Culture and Social Change
Carlos Basualdo
Can art instigate social change?
I will start with an attempt to rephrase the question posed above to reach a larger field of inquiry: What is the relation between the struggles from which the name “art” has emerged and the issue of social change? Has the Western notion of “art” been historically associated with social change and the overcoming of social hierarchies and/or social injustices? Does contemporary art deal with social change, and how? An entire volume could be dedicated to these questions. The following paragraphs should be understood thus only as a very preliminary approach to the horizon of problems that they pose.
The Western category of art emerged during a period characterized by dramatic social and cultural changes, mostly associated with the development of a class of merchants and bankers. According to Hans Belting in his “Likeness and Presence,” the passage from the production and use of traditional icons to the first church altarpieces was made possible by the support of a number of minor religious groups and associations (in power? With economic means?) and only later appropriated by the religious establishment. The above was one of many transitions that marked the passage from cult to exhibition value in the relation between art and its audience, and which lie at the core of the transformations that generated art as an identifiable category. Even when artistic practice came to be progressively associated with the most powerful sectors of society, the development of the arts sustained a dialogue with a number of revolutionary social changes, including the emergence and consolidation of the figure of the artist. At the end of that period and for a long time afterwards art would not only cease to promote social change, but paradoxically would also be used as a tool for the cementing of privilege and inequality.
Only with the advent of Modernity did that situation change, and then not in an unequivocal and unilateral direction. In close association with the social transformations of the Industrial Revolution, modern art emerged as the result of the constitution of an independent market and an institutional system of cultural institutions organised around the purchase and preservation of the artistic objects. Artistic practices, deeply ingrained in the functioning of that system, turned themselves against it in the name of a closer association with life, that in many cases took the form of a demand for social change. Although programmatically this demand could only have failed, as it did, its effects in the social field have been dramatic, and only recently understood in their complexity –an example of this could be the failure of the utopian stance associated with Russian Constructivism and their profound influence in the field of design, advertising and architecture. In the post-war period advanced artistic practice articulated its critical stance through an emphasis in the linguistic aspect of the artwork and the parallel attempt to deny its association with craft and objecthood. Even the most traditional art forms, such as panting and sculpture, could not escape this process and were thus subjected to a linguistic reading. The emphasis on the informational nature of art production coincided with the development of a service economy based on speed and efficacy of the communicational processes. Thus, it could be stated that in the post-war period, advanced artistic practice became increasingly integrated to the process of production of economic value, centered around communications.
Indeed the centrality of language and communication in the economic process has recently become the focus of intense debate and discussion. Equally, and most clearly since the transformations in the language of contemporary art in the late sixties, art production itself has come to be organised around processes of a communicational nature. This clearly constitutes a renewed possibility for the artists involved in such practices to readdress the topic of social change, and the number of people working in that direction has grown exponentially in the last decade. At the same time, more traditional, object-based, forms of art practice, associated with an extraordinary process of expansion of the art market, and the privatization of cultural institutions have increasingly gained an extraordinary level of visibility that advanced practices seem unable to match. The struggle seems to be both for visibility and resources in a context in which the arts are unequivocally merging with the system of entertainment. The future of these advanced forms of artistic production and their efficacy vis-à-vis their ambition for social change resides in their possibility of contesting the traditional forms of economic support for the arts –based on collecting- and thus entering into association with other fields of economic production and circulation. One of the main risks for these practices is to avoid a tendency towards instrumentalization that tends to consider them a form of social engineering. Their success as artistic practices will ultimately depend on their resilience to perform a compensatory function, in accordance to the interests of a particular institution of organisation.
It remains to be seen to which extent these advanced artistic practices – directed to the production of “experimental communities” – will succeed in gaining visibility in a system largely dominated by the consumption of individual objects and, if so, will retain any degree of the autonomy that was historically associated in the West with the production of “art.”
Carlos Basualdo, June 25th 2005
