“Between activism, art, and bureaucracy.” (the snip-it to take home if you don’t have time to read more)

It’s been very busy these past weeks, and it shows no sign of letting up. But when I woke up this morning and realized that it is 11/1/11 and that I hadn’t written a second post about Living as Form, I decided to take a moment with my morning coffee to write.

I have been thinking about the migration of forms between activist, artistic, and bureaucratic realms. In part, this was inspired by the installation at Living as Form, which used metal shelving to present the documentation and visual aids of social art projects. Social art has, as Claire Bishop suggested this summer, an “anomic” relationship to the visual or aesthetic realm, that is a disoriented or undetermined relation. On the one hand, social art practitioners might reject the bourgeois art object and aesthetics in favor of the social value of their work, and yet, on the other hand, compared with “real” social work, social art is, well, art-y and often funded through cultural organizations. Whatever the relationship, many artists use photography, video, text, and infographics to “represent” or communicate about their social art projects. They often engaged in extensive research during the process, producing more paper weight. Exhibitions of social art that do not re-activate projects but intend to record previous or ongoing projects are essentially presentations of the documentary materials, collected in binders, folders, stacks, slide shows, videos, and posters. These are the same materials you would find in almost every office environment with the dutiful paper-pushers laboring through reams of paper in their cubicles.

If these presentational strategies relate to bureaucratic realms so too does the durational experience. I spent 3 hours in the exhibition and engaged with about 20 projects. To take in the exhibition as a whole, which included over 100 projects, would require around 16 hours. Social art projects propose a spectatorial experience antithetical to Kantian aesthetic immediacy. They implore viewers to slow down. You learn about the place, problem, participants, context, and collaboration that led to the gradual evolution and execution of the project, which in many cases is never finished. At its roots, bureaucracy was the hierarchical reorganization of public administration to modernize it, a corollary to assembly line efficiency. When we talk of bureaucracy today, we refers to painfully slow processes, red tape, and seemingly antiquated, arbitrary rules, holdovers from an earlier era. But, is there not something positive about this temporality? About the slow digestion of paper in the bowels of socialist governments as opposed to the decisiveness of renegade and fascist presidents? Might the emphasis on process as opposed to outcome be valuable in a “bottom-line” and “end result” culture?

I can’t remember the last time I spent 3 hours in a single exhibition and still felt like I needed more time to delve in. It’s an overwhelming feeling in our busy lives. I often feel torn between digestible, twitter-sized culture (articles, news, meals, recipes, etc.) and indigestible profundity (dissertations, slow foods, marriage, etc.). The duration of social art, both the projects themselves and the engagement by a secondary audience, is partly a result of its engagement with and use of bureaucracy and is one of its greatest assets.

PS (a real practice in patience): When I had almost finished this post, I accidentally hit the close tab key and lost all the text. I relished expending another 20 minutes to reconstruct it.

Above: Photos of Living as Form exhibition, Creative Time, NYC, October 2011