Examining the Social in Practice

Alistair Hudson: In 2018 I was appointed director of The Whitworth and Manchester Art Gallery, which were both conceived as places of social art practice to give the citizens of Manchester a healthy way of living and a good education in design and aesthetics. These were institutions that had a purpose. Platt Hall, in the south side of the city, is part of this museum portfolio and is being reconfigured as a new kind of institution, one that is not based on the idea of the exhibition but on the ideas of action and activity and how that can work in a positive way for the people who live nearby. The underpinning of my thinking about museums has been developed with fellow travellers, in particular the artist Tania Bruguera. We are co-directors of Arte Útil (Useful Art), which is a way of moving beyond social practice to thinking about art which is active in society.

This means changing the mindset of art as a set of objects and thinking about art as a process that we apply in all walks of life and for greater social benefit.

Jacqueline Donachie: As an artist I make artworks that are objects but I also do public events – I don’t really know at what point what I do stops or starts being socially engaged. There are two projects that I’d like to talk about. Slow Down was initially realised in Huntly, a town in rural Scotland in 2009.

I’m very interested in how people use public space and the things that limit people’s access to it, so we organised a day for the public to do a cycle ride. One of my roles was to establish the cycle routes and work out how to make these visible. A plastic water bottle with powdered chalk was gaffer taped to the bicycle with a dragger on the bottom, which left lines of chalk behind as you cycled. The day finished with a  lunch at a quarry on the outskirts of the town. It is important for me that my work has an element of getting people to take part, but also that you celebrate the process of making the work.

The second project is Advice Bar (Expanded for the Times), which was part of my exhibition Right Here Among Them at Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh (2017). It was based on a work that I made in 1995 in New York where I ran a bar at my studio offering drinks in exchange for problems and Advice Bar was then recreated at various other locations.3 More than 20 years later I felt that it was time to do it again but on a larger scale. The people that took part really responded to an unbrokered opportunity to speak one-to-one with someone about a problem that they had. We invited experts to participate in response to themes like immigration, benefits and housing. At a one-off event at the gallery, the bar was staffed by a law clinic and a number of other Edinburgh charities were involved. One of the things that I hadn’t anticipated was that the different organisations met each other, which is something that I feel art galleries and art practice can do – be catalysts for connecting people and establishing new relationships.

Catriona Whiteford: How do you both approach projects to ensure that the collective activity doesn’t become unpaid labour and becomes something more in the realm of ‘a creative celebration’?

Alistair Hudson: This is a very live discussion at the moment. How you remunerate people for the labour that they expend becomes quite complex – this argument could be extended to people who just visit the museum being paid – for increasing the cultural value of the museum. However, I don’t think we’re quite there yet, because paying people can also be a form of power and of abuse, but we certainly pay people who make contributions to projects and we include that in our budgets. A lot of the Arte Útíl work is initiated by artists, but projects are run by the communities who benefit from them most. One example is Jeanne van Heeswijk’s Homebaked, part of the Liverpool Biennial 2012, which started out as an art project that resurrected a defunct bakery as a community enterprise and is now running as a genuine business, not a performance of one. People are paid to work there but it is still an art project.

Jacqueline Donachie: I don’t like to ask people to do things for me if I am not able to pay them. If I’m asking people to do something for nothing, even though there is an engagement level with being involved, I think it is important not to assume that people can give you their time for nothing.

Catriona: What are your views on going outside of the institution or working with communities in a digital way during the COVID-19 pandemic?

Jacqueline: I feel strongly that artists are not social workers and they should not be sent into situations that are better placed for trained social workers. As an example, a lot of people in my family really rely on social workers so I see how important that service is, and I also see art students sent into situations that they are totally unqualified to be in under the guise of community arts and I find that really difficult. 

Artists are not there to replace a service that should be there, so in some ways I disagree a bit with some of the things that Alistair was talking about – about art not only highlighting problems but actually solving them. I think my voice is important, but I wouldn’t take my voice away just because I’m not able to solve everything. That’s where the voluntary sector, the third sector, is so important, but this situation has evolved out of a lack of a proper safety net in the level of social care provided by government.

Alistair: Yes, I think it’s a moment to say that not all art should be ‘useful art’. There are many art worlds and there isn’t one version of art. Artists shouldn’t have to be social workers but they can be if they want to be and equally social workers can be artists too. In fact, when I see how the world sometimes operates, I often think how much better it would be if things were done with a bit more artistry – a bit more care and consideration. To an extent, Arte Útil opens up the possibility for what art might be and how it might work within all walks of life. In Manchester we have turned one gallery into a Sure Start centre permanently because health visitors found that when you do this kind of work in an art gallery, using artists and a creative aesthetic environment, the outcomes are incredibly different and can affect the development of children pre-school in significant ways.

Jacqueline: That connects with ideas explored by the Artist Placement Group that emerged in the 1960s where artists were given placements in businesses or industry. Artists are so good at questioning things. The way of looking at the world that many artists have can be of real benefit to many organisations.

Alistair: A huge concern for me is the way in which the alt-right has really cornered the understanding of art and the way it can be utilised within politics and economics. For example, the American news channel Breitbart is on record declaring ‘politics is downstream from culture’; the UK Vote Leave Brexit lobby used highly emotive cultural strategies to win votes; and Putin’s former chief advisor comes from a background in avant-garde theatre and used those ‘tactics of confusion’ to political effect. It is almost as if the left has forgotten how to harness these resources in the way that they used to a hundred years ago – for productive change. This polarisation that we are seeing at the moment in many countries globally signals there’s a problem in talking about aesthetics and art because it’s become so enwrapped with an elitist version of what art is. I think there’s a real challenge that’s being laid at the door of art and its institutions to make this work in a more positive way.

Catriona: How do you see the role of artists progressing within the museum?

Alistair: At the moment I’m pushing for the idea of a museum that moves beyond just staging exhibitions, which translates, for example, as rehanging our permanent collections at Manchester Art Gallery in a way that seeks to have social effect and relevance. The new themes of our times are migration, colonisation, health, economics and work, not the Grand Tour or the ‘Pursuit of Beauty’. Our collection displays on work, labour and the Pre-Raphaelites – which was a political social movement in the mid-1800s – are currently playing host to a project with artist Suzanne Lacy. Lacy is working with older people at the intersection of race and class to advocate for a change in policy towards the precarious labour conditions of older women in the city.

Jacqueline: What people see in their museums is critical because socially engaged practice isn’t new, it’s just been given a title.

City museums are really important public spaces where you can have your first opportunity to engage with things that are not your domestic environment or your school – essentially it’s about who participates in culture and thinking how do they do that?

Alistair: In a way art has become entrapped in meaning rather than use. The meaning is controlled by both the market and established museum culture, and what you need to do is liberate art objects so that people can use them in their daily lives in ways that has meaning for them, not meanings that are instructed to them.

This kind of radical shift needs to take place and is deeply rooted in the idea of art as social process.

Jacqueline Donachie is an artist and winner of the 2016 Freelands Award with Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh.

Alistair Hudson is Director, The Whitworth and Manchester Art Gallery.

Catriona Whiteford is Freelands Artist Programme Curator.

This essay was originally published in 'Aggregate' in 2022.

The publication and accompanying exhibition marked the second cohort of artists part of the Freelands Artist Programme – an initiative run by Freelands Foundation to champion artistic practice and support relationships and collaborations between artists and arts organisations across the UK.