The ‘usological turn’ and the intersection of macrocosm with microcosm

Alessandra Saviotti, Fabiola Fiocco
(2021)

Alessandra Saviotti, Fabiola Fiocco (2021)

Alessandra Saviotti, Fabiola Fiocco
(2021)

The 'usological turn' and the intersection of macrocosm with microcosm

ABSTRACT

One year after the pandemic’s start it became undeniable that human life represents just a small element in the universe, nevertheless, it brought one of its planets, the Earth, to the tipping point. Understanding and eventually acknowledging that micro-and macrocosm are interconnected and determine whether human beings, animals, plants, and all the other living beings are going to thrive, it has become imperative to think about how to leave bad habits behind and start fresh for a better future.

The realm of the visual arts has always been a fertile ground to elaborate possible scenarios and even feasible utopia (Bruguera 2016, 316) that rethink how we behave. In particular, in 2011 Tania Bruguera proposed to look at socially engaged art practices under the lens of usership (Wright 2013, 66), suggesting that art might be used as a tool to change people’s behaviour aiming at rehearsing and implementing change. This intuition gained traction on an institutional level soon, until a movement named Arte Útil was articulated through an archive which includes case studies from 1827 until today. Those projects use artistic thinking to imagine, create and implement tactics that change how we act within different fields such as politics, education, economy and so on.

This article will analyze some case studies and practices included in the Arte Arte Útil archive, situated right after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, which arose from a shared urgency. In particular, it will take into account those examples that challenge the fields within which they operate, such as environmental justice, climate emergency and sustainability. The main aspect that will be discussed is how socially engaged art practices in being extremely porous to the exchange with other disciplines such as science, architecture, law and so on, became a space where to imagine and enact real alternatives to be pursued in collaboration with citizens.

In particular, this text will discuss the intersection between projects, practices and working methodologies that were initiated by artists and art collectives in different regions of the world such as ‘Recetas Urbanas’ by Santiago Cirugueda, WochenKlausur and Ala Plastica.

KEYWORDS

Sustainability, Arte Útil, Environmental Justice, Socially Engaged Art, Decentralisation, Degrowth

I.

In the nineties, under the pressure of the new neoliberal policies implemented in various Western countries in the previous decade, and building on the legacy of the artistic avant-gardes of the sixties and seventies, a new type of art began to gain momentum. Labelled with a number of definitions – new genre public art, dialogical art, conversational art, community-based art, socially engaged art, activist art – the common thread that brought together all these experiences was a new relationship between the viewer and the artwork and the aim at deconstructing a specific system of production. As noted by Grant H. Kester, «this is less a formal art “movement” than it is an inclination that has developed in the projects of a number of artists and groups over the past thirty years» (Kester 2004).

Socially engaged art projects were initially characterised by solid roots in the legacy of the institutional critique, avant-garde, and post-conceptual artistic practices and were largely carried out within the public space. Neither object, nor concept-based, they relied on the active collaboration between the artist and the community, understood as co-creator but also public and final recipient of the work. Finally, political and social aims were at the core of these artworks, as well as methodologies of engagement, but largely distinguished by an aesthetic sensibility (Lacy 1995).

It is particularly relevant to reflect on the historical context in which these practices took place. The eighties were in fact a period of profound change, in many aspects of society, and in which we might identify the genealogies of various phenomena that later consolidated between the two centuries and that lay the foundations for the crisis of the Western cultural and productive model, which is still subject of analysis and deconstruction today. The consolidation of countercultures and the emergence of multiple political subjectivities and alternative areas of study, such as post-colonial and queer studies, have paved the way for new cultural, organizational and social models. As summarised by Manuel Borja-Villel:

«in much the same way that in the nineteenth century, the crisis of 1848 evidenced the fact that the bourgeoisie no longer represented the emerging social classes and that these would be organized on the basis of new political formations, the long eighties represented a period of wide-ranging reaction, whose end was marked by the irruption of the anti-globalization movements» (Borja Villel 2018).

During the eighties, it emerged a political, but above all, cultural crisis that produced a transnational and transdisciplinary movement aiming at a radical change. Like every realm of society, art too was hit by this need for renewal, to rethink its own form, role and meaning within a rapidly changing context. Within this framework, socially engaged art has thus placed itself as a creative and productive tool, combining an experimental approach to intersectional and political stands. Over the years these types of projects have focused on extremely different areas of intervention, from the art system, to institutions, to society in general, often pursuing a “glocal” vocation.

The current health emergency caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, has called into question many of the issues that emerged in those years. On a personal level, we acknowledged the precarity that characterizes the modern labour market and the progressive alienation and self-exploitation related to it; we were asked to reconsider our social relationships and habits in the light of a series of limitations, thus realizing our agency as makers and not just consumers of objects, events and services. At the collective level, we faced the fragility of the welfare state, weakened by years of privatization of public assets, financial cuts and austerity measures, and acknowledged the importance of self-organization and of a strong and resilient community. Significant examples in this sense were the informal groups born online and offline to buy food and medicines for those who could not go out or the shared and collective management of childcare, born in response to the closure of schools and nurseries. Furthermore, we recognized the need to rethink our current production system for greater social and environmental sustainability.

Already in the eighties, environmentalism witnessed a new renaissance, thanks to the no global and anti-nuclear movements among the others, and in strong correlation to the phenomenon of reclamation of the commons (Linebaugh 2014). This is even more true today, so much so that in the art field we have witnessed a great interest in projects that reflect on topics such as the Anthropocene.

In this context, socially engaged art projects are not only a tool for reflection, but mainly for the material construction of alternative practices, which can go beyond the boundaries of art to integrate into society. The sequence of events related to the development of the pandemic and its effects proved the interdependence between organisms, micro- and macro-systems. In this sense, socially engaged art practices might follow a similar pattern to the extent that artists act on a specific (micro) context to reveal general (macro) issues, hence leading to benefits that often transcend the limits of the community involved.

In analyzing a selection of case studies, both in their artistic and social value and heritage, the main aspect that we are going to discuss is how socially engaged art practices in being extremely porous to the exchange with other disciplines such as science, architecture, law and so on, became a space where to imagine and enact real alternatives to be pursued in collaboration with citizens.

Moreover, in transcending the material object to focus on the process and on the modalities of work, and in relying more on tangible effects on society than on technical and formal skills, socially engaged art brought to reconsider the role of the artist. In her work, Lacy detected four macro-categories: the artist as experiencer, as reporter, as analyst, as activist. Especially as regards this final role, artists have to reposition themselves as citizen-activists, diametrically opposed to the archetype of the isolated artist, and to develop a new range of strategies and skills: how to collaborate, how to develop multilayered and specific audiences, how to crossover with other disciplines, how to choose sites that resonate with public meaning, and how to clarify visual and process symbolism for people who are not educated in art (Lacy 1995).

II. The usological turn

One of the most interesting criteria that has been placed at the centre of the discussion in recent decades is that of “usership”. A concept that relates both to the type of purpose of the work and to the role of the individual with respect to the process. The concept of use in relation to the artistic practice is anything new, having been discussed already in the second half of the XX centuries by various artists, among which Juan O’Gorman (1933), Pino Poggi (1965), and Eduardo Costa (1969). However, foundational in this regard has been the work by Tania Bruguera, who initiated in 2011 the movement of Arte Útil, a collective research on the use of art, which suggests that it could be used as a tool or device to challenge, re-think and change people’s behaviour aiming at tangible social change:

«a way of working with aesthetic experiences that focus on the implementation of art in society where art's function is no longer to be a space for "signaling" problems, but the place from which to create the proposal and implementation of possible solutions. We should go back to the times when art was not something to look at in awe, but something to generate from. If it is political art, it deals with the consequences, if it deals with the consequences, I think it has to be useful art.»

Thus it represents a radical change of the role, function, and purpose of art within the terms and conditions of globalized neoliberalism. Quoting from its website, Arte Útil projects should: propose new uses for art within society; use artistic thinking to challenge the field within which it operates; respond to current urgencies; operate on a 1:1 scale; replace authors with initiators and spectators with users; have practical, beneficial outcomes for its users; pursue sustainability; re-establish aesthetics as a system of transformation. Therefore, use represents both a methodology and a principle that goes beyond art autonomy - a rhetoric strengthened within Modernism - to bring art back into everyday life and reconnecting it with all its audiences.

Overcome the binarism between art and life, we borrow Sara Ahmed concept of queer use (Ahmed 2019), namely using something in ways it was not conceived for or by those for whom it was not intended. As noted by Ahmed, the queerness of use is not a peaceful or obvious outcome as it requires an often-conflictual work of deconstruction and reclamation. Nevertheless, this is the reason why imagining and implementing new uses of old tools and practices is essential to create a world that goes beyond the current economic and political paradigm.

III. Sustainability and decentralization in the practice of WochenKlausur

In 1993 as a response to an invitation by the Secession in Vienna, WochenKlausur bought a white van which was transformed into a mobile clinic to provide medical assistance to homeless people who often gathered on Karlsplatz, the square in front of the exhibition space. Medical care for homeless people (WochenKlausur 2014) was born and it has been offering medical assistance to those in need since then; around six hundred people per month stand in line outside the van to receive some treatments and today users are not only homeless but also foreigners without health insurance. Caritas, a relief organization, became a substantial partner of the project from its very beginning, and meanwhile it provided new funding for the purchase of a larger vehicle, which is now offering assistance around the city five days per week (Asociación de Arte Útil 2015).

The project laid the basis for the methodology of the collective, who until today has produced forty-two interventions involving constituencies and citizens around the world. Following an invitation by an art institution, WochenKlausur’s working strategy is to respond to a specific urgency with a proposal situated within the field in which it should operate, healthcare for example, using art as a tool to change the very same field, in a very compact timeframe. The collective consists of a core group of six people who are based in Austria; however, there is a certain level of flexibility in including other members from other countries. So far around hundred artists and other practitioners have been part of WochenKlausur and they are invited to join according to each project. The time frame is what allows the collective to work full time for a period between four and twelve weeks, therefore specific time commitment is pivotal during the research and the delivery of the project. That is one of the reasons why WochenKlausur has been developing a sort of protocol to render their practice as much sustainable as possible in order to be effective and produce small but real change.

They sought to place focus on understanding the relationships that exist between different forms of organizations (for example between the municipality and relief associations in the same city) and work - if possible - with the same organizations, to provoke structural change and to hold them responsible. Consequently, the production of the artwork is based on uncountable conversations, dialogues and the establishment of collaboration with people on location such as journalists, politicians and other members of the civil society. Such a new line-up, constitutes a temporary and provisional community whose work persists beyond it (Kester 2004). Concepts such as consumption and accumulation are hardly part of the collective’s methodology, in fact their artworks are not always suitable for the exhibition space and they do not circulate on the traditional art market. For example, if Medical care for homeless people would be subtracted to its use and installed in a gallery, it would lose its meaning as an artwork. The van has a double ontological status (Wright 2013) so that the work can be perceived simultaneously as what it is (a van providing medical care) and the artistic proposition of the very same thing (an art project in the form of a van).

WochenKlausur is conscious that «artists alone can’t change the world. Neither can anyone else, alone. But we can choose to be part of the world that is changing» (Lippard 1984). They use what is already available in the world, they problematize and unpack the very same issue they tackle, and through research they design a small change to improve the condition of people who are most affected by the issue. The result of their intervention which often operates in politics, social work, ecology, education, economy and so on, provokes a change in the routine until then. Therefore, it demonstrates the potential that art has in fostering and producing something which goes beyond their mere intervention and physical presence. Such intervention becomes embedded in the real world and it is carried on by other constituencies that appropriate the work in and of itself.

This is the case of Problem solving through networking (2012) a more recent project that pushes the boundaries of the immateriality of the action and the notion of authorship. The Alaska Design Forum invited the collective to witness the precarious living conditions of 374 inhabitants of Kivalina, an island located in Northwest Arctic Borough, Alaska. Kivalina has been threatened by rising sea levels and coastal erosion due to climate change and it is likely to be completely submerged by 2025 (Sackur, 2013) causing the first American climate refugees. Living conditions on the island are extremely precarious, inhabitants do not have access to clean running water for example, a system of waste disposal does not exist, and it is impossible to produce food locally due to shortage of land. Sooner or later people would need to be relocated elsewhere and this could cost up to $400m to the government of the United States. WockenKlausur teamed up with a group of transdisciplinary experts in Kivalina and around the world, and created Re-Locate (Relocate-AK 2012), a network of web-based platforms to highlights the «social, political, and environmental issues related to relocation visible to local audiences«. Despite the difficult task of creating a sustainable solution in such a precarious context, they succeed in facilitating the conception of a series of mobile infrastructures such as water and sanitation systems, that could be used not only on location but by other communities who are planning to relocate due to the same issue. Working from the Gallery space-turn-office of the Austrian Cultural Forum in New York, they prepared the ground for a series of relationships between organizations to develop, and they used their position of privilege to lobby for the cause of Kivalina’s inhabitants.

If we consider this artwork retrospectively, it is evident how these kinds of projects shift the perception from the short-term and fast solution (proper of the neoliberal and capitalist framework) toward a durational, sustainable, decentralised and imaginative thinking which is proper of the artists (Kester 2004). In order for this to happen, the artists must shift from their position as authors to that of the initiators, thus opening their methodology to the constituents’ propositions for them to claim ownership of the intervention-as-project.

IV. They said yes, because they thought it was impossible

Recetas Urbanas (Urban Recipes) was initiated by architect Santiago Cirugeda, who after seven years of independent practice since 1996, decided to collectivize his working process focusing in particular, on the legal aspects that regulate both the use and the abandonment of the public space. The studio includes architects, lawyers and social workers who explore and expand the notion of “a-legality” between government, market, public and private space, and how those intersect and use the art context to create common infrastructures. Alegal is a Spanish term that can be translated as unregulated, but it goes further suggesting an act that is deliberately committed to disrupting because there is not yet a specific law declaring that act illegal. It is a concept that goes beyond the idea of creating a loophole «to describe what the law has been unable to recognize, and therefore regulate» (Bruguera 2017). The term has been theorized to fit within the Arte Útil discourse by Tania Bruguera who affirms that using A-Legal as a methodology means playing with art’s autonomy as a tool for permissibility. She continues: «combining artistic creativity with knowledge of the law, one can create a situation that remains unregulated and therefore free to propose a new way to operate, both socially and politically».

Recetas Urbanas’ methodology is based on a practical approach where action drives planning toward the resolution of specific issues. Urgencies are often pointed out by a group of citizens who invite the studio to collaborate with them, therefore «the relationship between citizenship and public space becomes a dialectical framework and a challenge that raises the possibility of personal and community responsibility when intervening in cities» (Guzmán 2018). According to Cirugeda the transformation aimed at improving the public space is almost impossible for an individual citizen in Spain, even if in theory, as a citizen, obtaining permits for temporary interventions should be a straightforward procedure. Recetas Urbanas operates within the gap between bureaucracy and real needs through temporary architectural interventions, delegating power to citizens. Therefore, collaborators are enabled to challenge those laws that initially were an obstacle for the realization of a project, and at the same time, what they imagined becomes possible on a 1:1 scale (Wright 2013).

Recetas Urbanas engages every collaborator in setting up a temporary workshop which is going to be used as the headquarter in order to deliver and build the project. Often, citizens-as-commissioners-as-collaborators are not trained as architects, so the studio provides an initial plan with the idea of creating a common space that the community decides to manage with its own means, driven by specific daily needs (Garcia 2018). After a project is completed the studio gathers all the procedures such as strategies, protocols, self-building and tips on how to recycle materials, creative and educational tools, legal and economic resources, and eventually they publish every project on their website which functions as a free database to allow other people to use the urban recipes within their own context. Additionally, the website functions as a legitimation tool in front of those authorities who might be skeptical about their technical construction criteria. Documenting other experiences of collectives who used Recetas Urbanas’ proposals in other countries, adds an additional layer of agency and validation to the collective in and of itself.

Not every building is going to be permanent such as the case of Conviviality Room (2015), a canteen for the Europa school in Dos Hermanas neighbourhood in Seville. However, every material is always recycled into another project either temporary or permanent according to specific regulations, most of the time regarding safety. Sustainability then becomes not only an aim but also a strategy: in the case of Conviviality Room in fact, parents’ demand for a children’s canteen stayed unanswered for 8 years. Until parents decided to invite Recetas Urbanas who proposed a cheaper plan thanks to the community's ability to take part in the solution by using and organizing their own resources. In the words of one of the mothers who took part in the self-building process: «They (the management of the school and the City Council’s representatives) said yes, because they thought it was impossible» (Pelegrina 2020). Moreover, learning by doing became a pedagogical process for the children who took part in the self-building, witnessed the power of teamwork and sustainability, and it showed them that being an active and committed citizen is possible.

Cirugeda tries to address Recetas Urbanas’ recognition within the art context explaining how he has been always looking at the notion of creativity as a flexible territory which enables his and other collaborators’ actions. Often, creativity opens up a space of imagination which stays unforeseen by the system, so that practitioners can take advantage of it and share the benefits for a common cause. In his words: «since the beginning with La Casita I have had an on-off relationship with art, but whenever we have interacted with it, we have done so with the idea and intention of taking advantage of it: to make it useful» (Guzmán 2018). Ultimately, the practice of Recetas Urbanas operates on the border between art and architecture, where a building becomes the result of an artistic process intended as an extraterritorial reciprocity (Wright 2013). In fact, when art vacates in a gesture of reciprocity (to architecture in this case), it leaves a space for other social practices to use (collective responsibility in common building); and it is precisely the case of Recetas Urbanas: the impossibility to situate itself without the context within which it operates.

V. The rhizomatic approach of Ala Plástica: when nature and nurture meet in art

Since 1991, the practice of Ala Plástica has been deeply rooted in the bio-regional context of the Río de La Plata Estuary, an area that welcomes the water which runs across Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Paraguay and Uruguay. In a region that is approximately one third of the United States of America and almost the same size of the European Union, the unidirectional development based on hyper extractivism and the building of large-scale hydroelectric projects supported by the government, has been causing high water pollution, flooding, erosion of coasts with the consequent displacement of its inhabitants and the loss of biodiversity in the whole area. In addition to this, the underdevelopment of infrastructures, lack of environmental education and the destruction of riverside culture are the result of years of almost unregulated exploitation of the land due to social and political turmoil in the country.

In 1995 Ala Plástica partnered with botanist Nuncia María Tura, other scientists, producers of a native reed species, environmental activists and political representatives to activate a series of exercises as part of Emergent Species in order to reverse the process which caused the loss of the local ecosystem. The intervention was intended as an environmental restoration initiative aimed in particular at the reparation of the coastal areas around Punta Lara, a town located at the fringe of the metropolitan area of Buenos Aires (Coleman 2016). Taking the California bulrush – a rhizome native to the region – as the main material for the development of the exercise, they were able to articulate a series of interventions carried on in conversation with the local residents, in a context where nature is driving life, whether at the same time going through a process of decay. Botanically speaking California bulrush (Schoenoplectus californicus) is an ‘emergent species’, which means that thanks to the rhizomatic patterns of its roots, it stabilizes the soil in holding new sediments that are used by other plants to grow, and at the same time purifying the water that flows through the plants themselves. Emergent Species as a 1:1 scale intervention, pushed the boundaries of what was perceived and understood as artwork; the result was about recreating an ecosystem in danger of being lost forever using art merely as an alibi to intervene, and it enabled a self-organizing process within the community of practice. The intervention in fact, used nature’s self-restorative capacity highlining its own articulation (Coleman 2016).

Thus Emergent Species might be exemplary if we consider the principle of the coefficient of art (Wright 2013) in the context of the “usological turn” fostered by a movement such as Arte Útil. Ala Plástica’s practice can be taken as an example for clarifying the shift from the object of art to the process of art, through socio-environmental rescue initiatives. According to the “usological turn” in fact, there is no separation between what exists as a work of art, and what does not; therefore, the coefficient of art becomes a characteristic which is present potentially in everything being it inside or outside the framework of the art context. This definition shifts the question from whether or not a certain object or process is art, to how much art is in it (Saviotti 2020). In Ala Plástica’s own words «these initiatives will be relative not only to these plants’ behavior, but also to the emerging character of new ideas and practices when faced with the decaying state of relationship networks, as well as to a kind of positioning as a means of survival» (Ala Plástica 2015).

The method used by the collective is dialogic nevertheless very practical in terms of materials, tools and beneficial outcomes. The ultimate aim is the articulation of collective forces (Ala Plástica 2007) in order to have an impact on the lives of the people they work with, generating a toolkit for others to be potentially used. One of the basic elements for regenerating an immune social system is communication and the recovery of the community’s power to take action. «That is where we will find the value experiences to reside, among multiple levels of significance, translating itself into an assortment of references as concrete as the life of those involved, and which then becomes a solar panel, a plant nursery, a communications module or some large shed» (Ala Plástica 2007).

Like for the other case studies analyzed previously, the strength of Ala Plástica’s practice lies in approaching its collaborators and the context where they situate their practice, as authors. Together they re-evaluate the potential of art to reimagine the landscape and find means to act for bettering their living conditions and suggesting new ways of achieving it together.

VI. Conclusions

We would like to conclude this article looking at some similarities of the above-mentioned case studies in particular regarding the durational aspect of their practices, the use of dialogical and collaborative forms as a public pedagogy to foster change through usership, and finally their relation with the real. WochenKlausur, Recetas Urbanas and Ala Plástica’s approach to collaboration through dialogue creates the condition for claiming ownership before the final work, and at the same time it fosters the possibility to reproduce a shared experience with others (Helguera 2011). Rather than merely reacting to an issue, the artists try to understand how to intervene together with the constituency which is directly interested by the issue (in the case of this article, environmental emergency) providing art tools that operate on a 1:1 scale. In this way, art becomes operational rather than representational (Byrne 2020) and it eventually creates a bridge between art and non-trained contemporary art communities. Because such case studies navigate the realm of double ontology, they function by using tools, subjects and strategies that normally belong to other fields – such as the legal, the architectural and the environmental respectively - leaving the territory of the self-referential art-based context behind (Rancière 2010). However, precisely because they are officially situated within the art context being either supported or commissioned by museums and other art institutions, they move temporarily into a space of ambiguity which opens the doors to the intervention of other constituents, who become agents of change. The hybrid and multidisciplinary approach of Arte Útil-related projects therefore exists where art and non-art intersect, causing a constant process of inquiry that acts as a public pedagogy for placing art in the public arena for supporting a political struggle. In fact, the knowledge produced through these case studies does not end in knowing what those artworks are about or present, but it becomes a tool for understanding the world (Helguera 2011), and consequently imagine the future differently.

If the principles of Arte Útil enable artists in being honest with the real (Garcés 2012) it means that artworks should not just include «the vision of victims to the image of the world, but change at root our way of looking at it and understanding it. This change can only and necessarily lead to combating the forms of power that cause so much suffering (…) Commitment as a condition of the creator and intervention as a horizon of his or her creative activity» (Garcés 2012). As a consequence, the emancipation of usership is both the method and the goal, which goes hand in hand with the idea of creating the condition for sustainability, both in terms of artistic practice and in terms of impact on everyday life.

If the path to follow in order to provoke change through art seems very clear for some when usership is employed as a praxis, nonetheless it blurs when we look at its long-term effect within the non-art context. In the light of the constant climate and health emergency caused by the unbalanced relation between humans and the rest of the living beings, the impact of art on a large scale seems still a mirage. However, the artists’ practices discussed in this article imagine the world otherwise and create tools to be used by constituencies to make that vision real. Nevertheless, the goal is not that of replacing or making up for government’s failures, because this would imply endorsing existing methods of economic production and social organization. The key to open the doors of governmental policies seems there; yet how to reach those doors is still an open and possibly conflictual question. Arte Útil’s criteria suggests possible principles to follow in order to foster change mainly through a transdisciplinary and operational approach, and its archive shows how successful those attempts to change the world were. However, a number of conceptual and practical knots are still open to debate, for example as noted by Larne Abse Gogarty, in refusing its socio-economic relation to exchange value within capitalism, the concept of usership could still be too easily tied to productive and reproductive structures that fall within more traditional categories (Abse Gogarty 2017).

On the one hand, artists should start to change first the context they know better, such as museums for example, and then allow users to hack the art institutions and disperse its knowledge in other contexts, for others to use. On the other, it is imperative to acknowledge that usership brings with it a radicality that affects not only the artistic realm, but also the political, intended as every aspect of social life.

ABSTRACT

One year after the pandemic’s start it became undeniable that human life represents just a small element in the universe, nevertheless, it brought one of its planets, the Earth, to the tipping point. Understanding and eventually acknowledging that micro-and macrocosm are interconnected and determine whether human beings, animals, plants, and all the other living beings are going to thrive, it has become imperative to think about how to leave bad habits behind and start fresh for a better future.