Other Ways
By Gloria G. Durán
Whenever we try to think about socially engaged artistic projects, processes or practices, we enter into a rich reflection that often leads us to the impossibility of a single answer. I have to say that this is precisely what makes these practices so fascinating and complex. It is obvious that the four projects that are being developed in Concomitentes are as fascinating as they are complex, interesting and open to infinite possibilities. Each one seeks to have an impact in a new way, with a new political imagination, with a range of unforeseen proposals, in the territories and contexts in which they set out to work. In fact, one concomitance is the deliberate or coincidental coincidence of two or more factors in the production of an effect. In this case the meeting of civil society and artists deliberately coming together to bring about change or invent new ways of doing things.
The four concomitances, in the Library of Fine Arts of the UCMin the Paediatric ICU of Santa Cruz de Tenerife, in Legacy Care in Betanzos, y Diversorium in Barcelona deliberately“ seek this coincidence. They seek to update the ways of making and using a university library; to elucidate how artistic practices can help to manage the emotions of children in a situation of trauma; to re-signify and give value to the encyclopaedic park in the Galician region of Betanzos; or to advance towards social justice in the integration of diversity. Clear aims that have activated the meeting of agents involved with artists. Meetings that raise questions and offer diverse possibilities for action, testing and organisation.
All these attempts involve the transition from the strictly social to the artistic and vice versa. That's why I want to bring up two projects that raise these questions from their very title. One is by Ian Nesbitt, who presents your project New Ways, It is a kind of quest, a pilgrimage in which he meets people from different villages in the south of England, asking for that social bond that seems to have been lost and for fresh ideas to face the challenges of a new world.. He asserts that we lack political imagination and that, by thinking together, perhaps we will arrive at these “new ways”. He walks along a medieval map that adds another layer of symbolism to his artistic being.
«His artistic aim is to generate a community, to collaborate, to connect, to converse in a growing encounter. A connecting artist towards finding possible answers. The photo shows him with his staff and his huge poster Another Future, it reads. Another Future. A book finishes off the project, a book in which he pours out what he has discovered and the floating community that he is shaping».»
Yes Claire Bishop If I were to talk about this practice, maybe I would look at that book, that cultural product. If it were Grant Kester would look at the condition of that conversation which, although it takes place, does not manage to be plotted, does not manage to generate a real being together. The question is whether or not it really needs to be plotted socially and politically. For some theorists To be named as collaborative practices implies that there must be a weft that somehow makes the initiatives proposed by artists follow a vital drift in the territory in question. For others, as long as the symbolic value of the artistic action is respected, it would suffice. The projects of Concomitentes have a great advantage in that they emerge from a community that is already woven into the territory in which it operates. New ways are invented from and based on the agents already involved. The paradoxical and interesting question would be whether or not the figure of a professional artist is needed to provide ideas in order to face the solution of a long-distance process in a common action.
To illustrate this paradox inherent to these practices, I will now focus on a character that we tend to forget and who is, for me, foundational and fundamental. I am referring to Allan Kaprow, who has become a sort of auratic figure for the whole generation that was formed under the influence of Mapping the Terrain, New Genre Public Art (1995), The collection of essays edited by Susanne Lacy wanted to do exactly that, to give an account of those ways of making art that had been taking place for decades outside the institution and that intentionally situated their projects and processes between ethics and aesthetics, between the social and the eminently artistic, between radical experimentation and activism.
«Allan Kaprow used this book, twenty-five years later, to reflect on a project he developed at Berkeley between 1968 and 1970. His essay entitled ‘Making other ways: success and failure when art changes‘masterfully frames the problems inherent in these practices, those problems that may not need to be solved».»
“Making other ways” sought to influence the literacy of the marginalised population of the Bay Area, The aim of the project was to use artistic means to think about the future of education, not education in the arts, but education in general. In tandem with Herbert Kohl and with a scholarship from the Carnegie Corporation set out to develop an educational experiment that would place art at the centre of daily work in the Berkeley school district. In the essay, Kaprow reflects on his project, which was a social experiment in its day and which, once incorporated into artistic discourse a quarter of a century later, could be studied as art. He begins his analysis by acknowledging that his experiment aimed to improve literacy with the means he knew, those of art, and was therefore inspired by what artists were doing in the 1960s. He looked at the Gutai, The Japanese performance experimenters, in the Happening (which he himself was conceptualising), the new realisms, the fluxus, noise music, chance poetry, life theatre, found actions, the body works, earthworks, conceptual art and a long list of etceteras. All the young people who came to his project as “unable to become literate”, mostly African-American and Hispanic, managed, after two years of practical exercises of the most artistic kind, to read and write a little better.
The rules of art in the 1960s did not assimilate their experiment as art, but Kaprow and Kohl did set the precedent for affirming that the more experimental artistic terrains, those that wanted to merge with life, initially nourished these practices. They eventually paved the way for its institutionalisation by paving the way for the social turn. When in 1995 Kaprow had the opportunity to reflect on the project in that art book, he asks himself whether this action becomes art? Moreover, if so, is it good art or bad art? For him, for whom the ambiguity of art is its most precious characteristic, this ungraspability, this impossibility of being reduced to a concept, encourages him to think that such an experiment, which balanced on the fine line between art and the social, could be good art.
And returning to where we started, it is clear that this impossibility of being reduced to a concept, these open questions without a clear answer that framed the Concomitentes laboratories and the projects themselves make us think that we are on the right track. They could be thought of as laboratories, places where possible models of future work are prototyped, where, in a way, futures are invented. Places where to develop proposals without purpose, that can challenge the mind, that generate more questions, that activate our imagination to look for new models. Nesbitt's New Ways and Karpow's Other Ways: two examples separated by sixty years. Two artists who give very similar titles to their practices. Other ways of doing, which will always be ambiguities, possibilities, paradoxes and very open endings for others to seek. other ways y new ways, Once again, back and forth. A back and forth that I believe each of the four projects deserves not only to be paved but to be continued and pursued.
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