The social throughout: A multisited ethnographic case study of socially engaged art at the gallery

Social practice is an approach to art-making predicated on participant involvement in the creation of an artwork. It is often made and disseminated in public spaces like parks, community centers, or schools and by artists who want to work with a variety of people. The presence of social practice within a gallery is, therefore, indicative of an artist’s willingness to have their work enfolded into discourse with institutional systems, resources, histories, audiences, and politics. Though art institutions are increasingly hosting and facilitating socially engaged art projects, little scholarship addresses how this form of art shapes and is shaped by the gallery. Furthermore, institutions, artists, and the academics who analyze social practice tend to tell stories about this form of art that focus on final culminating events and neglect the all-important relational exchanges that transpire throughout a work. This represents a major loss of knowledge about socially engaged art because, as Helguera (2011) has argued, social practice is primarily a dematerialized form of art that lives on through the stories (images, texts, etc.) that are shared about the work. This dissertation addresses this gap with a multi-sited ethnographic case study of two social practice artworks created at two public galleries, one in Canada and one in the United States. This methodological approach leveraged participant observations and interviews to get insight into the lifecycle of each project, as well as how artists’ and gallery workers’ perspectives, objectives, and priorities shifted over the course of the work.\n\nThis study found that, in these two cases, understanding the relational experiences that transpired before, during, and after culminating social practice events—what I call the social throughout—required a shift away from the notion of a final artwork. Working from deSouza’s (2018) articulation of art as “process” (p. 29) and Jackson’s (2011) argument that social practice should be examined based on how it responds to its “supporting apparatuses” (p. 33), this research shows how the durational examination of this form of art can illuminate the often surprising, banal, and fraught interdependencies of a work. At one site, I used this analytic lens to identify how the support apparatus of settler colonialism contributed to a local phenomenon of participation fatigue: exhaustion brought on by frequent and repeating requests from outsiders to participate in story collection artworks and research projects. At my second site, I distinguished how documentation images of socially engaged art represented and created new social aspects of a work. I further assert the value of expanded forms of documentation that incorporate the social throughout into a project's storytelling. This dissertation contributes to the field of socially engaged art and the overlapping practice-focused fields of gallery education, curation, and public programming by developing new knowledge about the under-attended topic of institutionally supported social practice. By expanding the analytic focus of socially engaged art to include the social throughout, this research provides insights that artists, gallery workers, and participants can leverage in their collaborations.

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