INSIGHTS 47
is understood and promoted by institutions, moving it out of
the education wing and into the main spaces of exhibition and
promotion, or enabling it to move easily between these different
contexts. In particular, this meant clarifying the relationship
between social art, that was generally defined as critically
engaged and art world-focused, and community art, which was
felt by some to have become a diluted term, associated with
instrumentalism and a lack of criticality, although this position
is one strongly contested by many community arts practitioners
and scholars.²
When social artists were commissioned by galleries, their
role was often understood to be that of a pedagogue or community
worker, to the exclusion of being an artist:
I’d like to see a separation between
socially engaged practice and what you
might call… community art… I don’t just
want to make work that keeps people
entertained on a session or is a really
nice creative output. Socially engaged
for me is more than that (Artist, 3A)
For many of these artists, it was felt that networks of artist
peers should play a greater role in shaping and determining
the nature of validation within the social practice community,
rather than relying on institutions and funders. The future role
of organisations might then be to foster and support artist-led
movements, without co-opting or appropriating such systems
as their own.
Both the pilot research and the interviews for the current
research highlighted an absence of connections congruent
with the values of stakeholders and able to provide the kinds
of validation relevant and necessary to their careers — critical
feedback, solidarity, reputation, peer-learning, training, advice,
profiling, and so on. This suggests that effective validation is
not transactional (I work with you because you know how to
behave) but transformational for both parties (shared values
and authentication), something that is preferable in the longterm
because mutuality is explicit.³
A number of commissioners interviewed for the current
research suggested that validation by peers in the field of social
art was important in their own judgement of how successful a
commission had been:
For others, it is imperative for institutions to better understand
the nature and role of social practice and ensure that a
shared value system is discussed and negotiated in relation to
a commission:
If an art institution does not have a
fundamental understanding of social
practice, it does not matter how much
tangible support they provide, there
are always difficulties and unmet
expectations, because the philosophical
understanding is mismatched
(Artist, 13A)
However, others argued for more systemic change,
rejecting the gallery system as something fundamentally at
odds with their values as social practitioners:
I don’t think I fit into…regular [validation]
models, but I’d like there
to be different validation models
(Artist 21A)
We don’t fit that model and we mustn’t,
otherwise we’ve failed… Let’s not
re-invent the wheel, let’s invent something
else (Artist, 22A)
We would look at things like the reception
amongst peers in terms of the
socially engaged arts world. What’s
the reception of a project in the arts
world? (Commissioner, 9B)
However, commissioners also described a lack of diversity
in artists known to their organisations and spoke about their
wish to broaden the pool of potential commissions, as well as
benefiting from associated expertise from and about the field
of social practice:
Access to a wider range of artists and
information about their previous work.
Input from artists about what barriers
they face to working in the public
realm so we can get a better idea how
to support a more diverse representation
of artists working in this area
(Commissioner, 1B)
Our pool of artists…is quite narrow and
anecdotally does not seem to be very
diverse in make-up (Commissioner, 2B)
2 Matarasso, François. A Restless Art: How Participation
Won, and Why It Matters. London: Calouste Gulbenkian
Foundation, 2019.
3 Personal communication, Susan Jones. Jones uses the term
co-validation to describe this in her forthcoming Ph.D. thesis.