This course is for activists, artists, and thinkers who wish to better understand and participate in social change. We will focus on the prolific and exciting overlap between socially engaged art and cultural practices generated by recent social movements around the world. Rather than assess the political efficacy of activities like mourning, listening, organizing, dancing, or partying, the lectures examine such cultural activities next to, and within, contemporary art practice. Included in the course are guest presentations by key artists, activists, and scholars, like: Rebecca Gomperts, Chido Govera, Gulf Labor, Hans Haacke, Sharon Hayes, Jolene Rickard, Gregory Sholette, Joshua Wong, and many more. Designed by artist and Duke professor, Pedro Lasch and co-taught by Creative Time artistic director, Nato Thompson, the course challenges learners to treat the MOOC itself as a social and artistic form. This happens mostly through the practical components, local project productions, global exchanges, and critical feedback. While no prior art making or activist experience is required, projects also offer challenging options for advanced learners. For other course offerings or language versions in this series, just search 'ART of the MOOC' inside the Coursera course catalogue.
Shannon Jackson
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From the course by Duke University
ART of the MOOC: Activism and Social Movements
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From the lesson
Aesthetics, Art History, and Cultural Institutions - Lectures, Guest Presentations, and Quiz
Just as recent social movements have transformed contemporary art and culture, activists have relied on ideas developed in more specialized cultural circles, sometimes without knowing it. Starting with an exploration of the ways in which socially engaged public art has been included and excluded from particular narratives, theories, institutions, and events, we will use this lesson to follow social practices as they question conventional art and art history. As we do so, students will be invited to create projects that directly engage with Cultivating, Farming, Cooking, or Eating—activities that are fundamentally social but traditionally seen to contradict serious artistic production.
Meet the Instructors
Nato ThompsonChief Curator
Creative Time
Pedro LaschVisual Artist and Associate Research Professor
Duke Art, Art History & Visual Studies
We're here with Shannon Jackson.
Thanks so much, Shannon, for being in coversation with us.
And I think many of our students will be excited to hear you talk.
You're a very important figure in this area of social work, like your book
Social Works has been very influential to rethink how we consider public art and
what has happened to this field, right, and how it has transformed itself.
I mean, I can speak for myself perhaps,
one of the reasons I've really been interested in following your work and
your thought is because in the midst of all these terms that people use,
socially engaged art, relational aesthetics, etc.
You use a term social works for a very specific reason, right?
But you're also engaging quite actively in the diversity of this workspace.
What are your main arguments for talking about social works as such, and
why do you also appreciate the diversity of voices?
>> Well, I think that there's obviously a certain kind of opportunity that's a more
contemporary opportunity given to talk about the role of aesthetics and politics.
And there is a certain kind of discussion and debate around,
say, a term like social practice that has arisen in a particular domain and
gives us a new opportunity to reignite that conservation.
But the point is that the conservation has been going on for a long time.
[LAUGH] >> Right.
>> And that it occurred under different rubrics and
in different domains with a range of aesthetic forms and
also with, you could say, sometimes different politics and
sometimes not where politics is not actually very much in the foreground.
So I think that I appreciate the plethora of recent terms and then I'm,
at the same time, really interested in trying to supply a longer
genealogy of terms and remind ourselves of the connections
to different historical moments when those debates arose.
I have more to say on that.
>> No, and I think that's also one of the things that distinguishes your
work on this topic, that you stress the continuity, right?
And that makes people engaged with performance.
>> [CROSSTALK] To this continuity.
Odd professions here or reinventions of wheels and [LAUGH].
>> Well, to be more specific about that, you actually discuss theatre, right,
which is a field that did so many incredible things throughout the decades,
throughout the 20th century, but even before.
And by stressing this importance of theatre, you're actually filling a gap.
Because a lot of the visual arts literature on social practice
has actually excluded theatre.
So, can you talk a little bit about the theatrical practices?
>> Yes, I think that's another thing, I've always been really interested in,
from an academic perspective, we use the term interdisciplinary.
And we all think that we're being interdisciplinary.
We all think that we're pushing the boundaries of our fields.
And social practice is one way of phrasing and
describing a range of practices that are pushing certain kinds of boundaries.
But at the same time,
it is a kind of target that erodes more in a visual art context, and so
it's pressing on the boundaries of that, of those forums, right?
So, I think that it's really interesting to notice the sort of thee
disciplined nature of one's own interdisciplinarity.
And just to sort of say, what are the things that are opening up to us, and
at the same time, what habitual blinders might we have, that we don't know we have?
And our attachment to particular aesthetic forms might be forming
our sense of what's possible or what is innovative, what's not possible,
what's not innovative in a politically engaged or socially engaged art practice.
I think that also, I've been interested in noticing places,
organizations, different kinds of gatherings,
where there is an investment in, say, community engagement,
or an investment in political practice.
And there is still a kind of medium specificity to issue those gatherings.
So that the dance people talk to the dance people and
the theatre people talk to the theatre people.
Actually, I made this point a few years ago at Creative Time,
that it was during the living as form iteration,
where I was just trying to say what we think an expanded
form is is still dependent upon the forms we know well,
the aesthetic forms we know well.
>> One term that I also wanted to ask you about, because I think it's very
important, but it's one that I think takes people by surprise in your writing But
I hope many of our students around the world will be thinking about,
quite seriously, is this idea of support, right?
One of your chapters in your book is about aesthetics and performance and support.
And this term support kind of really stands out.
And can you say a little bit about why this term matters so much to you and
how it plays out in social practice and social works?
>> Yeah, I mean, for me, it actually has to do with
a certain kind of political position actually.
Actually perhaps not so much in a social practice in this course,
but in a certain kind of history around politically engaged art or
activist art, I was concerned about the sort of
tendency to position the politically engaged artist
as someone who was perpetually anti-institutional.
That we are always trying to figure out how to take down the bureaucratic,
oppressive, domineering institution,
and there's so many important moments when we need to do that.
At the same time, I'm really worried about
the tendencies of that argument to that stance.
You can say it's just to say it's something more like a 60s stance.
That it plays into what we now can see happening locally,
nationally, globally, where a whole variety of conservative
governance structures are also anti-institutional.
[LAUGH] They're also trying to pull back welfare programs,
make sure that nobody has healthcare, that public education gets defunded, and
that you might find yourselves at certain moments that the politically engaged
artist maybe should be talking about being pro-institution sometimes [LAUGH].
And so I was interested in that as a professor at UC Berkeley,
as watching how our historically activist campus also is navigating this discourse,
being actually fairly anti-institutional,
anti-machine university appropriately, in many occasions perhaps.
And at the same time,
how we square that now with the public investments in education.
So I was interested in this before for a long time around that paradox,
of how we know we're being political.
And it seemed to me that also, you could say that there's a gender
dimension to this, that it's partly about the institutions or
systems or practices of care that we depend on are often invisible to you.
So that's a gendered argument, that's a maternal argument.
And support was, for me, a way of trying to raise to some sort of level of
consciousness, our interdependent relationship to a wider support system,
whether it's something that's quite intimate or something that's systemic.
And to avow that, to connect with the part of
us that is not only about our autonomy and
our individuation, but also about our interdependence.
And it seemed to me that that political position actually has
some parallels with a whole variety of conceptual art practice or
a lot of experimental art practice,
where you could say the dependents of the art object on its surround,
on the background, on its pedestal, on its frame.
It's something that artists are taught, and there's this constant sort of effort
to sort of say, well, where does the art object begin and end?
By actually exposing its interdependence on a support system.
So I became really interested in trying to find projects where
that aesthetic formal pursuit, which is such an interesting
conceptual pursuit, could be joined to this thing.
But an alternate way of thinking about what we mean by political.
And that word support is both a political term then for me and
in politics and in feminist politics in particular.
And it's obviously an aesthetic term as well.
And I just put them together.
In terms of, as somebody who came through my pathways through theatre,
getting a PhD in performance studies, under a school of communication, this
is a whole field where people actually do talk more precisely about dialogue.
Or people talk more precisely about, as you say, or
really sort of mining how a theatrical terminology or
communication terminology can be expanded.
And if art worlds that have not been used to crafting exchange or
for whom exchange is actually a new thing, it really actually
might be helpful to turn to some of these other disciplines,
where there is a longer history of talking about the nature of talking.
And that's the thing about why I feel that social practice perhaps now has
to learn from theatre, traditions of theatre, and also what theatre
has to learn from it, that theatre is also an art form with a lot of body.
[LAUGH] It's always been that, especially whether you're talking
about the ensemble making it, or you're talking about the audience,
the assembly of co-present audience members encountering it.
And what I think the history of theatre, which also has been mobilized for
a whole lot of conservative ends, shows is that just bringing bodies together and
putting them in the foreground is not enough.
[LAUGH] It's not in itself a radical thing to do, it's been done.
It's what you do with that assembly and how you direct its attention.
And that's also why I also think that there's something very
interestingly defamilarizing for a theatre student to look at,
say, a Claire Dougherty project, Situations project,
to sort of say, well, this has a lot of people in it.
I'm used to being around people all the time, but
this is an assembly or a redirecting or
a placement of people in relationship to each other that is unfamiliar to me.
And I think that that normalization of something that we either
often think we do well, assemble bodies in space together in real time,
we're looking for other ways to do that assembly, right?
And I think that contact with other art forms' experiments helps us.
>> Mm-hm.
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