ABSTRACT
By a certain metric, both Shannon Flattery and Santiago Sierra work in the art of social practice. Both have created projects that broach issues of immigration, labor, race, poverty, exile, and environmental degra dation. Both have created projects with large groups of people that require significant infrastructural commitments from art, community, and civic organizations. Both were trained in sculpture before “expanding” into the arena of social practice. Soon, however, the parallels start to unravel, as the structures and sensibilities that propel the works of each differ enormously. Flattery’s projects are created under the umbrella of Touchable Stories, a Boston-based US non-profit that relies on donor contributions, foundation grants, and under-funded civic commissioning bodies. Santiago Sierra’s projects are created under the umbrella of his authorial name, one that receives artistic commissions, fees, and royalties from an artworld network of biennial, public art commissioning, museum, and gallery-collector systems. Whereas the language of com munity voice appears ubiquitously in the descriptions of Touchable Stories, the concept of “voice” is eclipsed in both the descriptions and practices of Santiago Sierra. Whereas the language of Minimalism serves as a touchstone for Sierra’s formal expansions, it is never cited as a resource by Shannon
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Such eclipses and bafflements have their parallel in the critical thousands of artists and art organizations who self-consciously engage “the social” in their work. For those who measure a work’s success on its degree of community “self-definition,” its efficacy is measured in its outreach strategies, its means for providing access, the representational demographics of its participants, and its identifiable social outcomes. Such critical barometers also worry about the mediating role of the artist, about whether an artistic vision enables or neutralizes community voices.3 But other critical frameworks question the concept of artist-as-communityhelpmate on different terms; indeed, for some, a critical barometer starts by questioning the concept of community on which such work relies. To what does a term like community refer? Does it pursue or enforce visions of harmony and consensus? Should a work seek to represent under-represented voices or provide a shared forum for all? Does the helpmate model obscure other goals of artistic work that might use the language of critique rather than the language of consensus?4
