Art as activism

Theaster Gates is an artist, curator and urban activist whose work aims to galvanise communities and act as a catalyst for social change. He is currently exhibiting at White Cube Bermondsey and "has created a multi-faceted installation that investigates themes of race and history through sculpture, installation, performance and two-dimensional works."

Gates refers to his working method as ‘critique through collaboration’ but, as this exhibition demonstrates, the way in which Galleries operate tends to neuter what is at the heart of his artistic practice. My Labor Is My Protest is a fine exhibition which is well worth visiting but it is not a collaborative experience.

Art Galleries, while often presenting as radical spaces, are in reality rule-bound spaces with 'Do Not Touch' being the generally unspoken or unsigned but rigorously enforced fundamental prohibition. It is interesting to observe the way in which rules are also enforced even when participation is an element of an installation.

Eva Rothschild's film Boys and Sculpture created for the Whitechapel Gallery demonstrated this clearly. Boys and Sculpture shows a group of boys, aged between 6 and 12, each entering a gallery full of Rothschild’s sculptures. Slowly and tentatively the boys begin by looking, then touching. They proceed to totally dismantling the sculptures, revelling in the joys of play and of destruction. This is real collaboration between viewer and artwork but is not, for reasons of health and safety, insurance and other related factors, something that most Galleries will entertain. Therefore, as on issues of commerce and materialism, many galleries talk the talk but don't walk the walk.

This is illustrated most clearly for me in My Labor Is My Protest by the installation of a library borrowed from the archive of Johnson Publishing Company, the Chicago-based publishers of Ebony. This curated selection of books and magazines offer a history of black American culture but this is almost irrelevant as the majority of the items in this library cannot be touched, handled or explored. It may be that the installation is replicating in reverse the experience of exclusion from participation and collaboration endured by black people in America for many years but, if so, why are a small selection of books made available for viewing. This is the worst of possible worlds, it seems to me, for this work, as, if the work is primarily about exclusion then our exclusion from the collection should be absolute and if not, if it is about accessing black culture, then to limit our access neuters the work's meaning. My guess given that Gates' focus is described as being "on availability of information and the cross-fertilisation of ideas" is that the latter is the intent and that the force of the work has been neutered for reasons of insurance.   

The current edition of frieze has an excellent feature about the work of Gates as part of a thematic look at art as activism. Gates' work includes collaborative projects with other artists to purchase and rebuild homes in rundown areas of Chicago to teach carpentry and construction skills. This raises the question of what art is. In my ministry, for example, am I an artist when I read my poetry, show my paintings or use my meditations or is the whole of my ministry, including my involvement in community activism/projects, a work of art. Ultimately, it seems it would depend on whether I wish to describe it in those terms and whether others wish to accept it on those terms. We are all artists, at least if we wish to describe ourselves as such. As Ananda Coomaraswamy said, "The artist is not a special kind of person; rather each person is a special kind of artist.”

Gates has written that he leverages "artistic moments to effect real change." Mark Godfrey writes in frieze that without cynicism Gates "employs the commercialism of the art world to regenerate deprived neighbourhoods":

"His performances are ... addressing real questions of economic inequality and political disenfranchisement affecting black people in the States. At the same time, he is genuinely interested in rituals, not just as historical ceremonies, but as ways of bringing people and thoughts together, just as he is sincere in his approach to incantation and religious music, testing even the most secular members of his audience to reconsider their ambivalence about the 'spiritual' in art."

The idea of art as activism is easy to mock and frieze includes a satirical piece doing just that  - peace achieved through impenetrable wall texts, poverty eradicated by carefully curated collateral events etc. Art cannot, of course, change the world but the activism of artists like Gates can impact positively on local communities.

His work is also of relevance to current debates about the usefulness or uselessness of art. Christopher Brewer and Daniel Siedell are currently in debate on this issue following an initial post by Siedell to which Brewer is responding. Siedell affirms Kant’s intuition that art is useless and states that “Taking seriously art’s uselessness is a way to preserve an aesthetic moment that defies the forensic structure of reality, a moment that testifies to an alien presence, grace.” Brewer begins his series of responses by suggesting that Siedell is setting up a false dichotomy in opposing the usefulness or uselessness of art.

Gates' work suggests clearly that art can be useful. Presumably, he would not accept the dichotomy which Siedell sets out and seems unafraid of engaging with the complexities of his practice and of his practice within both the "compromised situations of art practices today" and the inequality and disenfranchisement his work addresses. In speaking of his input to The Armory Show, Gates said, “If the belly of whales and fiery furnaces can render men or women unscathed, then surely, I can have a few conversations from within the beast. I want to make space for my friends and ensure that some new friends meet old ones. Holding court seems the best way to do this and a much better use of my time than the winter sale at Barneys.”

Gates has written: "I love when I go to new cities and I am taken to small, obscure spaces of beauty that I would never expect ... My hope is to grow the number of small acts of beauty and contemplation with the hope that the moments began to suggest that the place where I live is, in fact A PLACE. I want to enunciate PLACES that already exist and occupy those Places with happenings ... Everyone deserves to see and be a part of the transformation of their spaces into places. Beautiful objects belong in blighted spaces and creative people can play a pivotal role in how this happens. I want the young people in my neighborhood to look at the built environment and see the world as something worth critiquing, exploring and constructing."

This quote suggests that Gates is creating material signs for immaterial realities (sacraments); places, spaces or moments which convey critique or construction. In this way, his work could have resonance with David Jones' argument in 'Art and Sacrament' that "man’s makings have throughout all times incorporated both utile and gratuitous elements":

"The utile element of a making is purely animalic; wholly utile works – birds' nests and beehives, diesel engines and screwdrivers – are wholly mundane. On the other hand, the gratuitous element of a
making is seen by Jones as an engagement with ontological truth because the necessity directing that making is immaterial: there is no reasonable justification for making such works."

Jones is positing a continuum for making ranging from the utile to the gratuitous with art appearing towards the gratuitious end of the continuum while also containing elements of the utile. This would seem to me to capture better the real achievement of Gates' art activism than would the creation of a dichotomy between the useful and the useless.

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Theaster Gates with the Black Monks of Mississippi and the Journeymen for Christ - A Closer Walk with Thee (Speakers).