Socially engaged art, at its core, seeks to dismantle the traditional artist-audience binary, fostering collaborative experiences that generate knowledge and catalyze social change. Within this realm, research-creation, a methodology that blends artistic practice with rigorous inquiry, becomes a potent tool for exploring the nuanced interplay between embodiment, emergence, and relationality. Research-creation, crucially, is not simply art that illustrates research findings, nor is it research that merely analyzes art. It's a dynamic interplay where creative processes are integral to the generation of knowledge, emphasizing the investigative journey and recognizing that artistic forms can produce unique and valuable insights. It is an approach to research that combines creative and academic research practices, and supports the development of knowledge and innovation through artistic expression, scholarly investigation, and experimentation. It is about the creation process being situated within the research activity and producing critically informed work in a variety of media (art forms). Rather than simply observing or documenting, artists become active participants, generating new forms of understanding through embodied action and shared experience, using methods that combine creative and academic research practices.
Embodiment in this context moves beyond the individual body as a site of expression. It acknowledges the body as a locus of lived experience, memory, and cultural inscription, deeply intertwined with social and environmental contexts. Research-creation methodologies that prioritize embodiment often involve participatory workshops, site-specific performances, or interactive installations that invite participants to engage physically with the artwork and its surrounding environment. For instance, a project exploring urban displacement might involve walking workshops that map embodied experiences of navigating contested spaces, or collaborative movement exercises that explore the feeling of being uprooted. These methodologies, through the lens of research-creation, recognize that knowledge is not solely cognitive but is also felt, sensed, and lived through the body, contributing to the development of knowledge through artistic expression.
Emergence, a concept borrowed from complex systems theory, recognizes that meaning and understanding are not pre-determined but rather arise through the dynamic interactions between participants, materials, and contexts. In socially engaged art, this translates to a research process that embraces uncertainty and allows for unexpected outcomes. Research-creation methodologies that foster emergence might involve open-ended creative prompts, iterative prototyping, or collaborative world-building exercises. Rather than seeking to control the outcome, the artist acts as a facilitator, creating the conditions for collective exploration and discovery. For instance, a community garden project might employ emergent methodologies by allowing the garden’s design and purpose to evolve organically based on the participants' needs and contributions, demonstrating how the creative process itself is a site of knowledge production.
Relationality, the understanding that all beings are interconnected and interdependent, is fundamental to socially engaged art research creation. Methodologies that emphasize relationality prioritize dialogue, collaboration, and co-creation. This might involve participatory action research (PAR), where community members are actively involved in all stages of the research process, or collaborative storytelling projects that amplify marginalized voices and foster intersubjective understanding. Relational methodologies, when approached as research-creation, recognize that knowledge is not produced in isolation but rather through shared experience and mutual respect, producing critically informed work through collaborative art forms. For instance, a project addressing environmental justice might utilize collaborative mapping techniques to visualize the interconnectedness of human and ecological systems, or employ storytelling circles to create spaces for collective healing and transformative dialogue.
By integrating embodiment, emergence, and relationality through the lens of research-creation, socially engaged art moves beyond traditional research paradigms. It embraces the subjective, the affective, and the experiential, recognizing that knowledge is not a static entity but rather a dynamic and evolving process. The artist, in this context, becomes a facilitator of shared meaning-making, creating spaces for collective learning and social transformation. Through embodied action, emergent processes, and relational encounters, socially engaged art research creation has the potential to generate new forms of knowledge that are both deeply personal and profoundly social, contributing to a more just and equitable world, with the creation process itself situated within the research activity.
- 1 min read
I repel against any sense of artist elitism.
I advocate for the public to value artists.
I sit in that space where the curtain rises and falls - between the public and artists.
Then ask that we, the audience and the artists, go witness how the curtains were made, revealing the unseen and the hands and the stories that made them.
- 3 min read
Ask anyone on the street how they define public art and they will inevitably refer to it as a sculpture in a park or on the street. That’s been the definition of public art for quite some time.
In 1991, artist, educator and activist, Suzanne Lacy, proposed the term new genre public art to define work that engages the public but may not in fact end with a sculpture. She first coined the term in a public performance at the San Francisco Museum of Art and later in her book Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art. She defined it as art for activism, often created outside the typical art institution, and which the process had the artist engage directly with the public or audience in discussing and creating action around social and political issues. In her own words, new genre public art is “socially engaged, interactive art for diverse audiences with connections to identity politics and social activism.” (1)
Emerging out to the 1990s were these alternative definitions for public art such as contextual art, relational art, participatory art, dialogic art, community-based art, activist art, and the comprehensive new genre public art. Artists began moving from the art institutions into the realm of civic activism. Instead of reflecting social or political issues through metaphors in public art, new genre public art aimed to engage the regular citizen, specifically those from marginalized groups, in creating solutions for these issues.
Examples of this can be seen in the work of Mark Dion and his Chicago Urban Ecology Action Group. Dion, who believes that art and ecology can be fruitful partners in creating solutions for environmental conservation, along with a group of youth from two schools in Chicago, traveled to Belize to learn about the conservation initiatives the country was implementing. They then returned to Chicago and researched the work of different art and ecological initiatives in the area and how the issues of the Belize tropical ecosystem parallel to those of their own environment. This culminated in establishing an experimental field station that would be the site for future art/ecology experiments, guest speakers and future activities. It also acted as the base of operations for weekly community clean-up and restoration projects. (2)
One of Suzanne Lacy’s works, Silver Action, brings women from diverse political and socio-economic backgrounds to discuss the role that women played in political protests of our time. It explored issues that were relevant in British media at the time around aging. Workshops were held with women who participated in the miner’s strikes, disability, ecology and feminist movements. Four hundred women then participated in a five-hour performance split into three tableaux. Each hour one hundred women were seen conversing at small tables. (3)
New genre public art challenges the idea of commissioned public art. Does public art have to be sculptural when in fact the work is for the public? It also challenges the relationship between the viewer to the art piece. Is the relationship the viewer is having withe art the only relationship? And, finally, it challenges the possibility of perspectives. Is the art work suppose to mean only one thing — that which the artist intended it to be. Ultimately, new genre public art aims to engage the public in the creation of an art work that does not necessarily end with a sculptural or typically visual aesthetic and instead engage the public in bringing about change through art.
Knight, Cher Krause (2008). Public Art: theory, practice and populism. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. ISBN 978-1-4051-5559-5.
http://distributedcreativity.typepad.com/on_collecting/files/Mark_Dion.pdf
http://www.suzannelacy.com/recent-works/#/silver-action-2013/