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.