<span style="background-color: rgb(102, 255, 153);"><br>Responding to: "Failure & reflection - Is it just me or do social art projects seem
to have lots more failure involved than other art projects?"</span><br><br>I may have missed something but I don't think I understand exactly what
"failure" means in the context Kanarinka's post. As Sal suggests a
defining of failure is important. It seems to me there are a couple
different types of social projects. The more political ones attempt to
present information and cause "participants" to reexamine their own
social or political positions. In these the artist is often times
hoping that a certain outcome will be attained and if it doesn't this
could be a failure. Other projects, and I personally consider these the
better projects, are more of a facilitation where participants become
more than just something that is decentered (they are not objectified),
instead these participants take on the responsibility of either
carrying or not carrying the load given to them originally by the
artist. In this way the artist gives up all hope of any set outcome and
allows participants to sculpt the outcome according to their
particular, or local needs or desires. In this sense failure for the
artist would consist of bad moderating and facilitation of an event.
There is more to say on this but for now that is all I will say.<br><div class="gmail_quote"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
<div style=""><div><br></div></div></blockquote></div>-eric<br clear="all"><br>-- <br><a href="http://ericmsteen.blogspot.com">ericmsteen.blogspot.com</a><br><br><br><br><br><br>On Jan 14, 2008 5:50 PM, kanarinka <<a href="mailto:kanarinka@gmail.com">
kanarinka@gmail.com</a>> wrote:<br>Hello Sal and everyone - <div><br></div><div>Wow. Thanks so much for such a detailed and thoughtful synopsis of this arena of practice. I am very curious to read responses.</div><div>
<br></div><div>A few things that are questions for me:</div><div><br></div><div>1)
Historical, Different histories & publics - I am interested to know
what people coming from a community art practice and/or media activism
practices think about the recent surge in public, interventionist,
social, participatory art projects. Not that these positions are more
ethical or better, only that I think it is interesting that there is
curatorial and academic interest in social, participatory projects that
seem to be connected more to an avant-garde art tradition than these
other histories. Or, I guess, why is serving soup in a gallery suddenly
interesting enough to make a theory about when artists have probably
served soup in many other places over the years? Or, another way to put
it, which histories matter when we are talking about the
social-participatory-ethics-aesthetics world? </div><div><br></div><div>2)
Failure & reflection - Is it just me or do social art projects seem
to have lots more failure involved than other art projects? (I am
silently counting many of my own project's failures here). I really
appreciated and agreed with this: >>>> "Personally, one of
the aesthetic qualities I most admire in social artworks is what I
think of as aliveness - when the interactions of the participants
develop beyond the situation envisioned by the artist, when the
participants take over and really make something new happen. This is
the reason I keep doing this kind of work - if the piece is successful,
I never fail to be profoundly surprised by what actually develops.
">>>>></div><div><br></div><div>And one of the things
that is endlessly surprising are the failures (sometimes small,
sometimes large) which cause you to reevaluate your expectations, your
publics and your approach and, ideally, to work in versions/iterations.
I am thinking of failure in a positive, learning way.</div><div><br></div><div>If
an experiment fails, this is useful public knowledge. But most of the
"art" structures aren't geared towards collectively reflecting on
failure. I am thinking of artist talks, grants, and so on, where the
main goal is to impress the audience and promote the project so you can
get a few bucks to make the next version. But it seems like these
projects would be much more interesting and might accomplish more if we
could begin to publicly talk about their failures. </div><div><br></div><div>I could go on, but I am looking forward to other thoughts & questions,</div><div>Best,</div><div>kanarinka</div><br>