I have come across three different explanations of socially engaged art, all of which use four steps in their analyses. These are: Suzanne Lacy’s four positions of the artist; Mark Hutchinson's four stages of public art based on the dialectic of Roy Bhaskar and Declan McGonagle’s four dimensions of art. I have started to compare these models as each step seems to share something in common. Each description also implies that the fourth stage is the ultimate, ideal stage to work towards, which I would like to analyse further. The drawing above is a very basic breakdown of the different ways of working or defining socially engaged art. I would argue that most definitions would describe socially engaged art as being somewhere in the middle of this scale, but this is something I want to test through my research.

The reference for the three texts are:

Lacy, S., 1994. Debated Territory: Toward a Critical Language for Public Art. In S. Lacy, ed. Mapping the Terrain. Seattle: Bay Press, 1994.
Hutchinson, M., 2002. Four Stages of Public Art. Third Text, Vol. 16, Issue 4. p.329-438.
McGonagle, D., 2007. Forward. In D. Butler and V. Reiss, eds., Art of Negotiation. Manchester: Cornerhouse, 1997, p. 6-–9.

Stage One:
This activity prioritises the artist’s voice and leans towards the individualistic side of the scale. Characteristics of this stage include reveling (rather than critiquing) the artist’s role as outsider to a community and assuming and relying on this privileged status in order to make one’s own work.

For Lacy, this first stage is described as ‘Artist as Experiencer’ where ‘the artist, like a subjective anthropologist, enters the territory of the Other and presents observations on people and places through a report of her own interiority. In this way the artist becomes a conduit for the experiences of others, and the work a metaphor for relationship.’

For Hutchinson, we are at a stage of ‘non-unity, difference or alterity’. He also describes this as ‘an anthropologist’s descent upon an exotic community…What such an anthropologist would not observe or analyse would be his or her own presence: the way he or she formed relationships with, affected, and was affected by, the community in question.’ For Hutchinson, this is ‘un-self-reflexive’ where the production of the art is imposed on the context and viewers.

McGonagle sees the first stage as a selfish model – ‘a model of self in the studio, value lies in the uniqueness rather than the commonality of the artist’s experience – a model of separateness and often eccentricity, of silence in the sociopolitical space and celebrated, admired and rewarded as if fulfilling the only legitimate role of the artist.’

So we see here that a priority for the artist is researching and compiling material about a given community. Such ‘separateness’, ‘selfishness’ and ‘non-unity’ in art could be seen as an arrogant position but could also be understood as a strategy to undermine the expectations of the commission. By revelling in the boondoggling nature of the futile act, an art project could counteract the expectations of productivity placed on it by funding. Richard Sennett describes ‘craftsmanship’ as the ‘desire to do something for it’s own sake…the new order does not and cannot satisfy this desire…getting something right, even though it may get you nothing is the spirit of true craftsmanship…and only that kind of disinterested commitment…can lift people up emotionally, otherwise, they succumb in the struggle to survive.’ By taking a stance as distant observer, the artist is able ‘shock us out of this perceptual complacency, to force us to see the world anew…[lifting] the viewers outside of the familiar boundaries of a common language, existing modes of representation and even their own sense of self’ (Kester, 2004).

The idea of the art process bringing some transcendent qualities can be seen along the sliding scale but it is in this phase that it is most potent, to the extent that some think the more removed from the everyday (the higher up in the garret; the furthest towards the autonomous side of the scale) the more possible it is to be subversive. Marcuse held this view:
‘Art is “art for art’s sake” in as much as the aesthetic form reveals tabooed and repressed dimensions of reality…[art] shatters every day experience and participates in a different reality…expresses a consciousness of crises: a pleasure in decay, in destruction, in beauty of evil, a celebration of the asocial, of the anomic – the secret rebellion of the bourgeois against his own class’ (Marcuse, 1979).

Indeed, this rejection and distancing from the everyday is a repost to the commonly adopted phrase in current social and cultural plans and policies: the use of art. What if it is presented as having no use? Pointlessness and uselessness could be a strategy of resistance in a society that demands productivity, outcomes and quantifiable results. One of the loudest criticisms of this current situation lambastes the instrumentalisation of culture and calls for the reclamation and recognition of artistic autonomy. In their recent essay, ‘Championing Artistic Autonomy’, the independent organisation, The Manifesto Club, for example, argue for artistic autonomy from ‘physical, political and financial restraints’ in order for the artist to ‘realise a creative vision’ (The Manifesto Club, 2006). This argument falls neatly into our autonomous side of the scale without question. The further away we move from this position on the scale towards the everyday, the more we begin to question the very notion of autonomy and with it the impossibility of championing it.

Stage Two:
In this stage a process of self-reflection begins and the notion of autonomy is questioned but the artist’s role is never the less affirmed in the process. Participation and collaboration are attempted for the artist to make their own work without relinquishing authorial control to those participants.

For Lacy this stage is the ‘Artist as Reporter’, as the artist gathers information and makes it available to others. For Hutchinson it is about a process of ‘realisation and undoing of absences, lack, silences…The relationship between subject and object becomes visible and agency becomes reciprocal’. He goes on to say how at this stage there is a ‘negation of the idea of art’s detachment from everything else. Some art hopes to adopt the culture or meanings of a chosen public, without relinquishing the agency of the artist in the making of the art’. There is a potential silencing of the subjects rather than giving them a voice. In this process the public ‘appropriate existing public art in a way utterly unintended by the authors of the work’. For McGonagle there is also an acknowledgement of the ‘other’ and the artist’s intention to communicate with this other.

This stage demonstrates a kind of schizophrenia towards responsibility, which sometimes lies with the integrity of the work and at others with the ‘subjects’ or ‘community’ that the artist/anthropologist is ‘working with’. Martha Rosler refers to this:
‘Anthropologist Jay Ruby believes that only self-reflexive documentary – giving the camera to those represented – evades authoritarian distortion. Others wish to interpret all representations as fictions. I disagree with all these totalized criticisms’ (Rosler, 1994).

There are many histories of artists opening up their work to involve participants throughout the 20th Century from the use of people as subjects in the making of the artists work, to the handing over of artists’ initiatives to individuals who go on to author the work as their own. Many of the projects that are considered socially engaged embody a variety of types of participation (maybe at different times of the project – at times the project may be more participant than artist led). During stage two, participation in an art project does not automatically result in the politicisation and activation of the participant. Walter Benjamin in his essay, ‘The Author as Producer’ of 1934 describes a notion of production, ‘which is able first to induce other producers to produce, and second to put an improved apparatus at their disposal. And this apparatus is better the more consumers it is able to turn into producers, - that is, readers or spectators into collaborators.’

This second stage does not go that far as it tends to privilege the artist’s own work and is reliant on their status as artist, although Benjamin’s call for turning consumers into producers would perhaps ring true to many practicing artists today as something that inspires them to develop projects, create platforms and facilitate collective production. It could also refer to New Labour policies of social inclusion and the rising trend of corporate social responsibility through which much socially engaged art is funded. This top-down process of empowerment, however, has been heavily criticised by the communities of ‘consumers’ themselves, as being patronising and vacuous. Through the veil of social inclusion (often delivered through community consultation and socially engaged or public art) one witnesses or experiences the realities of regeneration such as increased control and privatisation of public space and rising house prices.

‘Daily life and its ambiguity, simultaneously effect and cause, conceal these relations between parents and children, men and women, bosses and workers, governors and governed. For it’s part, critical knowledge removes the screen and unveils the meaning of metaphors’ (Lefebvre, 1947). One could interpret this ‘critical knowledge’ as socially engaged art. During stage two, the screen may be removed but only for the artist’s benefit; the ‘critical knowledge’ may not extent to other (non-artists) involved.

Stage Three:
This stage goes further in analysing and negotiating with the systems and structures that support the artistic process. For Lacy, the artist becomes an analyst: ‘As artists begin to analyse social situations through their art, they assume for themselves skills more commonly associated with social scientists, investigative journalists and philosophers’. Hutchinson’s third stage involves negotiations between the artist and other people in the process of production and a reciprocal relationship begins between subjects. McGonagle’s third dimension takes the artist beyond the gallery context and into public space contexts, ‘usually based on negotiation with forces which own or control public space rather than those who use it’.

The question is, to what extent does negotiation become co-option and what are the issues with this? Owen Kelly in 1984 describes the problem with the development of a professionalised, fully funded community arts practice: ‘Community artists are increasingly told what to do, and how to do it, by people whose motivations often directly contradict the alleged aims of the community arts movement. We have become foot soldiers in our own movement, answerable to officers in funding agencies and local government recreation departments…[leading to the] collapse of the community arts movement into the waiting arms of the state’ (Kelly, 1984). The third stage acknowledges its part in a bigger system but to what extent does ‘embedding radical creative practice’ (as promoted by public art agency General Public Agency, for example) decrease art’s ability to critique the process it is a part of?
‘By embedding radical creative practice into the decision-making and delivery process, truly imaginative, innovative and tailor-made solutions become possible due to the more lateral thinking and skills available to decision-makers’ (Meissen & Basar, 2006: 86).

Marcuse does not think complete assimilation into the system is a good idea: ‘The strength of art lies in its otherness, its capacity for ready assimilation. If art comes too close to reality, if it strives too hard to be comprehensible, accessible across all boundaries it can no longer negate the world…Art should not help people become assimilated in the existent society but at each turn challenge the assumptions of that society.’(Becker, 1994: 181)

A process of revealing and understanding the politics of production is applied in practice by recognising and responding to ‘failures’. Another tactic used by artists is to engage those involved in the decision-making processes of the commissioning of art and the development of real estate as participants in the work itself. This way it is possible to question the values placed on art with a wider community of people allowing these values to be disrupted and challenged not just by artists but also by those supporting art and getting involved in its production. Can the project at times be focused too much on negotiating and providing platforms for the ‘decision-makers’ rather than the communities who these decisions will affect?

Stage Four:
This final stage is where the art is open to interpretation by the different people involved. ‘Artistic control’ is relinquished and the emphasis is on agency and transformation. Lacy describes this as when the artist turns activist: ‘art making is contextualised within local, national, and global situations, and the audience becomes an active participant…Artists reposition themselves as citizen-activists. Artist-activists question the primacy of separation as an artistic stance and undertake the consensual production of meaning with the public’. Hutchinson’s fourth stage involves agency and practices of transformation. ‘Art would be an art that changes what art it…Public art that potentially transforms itself; transforms its publics; allows itself to be transformed by its publics; and allows these relationships and definitions to be transformed too.’ McGonagle’s selfless fourth stage ‘houses other models in a field of negotiation rather than of fixed positions, reconnected to a social continuum and also reconnecting arts aesthetic and ethical responsibilities.’

This fourth stage of socially engaged art is perhaps the preferred method of our three ‘model-makers’ as the most critical and effective way of working. Grant Kester points out, however, that such ‘dialogical works’ are often not considered as serious, critical art: ‘dialogical works are criticized for being unaesthetic or are attacked for needlessly suppressing visual gratification. Because the critic gains no sensory stimulation or fails to find the work visually engaging, it is dismissed as failed art’ (Kester, 2004: 10-11).

Due to the specifics of this economic situation, the critical aspect of a socially engaged art practice shifts a gear from direct action (to activate and empower individuals) to question the very nature and meaning of a socially inclusive agenda. Rather than becoming the vehicle through which urban developers can market their social responsibility, for example, such projects have the potential to demand a more thorough, democratic involvement of different people in the inevitable development of the ‘masterplanned community’. This marks a shift in the focus of the critique to a questioning of the means of production thereby unravelling the reason why the money is there for the socially engaged art in the first instance. The critique now involves a probing of the motivations of corporations and governments to empower and make producers of us all and questions the artists’ role and position in carrying out the objectives of an art that could be interpreted as a waste of time and money (in other words, a complete ‘boondoggle’).

Does the fourth model which is all about the experience of ‘getting involved’ and ‘participating’ mean it will have a transformative effect? How can an art that aims to ‘subvert’ the status quo be effective when those involved are unable or unwilling to change? Who, essentially, are the artists working for? How is the map, the walk, the technology used, adopted and manipulated? There have been discussions locally about the emotion mapping technology being used to map the content of local meetings in order to adopt a visual mode of communicating key issues or concern to other groups and decision-makers. There are also plans to develop the project further in collaboration with a local artist so that the project is embedded in the local context and has the potential to become even more locally relevant. The future use of the technology and the maps will determine to what extent the users will become producers.