand their issues.
She’s now creating the Hannah Arendt Institute of Artivism, named for the German political theorist who wrote the 1951 book “The Origins of Totalitarianism.” That project will likely get her into trouble, again, with the Cuban government — even though the institute’s first project will deliver humanitarian aid to victims of Hurricane Matthew in eastern Cuba.
Bruguera is pleased that institutions want to share social practice art, but they need to be more flexible about how they present it, she said. “They want to stop the project in time, and these kinds of projects keep growing and changing over years, even after the project is finished.”
San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts is staging a survey of her work next year, and Bruguera insists that it will have “no small photos and videos.” She wants to create a compelling physical environment for the show, but she’s not creating any objects for it. And if you want to see anything happening there, you’ll have to drop by during the hours when her “school” is in session.
The “exhibition” will be a live event — a 2017 version of the “Behavior Art School” she created in 2003, before universities began offering degrees in social practice. Area students and nonartists will participate in classes there every day.
Bruguera will display thousands of postcards from her “Dignity Has No Nationality” project, a plea to legalize undocumented immigrants around the world as citizens of the Vatican.
“But it’s not going to be shown as an object. It’s going to be shown as proof that it’s real. We’re going to do a box (to hold the postcards). … That’s an object, but I’m not going to sell it,” she said. “The only reason the box will be good is because I want the pope to like it when he receives it.”
Bruguera doesn’t care if people view her work as art.
“I just want them to feel it,” she said. “Art is a device through which we can process things. The aesthetic experience is not in the shape, the color or the experience of the space, but in the emotional effect it has on people, and how can people start learning to behave differently.”
She thinks the world could use a new kind of art space devoted to social practice: “It would be nice to have something different — a gallery that is not about selling, that’s about investing in a project and sustaining it.”
Roberto Tejada, a professor of creative writing and art history at the University of Houston, says museum professionals, too, must find other ways to tell social practice stories in the future.
“Maybe they won’t show anything,” he said. “Maybe we have to stop thinking of the museum as a container and make it a meeting place.”