Making Another World Possible

10 Creative Time Summits, 10 Global Issues, 100 Art Projects

Corina L. Apostol, Nato Thompson, Corina L. Apostol, Nato Thompson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429889394
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

Making Another World Possible offers a broad look at an array of socially engaged cultural practices that have become increasingly visible in the past decade, across diverse fields such as visual art, performance, theater, activism, architecture, urban planning, pedagogy, and ecology.

Part I of the book introduces the reader to the field of socially engaged art and cultural practice, spanning the past ten years of dynamism and development. Part II presents a visually striking summary of key events from 1945 to the present, offering an expansive view of socially engaged art throughout history, and Part III offers an overview of the current state of the field, elucidating some of the key issues facing practitioners and communities. Finally, Part IV identifies ten global issues and, in turn, documents 100 key artistic projects from around the world to illustrate the various critical, aesthetic and political modes in which artists, cultural workers, and communities are responding to these issues from their specific local contexts. This is a much needed and timely archive that broadens and deepens the conversation on socially engaged art and culture. It includes commissioned essays from noted critics, practitioners, and theorists in the field, as well as key examples that allow insights into methodologies, contextualize the conditions of sites, and broaden the range of what constitutes an engaged culture.

Of interest to a wide range of readers, from practitioners and scholars of performance to curators and historians, Making Another World Possible offers both breadth and depth, spanning history and individual works, to offer a unique insight into the field of socially engaged art.

Part I

A precarious assembly

Ten years of art and activism

Nato Thompson

The Summit, a conference that tracks political art across the globe, has been transformed over the past decade, its form and content shaped by the contours of political events abroad and on U.S. soil and by the changing genre of socially engaged art practice. What started as a gathering to make the case for the relevance of art and politics in the main circuits of contemporary art evolved into an urgent coming together of disparate and politically telling artistic practices. Looking back over the last decade, the texture and content of this gathering reflect the mood, spirit, and political urgencies of this wild decade.

This book is an opportunity to reflect on the condition of both tendencies—political and artistic—across the vast geography of the globe and how they inform each other. The essays and projects contained herein offer a lens into a series of practices that could be inspiring to practitioners in a wide array of regions, while also possessing a specificity germane to their location. They tell a tale of the complex forces that give rise to and foreclose moments of aesthetic political action. The urgencies of political moments, coupled with the condition of support for the arts and the various intersectional dynamics within a given region, set the groundwork for specific manifestations of creative protest, resistance, community building, institutional critique, and more.

While art fairs and biennials offer a glimpse into different regional art scenes, much of what constitutes political art remains outside these networks. While the commercial world had, over the course of the 1990s and into the 2000s, begun to embrace a fever of globalism, the political art sphere still required much more conversation and spaces of international connection. At its inception, the Creative Time Summit also lagged behind in providing a global lens on these practices. While the Summit has always attempted to connect diverse practices across the globe, the reach and understanding of these practices and practitioners would take time to develop.

Over the course of the next decade, the Summit would take place annually (if not biannually), and each iteration would reflect tendencies happening both in political art and in the urgencies of the political moment. Reflecting on its modalities over time, the Summit provided a clear snapshot of the forces and events that would come to occupy the center of current political concerns. If political art exists at the fringes, then it is the fringes that usher in an emerging social landscape.

The return of political art

On public memory:

[T]hose various types of distributed memories [collective memory, communicative memory, and cultural memory] reinforce the concept of memory as shared process, as a condition that takes us out of our immediate reality and allows for an awareness of connections and contingencies. Public memory resides precisely in that transitional realm of individual awareness and collectively scripted narrative of self-expression and context. To activate public memory, that is to render it an agent of the moment. We need to work in that ambiguous realm and to bring our audiences to it.

Carin Kuoni, Creative Time Summit: Revolutions in Public Practice, 2009

We shaped the Summit in order to uplift political art and to make the case for its relevance to the community of artists, scholars, and cultural workers that form not only the art world but also the world beyond. We, at Creative Time, wanted the Summit to introduce audiences to the vast world of political art production and to make a case for the power of art to transform society. That said, the first important task was to make the case to the art world itself.

The methodology and content of the Summit built upon a number of important precursors. One of the more significant conferences in New York history that guided our vision for the Summit was the Town Hall series at the DIA Art Foundation that took place in 1980. The first half of the project consisted of an installation by Martha Rosler titled If You Lived Here, which responded to questions of gentrification and housing. The second discursive exhibition and platform was by the collective Group Material, titled Democracy. Both featured a series of conversations on topics that would not only continue to be urgent at the time of the first Summit—including gentrification, intersections of class, race, and cultural production, AIDS activism, and strategies to resist capitalism—but also put forth a politically progressive agenda by way of an art institution.

In addition to these seminal projects at DIA, we at Creative Time (which, most importantly, included then Executive Director Anne Pasternak) found inspiration in the work of Okwui Enwezor, the artistic director of documenta 11. The 2002 edition highlighted art from the global South and brought colonialism front and center as an important rupture in the production of culture. In addition, Enwezor produced a series of discursive “platforms” that emerged in major port cities across the globe. These platforms, as they were called, featured philosophical and political voices from across the cultural spectrum. Urgent and necessary conversations on subjects ranging from truth and reconciliation in South Africa, to the concept of creolization, to the rise of neoliberalism were being addressed by the world’s sharpest minds. And what else could bring them together than art itself? It was within the field of art where these conversations that seemed both urgent and, strangely, beyond the bounds of contemporary political discourse could emerge.

It is also helpful to note that Creative Time itself had a history of organizing around art and politics. In 2006, Creative Time organized three roundtable dinners asking artists, curators, and academics about the state of art and politics. Many of these artists would continue to play a role in Summits to come, including Doug Ashford, Julie Ault, Hans Haacke, Emily Jacir, Lucy Lippard, Daniel Martinez, Marlene McCarty, Helen Molesworth, Anne Pasternak, Paul Pfeiffer, Michael Rakowitz, Martha Rosler, Ralph Rugoff, Amy Sillman, Allison Smith, Kiki Smith, and David Levi Strauss.

Just a year previous to the first Summit in 2009, Creative Time organized a large-scale project at the Park Avenue Armory titled Democracy in America: The National Campaign. It could be considered, in some manner, a test case for what would become the Summit. With its cavernous hall, the Armony was transformed into an ad hoc hub for social politics, which brought together voices ranging from David Harvey to the Guerrilla Girls, the Yes Men, Critical Art Ensemble, Brian Holmes, and Karen Finlay, among others. As part of Democracy in America, curator Daniel Tucker and I went to five cities—New York, Baltimore, Los Angeles, New Orleans, and Chicago—to initiate in-depth conversations with artists and activists. It became evident, in 2008, that, rather than only fighting the Bush administration’s role in Iraq or the Patriot Act, an issue that evidently had captured the imagination and work of many artists was a topic that would come to be a critical part of the Summits for the decade to come: gentrification.

The Summit also emerged out of a recognition of an ever shifting vast landscape of political art. The broad array of approaches provided an opportunity for a conference where these regional and aesthetic specificities could be explored, from the community-based work of Appalshop in Appalachia to the social practice art coming out of Portland and San Francisco, to the politically engaged social practice out of Chicago in spaces like Mess Hall, to the discursively rigorous work inspired by or in connection with the Whitney Independent Study Program in New York City. More directly activist work like the agitprop activities of the Guerrilla Girls or the Yes Men expanded this landscape even further. And that was just in the United States.

Admittedly, our knowledge of art making outside of our immediate, United States–based context would take some time to come into sharper relief. We began by highlighting the work of cultural workers and artists already familiar to us: the work of curators such as Lars Bang Larsen, Okwui Enwezor, Chus Martinez, Maria Lind, Bisi Silva, Gridthiya Gaweewong, and the Croatian collective What, How and for Whom, as well as the work of artists such as Dinh Q. Le (Vietnam), Etcétera (Argentina), Regina José Galindo (Guatemala), Chto Delat? (Russia), Minerva Cuevas (Mexico), and Yael Bartana (Israel). Many of these artists and curators are well-known in the arts circuits of biennales, major exhibitions, and art fairs. The Summit’s network of international artists would expand over time as we continued to have conversations and grew our network and knowledge of practitioners.

Presenter Okwui Enwezor at the first Creative Time Summit: Revolutions in Public Practice, 2009.

Courtesy Creative Time.

The first Creative Time Summit took place in 2009, one year into the Barack Obama presidency, and in partnership with the New York Public Library. It was seemingly the dawn of a new era. Eight years of George W. Bush as president and the so-called War on Terror had somewhat come to a close; the country had clawed its way out of the big bank bailout of the subprime mortgage crisis. Obama rode into office with promises of closing Guantanamo Bay, and, after eight years of Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, the new presidency sent an electric shock that history was in the making.

The 2009 and 2010 Summits made a case for political art. We aimed to acknowledge its history and to make space for those artists and collectives that possessed active disdain for the mainstream art world and capitalism in general. Established contemporary global curators and artists such as Okwui Enwezor, Maria Lind, Thomas Hirschhorn, Carin Kuoni, and Alfredo Jaar presented alongside historically important art activists and social practice creators such as Gregory Sholette, Suzanne Lacy, Harrell Fletcher, and Mel Chin and off-the-circuit contemporary activists such as Baltimore Development Cooperative. This would be an evolving formula that would become more global and interdisciplinary as time went on

Leveraging the social capital available from established artists and curators, we put forth a platform that was consciously resistant to power. We were cognizant of the world of conferences that were beginning to emerge in the media landscape. The dot-com–supporting blockbuster innovator conference TED haunted us with its flashy motivational speeches, solid embrace of popular education, and adoration for the rising world of technology. We wanted to keep the conference grounded by speaking truth to power and to simultaneously play a spotlight on many projects that remained hidden. In doing so, we walked the tightrope in the inevitable contradiction of being a resistant program at the center of global capitalism. This contradiction would become more apparent in years to come.

2011: take to the squares

So, 42 years later, this manifesto is a world vision and a call for revolution for the workers of maintenance. For these are the workers of survival and sustainability. Look around, that’s most of the people in the whole world. Together, if organized and in coalition, we could reshape the world.

Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Creative Time Summit: Living as Form, 2011

In 2011, the world erupted in a wave of protest and vast political transformation. The year of 2011 would come to be known for the Arab uprisings, the European Summer, and Occupy Wall Street—a domino effect of historic popular uprisings that took over the planet and rocked political establishments worldwide.

It was during this period that Creative Time launched Living as Form and the accompanying Summit of the same title. A sprawling exhibition that took place at the Essex Street Market surveying socially engaged art across the globe from 1991–2011, Living as Form placed into the conversation a diverse set of artistic practices that utilized the form of everyday life as their artistic medium. As artist Paul Ramírez Jonas said, “The public has a form and any form can be art.” The exhibition and Summit itself would coincide with the dawn of Occupy Wall Street located in Zuccotti Park in downtown New York’s Wall Street.

Three years after the financial crisis and related big bank bailouts, activists and artists camped out in the park and regularly held protests that demanded accountability from the financial sector. With adages such as “We are the 99%,” the movement—which continued to grow and to spring up across squares throughout the country—brought a much needed conversation about neoliberalism and class to television screens, newspapers, and plazas across the United States.

The Occupy Wall Street movement erupts, 2011.

Open source/Wikicommons.

Protesters occupy Zuccotti Park in New York’s Wall Street.

Open source/Wikicommons.

The occupation of the squares had first begun in the Arab world, kicked off in Tunisia with the self-immolation of the fruit seller Mohamed Bouazizi. After having his wares confiscated by the police, Bouazizi set himself on fire, unleashing a wave of protest in Tunisia. The scale of the pushback would not go ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Biographies
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Part I A precarious assembly: ten years of art and activism
• Part II On arts, politics, and engagement: a selected timeline 1945 to present
• Part III Major issues in the field of socially engaged art
• Part IV Dialogue: 10 global issues, 100 art projects
• Part V Epilogue: responsibilities and affirmations for the future
• Part VI Glossary of terms
• Index