Art as Social Practice: Notes on Artists and Projects

In Tokyo in 1964, Yoko Ono performined her “Cut Piece” at the Sogetsu Art Center. She walked onto the stage dressed, presented the audience with a pair of scissors, and instructed the audience to cut the fabric away gradually until she was naked.

More about Yoko Ono

For her photo-based project, Signs That Say What You Want Them to Say, Not Signs That Say What Other People Want You to Say (1992-93) by Gillian Wearing asked passers-by to write down the first thing that came into their minds. The resulting photographs show the people with their handwritten thoughts. Often what they chose to write was entertaining, funny, or tragic. One tattooed man holds a sign saying “I have been certified as being mildly insane.” Despite his fierce appearance, there is a vulnerability that comes through as if he were telling us a secret. Wearing makes the ultimate public art by turning the public into art.



In Games to Be Played (1998), Carsten Holler devised five games. The catalog states that “to play these games, you do not need any materials (dice, playfield, etc.), just people.” They have titles like “games to be played alone,” “games to be played with others,” “games to be played with two people,” and so on. This is perhaps as reductive you can get as an artist — unlike Wearing, Holler doesn’t even give participants a sign to write on.

Untitled (Ross) (1997) by Felix Gonzalez-Torres: A heap of candy set in one corner of the gallery. This particular kind of candy was shared by Felix Gonzalez-Torres and his lover Ross when they were in Italy together. This is Gonzalez-Torres’ sweet memorial to his friend, who died. Visitors are invited to participate in the piece by taking some candy.

Dinner Party by Judy Chicago: The Dinner Party elevates achievement by women in Western culture to a heroic scale traditionally reserved inequitably for men. A massive ceremonial banquet in multimedia art, laid on a triangular table measuring 48 feet on each side, The Dinner Party combines the glory of sacramental tradition with the intimate detail of a social gathering.

Thirty-nine guests of honor, mythical and historic women whose accomplishments were largely erased from male-dominated histories, are represented by individually symbolic, china-painted porcelain plates and intricately needleworked table runners. Each plate is essentially an independent work of art and features an image based on Chicago’s vulvar and butterfly iconography, a symbolic representation of the female core intended by the artist as an affirmation of empowered female agency. The plates reside atop elaborate runners decorated with historically significant details associated with the women honored. The first name of each woman begins with an illuminated letter magnificently incorporating a small symbol or motif that references the subject’s importance.

The table itself is set upon the enormous Heritage Floor comprised of over two thousand hand-cast, gilded and lustered tiles, inscribed with the names of 999 other women of importance. The Dinner Party dominated art headlines during its early history and, though enormously popular with the more than a million viewers who saw it in a dozen cities worldwide, it bore the brunt of hostile opposition from some quarters of the art world who saw it as an assault on modernist traditions and from the political right who felt threatened by its feminist agenda.

Perhaps emblematic of how much things have changed, today it is thought of as, in the words of renowned critic Arthur C. Danto, “one of the major artistic monuments of the second half of the 20th century.” It has influenced the lives and work of thousands of people and has become the iconic example of how art can change the world, the expanded role for the artist in society and women’s freedom of expression.

Roberta Smith in The New York Times said that it has become “almost as much a part of American culture as Norman Rockwell, Walt Disney, W.RA. murals and the AIDS quilt.” The Dinner Party was conceived by Chicago and executed by 400 artisans from around the world, working under her supervision from 1974 to 1979. She intentionally chose mediums traditionally associated with women—such as weaving, china painting, ceramics and needlework—that enhanced the impact of the installation’s powerful rejection of female marginalization and erasure.

Chris Burden (born 1946)

• Burden began to work in performance art in the early 70s, and made a series of controversial performances in which the idea of personal danger as artistic expression was central.
• His most well-known act from that time is perhaps the 1971 performance piece Shoot, in which he was shot in his left arm by an assistant from a distance of about five meters.
• Trans-Fixed (1974): Burden lay face up on a Volkswagen Beetle and had nails hammered into both of his hands, as if he were being crucified on the car. The car was pushed out of the garage and the engine revved for two minutes before being pushed back into the garage.
• White Light/White Heat: For this work of experiment performance and self-inflicting danger, Burden spent twenty-two days lying on a triangular platform in the corner of the gallery. He was out of sight from all viewers and he could not see them either. According to Burden, he did not eat, talk, or come down the entire time.
• Doomed: Burden lay motionless in a museum gallery under a slanted sheet of glass, with a clock running nearby. Unbeknownst to the museum owners, Chris was prepared to remain in that position until someone interfered in some way with the piece. Forty-five hours later, a museum guard placed a pitcher of water in reaching distance to Burden. Burden then smashed the glass, and took a hammer to the clock, thus ending the piece.

Martha Rosler

• Rosler works in video, photo-text, installation, and performance, as well as writing about art and culture. Her work and writing have been widely influential. She has lectured extensively nationally and internationally and teaches art at Rutgers University, the Städelschule in Frankfurt, and the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland
• In 1989, in lieu of a solo exhibition at the Dia Art Foundation in New York City, Rosler organized the project "If You Lived Here...", in which over 50 artists, film and video producers, photographers, architects, planners, homeless people, squatters, activist groups, and schoolchildren addressed contested living situations, architecture, planning, and utopian visions.
• In 2009, an archive exhibition based on this project, "If You Lived Here Still," opened at e-flux's gallery in New York and then traveled (2010) to Casco Office for Art Design and Theory, in Utrecht, Netherlands.

Survival Research Labs

• SRL is a machine performance art group credited for pioneering the genre of large scale machine performance.
• SRL was founded by Mark Pauline in 1978. Since its inception, SRL has operated as an organization of creative technicians dedicated to re-directing the techniques, tools, and tenets of industry, science, and the military away from their typical manifestations in practicality, product or warfare.
• Since 1979, SRL has staged over 45 mechanized presentations. Each performance consists of a unique set of ritualized interactions between machines, robots, and special-effects devices, employed in developing themes of socio-political satire. Humans are present only as audience or operators.

Althea Thauberger

• Thauberger’s artworks are often concerned with the social document and self expression, and allude to popular forms of music and drama. In addition to contemporary modes, her influences include the histories of painting and photography.
• Thauberger’s subjects are often adolescent girls in emotional states ranging from abjection to euphoria, as with the latest media work, A Memory Lasts Forever. This piece is a collaboration with Jessica Griffiths, Gemma Isaac, Kaoru Matsushita and Natalie Needham, the performers who developed their own characters, costumes, script and songs from improvised sessions. “Their teenage energy became an important part of the work,” says the artist. Here a story about confronting death is told in four different ways, expressed through the anxieties and fantasies of teenage girls. The narrative is driven by the evocative power of song, which the artist sees as “the most immediate and ultimate way of expressing yourself artistically…. singing affirms the desire for communication.” Filmed in a North Vancouver home, the piece is cinematically lit and shot as a stage production played out in real time. The contrived footage resembles soap opera, music video, slasher movies and musical theatre. Typical of her videos that feature improvised performances by amateurs, the film seems to constantly shift between a sense of fiction and documentary realism.
• Thauberger’s collaborative processes empower the performers. “The unexpected things that other people bring to the work become crucial to the content – they develop ideas in ways that I would never be able to myself.” Two new projects involve collaborations with community choirs, a devotional choir in Montreal and a choir of military spouses in San Diego who will write their own music. “For these projects, I am working not only with the musical content but in the social and spectacular aspects of performance.” In this way, she takes aesthetics into everyday life and becomes an instigator of social interaction.

Mierle Ukeles (born 1939)

• New York based artist known for work dealing with feminism, service and labor, and public/private.
• In 1969 she wrote a manifesto entitled Maintenance Art—Proposal for an Exhibition, challenging the domestic role of women and proclaiming herself a “maintenance artist.” Maintenance, for Ukeles, is the realm of human activities that keep things going, such as cooking, cleaning and child-rearing and her performances in the 1970s included the cleaning of art galleries.
• One of her most well-known projects Touch Sanitation (1970-1980), involved shaking hands with more than 8,500 workers in the New York City Department of Sanitation while saying “Thank you for keeping New York City alive.”

Learning to Love You More: http://www.learningtoloveyoumore.com/
Learning to Love You More is both a web site and series of non-web presentations comprised of work made by the general public in response to assignments given by artists Miranda July and Harrell Fletcher. Yuri Ono designs and manages the web site.

Participants accept an assignment, complete it by following the simple but specific instructions, send in the required report (photograph, text, video, etc), and see their work posted on-line. Like a recipe, meditation practice, or familiar song, the prescriptive nature of these assignments is intended to guide people towards their own experience.

Since Learning To Love You More is also an ever-changing series of exhibitions, screenings and radio broadcasts presented all over the world, participant's documentation is also their submission for possible inclusion in one of these presentations. Past presentations have taken place at venues that include The Whitney Museum in NYC, Rhodes College in Memphis, TN, Aurora Picture Show in Houston, TX, The Seattle Art Museum in Seattle, WA, the Wattis Institute in San Francisco CA, among others. Since LTLYM inception in 2002 over 8000 people have participated in the project.

127 Prince: Journal named after the location of artist Gordon Matta-Clark’s 1971 restaurant FOOD. Like FOOD, 127 Prince hopes to function as a site for conversation. The journal will present and examine ideas on the art of social practice, and the social practice of art.