Interventionist Art Education: Contingent Communities, Social Dialogue, and Public Collaboration.

"What types of knowledge could be produced through art education if it were conceived as a form of social collaboration drawing on forms associated with interventionist art?"Many contemporary artists conceive, produce, and present their work beyond established parameters of traditional art practice. Moving outside the cultural centers of artistic distribution, such as museums and galleries, and into the spaces of daily life and experience establishes more direct contact with an audience, and subsequently, with the flow and character of social life. To the extent that the work infiltrates public social spaces, it can be understood as a type of social intervention. Specifically, the work challenges conventional notions of art as an autonomous object around which dialogue accumulates, often in the form of critical discourse, public debate, or historical analysis and positions the process of social exchange as the constitutive component of the work. Artwork of this kind "develop[s] a new aesthetic and theoretical paradigm of the work of art as a process - a locus of discursive exchange and negotiation" (Kester, 2004, p. 12). Contradicting forms of art that are frequently born of introspection and solitary production, this work represents an interest in "engaging with projects that are organized around a collaborative, rather than specular, relationship with the viewer" (p. 11).This type of artistic practice has historical precedence in community-based art and cultural activism. Kester (2004) identifies various terms that have been used in reference to this sort of practice including: Suzanne Lacy's (1995) "new genre" public art; Ian Hunterand Celia Larner'sterm /irrora/ art developed in reference to their series of conferences organized around activist art practices that "evoke the hybrid or in-between nature of these practices" (Kester, 2004, p. 10); Nicolas Bourriaud's (2002) relational aesthetics; Homi Bhabha's (1998) "conversational art"; Finkelpearl, Acconci, and Ebrary Inc.'s (2000) "dialogue-based public art"; and dialogical art, a term derived from the Bahktinian literary notion that a work of art can be understood as a kind of conversation (Kester, 2004). I have chosen the term "interventionist practice," as it is developed by Nato Thompson (2004), implying a pro-active process-based form of production that comes to form as a disjunctive event within the ongoing daily activities of public life. As such, the work does not necessarily propose alternative perspectives, but rather, opens up an intellectual, and sometimes literal, space for this possibility. Interventionist art begins among its viewers and is constituted as a social collaborative event that occurs as a kind of open public exchange producing dialogue that connects producers with the social environments that compose their lives and provides both the opportunity for reflection and the potential for active social participation.Specific examples of artworks that exemplify this form of public participation and artistic production can be seen in the work of many artists throughout the 20th century. Joseph Beuys, for instance, proclaimed the social organism itself as an artwork and referred to his work within this conceptual structure as "social sculpture" (Beuys, 1 990). He defined with social sculpture with actions ranging from ceremoniously washing the feet of strangers to exhibitions conceived as public dialogue, such as the 1972 piece IVe Won't Do It without the Rose, in which Beuys effectively dissolved the perceived barriers between issues concerning the artist and those more pertinent to society in general. Similarly, Suzanne Lacy, with works such as The Crystal Quilt (1987) in which 430 women, arranged at tables resembling a quilt, had conversations accompanied by a soundtrack of other women discussing aging. This work positioned dialogue not simply as a byproduct of the art, but as its substance. Arguably, each of these artist's works could be identified as interventionist in that they engage two of the most significant components of interventionist art practice: a focus on social dialogue as an artistic form and the presentation of art outside of typical institutional parameters of art practice. …