Issue 162 April 2014

Whats the Use?

STATE OF THE ART

Museums take on social practice

Its time to put Duchamps urinal back in the restroom! This catchy call to arms belongs to
Tania Bruguera. A few years ago, the Queens Museum of Art took the Cuban artist at her
word, inviting her to install a replica of Fountain (1917) in the New York institutions
toilets. This was a neat idea: a symbolic representation of the feeling, familiar right now,
that symbolic representations might no longer be enough. A day later, though, Duchamps
R. Mutt signature had vanished, cleaned away by maintenance staff. Perhaps this
accidental erasure was only appropriate. Even in a museum, art becomes harder to discern
once its been put to work.
The recently expanded Queens Museum has been an important ally in Brugueras quest
for arte til. This Spanish phrase means useful art which, depending on your mood,
sounds either tautologous or oxymoronic though also has the difficult-to-translate sense
of a tool or device. For the last dozen years, Bruguera has been refining and complicating
this idea via several major projects: an art academy in her Havana home (200209),
Immigrant Movement International in Queens (2011ongoing) and, most recently, the
exhibition Museum of Arte til at the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven (201314). Despite
having close ties with conventional organizations, all of these initiatives function like spiky
counter-institutions or alternative propositions. To paraphrase another of Brugueras
maxims, she doesnt want an art that points at the thing, she wants an art that is the thing.
In this, shes not alone. Its been a high-profile year for useful art, even if theres little
agreement on what to call it (current front-runners are social practice or socially engaged
art). Last year, Laurie Jo Reynoldss remarkable legislative art initiative, Tamms Year
Ten (200813), succeeded in closing the notorious Tamms supermax prison in Illinois. As
she noted, Out of solitary confinement came solidarity. In recognition, Reynolds a
participant in Museum of Arte til was awarded the Leonore Annenberg Prize for Art
and Social Change at the 2013 Creative Time Summit: the wildly popular, slickly
evangelical annual event that celebrates the confluence between art and social justice.
Useful art has also received a level of mainstream exposure: last year, The New York

Times published an article titled Outside the Citadel, Social Practice Art Is Intended to
Nurture, which name-checked Bruguera, while, in January, The New Yorker ran a lengthy
profile of Theaster Gates. The latter piece was titled The Real-Estate Artist symptomatic
of the more breathless accounts of useful art, framing social practice as little more than entrepreneurial activism. Where governments fail, artists lead the way!
Plaudits have been punctuated by quiet, insistent criticisms. In a penetrating essay titled A
Critique of Social Practice Art, published in the International Socialist Review last July,
the New York-based critic Ben Davis questioned what happens when such projects actually
divert attention from the true extent of broader social malaise. His case study was Rick
Lowes Project Row Houses (1993ongoing) in Houstons Third Ward district. Comprising
the renovation of some six blocks of shotgun housing, this is, quite rightly, one of the most
lauded examples of social practice. But the citys housing crisis has not improved in the
past two decades. Instead, it has got drastically worse: the number of people living in lowincome neighbourhoods has doubled in the last decade alone. And what happens when art
is useful for the wrong people, a front for property developers or ambitious councils?
Persistent allegations of abetting gentrification are never far away. Lowe himself is aware
of this. At last years Creative Time Summit, he even wondered whether community art
isnt itself being gentrified by upwardly mobile social practitioners.
As Bruguera knows, the term useful art isnt a new one. Back in 1969, the Argentinian
artist Eduardo Costa wrote a Manifiesto de Arte til, describing the first of what he called
his Useful Art Works. These included buying replacements for missing street signs in
midtown Manhattan and painting a subway station on Fifth Avenue. You could trace the
impulse even further back: in the US, to John Deweys argument, in his book Art as
Experience(1934), that nothing is more useful than art; or, in the uk, to John Ruskin, who
famously cautioned in The Stones of Venice (1853) that the most beautiful things in the
world are the most useless. Today, Ruskin is something of a guiding spirit for Grizedale
Arts in the Lake District. His reformist approach infuses their energetic activities, such as
the honesty shop and the Liam Gillick-designed library they set up in their local Coniston
Institute, which Ruskin himself helped rebuild in 1878. Grizedale was one of several
partners of Museum of Arte til, which temporarily transfigured the Van Abbes old
building into what was described as a social power plant.
Developed in conversation with Bruguera, this project prompted a number of pressing
questions, including how do we use a museum? And, if the public museum remains an
essentially late 18th century institution, how do we make it relevant for today? In an

interview screened in one of the galleries, the Van Abbes director, Charles Esche, called for
nothing less than the abolition of the museum as it currently exists. In an essay
commissioned for Museum of Arte til, the theorist Stephen Wright claimed that recent
decades have seen a usological turn. Whether or not this unattractive phrase will catch on
(I vote no), a major component of this provocative project is a switching of terms. Viewers
become users; works are initiated rather than authored, and were ordered according to
updated though, it has to be said, slightly 1990s-sounding categories: A-Legal, Space
Hack, Open Access. This wasnt so much a new museum as a parody of the authoritative
classifications of yore. With Brugueras own gallery in Museum of Arte til titled the
Room of Propaganda, Legitimation and Belief, it was for the most part tongue-in-cheek
the zeal only winkingly messianic. It was the sound, not always pleasant, of the museum
thinking about itself, and about what usefulness might mean.
Sam Thorne
Sam Thorne is Artistic Director of Tate St Ives, uk, a founding director of Open School
East and a contributing editor of frieze.