After months of execrating Social Practice Art, I was offered a spot in PSU’s Social Practice Art program and accepted with almost no hesitation. I associated social practice art with some kind of new age missionary agenda, with MFA students promulgating dumbed-down art under the oppressive assumption that, as a Social Practice alum explained to me on a tour of an affordable housing community, “the people here (i.e. low-income, non-white) won’t get anything out of abstract video art.” If accessibility means the reduction of complexity and difficulty, then ACCESSIBILITY KILLS DIVERSITY. Peripheral Chinese dialects, indigenous instruments, and archaic words are going extinct in the name of accessibility; it’s inconvenient to speak a language that isn’t widely spoken, or learn how to make and play a nose harp, or look up words you don’t know, like anfractuous. Some things should only be available to those who are willing to work; understanding requires an enduring effort.
Due to my obsessive interest in the Chinese Cultural Revolution, I distrust people who believe that art should be “useful” or have a positive impact on the world. My grandmother was a communist spokeswoman who was betrayed by her party for having a half-Japanese husband, and my mother – forcibly separated from her parents – was a “little red guard.” Mao’s ideas were beautiful, progressive, and optimistic – he advocated for the abolition of poverty and the emancipation of women – but instead of blooming into a bountiful communist utopia, teachers were terrorized (my mother’s uneducated generation became known as the “lost generation”), ancient art and monuments – derided as bourgeoise – were destroyed, and twenty million people died from famine. How can a person have faith in social activism with this legacy? In the few days I was given to decide whether or not to join the social practice program, I watched every video of Harrell Fletcher (the program founder) on youtube, and I remember hearing him say that though many social practice artists want their art to have a positive impact on a community, there could also be evil social practice art.
I am perpetually trying and failing to be good, because most of the time I am confused, unable to untangle the action that honors my deepest self from Pavlovian conditioning. Sometimes guilt is a signal from my conscience, but I also feel guilty for desiring, for being appetitive, for existing. Not long ago it was “wrong” to be a homosexual or in an interracial relationship – what “wrongs” have I internalized in the present? Everything that is wrong is right somewhere else, in another time, or another space, from someone else’s perspective. What interests me more than delusive binaries of good and bad is kindness. Bombing the Twin Towers may be the right thing to do from jihadist’s perspective (or, according to the experimental compose Karlheinz Stockhausen, “the greatest work of art imaginable for all cosmos.”), but no one could say that it was the kind thing to do.
In the poem Whale Watch, Dean Young writes: if you don’t surprise yourself, you won’t surprise anyone else. And so I return to what I have rejected. And so I admit that I do not know everything, and do the thing that I would otherwise not do, the thing that makes me uncomfortable. Why? Because I love to be proven wrong, and luckily, I am usually wrong. So here I am, a social practice-hater committing to doing social practice art.
I want to read all of your articles and reviews and listen to your podcasts. Sometimes your written work reminds me of a painting, it's complex and intellectual but personal and surprising- something to be absorbed <3