Social practice or socially engaged practice is an art medium that focuses on engagement through human interaction and social discourse. Social practice goes by many names, including relational aesthetics, new genre public art, socially engaged art, dialogical art, and participatory art. Social practice work focuses on the interaction between the audience, social systems, and the artist or artwork through aesthetics, ethics, collaboration, methodology, antagonism, media strategies, and/or social activism.
Because people and their relationships form the medium of social practice works – rather than a particular process of production – social engagement is not only a part of a work’s organization, execution, or continuation, but also an aesthetic in itself: of interaction and development. Social practice aims to create social and/or political change through collaboration with individuals, communities, and institutions in the creation of participatory art.
Artists working in social practice co-create their work with a specific audience or propose critical interventions within existing social systems to expose hierarchies or exchanges, inspire debate, or catalyze social exchange. There is a large overlap between social practice and pedagogy. Social interaction inspires, drives, or, in some instances, completes a project. The discipline values the process of a work over any finished product or object.
Although projects may incorporate traditional studio media, they are realized in a variety of visual or social forms (depending on variable contexts and participant demographics) such as performance, social activism, or mobilizing communities towards a common goal. The diversity of approaches pose specific challenges for documenting social practice work, as the aesthetic of human interaction changes rapidly and involves many people simultaneously. Consequently, images or video can fail to capture the engagement and interactions that take place during a project.
History of terminology
Until 2020 the term "social practice" was used in a branch of social theory considering human relationships to each other and to the larger society as "practices". The term “social practice art” is likely rooted in the German phrase “Kunst als soziale Praxis,” which emerged in writings about such practices in the 1990s. The term "art and social practice" was institutionalized in 2005 with the creation of the Social Practice MFA concentration at the California College of the Arts, followed by other institutions of higher education offering similar degrees. Social practice art as a medium has been referenced in the India Artforum, ArtNews, and Art Practical. As an emerging field, social practice can encompass a variety of terms: public practice, socially engaged art, community art, new-genre public art, participatory art, interventionist art, collaborative art, relational art, and dialogical aesthetics.
Characteristics of social practice
Socially engaged art differs from its art historical ancestors in that it is not a specific movement or style, but rather a way of defining a new social order. Thousands of existing social practice projects across the world have taken vastly different approaches to their combination of publics, methodologies, aesthetics, and environments, yet these projects all share an aesthetic of human interaction and development. The end products of such works are not commodities, but rather processes for constructive social change. Some foundational characteristics of socially engaged art remain consistently relevant to a diverse range of works. For an artist or producer to create a successful social practice work, they must consider the unique context in which they are working and identify specific characteristics of the community and environment. They must also balance aesthetic and methodology in their work, aligning the timeline of a project with its purpose: a quick-impact ephemeral work, or the regularity of a longitudinal work.
Community and environment
Social practice artists and producers aim to affect their community and environment in a real (rather than symbolic) way - some specifically do so in hopes of enabling social and political change. Each project is tailored to the community and environment in which it will take place. In social practice, the identification of the public, or audience, precedes the project's development. It is impossible to create a project founded upon engagement and collaboration without first making assumptions as to who will be involved. Who the artist or producer wishes to engage and where they wish to engage are therefore core characteristics of socially engaged art.