Socially Engaged Art History and Beyond: Alternative Approaches to the Theory and Practice of Art History

What is socially engaged art history? Art history is typically understood as a discipline in which academics produce scholarship for consumption by other academics. Today however, an increasing number of art historians are seeking to broaden their understanding of art historical praxis and look beyond the academy and towards socially engaged art history. This is the first book-length study to focus on these growing and significant trends. It presents various arguments for the social, pedagogical, and scholarly benefits of alternative, community-engaged, public-facing, applied, and socially engaged art history. The international line up of contributors includes academics, museum and gallery curators as well as arts workers. The first two sections of the book look at socially engaged art history from theoretical, pedagogical, and contextual perspectives. The concluding part offers a range of provocative case studies that highlight the varied and rigorous work that is being done in this area and provide a variety of inspiring models. Taken together the chapters in this book provide much-needed disciplinary recognition to socially engaged art history, while also serving as a springboard to further theoretical and practical work.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Release date: Feb 4, 2021
• ISBN: 9783030436094

Book preview

© The Author(s) 2021

C. Persinger, A. Rejaie (eds.)Socially Engaged Art History and Beyondhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43609-4_1

1. Introduction

Azar Rejaie¹  

(1)

Department of Arts and Communication, University of Houston-Downtown, Houston, TX, USA

Azar Rejaie

Email: [e-mail]

Keywords

Socially Engaged Art HistoryGiorgio VasariIvory Tower

In 2014, President Barack Obama called out art history when apparently attempting to identify a discipline lacking market practicality, implying its residency in the so-called ivory tower (Obama 2014). The metaphor of the ivory tower, rooted in the Bible and antiquity, evolved throughout recent centuries as shorthand for anti-elitist sentiments (Shapin 2012, 4). Used by some to signify a space occupied by those out of touch with reality and lacking practical experience and by others to denote a place protected for critical thinking and intellectual integrity, the phrase became associated specifically with universities around World War II (Shapin 2012, 7). Since then, accusations of ivory tower residency have been used to distinguish disciplines within the university that, in failing to direct their attention sufficiently outward, stand accused of being overly self-referential, creating knowledge useful to and used by its own members (Shapin 2012, 21–23). President Obama’s comment to GE Energy workers in Waukesha, Wisconsin, that a degree in art history—likely a stand-in for any humanities degree but nonetheless specifically named—is less marketable than a skilled manufacturing trade essentially gave art history an address on the ivory tower’s top floor. The debates regarding the ivory tower’s societal role can be seen, historian Steve Shapin suggests, as a modern rehashing of ancient arguments over the virtues of an active versus a contemplative life (26). Rather than continue this debate, the present volume demonstrates that art history, often framed as a discipline largely pursued solitarily by and for a highly educated elite, has deeply collaborative roots based in the notion of the social good. It further demonstrates that a growing number of academics, curators, and other art history practitioners are actively creating and testing methodologies for collaborative, public-facing socially engaged art history in a variety of circumstances. Moreover, many socially engaged art historical projects actively include and value the contributions of individuals and groups that typically have been excluded from the process of producing art historical knowledge.

Later in this book, Cindy Persinger explores how the social bases of art history have been variously embraced and ignored at various points in history. She argues that the present moment is ripe for embracing its social bases—bases, I believe, that go as deep as the discipline itself. While agreement with naming Giorgio Vasari (1511–1574) the first art historian is far from universal, the approach he used to produce the 1550 and 1568 editions of the Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (Lives, hereafter) provides one of the earliest models of a kind of socially engaged art history, while also, perhaps, heralding some of the reasons why the present volume exists (Vasari 1912–1914). With the publication of the Lives, Vasari created a new discipline founded upon exchange of knowledge and social engagement that is visible within his manuscript and known from the author’s biography and copious correspondence. Vasari’s intrinsically collaborative approach is read in the histories and anecdotes gathered from artists and artists’ pupils and friends that inform and undergird his own observations and provide credentials for the Lives. Simultaneously, however, Vasari’s project helped lay the groundwork for an art historical practice based on the solitary pursuit of knowledge, and what has come to be seen as the discipline’s traditional methodology.

A painter and architect at the court of Cosimo I de’ Medici, Vasari was noticeably self-conscious that he was neither a writer nor historian (Vasari 1912–1914, vol. 1, xv). Perhaps to offset self-perceived inadequacy, Vasari relied upon a network of sources for his vast project. In fact, Charles Hope argues that Vasari, whom he believes had insufficient education to pull off the project, was indeed inadequate and posits that the Lives were essentially written by a committee of Vasari’s friends (Hope 2014). Although Hope’s argument has not found widespread acceptance, Vasari undoubtedly relied upon a great deal of assistance to bring the project twice to print. A constant flow of various correspondence and manuscripts—ancient and modern, copied or borrowed from his various advisors, other men of letters who knew of his ambitious project, and fellow artists and those who knew or had known them—acted as the foundation and provided a framework for the creation of the Lives (Rubin 1995, 150–151). Over the years of researching and gathering information, learning the art and conventions of history writing, and consulting with others, Vasari crafted a socially engaged practice: the accumulated knowledge from a range of sources with which he was in steady dialogue forms the basis of the work produced in 1550 and refined in 1568.

Several authors in this volume examine the relationship between socially engaged art and socially engaged art history. An artist himself, Vasari’s own socially engaged approach to compiling material for the Lives may seem inevitable when one recalls that during his lifetime, art making was a collaborative process and art consumption was often a social activity that took place in public. The creation of prestigious types of art required various types of collaborations to create works that drew society’s attention and admiration to patrons and artists (Reiss 2013, 23–27). Importantly, art consumption was also largely and conspicuously social during the Renaissance: public competitions and displays of art in a wide array of physical contexts for diverse purposes were intended to engage the populace by informing and inspiring, influencing and activating. Nonetheless, threaded throughout the Lives is the insistence upon the importance of the artist’s skills and insights, his professional judgment and ability to satisfy and guide his patrons to pleasing outcomes through his skills and occasionally his cleverness and manipulations as required. Running alongside this concern is the author’s for his own authority in an unprecedented new field. Vasari states that he had written the Lives not only to say what these craftsmen have done…but…to distinguish the better from the good and the good and the best from the better…seeking with the greatest diligence in my power to make known, to those who do not know this for themselves… (vol. 2, 78). Writing to those who did not know for themselves, Vasari asserts himself as someone who does, but as demonstrated, such knowledge was collaboratively produced. Yet in developing the notion of the artist as genius and himself as the first authority in untrammeled terrain, I believe Vasari essentially downplayed the practices of collaboration and social engagement that the arts—and the invention of art history—required.

Socially Engaged Art History and Beyond: Alternative Approaches to the Theory and Practice of Art History examines the historical and emerging theoretical bases, definitions, practices, challenges, and important civic benefits to developing a socially engaged art history practice. The membership rosters of art history professional societies, listservs, and social media, including numerous Facebook groups dedicated to art history and its practices, demonstrate that the collaborative model that Vasari practiced (if not one he preached) continues today. Nonetheless, the conversations these venues promote cannot alone move art history out of the ivory tower, tending as they do to be self-referential, for and by art history professionals. This book, the first to draw together and examine socially engaged art historical practices that have hitherto remained largely outside of scholarly debate, shares alternative approaches that privilege the engagement of diverse communities and, through sharing of specific examples and discussion of the theoretical issues such practices raise, argues for the role(s) such approaches may play in the discipline’s future.

This book is organized into three sections, each of which has its own introduction, that progress from theoretical discussions found in Parts I and II to practical case studies and specific examples in Part III to provide theoretical bases for scholars refining their socially engaged practices in relationship to theory, and to furnish practical examples to scholars seeking to incorporate such practices in their work. In Chap. 3, Cindy Persinger provides a critical definition that resonates throughout the volume and can be seen as a point of connection for a range of practices. Socially engaged art history is produced within and between social groups over an extended period of time, it will seek to engender a productive dialogue regarding political and social issues and to foster resilient and sustainable communities. Its focus will be on difference, division and inequality in society. It may or may not result in publication (quoted in Hamlin and Leader 2015). Although contributors to this book hail from various countries and pursue socially engaged art historical practices in a variety of venues, their essays and case studies connect through a shared goal of exploring the potential roles for socially engaged approaches within the larger discipline.

Part I, Envisioning, is comprised of five essays that seek to give context to and establish firm foundations for diverse socially engaged art historical practices. Their authors provide definitions, describe various methods, and explore the social benefits and educational outcomes, realized and potential, of an art history that is unapologetically public-facing and civic-minded in its approaches and goals. In Chap. 3, Cindy Persinger defines socially engaged art history and legitimizes its practices of community and social engagement through an examination of the interconnections of the social bases of art and art history. In Chap. 4, Laura M. Holzman looks to the framework provided by public scholarship in history and anthropology to derive specific characteristics of and actions for engaged art history—and characterizes engaged art history as rigorous, problem-oriented, and democratic. Her emphasis on art historical knowledge created through the building of relationships and pursuit of shared authority, and that embraces activism and advocacy, finds strong parallels in Persinger’s definition. In Chap. 5, Julia A. Sienkewicz discusses the pedagogical and research potential of community-engaged art history. Encouraging her students to realize art history’s value beyond the university through socially engaged research assignments, she also acknowledges that pursuit of such research requires ceding layers of control to community partners, partners that may include one’s own students. In Chap. 6, the last in this section, Ya’ara Gil-Glazer establishes an approach built from commonalities shared by the theoretical bases of visual culture studies and Paulo Freire’s critical pedagogy ([1968] 2005) that she calls Visual Critical Pedagogy. This approach serves as the foundation for her radical revision of the Israeli high school curriculum for modern and contemporary art that, addressing topics and issues selected by students, promotes active citizenship and social change.

Authors in Part II, Intersections, explore instances of engaged art historical practices with emphasis on the theoretical frameworks from which these practices emerge. The first three chapters in this section deal with re-conceptualizing university courses to find alternative ways to teach social engagement and socially engaged art that emphasize student learning beyond the classroom. In Chap. 8, Jenna Ann Altomonte takes cues from a constructive approach to learning, Nicolas Bourriaud’s theory of relational aesthetics (2002), and Littoral art, to develop Global Art and Activism, a university course grounded in what she terms applied art history, a pedagogical method that combines scholarship, critical inquiry, and creative practice. Projects beyond the university provide her students with the opportunity to merge scholarship with studio practice and encourage them to take on active roles as artist-scholars. Although grounded in alternative theories, similar themes emerge in Chap. 9 as Jonathan Wallis explores the thesis that socially engaged art affords a unique educational/pedagogical circumstance for experiential learning in the discipline of art history. Based in Grant Kester’s critique of the art historian/critic’s engagement in dialogical art (2013) and David Kolb’s concepts of experiential learning (2007), Wallis’ approach to teaching Art as Social Practice fosters educational experiences beyond the classroom to allow students to experience conditions of social engagement to further their understanding of socially engaged art and to explore engaged processes that potentially result in effective changes within their local communities. In Chap. 10, Kelly A. Wacker also explores the redesign of an undergraduate course, one that resulted from the central question of what options art historians have for confronting a global environmental crisis: can we reassess and redirect scholarly inquiry in the discipline? By what means can meaningful dialogue concerning environmental issues be incorporated into art historical pedagogical practice? Wacker details the transformation that resulted in Art and the Environment through description of projects that place art history into dialogue with environmental issues and provide means for students to understand ecological issues through a disciplinary lens.

Chaps. 11 and 12 explore issues of place-making and the co-production of art historical and community knowledge within neighborhoods in Evansville, Indiana, and Madrid, Spain. In Chap. 11, Hilary A. Braysmith presents Sculpt EVV, an arts-driven, heritage-based, community and economic development project active between 2011 and 2015, as a social practice model that, relying heavily upon the constructive casting of community actors as co-producers of knowledge, realized positive community development outcomes in marginalized neighborhoods. Braysmith situates this project within her university workload as she describes the project’s goal of strengthening a sense of place among Sculpt EVV’s constituents and achieving economic development outcomes in challenged neighborhoods. In Chap. 12, Olga Fernández López, Azucena Klett, and Zoe López Mediero consider the role of art institutions, citizens, and the municipal administration in the transformation of Madrid’s cultural-artistic landscape before and after May 15, 2011 (15M), the beginning of a period of cultural and economic insurgency that saw the re-appropriation and transformation of civic spaces for common use. The authors reflect on two projects enacted by the municipal art program that pushed curatorial practices beyond notions of reflecting or enunciating culture to emphasize instead the function of curating as place-making with local residents based on local civic needs. In Chap. 13, Vendela Grundell Gachoud seeks to counter ableism through an examination of selected examples of sensory photography by Tanvir Bush, exploring the performative power of such images to shape social relations and both illustrate and generate discourse. Gachoud demonstrates and argues how Bush’s portfolio repositions visual agency and argues that the photographer’s work provides an example of a socially engaged practice.

The eight shorter essays grouped in the final section, Part III, Implementation, provide case studies in socially engaged art history that, drawing attention to the varied and rigorous work being done in this area, provide a variety of models to others. Like those described in earlier essays, these projects take place in a variety of circumstances and settings. Some examples emerge from museums (Marianna Kistler Beach Museum of Art and the Tate Modern) while others occur in conjunction with university classes (Indiana University, University of Southern Indiana, University of Houston-Downtown, and University of Arizona), and some in spaces that are neither. All work to broaden socially engaged art historical practices through discussion of practical concerns and potential outcomes of projects, exhibitions, course assignments, the role of engaged practices within a university structure, and the ways in which scholars pursue art historical knowledge. The Silent University discussed by Luisa Santos and exhibitions on Toyo Miyatake and Roger Shimomura are associated with museums, while several essays, including those by Hilary Braysmith, Julia A. Sienkewicz and Terri Baltimore, Rebecka A. Black and Carissa DiCindio, and Laura M. Holzman, address socially engaged practices that come out of university settings and reach out to address concerns beyond the institution. A subset of these provides discussion focused on projects that engaged students with their communities both in their university and public spheres to create new socially engaged art historical knowledge. The socially engaged art history described in essays by HAIR CLUB and John-Michael H. Warner work in wide-open settings. HAIR CLUB envisions a new discipline pursued by whole communities brought together by a human fascination with hair, while Warner reexamines a project that everyone thought they knew—Christo and Jean-Claude’s The Running Fence—in the context of the LLC that formed to support it, to understand the critical but largely unknown roles individuals and communities played in its making.

Persinger’s conclusion, the last chapter in this volume, addresses several of the themes that have emerged throughout this book while asking critical questions that one might consider before starting a socially engaged art history project. In addition to touching on the challenges facing art historians, curators, art workers, and others who seek to incorporate socially engaged art historical practices into their work, Persinger explores the great potential for good that socially engaged art history can offer at the local level to create sustainable communities and the various means by which authors in this volume have worked to achieve such efforts. Scholars throughout this book address a critical question: what opportunities and social benefits does the practice of socially engaged art history, within and beyond the conventional settings of universities, museums, and art organizations, offer us?

References

Bourriaud, Nicolas. (1998) 2002. Relational Aesthetics. Trans. Simon Pleasance and Fronza Woods with the participation of Mathieu Copeland. Dijon: Les Presses du réel.

Freire, Paulo. (1968) 2005. Pedagogy of the Oppressed (revised). Trans. Myra Bergman Ramos. New York: Continuum.

Hamlin, Amy, and Karen Leader. 2015. SECAC 2015 reflection: Socially engaged art history. Art History Teaching Resources Weekly (November 13). http://​arthistoryteachi​ngresources.​org/​2015/​11/​secac2015-reflection-socially-engaged-art-history/​.

Hope, Charles. 2014. Vasari’s Vite as collaborative project. In The Ashgate research companion to Giorgio Vasari, ed. David Cast, 11–21. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing Limited.

Kester, Grant. 2013. The device laid bare: On some limitations in current art criticism. e-flux 50 (Dec): 1–11.

Kolb, David. 2007. Experiential learning (Kolb). In Learning theories. https://​www.​learning-theories.​com/​experiential-learning-kolb.​html.

Obama, Barack. 2014. Remarks by the president on opportunity for all and skills for America’s workers. Speech, GE Energy Waukesha Gas Engines Facility, Waukesha, Wisconsin, January 30. https://​obamawhitehouse.​archives.​gov/​the-press-office/​2014/​01/​30/​remarks-president-opportunity-all-and-skills-americas-workers. Accessed 19 Jan 2020.

Reiss, Sheryl. 2013. A taxonomy of art patronage in Renaissance Italy. In A companion to Renaissance and Baroque art, ed. Babette Bohn and James M. Saslow, xlviii–lxix. Chichester, West Sussex: John Wiley & Sons.

Rubin, Patricia. 1995. Giorgio Vasari: Art and history. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Shapin, Steven. 2012. The ivory tower: The history of a figure of speech and its cultural uses. British Society for the History of Science 45 (1, Mar.): 1–27.

Vasari, Giorgio. 1912–1914. Lives of the Painters, Sculptors and Architects. Trans. Gaston du C. de Vere, 10 vols. London: Macmillan and the Medici Society.

Part IEnvisioning

© The Author(s) 2021

C. Persinger, A. Rejaie (eds.)Socially Engaged Art History and Beyondhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43609-4_2

2. Introduction to Envisioning

Cindy Persinger¹  

(1)

Department of Culture, Media, and Performance, California University of Pennsylvania, California, PA, USA

Cindy Persinger

Email: [e-mail]

Keywords

Socially Engaged Art HistoryEngaged Art HistoryCommunity EngagementVisual Critical Pedagogy

What does it mean to envision the future of art history as socially engaged? While every contributor to this volume seeks to answer this question, the authors in this first section address it most broadly. Collectively, they seek to prompt a more widespread embrace of socially engaged art history by focusing on both the actual and conceptual spaces from and in which socially engaged art historical practices can and do both emerge and grow. Here, socially engaged art history can find its ground. The authors consider historical and theoretical concerns regarding both how and why one might practice an art history that may be called socially engaged. In so doing, they establish broad themes for the field and this volume, including socially engaged art history’s relationship with public scholarship, community engagement, critical pedagogy , and art, especially socially engaged art.

A look at art history, past and present, reveals that some art historians and artists choose to engage forthrightly with the social circumstances of their time in their work while others do not. In her essay What is Socially Engaged Art History?, Cindy Persinger argues that this variation can be understood as stemming from the social bases of art history. Those who do art history respond implicitly or explicitly to their social historical contexts in their work, for example in their selection of research areas, course topics, pedagogies, and methodological approaches. What does it mean to teach the western canon to Israeli high school students through the lens of formal changes in art, as Ya’ara Gil-Glazer discusses in her essay Visual Critical Pedagogy in High School: Students Offer an Alternative to the Official Art Curriculum? She proposes that to do so reinforces white, western, male, upper-middle-class privilege. Thus, to practice a socially engaged art history may mean to reject outright racism, nationalism, sexism, heterosexism, ableism, classism, and so on.¹

The authors in this section seek to ground socially engaged art history in the praxes of several established areas: socially engaged art, public scholarship, and critical pedagogy . Each of these areas resonates with as well as reappears in the essays and case studies that follow. In arguing for the social bases of both art and art history, Persinger draws out significant parallels between the practices of socially engaged art and socially engaged art history, a point further explored by others, including Jenna Ann Altomonte and Jonathan Wallis. A second area in which contributors locate their practices is that of public scholarship. In Cultivating an Engaged Art History from Interdisciplinary Roots, Laura M. Holzman looks to the established practices of public scholarship in the disciplines of anthropology and history as a model for a socially engaged art history that both she and Julia A. Sienkewicz refer to as engaged art history. The third area that serves as a theoretical touchstone for contributors to this volume is the critical and dialogic pedagogy of educator Paulo Freire ([1968] 2005), which in part serves as a basis for what Gil-Glazer refers to as Visual Critical Pedagogy.

While the variety of practices described, and in some cases enacted, in this volume can all be understood as socially engaged art history, contributors use a varied set of phrases to describe their practices. How you talk about what it is that you do, the terms and phrases that you choose as individuals and groups to describe your work, helps you to communicate about, understand, and advocate for it.

While Persinger describes socially engaged art history, other contributors to the volume use other phrases.² In fact, each contributor in this section uses a different phrase: Holzman uses engaged art history; Sienkewicz uses both engaged and community-engaged art history; and Gil-Glazer describes Visual Critical Pedagogy or VCP. The variety of phrases emphasizes the manner in which socially engaged art history refers to practices that are socially specific and situated. The co-editors of this volume seek to demonstrate the breadth of socially engaged art history, but also how and why those who engage in these activities talk about them in somewhat different ways. In this manner, the volume is a step towards the shaping and understanding of shared vocabularies as people envision socially engaged art history.

To speak of a socially engaged art history emphasizes its parallels with socially engaged art as well as its concerns with social interactions, social themes, social justice, and the social bases of both art and art history. Further, socially engaged art history resonates with the common approach to understanding works of art as they relate to social-historical contexts. (Gil-Glazer talks about this as well.) To understand your work—be it art, art history or something else entirely—as embedded within your contemporary social-historical context is to consider how what you do relates to your social existence, that is your existence among others in a specific time and place. Why do we do what we do not just in general, but why do we do what we do here and now wherever, whenever, and with whomever that may be?

To speak of an engaged art history, as both Holzman and Sienkewicz do, gestures to the well-established field of public scholarship. Current trends in higher education support the growth of public-facing, community-engaged scholarship in the arts thereby providing the possibility of institutional support for individuals working where such programs are in place. At IUPUI, Indiana University’s campus in Indianapolis where Holzman holds a joint position as both associate professor of art history and museum studies and Public Scholar of Curatorial Practices and Visual Art, public scholarship is both recognized and valued. The community-engaged art history that Sienkewicz embraces was encouraged by a university-wide mandate that community engagement to be incorporated into freshman learning communities. Increasingly, institutions of higher education encourage and support community partnerships as a way to bring university and community stakeholders together to work towards sustainable communities. Both experiential learning and community-engaged pedagogies (or service learning) are valued as high impact practices (Kuh 2008). The common vocabulary and respect for the role of the public scholar and community engagement held by administrators and faculty at certain institutions can provide much needed support, as Holzman also describes in her case study about public scholar appointments at IUPUI later in the volume.

Working in institutional contexts that provide support and encouragement for public scholarship and community engagement as is the case for both Holzman and Sienkewicz provides a shared vocabulary as well as institutional resources for socially engaged art history. While these contexts also provide examples for those working to establish public-facing, community-engaged, and engaged art historical practices, it is important to note that socially engaged art historical practices occur in a variety of contexts beyond American higher education.

To speak of a Visual Critical Pedagogy or VCP as Gil-Glazer does references both visual culture and critical pedagogy . In this regard, her framework is unabashedly political in a way that sets it apart from Holzman’s and Sienkewicz’s. Gil-Glazer developed VCP in a pedagogical context in Israel where she and her students collaborated to design an alternative to the official program on the history of Modern Art designed by the Israeli Ministry of Education. At that time, Gil-Glazer worked in an experimental school that allowed her to develop an alternative to the official curriculum, which she describes as hegemonic and exclusionary. Her alternative curriculum challenges the hegemonic western canon and poses questions about sociopolitical issues. A distinguishing feature underlying her practices is her explicitly political and cultural commitments. VCP is not a type of neutral public scholarship. While not public facing in the manner of typical public scholarship, her intent is to promote active citizenship and thereby having a lasting public impact.

Thus, as the essays in this first section make clear, socially engaged art history is varied. It can, but need not, be public facing. It can, but need not, critique structures of power or oppression. The authors look to the past as well as the present in order to envision art history’s future as socially engaged.

References

Freire, Paolo. (1968) 2005. Pedagogy of the Oppressed (revised). Trans. Myra Bergman Ramos. New York: Continuum.

Grant, Catherine, and Dorothy Price. 2020. Decolonizing art history. Art History 43: 8–66. https://​doi.​org/​10.​1111/​1467-8365.​12490.

Kuh, George H. 2008. High-impact educational practices: What they are, who has access to them, and why they matter. Washington, DC: Association