Relational Aesthetic
May 27th, 2008It’s Lisa again – with a continuation of the discussion started in my previous blog on community engagement around the arts. Please keep in mind that my forays into relational aesthetics are only just beginning, and I welcome the comments of those much better read in this particular academic area.
Point II: “What criteria should we use to evaluate socially engaged art?” (taken from an interview with Claire Bishop from July 2006).
My last post was more concerned with evaluating the impact of community engagement programs in terms of social change, e.g. civic engagement. This post is inspired by the work of Claire Bishop, an Art History lecturer at the University of Warwick. Bishop argues that socially engaged art has been evaluated more for its ethical merit rather than aesthetic, with an overwhelming focus on process rather than on product. According to Bishop, “There can be no failed, unsuccessful, unresolved, or boring works of collaborative art because all are equally essential to the task of strengthening the social bond. While I am broadly sympathetic to that ambition, I would argue that it is also crucial to discuss, analyze, and compare such work critically as art.”
I reiterate that I am just now beginning to explore Dr. Bishop’s writings and the field of relational aesthetics overall, but when I ran across this quotation, I couldn’t resist bringing it up for discussion here. I’ll be writing again soon on how this discussion factors into our upcoming activities this summer at the Pulitzer.
I believe a problem with Bishop’s writing is that she does not understand the “ethical merit” or social process as aesthetic. The belief in the social as aesthetic is why the discussion’s start there, even if the writers are not stating that belief explicitly. As far as social change goes, I have written on social change as aesthetic, and one way to compare artworks is through Pierre Bourdieu’s forms of capital. Applying cultural, social, symbolic, and economic capital to relational art allows one to compare artworks on social qualities. Therefore, they are not all “equally essential to sstrenthening the social bond.” Each artwork is more or less successful at addressing the distribution of capital in our societies.