Socially Awkward

jonas ranson said...

Socially Awkward

The following text is taken from Art and Research, Journal of Ideas Contexts and Methods, Volume 2. No. 1. Summer 2008 written by Dan Kidner on the work of Chris Evans. I found it to be particularly relevant to the project when undertaking my initial research.

The text can be read in full at http://www.artandresearch.org.uk/v2n1/kidner.html

'Collaboration is a slippery notion in the context of art production, but one that when reflected upon opens up the possibility of understanding a great many contemporary practices that seek to conjoin social aims with aesthetic ones.

The ambiguous or unknown parts of a project become the content. The rumour, or the enunciation of the fact of the project, become the work.

Evan's destabilizes the very idea of collaboration as something that offers real social utility in contradistinction to the autonomous art object. The artist thus delivers what could be described as a critique of collaborative, or what Grant H. Kester terms ‘dialogic’, practices, by simultaneously ‘maximising the creative potential of a given constituency’ and subjecting that constituency to sustained critical scrutiny. This critical scrutiny doesn’t simply undermine the authority of that constituency or parody its function, but rather defines the limits of or possibilities for meaningful collaboration per se. Deconstructing the very notion of collaborative activity can reveal as much about the limits of current art practice in the UK as it can about the processes of co-optation of art and culture by state controlled public sector bodies and global corporations.