INSIGHTS 40
sincerity of claims that individual art projects might effect
significant transformations:
With focusing too much on the benefits
to participants, you forget how basically
this is just a more interesting
way of making art and that as an artist,
I gain massively from any of these
interactions (Artist, 1A)
I think it’s a lot of responsibility to
put on socially engage artists, when
actually you might be interested in a
social practice because you’re interested
in people, rather than interested
in marketing essentially (Artist, 22A)
Where projects were planned with a strong emphasis
on problem-solving, commissioners felt that artists were not
always well-supported enough to deliver the requested results
and sometimes became the ‘scapegoats’ for a failing system:
It’s managing people’s expectations of
what’s going to come out of it and also
[assessing] whether it’s even appropriate
to have an artist going into a
place that might have a lot of problems
(Commissioner, 7B).
I’ve had artists contact me…they’re
on the verge of a breakdown because
they’re in a really tough situation…
and they’ve been asked to do something
that’s really unachievable and they’re
getting flak from the commissioners
and the community (Commissioner, 9B)
In addition, some respondents emphasised that setting
out with a rigid set of expectations was incompatible with the
collaborative nature of social practice, in which all stakeholders
should be able to inform and influence the process:
From the artist’s perspective, there
is a reticence to run a project that
delivers very specific outcomes and
that artists don’t want to be tied down
to specific outcomes because that’s
actually not what their work is about
(Commissioner, 5B)
Artists also highlighted the need for more support to
protect their personal safety or professional integrity. A lack
of training for both artists and commissioners was emphasised
as an issue when working in sensitive contexts and addressing
complex social problems:
The gap is we’re undertrained… it’s
very arrogant of us to think we can
[make significant social changes]
(Commissioner, 4B)
I’ve been commissioned by people who
should be incredibly sensitive to
[ethical issues] because they work
with communities…but they still have
gaps in their understanding of this
(Artist, 16A)
My biggest worry about socially
engaged practice is the ethics…I think
there needs to be a lot more discussion
and research around this thing
called “socially engaged practice”
(Commissioner, 4B)
Particularly concerning is the reasonable inference that
lack of training and support could cause deficiencies in relation
to the ethical treatment and wellbeing of participants /
collaborators.