What is Useful Art: Part 1

Hi,

As this is my first Substack article, I’d like to outline a bit more about why I’m doing this. I’ve recently published my first book ‘Useful Art: How activist artists can save the world’ (published by Manchester University Press) and I’ve had a first round of book talks, interviews and discussions. I genuinely had no idea how interesting, challenging and invaluable I’d find these new discussions. I’ve already been asked a lot of interesting questions that have helped me to begin re-thinking about the book and some of my own ideas. I’ve also been asked to expand and develop upon some of the ideas and thoughts already in the book. Whilst ‘Useful Art: How activist artists can change the world’ is intended to be an easy and accessible read – it also contains a lot of ideas that could be developed further and, of course, there is a lot of material that couldn’t fit into the book in the first place.

One of the joys, for me, in writing this book was that Emma Brennan, Editorial Director and Art and Design History Editor at Manchester University Press (or MUP), suggested I write in a first-person, approachable and almost conversational style. This was largely because a) that’s probably how I communicate best and b) having been involved in Useful Art for 20 or so years I have either involvement in (or first-hand knowledge of) many projects, discussions and debates that it is more fruitful to frame from my own position or point of view - a kind of hybrid between autoethnography, as academics might call it, and anecdotal storytelling. Either way, this mechanism has enabled me to sift through a lot of information and experience that has shaped and formed my own positions toward Useful Art and, in turn, helped me to reshape and formulate my perspectives on Useful Art as they now stand. In turn, I expect my positions on Useful Art, and my own applications and uses of Useful Art to continue growing, evolving and changing.

So what follows is the first of (hopefully) many articles that will develop ideas already embedded in ‘Useful Art: How activist artists can change the world’ and, also, relate and evaluate how they are being applied to new projects and collaborations as they also grow and evolve. I’m also intending to supplement this with a series of ad hoc interviews and discussions with many of the makers, doers, thinkers and collaborators who appear in the book as ‘examples. Of course, I also hope to capture discussions and debates with many others who have already helped shaped my thoughts and, hopefully, with new fellow travellers whom I’m yet to meet. I’m also hoping to use this as an opportunity to put more thought into the relationship between Useful Art and use value and, also, to think more ‘out loud’ about relationships between Useful Art, use value, and technology.

The first of these Substack articles on Useful Art will also be the first in a short series in which I hope to expand and clarify on the first question I’m usually asked on this subject – which is, quite straight forwardly ‘What is Useful Art’

What is Useful Art: Part 1

Since I’ve had the opportunity to discuss my new book Useful Art: How activist artists can change the world’ I’ve been asked numerous times ‘what is Useful Art’. This really interests me because there is obviously no simple answer here. Instead, rather than being a simply explained category, or identifiable form or type of making Art as we know it or knew it to be, Useful Art offers an opportunity to rethink and remake our protocols of how art could operate in the world as an operational toolkit for social change. In doing so, it also offers us an opportunity to reimagine and open up the aperture for what we might understand art to be now and, also, to what it might potentially become (in ways that simply could not be understood if we limit ourselves to applying our existing and common understandings of art to its possibility and potential.

In doing so I’m also aware of the complexity and baggage that come with the necessary short hands we unthinkingly apply when discussing these topics. For example, the common and oft’ used phrase ‘social, economic and political change’ will, at some point, require more discussion and debate about what we might actually mean by the terms social, economic and political in relation to Useful Art. And, in doing so, it will be interesting to think at what points these terms coincide with, sit alongside, or overlap with other complex intersectional issues such race, gender, ethnicity, sexuality and even class within emerging meta-debates of ecology, degrowth and decolonialisation.

But for now, I’m going to try and keep it simple by looking at three components or aspects of Useful Art and some of the considerations and reimaginings that they might provoke.

(1) Useful Art is a way of working together

For me, it is most helpful to think of Useful Art as an open-source playbook of ideas, strategies, tactics, examples and findings – one that is a shared and porous resource of activist knowledge that takes full advantages of creative/artistic project work as a toolkit for effecting social change. Thinking of Useful Art this way immediately helps us to escape the gravitational pull of terms such as school, movement or style, which immediately invoke limiting resonances with established Art world protocols. It is not that these established protocols are somehow bad in themselves – and some terms like school or movement also have their helpful equivalences outside the confines of the current Artworld System. Instead, to think, identify or conceptualise Useful Art as an open-source playbook of activist change immediately tasks us with thinking beyond these established protocols. In doing to it also asks us to imagine what art now is, or could become, without the imposition of the usual ‘like or as’ equivalences which allow us to recognise or evaluate something as Art in the traditional sense of the term. In doing so, I’ve found that it is far less likely to get bogged down in the quagmire of is it art or not binarism. Rather than thinking whether or not Useful Art is a new type of Art as we know it or knew it to be, or whether or not it is Art at all, it might be more fruitful to think how me might expand the horizons of what art now is or can become. In this way we can also begin to think of Useful Art as something that can be operational in the world - as tool to challenge and change the condition of neoliberal capture.

(2) Useful Art projects don’t have to be made by Artists with a capital A

Useful Art projects don’t need to be conceived, implemented or sustained by Artists as we know them of knew them to be. As an open-source toolkit for social change Useful Art works just as well if it is activated and used by groups of non- Artists. If we extend some of the ideas about rethinking the limitations and confines of the current Artworld system we can begin to rethink and repurpose what we might mean by the term Artist as well. During the 1960s it became quite common to make the claim that everyone is an artist. But this tended to rely on the assumption that being an Artist followed a pattern of commonly established stereotypes of what being or becoming an artist was like. Whilst some of the values embedded in this idea are still of great value – especially the common idea that being an Artist is to question established values and to hold those in power to task – it might now be better to think how we begin to live together more artfully, rather than mimicking existing (and frequently commodified) cliches of artistic alterity. Because anybody can pick-up Useful Art as a tool of social change it is, more often than not, both solutions based and multi or transdisciplinary in nature. Being operational and embedded in the real world, Useful Art also offers us a decentralised approach to local and every day re-empowerment as forms of micro resistance from within the current condition of neoliberal occupation. Being artful as opposed to expedient, Useful Art allows us to repropose all of the poetic, caring, compassionate, imaginative, provisional and fragile devices, that are more usually associated with Art, as a means to build new subjectivities and ways of being together in the world as forms of political and social alternative.

(3) Useful Art tends to operate on a 1:1 Scale – it is no longer a representational form of art as we know it or knew it to be.

Useful Art projects tend to be ‘the thing itself’ (whether a collective, organisation, resource, project, outlet or whatever). As operational solutions their first goal is to make and effect change, rather than to provide representations of the world and what kinds of change should take place within it (though, of course, Useful Art projects can also be both at the same time and/or be represented remotely from their point of origin too). Because of this, Useful Art also asks fundamental questions of how we can begin to understand or reimagine art as it is now or can become. Consequently, this would require us to re-think and re-make the templates by which we now know and agree what Art was or used to be.

Being able to imagine an Artworld system that could accommodate 1:1 Scale Practice as the primary operational mode of Useful Art would, in turn, require us to reimagine the current systems of hardware (museums, galleries, art objects and collections) and software (understandings, theories and accepted educational protocols) which currently allow us to ‘see’ – but which also fundamentally delimits – our imaginary horizon lines of what art now is or could become as a force for real world change.

Our current hardware and software systems for experiencing and understanding Art are historically specific – largely arising from a Western Enlightenment tradition which has its roots in the eighteenth century - and increasingly incapable of keeping up with Useful Art.

If we cling to our cherished notions of what we know or knew art to be we will only be left with a historically outmoded notion of Art (and an equally outmoded hierarchy of Art related hardware and software) that have already become thoroughly instrumentalised and commodified within our current condition of neoliberal occupation.

I hope this has both clarified some points as to what Useful Art might be, as well as opening some doors and pathways to the complexities of the challenges it might present. In my next article for Substack I’ll take some of these ideas a little further and I’ll also try to ground some of these points in relation to some expanded examples of ongoing Useful Art projects that are already sign-posted in the book, as well as beginning to look at examples that I haven’t looked at or begun to cover yet.

In the meantime, if any of you would like to find out more about the range and breadth of Useful Art projects I can recommend a look at the Archive of the Association of Arte Útil . Also, as a kind of live footnote, the Association of Arte Útil is one of the key examples of Useful Art practice that I will be looking at and continually referring too (though Arte Útil is not quite the same thing as Useful Art and carries with several other layers of interesting meaning and engagement). However, if you do look at the Archive of the Association of Arte Útil can I encourage you to begin look at it as an open-source playbook of ideas? If you do this you will see it in a completely different light than if you see it as simply an only gallery or exhibition of exemplary projects. In doing so you’ll also begin to activate the potential of Useful Art as a tool for making, thinking otherwise as a form of resistance from within the current condition of neoliberal capture.