ARTIFICIAL HELLS

Notes
Introduction
1 Jeremy Deller: ‘Francis Bacon was socially engaged, Warhol was socially
engaged, if you’re a good artist you’re socially engaged, whether you’re
painting or making sculptures.’ (Interview with the author, 12 April
2005.)
2 For example, Bourriaud argues that relational art takes as its theoretical
horizon ‘the realm of human interactions and its social context, rather
than the assertion of an independent and private symbolic space’. (Bourriaud,
Relational Aesthetics, Dijon: Presses du Réel, 2002, p. 14.) But
when we look at the artists he supports independently of his arguments,
we find that they are less interested in intersubjective relations and social
context than in spectatorship as more generally embedded within systems
of display, temporality, fiction, design and the ‘scenario’. The present
book takes up from my critique of Relational Aesthetics published in October,
110, Fall 2004, pp. 51– 79.
3 See for example the MFA programmes in Art and Social Practice at Portland
State University and California College of the Arts; in Public
Practice at Otis College of Art and Design, and in Contextual Practice at
Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh. The Leonore Annenberg Prize
for Art and Social Change (New York) was inaugurated in 2009, while
the International Prize for Participatory Art (promoted by the Region
Emilia- Romagna, Italy) was inaugurated in 2011.
4 Claire Bishop, ‘The Social Turn: Collaboration and Its Discontents’,
Artforum, February 2006, pp. 178– 83.
5 It should be stressed that this tripartite ideological structure is less applicable
to two of the regions covered in this book. In Argentina, 1968 was
associated more with resistance to military oppression (the Onganía
dictatorship) than with leftist revolution, although artists knew of the
upheavals in France and made reference to them in their work. As Nicolás
Guagnini notes: ‘If anything, the dates of a South American
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