Along with a link to the writings of Harrell Fletcher on Social Practice as Art
http://www.harrellfletcher.com/?cat=33
Harrell Fletcher: Anything anyone calls art is art
An image from "The Problem of Possible Redemption 2003," staged at the 2004 Whitney Biennial in New York. The video is an adaptation of James Joyce's novel Ulysses shot at the Parkville Senior Center in Connecticut, with the seniors reading the lines from cue cards.Harell Fletcher
Harrell Fletcher teaches in the art department at Portland State University. He has exhibited at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Berkeley Art Museum, Socrates Sculpture Park in New York, and in numerous other museums and galleries around the world. In 2002, Fletcher started Learning To Love You More, a participatory website with Miranda July, which they turned into a book, published in 2007. Fletcher is the recipient of the 2005 Alpert Award in Visual Arts.
The question of why I make art needs to be broken down a bit before I can answer.
First of all, what is art? The definition for art that I have come up with, which seems to work best for me, is that anything anyone calls art is art. This comes from my belief that there is nothing intrinsic about art. We cannot do a chemical analysis to determine if something is art or not. Instead, I feel like calling something “art” is really just a subjective way of indicating value—which could be aesthetic, cultural, monetary, and so on.
If we look at other kinds of creative activity we can see how various forms can all exist and be valid at the same time. I’ve made what I think of as art since I was a child, initially drawings, then photographs, paintings, videos, and so on. By the time I got to graduate school, I was not so interested in making more stuff, and instead started to move into another direction, which these days is sometimes called “Social Practice.”
This is sort of a confusing term since it is so new and undefined. In a broad way, I think of it as the opposite of Studio Practice—making objects in isolation, to be shown and hopefully sold in a gallery context. Most of the art world operates with this Studio Practice approach. In Social Practice, there is more of an emphasis on ideas and actions than on objects; it can take place outside of art contexts, and there is often a collaborative or participatory aspect to the work.
So back to the question why I make art. In my case, the projects that I do allow me to meet people I wouldn’t ordinarily meet, travel to places I wouldn’t normally go to, learn about subjects that I didn’t know I would be interested in, and sometimes even help people out in small ways that make me feel good. I like to say that what I’m after is to have an interesting life, and doing the work that I do as an artist helps me achieve that.
Email
Feed
Share
