Claire Bishop

Claire Bishop has become known as an art critic who addresses socially engaged art and Andi suggested I read her essay Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics. It looks at the art of the 90’s and open-ended , in process, interactive work and critiques the writings of Bourriaud, as well as two artists who she feels are representative of his perspective – Tiravanija and Gillick. Bishop Feels that they don’t go deep enough and that they don’t deal with discomfort or conflict and this limits their effectiveness. Bishop posits two other artists as being more successful –Thomas Hirschhorn and Santiago Sierra.

In another article in Art Forum Bishop complains that aesthetics in socially engaged art are frequently lost to an overemphasis on social change. She feels that much of the work has become rote and didactic and that artists have lost “the oppositional and anti-authoritarian punch they had in the late 1960s and 1970s when radical theatre, community arts and critical pedagogy emerged in opposition to dominant modes of social control.”
She argues that critique of the work has lapsed into evaluations of the process, the ethics of an artist’s method of collaboration and the social benefits that it achieves. Bishop then takes the position that as a recourse it is crucial to discuss and analyze this work critically “as art” with an emphasis on aesthetics. While Bishop makes a good point about how critique of socially engaged art has become lazy, her solution is a rather paradoxical one. The artists of the 1960s and 1970s that Bishop holds up as models proposed just the opposite – the necessity of removing themselves from the confines of art discourse. Furthermore when she gives examples of such a critique, evaluating the work of Oda Projesi, Jeremy Deller, and Phil Collins she predictably judges them using traditional art world criteria—good art is art that which is obtuse and complex, art that confronts us and makes us uncomfortable.

To me, Bishop is emblematic of the academic in the clash between the academic and the community-based or socially engaged art world. There has been a long and succesful struggle to create an art movement outside of the "art institution" and Bishop is urging us to return to those confines. While I like her call to include conflict and to adopt a more critical and a more rigorous approach, concentrating on aesthetics is exactly the wrong direction to pursue. In this I share the opinion of LeisureArts. Their Blog is worth looking at.