Detroit Research Volume 1

120
Michael Stone-Richards
[T]he collaborative work artists do to effect public life is
intimately linked to the performance and play of conversation
– those that we have between ourselves and our
audiences.
Doug Ashford, “Finding Cytherea: Disobedient Art and
New Publics,” Who Cares, Creative Time, 2006
Unlike its avant-garde predecessors such as Russian
Constructivism, Futurism, Situationism [sic], Tropicalia,
Happenings, Fluxus, and Dadaism, socially engaged art
is not an art movement. Rather, these cultural practices
indicate a new social order – ways of life that emphasize
participation, challenge power, and span disciplines
ranging from urban planning and community work to theater
and the visual arts. 1
Nato Thompson, “Living as Form,” in Living as Form,
Creative Time, 2012
Part of what it is to be a modern artist, and part of the
transmission from the modern to the contemporary, is to be selfconscious
in the construction of the history of one’s practice. The
Surrealists, from the moment of their establishment between
1922 and 1924, set up a Bureau of Surrealist Research; Tristan
Tzara, Raoul Haussman, Georges Hugnet, amongst others, very
quickly, before the entry of the academics, began to write the histories
of Dada; whilst Guy Debord of the Situationist International
and George Manciunas of Fluxus would spend much time constructing
very precise genealogies and histories. With the advent
of performance art Marina Abramović would do the same and
eventually begin her own school to ensure the transmission of
her thought. It matters little that critics, historians and other actors
from the original formations would also add to, contest or upset
the often too neat or self-serving constructions; what mattered,
and matters still, is that the thinking called art-making was seen to
be a reflexive activity and as such an activity that could not, once
and for all, be settled, an activity, in other words, that could not be
foundationalist in conception. (It is for this reason that Duchamp
would have no time for what he called the little recipes of studio
art.) We might put this by saying that modern art introduces the
idea that all art-practice, and hence all historiography or art, is
necessarily a meta-history and meta-practice in the service of a
particular meta-theory of art. This is so, with no little irony, even
when art-practice seeks to break out of the studio and enter –
where – into The City, having left behind what – the frame.