Michael Rakowitz's paraSITEI'm guest blogging at PBS's Art21 blog this week on art and social change, and my first post lays out some of my thinking, including my growing belief that although art might not have the power to radically change the world, its unique role can be in planting seeds. Here it is:This weekend I went to an opening at
The Soap Factory, a scrappy and often-excellent nonprofit art space a block or so off Minneapolis’ riverfront. The description of the work, a Clive Murphy installation called
Almost Nothing, was intriguing enough to draw me there: he’d filled the entire space with a series of air-filled tubes created from black plastic garbage bags, mimicking the architectural geometry of the space—which, as its name states, was once a soap-making factory, reeking of lye.
But when I arrived, the piece immediately struck me as so much hot air. Here’s my progression of thought: it’s February in Minnesota. This building is virtually unheated. We’re facing twin catastrophes of economic downturn and human-made climate change. And this guy’s art requires electric air blowers to drone constantly on whenever the gallery’s open?
Murphy's work is what it is—a project influenced by “radical architectural proposals from the sixties” and inflatable carnival games that examine “themes of hierarchy, inter-relationality, and meaning formation”—and I don't knock it for that. But it isn't what I've been looking for lately: contemporary art with immediacy, that pragmatically or poetically addresses the challenges we face today. Not all art needs to do that, but it's what I'm looking for. Something more along the lines of another inflatable-bag art project:
paraSITE, in which artist Michael Rakowitz collaborated with homeless people to construct temporary inflatable housing designed to leech warmth from heat outtakes from apartment buildings.
In considering “political” art—especially in a non-election year, especially facing the economic and environmental problems we do—I’m reluctantly coming to believe that art doesn’t have the power I once believed it did for bringing about social change.
Perhaps it’s creeping cynicism. As a journalist covering the Republican National Convention in St. Paul this fall, I saw magnificent, irreverent and funny artworks – from full-fledged contemporary artworks (including Ligorano/Reese’s
The State of Things, gigantic ice letters spelling out the word
DEMOCRACY, which
melted away on the capitol lawn as time passed, or Suzanne Opton’s
Soldiers billboard series) to creative protest signs and hilarious chants by nonviolent demonstrators (“
You’re hot, you’re cute, take off your riot suit!”). Still, the police crackdown was
powerful,
unrelenting and sometimes
violent—and, if hearing from Republican delegates on the convention floor is any indicator, protesters’ messages didn’t seem to register. The art was dismissed as mere protest.
My doubts also have to do with responses to my oft-asked (and admittedly naïve) question, “
Can art change the world?” As an editor at the Walker Art Center and at
Adbusters Magazine, I posed the question to a number of people: critic Robert Storr; artists Rirkrit Tiravanija, Sam Durant, and Thomas Hirschhorn;
Artforum editor Tim Griffin and independent curator Hou Hanru, to name a few. While they all said they hoped it had that kind of power, few wholeheartedly agreed it did.
But from some of these same people, I found hope for smaller incremental change—one heart (or mind) at a time, perhaps.
During a residency at the Walker, Art21 artist
Guillermo Calzadilla told me his take. Art, unlike protest, is difficult to pin down, he said, and therein lies its power. Overt agit-prop is easily to spot, categorize, and therefore dismiss wholesale by opponents of the message it carries. But art is something… else. Something nebulous and multidimensional and hard to get one's brain around.
Before we can dismiss it, we have to figure out what it is.
Strange Maps has a fascinating post about how different cultures fill in the blank of the expression we English speakers formulate as "It's Greek to me." As this cartogram shows we're not alone: Persians, Swedes and Spanish speakers are among groups that refer to Greek when considering something incomprehensible. But it's not the most popular expression of the idea:
Photo: Courtesy the artist
