Claire Bishop: The Social Turn: Collaboration and its Discontents

Bishop, Claire. “The Social Turn: Collaboration and Its Discontents.” In Right About Now: Art and Theory Since the 1990s, edited by Margriet Schavemaker and Mischa Rakier, 58-68. Amsterdam: Valiz, 2007.

Keywords: aesthetic value, aesthetic criteria, socially engaged art, social constituencies, community-based art, interventionist art, research-based art, dialogical, littoral art, participatory art, experimental communities, collaborative art, authorial renouncement, Maria Lind, Grant Kester, Dan Graham, Oda Projesi, Phil Collins, Artur Zmijewski, Jeremy Deller

Claire Bishop’s short paper begins with a curious quote from Dan Graham: “All artists are alike. They dream of doing something that’s more social, more critical, and more real than art” (60). A brazen comment, this generalization gives Bishop’s otherwise straightforward discussion a provocative start, at the same time anticipating her assumption that all “real” art is necessarily concerned with aesthetics. This helps to explain her interest in discussing “the social turn” as Art—or, more accurately in her estimation, a lack thereof.

After briefly describing both the recent proliferation of publicly engaged art practices and their value as therapy for repairing the social bond, Bishop maps prevailing perceptions of this art as polarized. There are the “non-believers,” the aesthetes who dismiss the art as uninteresting, and there are “the believers” the zealots, the activists who, according to Bishop, “…reject aesthetic questions a s synonymous with the market and cultural hierarchy” (61). Curiously, Bishop fails to identify a third group: that is, the ambivalent believers, who, like Bishop and myself, sit between these two positions. Our group is comprised of art lovers and makers alike who wonder why we ask so little of art? Why can it not be both politically charged and aesthetically interesting at the same time?

Unfortunately, this is not a question being asked enough by critics, in part because critics aren’t asking many (if any) questions of socially engaged practices these days. Bishop offers two possible and complimentary explanations for this. On the one hand, there is the problem of authorial renunciation. Still rooted in a romantic notion of art, contemporary criticism is easily disorientated in the absence of a single and clearly defined author. Without this figure on which to peg their discourse, critics have instead turned to the intention of the work, specifically its so-called ethical intentions. Forgoing discussion about aesthetic quality, they have alternatively explored the work’s therapeutic value evinced through its working processes, and it is this emphasis on process over product that seems at stake in Bishop’s critique. It is this emphasis that leads her to lampoon Maria Lind and Grant Kester for their failure to define work by artists like the Turkish collective Oda Projesi as Art and not something else. Indeed, it is this emphasis that prompts Bishop to identify the work of Phil Collins (They Shoot Horses, 2004), Artur Zmijewski (Them, 2007), and Jeremy Deller (The Battle of Orgreave (2001) as “good” socially engaged art because it not only attempts to “unfold a…complex knot of human concerns about pleasure, visibility, engagement and the conventions of social interaction” (65) but also because it “thinks the aesthetic and the social/political together, rather than subsuming them both with the ethical” (65).

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