Detroit Research Volume 1

121
The latest claimant to the mantle of innovation
– aesthetically and ethically – in this tradition of
art-thinking has various and varying names as
well as various and varying paths of inheritance:
public practice, community-based practice, and
cultural activist practice. 2 This variance of naming
should suffice to tell us that though the practice is
identifiable, and clearly so, it is not yet settled on
a self-understanding. One can, however, say that
two names for this practice have emerged: in the
United States the dominant term has become Social
Practice, the equivalent of which in Europe is
Participatory Art. Both terms speak of the distance
from an art of the studio, and of engagement with
the audience and “community” – indeed, no term
is more used and possibly over-used than the term
community, 3 and one which is rarely explicitly defined.
As Joshua Decter put it in an essay for the
Dutch / American exhibition catalogue Heartland:
There has always been some acrimony
about what actually constitutes “public
practice,” “community-based practice,”
and “cultural activist practice.” At times,
this becomes a debate regarding who
has the right to articulate the interests of
a community and whether so-called outsiders
have the legitimacy to work with a
particular community; this may ultimately
be a question of cultivating trust, one of
the most complex challenges facing artists
who seek to work with, or in relation
to, citizens and their life-spaces. 4
These key terms, trust, community, relation, citizens,
and life-spaces point to a precise space of
practice, albeit one whose epistemology and genealogy
are not wholly agreed upon. 5 Before Social
Practice / Participatory Art became self-consciously
such, there was Relational Aesthetics – a term
still used by practitioners such as the conceptual
and food artist Jennifer Rubell – which re-situated
practice away from the studio to the site of production
and the audience; but Social Practice, beyond
Relational Aesthetics, seeks to engage the citizen,
in trust, and to be legitimate, so that its practice
will be seen to be of the community, and as such it
calls for, even, seeks to facilitate, the construction
of a relational subject, 6 one that will be the subject
of care and as such a subject that sees itself also
in relation to its environment, that is, the threatened
life-spaces, whence the implicit connection
between Social Practice and Biopolitical thought,
even if only as a logical entailment and not a
self-conscious problematic for all practitioners. 7
It would take more space to flesh out and make
the argument that the subject of Social Practice as
a distinctively new practice of thinking in art is an
ethic of care, but the time is right, and the material
is available for this investigation to begin, not
least because this practice of art has become the
prevalent and most urgent form of art-practice in
Detroit from the Heidelberg Project to the Power-
House Project, to the role of urban gardening of
which Kate Daughdrill and Mira Burack’s Edible
Hut can be taken as an exemplar, to the practice
of conversation found in Detroit Soup curated by
Amy Kaherl, to the experiments in communal living
practiced by the Grace Lee Boggs and friends at
the Grace Lee Boggs Center. It is, after all, Boggs
herself who said in an interview with Democracy
Now that “The only way to survive is by taking care
of one another.” Here is her full statement:
What happened in 2001 in Porta Legra,
Brazil, when people gathered to say: Another
world is necessary, another world
is possible, and another world is happening,
I think that that’s what’s happening
in Detroit in particular. People are beginning
to say: The only way to survive is by
taking care of one another; by re-creating
our relationships to one another; that we
have created a society, over the last period
in particular, where each of us is pursuing
self-interest. We have de-volved
as human beings. 8
It can reasonably be argued that the Diego Rivera’s
Detroit Industry mural, 1932-33, in the DIA is the
allegory and Ur-scene – even the primitive scene
in terms of representation – of Social Practice in
Detroit with its hymn to an idealized community of
workers and producers where the iconography of
the fresco cycle depicts not only harmony amongst
workers but a harmony of workers (say, Man)