The Art of Direct Action

The Art of Direct Action

Social Sculpture and Beyond

Published by Sternberg Press

Editors
Karen van den Berg, Cara M. Jordan, Philipp Kleinmichel

Copy Editor
Cara M. Jordan

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ISBN 978-3-95679-485-8

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 The Art of Direct Action
Social Sculpture and Beyond
Editors
Karen van den Berg
Cara M. Jordan
Philipp Kleinmichel
 Contents
vii Introduction:
From an Expanded Notion of Art to
an Expanded Notion of Society

1 Socially Engaged Art and the

Fall of the Spectator since Joseph
Beuys and the Situationists
Karen van den Berg

41 Experimental Station and the

Attraction of Complicated Settings
Dan Peterman Interviewed by Karen van den Berg

55 New Neigborhood // Moabit:

Shaping a Community with Artistic Tools
Marina Naprushkina Interviewed by Karen van den Berg

65 Action and the Critique of Action

in Theodor W. Adorno and Joseph Beuys
Grant H. Kester

99 Beuys, Achberg, and the

Woodstockization of the Discourse
Rainer Rappmann Interviewed by Karen van den Berg

111 All Fields of Human Endeavor Are

Creative: Beuys in the 1970s
Caroline Tisdall Interviewed by Karen van den Berg

119 Beuysian Pedagogies:

A Counter-history
Gregory Sholette Interviewed by Karen van den Berg

135 Joseph Beuys and Feminism in the

United States: Social Sculpture
Meets Consciousness-Raising
Cara M. Jordan
Attraction and Repulsion: 179
An American Perception of Beuys
Daniel Joseph Martinez Interviewed by Cara M. Jordan

Curating Social Practice and 189

the Influence of John Dewey
Mary Jane Jacob Interviewed by Cara M. Jordan

Social Sculpture and the 199

Cousins of Cosmism
Anton Vidokle Interviewed by Philipp Kleinmichel

The Symbolic Excess of 211

Art Activism
Philipp Kleinmichel

Art, Neoliberalism, and the 239

Fate of the Commons
John Roberts

The Proto-conceptual Machine 259

of Dissent
kuda.org Interviewed by Philipp Kleinmichel

Capturing the Public Imagination 273

through Social Sculpture
Pedro Reyes Interviewed by Cara M. Jordan

The Input and Output of Working 283

with Communities
Caroline Woolard Interviewed by Cara M. Jordan

Contributor Biographies 297

Acknowledgments 307
 1
Socially Engaged
Art and Fall of the
Spectator since
Joseph Beuys and
the Situationists
Karen van den Berg

Shifting Grounds
The geopolitical world order of the early twenty-first cen-
tury is already quite different from that of the twentieth
century—as is the role of art in society. In the era of digital
capitalism, or what the Italian philosopher Franco Berardi
has called “semiocapitalism,”1 faith in many of the assump-
tions that determined the political and cultural landscape
of the twentieth century has been severely disrupted.
Contemporary social diagnoses circulating in the human-
ities and social sciences address the disintegration of the
welfare state, neoliberalization, increasing social inequality,
and social divides.2 At the same time, autocratic govern-
ments are on the rise all over the world and to some extent
seem to prove that capitalism performs even better without
democratic structures. It is therefore not surprising that
around these instabilities and upheavals the position of art

1 Franco Berardi, Precarious Rhapsody: Semiocapitalism and the Pathologies of Post-Alpha

Generation (London: Minor Compositions, 2009).
2 See David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2005); Chantal Mouffe, Agonistics: Thinking the World Politically (London: Verso, 2013).
2

is also changing—not only as an unavoidable result of these

developments, but also because the art that has emerged
has also played an active part in it. Broadly speaking, this
shift is not in the least due to the fact that the role of the
arts in society—as identified by art theory and aesthetics
since the late nineteenth century—has been largely linked
to the emancipation and self-reflection of the individual and
a particular concept of civil society that emerged in the eigh-
teenth century, which sociologist Niklas Luhmann has de-
scribed as the “differentiated society.” 3 This constellation is,
at least partly, eroding as the relationships between the arts,
Socially Engaged Art and Fall of the Spectator

politics, economy, and the public are shifting.4

These changes are by no means all heading in the same
direction. On the contrary these developments are paradox-
ical, but also entangled with one another. One tendency can
be found in the increasing importance of the art market.
Within the attention economics of the twenty-first century, art
has essentially become an instrument of distinction among
the superrich—a phenomenon that French sociologists Luc
Boltanski and Arnaud Esquerre have described as “the en-
richment economy,” the depiction of a new economic modus
operandi in the realm of exclusiveness and high-end luxury
products.5 Another distinct development that is directly re-
lated to the repositioning of the arts is “the explosive growth
of cultural industries” and what has been defined as the “cre-
ative imperative.”6 This development has been described on
several occasions as the dissolution of the boundaries of the

3 Niklas Luhmann, Theory of Society, vol. 1 (Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press,
2012).
4 Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Life (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005), 52ff.
5 See Luc Boltanski and Arnaud Esquerre, Enrichissement: Une critique de la marchandise
(Paris: Gallimard, 2017); see also Isabelle Graw, High Price (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2010);
and Franz Schultheis et al., When Art Meets Money: Encounters at the Art Basel (Cologne:
Buchhandlung Walther König, 2015).
6 Nato Thompson, Seeing Power: Art and Activism in the 21st Century (Brooklyn: Melville
House, 2015), 4; Angela McRobbie, “Everyone Is Creative: Artists as Pioneers of the New
Economy,” in Contemporary Culture and Everyday Life, ed. Elizabeth B. Silva and Tony
Bennett (Durham, NC: Sociology Press, 2004), 186–201.
 3
art field as it transforms into a new economic sector.7 In con-
trast to the sphere of art for the superrich, this trend also leads
to a certain popularization of art. A third, again quite contra-
dictory development that tends to be more anti-economic has
been labeled as the “social turn” in art.8 This is the phenome-
non by which more and more artists understand the shaping
and transformation of social relations as an important part
of their practice. They are concerned with social justice and
politics and have thus established a field of action commonly
described by the terms “art activism,” “new genre public art,”
“social practice art,” or “socially engaged art.”9 It is precisely
this field that the following essay concerns, and I would like
to focus on the last term, socially engaged art, in particular.
The conviction I would like to advance is that the devel-
opment of socially engaged art in the twenty-first century

Karen van den Berg

is more than just an “ism.” Although socially engaged art is
not a mainstream movement and does not substitute for the
traditional concept of what community art researcher Doug
Borwick has called “spectator art,”10 I would like to intro-
duce socially engaged art as a tendency that brings about

7 See Marion von Osten, “Unpredictable Outcomes / Unpredictable Outcasts: A Reflection

after Some Years of Debates on Creativity and Creative Industries,” European Institute for
Progressive Cultural Policies 2 (2007), http://eipcp.net/transversal/0207/vonosten/en.
8 Claire Bishop, “The Social Turn: Collaboration and its Discontents,” Artforum, February
2006, 179–85.
9 See Karen van den Berg and Ursula Pasero, eds., Art Production beyond the Art Market
(Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2013); Tom Finkelpearl, What We Made: Conversations on Art and
Social Cooperation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013); Izabel Galliera, Socially
Engaged Art after Socialism: Art and Civil Society in Central and Eastern Europe (London:
I. B. Tauris, 2017); Grant H. Kester, The One and the Many: Contemporary Collaborative Art in a
Global Context (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011); Suzanne Lacy, ed., Mapping the
Terrain: New Genre Public Art (Seattle, WA: Bay Press, 1995); Claudia Mesch, Art and Politics:
A Small History of Art for Social Change since 1945 (London: I. B. Tauris, 2014); Steirischer
Herbst and Florian Malzacher, eds., Truth Is Concrete: A Handbook for Artistic Strategies
in Real Politics (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2014); Yates McKee, Strike Art: Contemporary Art
and the Post-Occupy Condition (London: Verso, 2016); Gregory Sholette, Chloë Bass, and
Social Practice Queens, Art as Social Action: An Introduction to the Principles and Practices of
Teaching Social Practice Art (New York: Allworth Press, 2018); Nato Thompson and Gregory
Sholette, eds., The Interventionists: User´s Manual for the Creative Disruption of Everyday Life
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press/Mass MoCA Publications, 2004); and Nato Thompson, ed.,
Living as Form (New York: Creative Time Books, 2012).
10 Doug Borwick, Building Communities, Not Audiences: The Future of the Arts in the United
States (Winston-Salem, NC: Arts Engaged, 2012), 35.
4

a repositioning of artistic action at large and leads to a fun-

damentally different understanding of art in society. This
is why I would like to argue that socially engaged art is not
simply a development within the art field to be described
from an art historical perspective alone, but rather a specif-
ic form of activity within society. Socially engaged art ob-
tains its working tools and intellectual approaches from the
knowledge resources developed in art over centuries, but it
no longer primarily draws upon these resources to establish
a self-referential author-centered art discourse.11
In order to understand this phenomenon in more detail,
Socially Engaged Art and Fall of the Spectator

the following considerations attempt to describe the concept

of socially engaged art systematically and distinguish it from
other practices, such as art activism, relational aesthetics, and
political art. To demonstrate this distinction, I will use current
examples of art on the subject of refugees. Moreover, I will link
some of the new developments in socially engaged art to ar-
tistic strategies developed in the 1960s and 1970s in Europe,
in particular to the Situationist movement and Joseph Beuys,
who in the early 1970s coined the term “social sculpture.” In so
doing, I will suggest a historical narrative around those artists
who intervene directly into the social world, like founders of
social enterprises and agitators who are looking for new ways
to create social change and thereby abandon the gallery nexus
as their main field of operation. The fact that this development
is not marginal is demonstrated by the numerous nonprofit
organizations founded by artists, the amount of publications
that have appeared on this topic in recent years, and the rise of
certain infrastructures and the establishment of state funding
mechanisms for socially committed art.12

11 Referring to participatory art, Claire Bishop distinguishes between “an authored tradi-
tion that seeks to provoke participants and a de-authored lineage that aims to embrace
collective creativity.” Claire Bishop, Participation (London: Whitechapel Gallery/MIT
Press, 2006), 11.
12 Creative Time, for instance, is a platform that presents those artistic initiatives
and organizations on a regular basis. Another example for the growth in the field of
 5
Nevertheless, the following thoughts do not propose the
development of socially engaged art as the only important
art movement of the early twenty-first century. To do so
would be naive. Rather, I am concerned with outlining a
critical description of this rising and increasingly differen-
tiated field, which to me also seems to be a field of practice
prone to failure. The vulnerability to failure of socially and
politically engaged art does not—and I will go into this be-
low—have to do with the fact that many of these projects
oscillate between the traditional author-spectator nexus
and practices that no longer refer to the classical reception
aesthetic with its anticipated spectator. Rather, it is because
they refer to an aesthetic of action and social design.

Karen van den Berg

A Brief Cartography of Disputes
One of the standard arguments that has consistently
emerged in debates about socially engaged art is the accu-
sation that art overestimates its own realm of validity when
intervening in the social and political world. One reason that
is often raised by those who expect art to have a direct socio
political efficacy is that artists are not adequately trained for
social tasks and for intervention into social crises. Artists
are considered politically naive and are not subject to the
consequences of their actions, or worse, they behave in a
cynical manner toward real social issues and problems and
instrumentalize victims to gain media attention.13

socially engaged art organizations and organizations of artistic activist was the confer-
ence “Artists Organisations International,” which took place in Berlin in 2015. The Paul
Hamlyn Foundation is an example of an institution that provides money and an educa-
tional infrastructure for socially engaged art projects; an example of a German founda-
tion that supports socially engaged art is the Ministry of Science and Culture Baden
Württemberg. Also, the City University of New York Queens College has established
an MFA in Art and Social Action. See also Nato Thompson, Seeing Power, 70–71; Pablo
Helguera, Education for Socially Engaged Art: A Materials and Techniques Handbook (New
York: Jorge Pinto Books, 2011).
13 For a discussion on this subject focused on German-speaking countries, see Leonhard
Emmerling, Kunst der Entzweiung: Zur Machtlosigkeit von Kunst (Berlin: Turia + Kant,
2017); Almuth Spiegler, “Darf man das? Kunst mit dem Leid machen?,” Die Presse, March
6

A number of negative examples can be cited here. A well-

known and highly problematic project of this nature was Ai
Weiwei’s visit to the Idomeni refugee camp in Greece in March
2016. The Chinese activist—who is one of the most famous art-
ists of our time—brought a piano to the muddy rain-soaked
refugee camp and invited a young female Syrian refugee, who
was obviously a musical novice, to give a concert in the pour-
ing rain. After the young woman played a few bars, Ai then
explained, in front of TV cameras, that this concert proved the
power of art and that art would overcome the war. This sort of
thoughtless action is often cited as an example that proves the
Socially Engaged Art and Fall of the Spectator

inadequacy of the art of direct action. And in the context of in-

stances like this, it is not without reason that the international
refugee aid organization RISE has drawn up a code of conduct
to prevent such ill-considered interventions.14
However, criticism of such actions does not come from the
field of politics and social work alone; it also comes from within
the field of art itself. Many of those who adhere to Theodor W.
Adorno’s dialectic model of autonomy and are convinced that
art can only be socially effective in an autonomous sphere are
also reluctant about the value of socially engaged art. In recent
years, French philosopher Jacques Rancière has come to be re-
garded as one of the main proponents of this argument. He had
a bitter dispute with the French curator and art critic Nicolas
Bourriaud, who in the late 1990s coined the term “relational aes-
thetics” to identify artistic positions that are concerned with a
“collective elaboration of meaning” and art projects that are no
longer made for contemplation but “to be lived through, like an

29, 2016; Wolfgang Ullrich, “Kunst und Flüchtlinge: Ausbeutung statt Einfühlung,”
Perlentaucher, June 20, 2016, https://www.perlentaucher.de/essay/wolfgang-ullrich-
ueber-kunst-und-fluechtlinge.html.
14 Tania Canas, “10 Things You Need to Consider If You Are an Artist—Not of the Refugee
and Asylum Seeker Community—Looking to Work with Our Community,” RISE,
last modified October 5, 2015, http://riserefugee.org/10-things-you-need-to-consider-if-
you-are-an-artist-not-of-the-refugee-and-asylum-seeker-community-looking-to-work-
with-our-community/.
 7
Ai Weiwei during a performance at Idomeni refugee camp on the Greek-Macedonian bor-
der, March 2016. Photo by Yannis Kolesidis/EPA/Shutterstock.

Karen van den Berg

opening to unlimited discussion.”15 Rancière’s main argument
against the participatory art projects gathered under the um-
brella term “relational aesthetics” was that a discrete distance,
unfolded in the aesthetic experience in particular, promotes a
certain politically relevant reflexivity. According to Rancière,
it is exactly that discrete distance in aesthetic experience that
enables us to put our own social position aside and in so doing
opens up new perspectives on situations in which one would
otherwise only be embedded.16 A counterexample to Rancière’s
proposition can be found in the book Truth Is Concrete: A
Handbook for Artistic Strategies in Real Politics, in which Austrian
cultural theorist Oliver Marchart dismisses Adorno’s dictum
of autonomy and the dialectical concept of “purposefulness
without purpose” as “nonsense” and furthermore claims that
it grew out of an anti-political ideology of art functionaries.17

15 Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics (Dijon: Les presses du réel, 2002), 15; see also
Nicolas Bourriaud, “Precarious Constructions: Answer to Jacques Rancière on Art and
Politics,” Open 17 (2009): 20–40.
16 Jacques Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator (London: Verso, 2009).
17 Oliver Marchart, “(Counter) Agitating,” in Steirischer Herbst and Malzacher, Truth Is
Concrete, 225.
8

These examples may indicate that there is anything but

agreement about whether artists have the appropriate tools
to trigger social transformation. The key question, there-
fore, remains: Can art make a contribution when it comes
to concrete interventions into politics and social life, and if
so, how? The belief that artists are unable to achieve positive
effects on real politics can be traced back to Plato’s Republic
and seems to be as old as the history of aesthetic theory it-
self.18 This conclusion still appears to be common sense to a
wider public. Such recurring disbelief explains why partic-
ularly fierce arguments regularly break out over the scope
Socially Engaged Art and Fall of the Spectator

and self-conception of artistic practice when art projects in-

terfere directly in the shaping of the social body or intervene
into social crises. However, what is symptomatic in these
debates is that they attempt to provide general answers and
therefore either lump all possible artistic approaches together,
thereby criticizing them in general terms, or campaign un-
critically for socially engaged art.

Artistic Approaches in the Field of

Political Engagement
Precisely because socially and politically committed art
is so controversial, it may be helpful to first distinguish
between the different approaches in this area of practice.
However, rather than initially proceeding historically, I
would like to shed light on examples from current practices
and to then examine their historical models. The diverse
approaches that now characterize contemporary art can
easily be traced by examining projects that have emerged
in recent years surrounding the issue of refugees, as this
topic has been the subject of socially engaged art projects
in an almost inflationary way.

18 Plato, Republic, 599bff.; Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of

Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 13.
 9
In this proposal for a typology, I would like to distin-
guish between three categories of art that addresses refu-
gees and then further subdivide the third more precisely. I
call the first category “art projects about refugee issues,” the
second “‘spectator art’ that integrates refugees as performers,”
and the third comprises “collaborative projects with refu-
gees beyond the gallery nexus.” It may be apparent that the
term “activism” does not appear here. There are reasons for
this choice that I will expand upon below.
Works in the first category in my typology—art projects
about social and political issues—often take place within the
framework of traditional public art institutions and galleries.
Here, we find many examples that are usually called “politi-
cal art” and are, for the most part, described more precisely
as art about politics. Once again, Ai Weiwei imposes himself

Karen van den Berg

as the most prominent representative of art about the refu-
gee issue. The Chinese artist has made a name for himself
with a series of monumental installations in museums and
art galleries that take refugees as a subject. In February 2016,
for example, he attached fourteen thousand orange life jack-
ets to the columns of the Berliner Konzerthaus. In another
installation, Laundromat, which was shown at the private
gallery Deitch Projects in New York in December 2016, he
exhibited approximately fifteen thousand personal belong-
ings and garments worn by refugees during their journeys.
Ai collected clothing, photographs, and personal memories,
cleaned them, and arranged them as if they were merchan-
dise in a huge high-end store. This series continued when he
exhibited a 70-meter-long inflatable boat with 258 oversized
faceless refugee figures at the National Gallery in Prague in
March 2017. I will not comment further on these spectacular
art-market-compatible works at this point. What matters to
me, however, is that these projects are prepared for an an-
ticipated art audience and their expectations. Their context
in established institutions asserts the problematic aspects
10
Socially Engaged Art and Fall of the Spectator

Ai Weiwei, Laundromat, Jeffrey Deitch, New York, November 2016. Photo by Genevieve
Hanson.

that are implied when a cultural elite attempts to speak on

behalf of marginalized groups. But the problem here is not
that most of the visitors belong to a certain class. Rather,
problems arise within this setting when an exhibition fails to
contribute valuable information or experiences on the topic.
Art about political or social issues that is shown in the
traditional museum-gallery nexus, in sum, must first and
foremost be measured against existing debates about the
prevailing subject matter. The yardstick here is whether an
art project succeeds as a contribution to the public discourse
to which it refers and whether it relates meaningfully to
existing knowledge, information, or aesthetic experiences.
Therefore, one can expect that documentary works—besides
the aesthetic precision in their execution—will not present
already familiar images, patterns, experiences, and reflec-
tions. Paradigmatic historical models for this documentary
approach reside mostly in the history of photography, from
Walker Evans to Bernd and Hilla Becher.
 11
Without going deeper into these examples and their moral
implications, I would like to emphasize that art about politics
and social issues is made for an art audience. In this respect,
it is perceived and appraised by a specific audience, one that
is best described using Elizabeth Currid-Halkett’s term the
“aspirational class.” According to Currid-Halkett, the “aspira-
tional class” is a heterogeneous meritocratic social group that,
despite a wide income range, agrees upon certain consumer
attitudes—like attaching great value to healthy food—and
spends most of its income on education.19 If art addresses this
privileged audience, it does not aim to enhance the social life
of those affected or marginalized directly, but at best it does
so indirectly. Hence, it is merely a reflection on this subject
and therefore must be measured by what it has to contribute
to this sphere of reflection. This is also why community art

Karen van den Berg

researchers call this art “spectator art.”20
It is somewhat different when spectator art lets refugees
appear as actors and performers—and here I am referring to
the second category outlined above. I have already alluded to
the highly problematic intervention by Ai Weiwei in Idomeni,
where the assumption seems unavoidable that the artist
placed himself at the center of attention through the use of
the misery of others.21
One encounters a similar but different problem in a project
by Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson. Like Ai, Eliasson
has been rightly criticized for the workshop he presented at
the Venice Biennale in summer 2017.22 In his project, called the
Green Light Workshop, visitors, in collaboration with a group of
about seventy (unpaid) refugees, who, as the artist explains in

19 Elizabeth Currid-Halkett, The Sum of Small Things: A Theory of the Aspirational Class
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017).
20 Borwick states that “spectator art” is a traditional European concept of art and is related to
courtly traditions and the aristocracy. Borwick, Building Communities, Not Audiences, 35.
21 See Ullrich, “Kunst und Flüchtlinge.”
22 See Javier Pes, “Creative Workshop Is Just the Job for Venice Biennale,” The Art Newspaper,
June 20, 2017, https://www.theartnewspaper.com/comment/creative-workshop-is-just-
the-job-for-venice-biennale.
12

a video, “voluntarily” work for him, were invited to assemble

lamps according to instructions provided by the artist. Visitors
were either forced into the role of the voyeur or were expected
to be observed at work—or they could buy the self-assembled
lamps for several hundred euros and in so doing donate to a
refugee project. What was quite bizarre about this situation,
even though Eliasson used a “fundamentally diplomatic, anti-
authoritarian approach,”23 was that the collaborative work-
shop was exhibited and labeled as an artwork in a heavily
author-centered exhibition. This meant that while the setting
may have functioned as community-building workshop when
Socially Engaged Art and Fall of the Spectator

it was first conducted at the TBA21 in Vienna (2016), in this it-

eration, as an exhibition object, it was disturbed and devalued.
The promise of collective knowledge production could there-
fore only be fulfilled with great difficulty.
The strange mixture of a situation of effective collabo-
ration and the exhibition apparatus, with all its protocols,
doctrines, strategic functions, and its author-centered atti-
tude was certainly also the stumbling block that sparked
Rancière’s and art theorist Claire Bishop’s unease with re-
lational aesthetics. The assertion that situations like this
reduce hierarchies and the claim that the distinction between
artist, collaborators, and visitors was undifferentiated is built
on shaky ground. Especially since, as Rancière convincingly
points out, it is based on a false opposition between a pas-
sive spectator and “living participation” and thus leverag-
es the actual critical potential of aesthetics, which unfolds
in aesthetic experience primarily because it is not an act
based on sociality. Neither marginalized groups nor the
“emancipated spectator” wait for paternalistic invitations
to social interaction in the museum.24 In a similar way,

23 Jörg Scheller, “It’s Complicated: How Is Contemporary Art Responding to the Current
Refugee Crisis? Three Case Studies,” Frieze, September 8, 2016, https://frieze.com
/article/its-complicated.
24 See Rancière, Emancipated Spectator, 5.
 13
Olafur Eliasson, Green Light Workshop, hosted by the 57th Venice Biennial, “Viva Arte
Viva,” June 2017. Photo by Karen van den Berg.

Bishop criticizes participatory situations in exhibitions,

Karen van den Berg

because for her they conjure an amorphous community
lacking an awareness of difference, fragility, and antago-
nism.25 In her critique, Bishop refers to a certain proximi-
ty between participative art practice with its harmonizing
approaches and simple “leisure activities.”26 Situations like
Eliasson’s Green Light Workshop therefore run the risk—as
Andrea Fraser has put it in another context—of turning
the social itself into a kind of fetish and commodity.27 The
problem with these projects, which bring marginalized
groups into the traditional exhibition apparatus and call
upon people to collaborate, stems from the fact that the ex-
hibition apparatus has limited compatibility with regard
to collaborative practices. This seems possible only if the
exhibition apparatus is itself suspended and the gallery
space is transformed into a social platform—if only tempo-
rarily. When political art, as Walter Benjamin stated, does
not take up a position toward its own production, it is not

25 Claire Bishop, “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics,” October 110 (Fall 2004): 66.
26 Ibid., 52.
27 Andrea Fraser, “Speaking of the Social World,” Texte zur Kunst 81 (March 2011): 154.
14

credible.28 Or, as Fraser put it, the problem with political

art is that “most of it is reactionary, that is, passively affir-
mative of the relations of power in which it is produced.”29
Against this background, it is worthwhile to differenti-
ate between collaborative art projects that are organized in
exhibition spaces and those that operate with artistic means
outside of the exhibition system. Maintaining the example
of refugee projects, I would like to call this category “col-
laborative projects with and for refugees.” I shall further
divide this category into four subcategories: therapeutic art
projects, refugees as authors, cultural projects using artistic
Socially Engaged Art and Fall of the Spectator

know-how to improve real life situations, and cultural proj-

ects using art institutions as platforms for social work.
I would like to begin with the subcategory of therapeutic
art projects, taking the example of a painting workshop with
Yezidi women who had escaped ISIS captivity conducted by the
British artist Hannah Rose Thomas and clinical psychologist
Dr. Sarah Whittaker-Howe. This project pursues completely
different goals because it is not, firstly, directed toward specta-
tors and recognition mechanisms of the art world.30 On the con-
trary, the workshop—similar to the projects of the Congolese
choreographer Fabrice Don de Dieu Bwabulamutima, to name
just one example—aims to help traumatized refugees to over-
come complete speechlessness. The workshops of both artists
intend to provide affected persons with articulation skills so
that they might distance themselves from traumatic expe-
riences, no more, no less. Artists who impart these sorts of
skills are, for good reason, in demand. Even if they receive lit-
tle or no attention in the art world, their work is nevertheless

28 Walter Benjamin, “The Author as Producer,” in Art after Modernism, Rethinking Rep-
resentation, ed. Brian Wallis (New York: New Museum, 1984), 297–309.
29 Andrea Fraser quoted in Gregg Bordowitz, “Tactics Inside and Out,” in Institutional
Critique: An Anthology of Artists’ Writings, ed. Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009), 444.
30 “Art with Former Isis Slaves | Kurdistan,” Hannah Rose Thomas, accessed March 14,
2019, http://hannahrosethomas.com/unhcr-art-project-1.
 15
Hannah Rose Thomas, workshop with Yezidi ISIS survivors in Dohuk, Iraqi Kurdistan,
August 2017. Photo by Rasheed Hussein.

Karen van den Berg

recognized and supported by institutions like the United Nations
High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) or the more art-
related Paul Hamlyn Foundation—the latter of which is a
private foundation specializing in supporting initiatives that
“help people overcome disadvantage and a lack of opportu-
nity” and in so doing specifically promotes creativity.31
In recent years, this area has become increasingly profes-
sionalized. One reason for this development is that founda-
tions not only finance this work, but they also accompany,
document, and evaluate the results. The Paul Hamlyn
Foundation, for instance, offers training programs for artists
to enable them to work in collaborative settings.32
Of course, the success of such projects is by no means guar-
anteed. The professionalization of these kinds of activities has
therefore become a necessity. However, what matters to me

31 Paul Hamlyn Foundation website, https://www.phf.org.uk/; see also “Congo Dance

Project Helps Refugees Take Steps towards Rebuilding Lives,” UNCHR, accessed March
14, 2019, https://www.unhcr.org/news/stories/2018/3/5aa666c14/congo-dance-project
-helps-refugees-steps-towards-rebuilding-lives.html.
32 See “ArtWorks: A Call to Action How We Can Collectively Strengthen Practice in
Participatory Settings,” Paul Hamlyn Foundation, March 2015, https://www.phf.org
.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/ArtWorks-A-call-to-action.pdf.
16

within my attempt to systematize is that these projects oper-

ate within an entirely different framework than the examples
mentioned above. It cannot be emphasized enough that these
projects do not aim to produce art. What they do is therapeu-
tic work with artistic means. In that sense, therapeutic prac-
tices follow a different logic than those within the exhibition
apparatus and the spectator system. Their aim is to help peo-
ple in a therapeutic setting. This is accompanied by the fact
that participants and artists have a different relationship than
those within the spectator system. Sherry Arnstein’s famous
“Ladder of Participation,” which was developed for urban
Socially Engaged Art and Fall of the Spectator

planning as early as 1969,33 would locate these projects not as

participatory but rather as patronizing areas. In so doing, the
therapeutic setting contradicts many of the basic emancipatory
assumptions of the art system. However, this does not delegit-
imize these projects. It only becomes problematic if the artists
are unable to assess the critical situations and the states of mind
of the participants, or the artists involved intoxicate themselves
with their own willingness to help. The success of the work is
not measured by the fact that works are created that relate to a
certain artistic discourse; rather, it is measured by whether the
people involved gain the possibility of articulation through their
participation and through which they can distance themselves
from traumatic experiences. This places these activities and any
knowledge produced firmly within therapeutic discourses.
This therapeutic work can be distinguished from projects
in which refugees (or other marginalized people) become au-
thors—or at least co-authors, which brings me to my second
subcategory. Here, again, there have been a wide variety of
projects at very different intellectual levels. For example, the
project of the National Geographic photojournalist ReZa, who
gave Kurdish children cameras to document their lives, has be-
come a model for many projects that work with photography.

33 See Sherry R. Arnstein, “A Ladder of Citizen Participation,” JAIP 35, no. 4 (July 1969): 217.
 17
Karen van den Berg
Sherry Arnstein, “A Ladder of Citizen Participation,” published in JAIP 35, no. 4 (July
1969): 217. Photo © The American Planning Association, www.planning.org, reprinted
by permission of Taylor & Francis Ltd., http://www.tandfonline.comon behalf of the
American Planning Association.

Participatory theater is another popular tool to empower

people to express themselves. Theatre scholar Alison Jeffers
credits this approach with a “double function of raising
awareness among the audience while providing a therapeu-
tic function for those involved.”34 But many theatre works
written or devised by refugees also show that the focus on
letting marginalized and traumatized groups speak for
themselves has its problems, just as when Western artists

34 Alison Jeffers, “Hospitable Stages and Civil Listening: Being an Audience for
Participatory Refugee Theatre,” in Refugee Performance: Practical Encounters, ed. Michael
Balfour (London: Intellect Ltd., 2012), 139.
18

presume to speak on behalf of refugees. Against the back-

ground of the audience’s expectations, a mixture of spec-
tator art and therapy can often lead to embarrassment and
disappointment for both sides.
To avoid precisely these pitfalls and to create truly dig-
nified and empowering platforms and environments, a
number of socially engaged artists have adopted complete-
ly different approaches. These attempts are no longer about
producing art. Instead, they use artistic means to produce
new forms of social togetherness. One example is the Silent
University, which links intellectuals living in the diaspora,
Socially Engaged Art and Fall of the Spectator

NGOs, and cultural institutions in “search for the most pro-

gressive ways to use each organization’s facilities and affect
changes,” 35 or the project of the Hamburg filmmaker Margit
Czenki, who helped refugees edit the videos stored on their
mobile phones and prepare them for public presentations in
which the refugees then told their own stories.
While these projects still adjust their institutional frame-
works, there are also a number of examples that further
resolve the relationship to the art field and abandon the
concept of authorship. So, let me continue with my third
subcategory: non-spectator art provided and created by art-
ists and art institutions.
One example of a “cultural project using artistic know-
how to improve real life situations” is Neue Nachbarschaft //
Moabit (New Neighborhood // Moabit). Initiated by a group
including Belarusian artist Marina Naprushkina, this proj-
ect involved the creation of a neighborhood meeting place
in Berlin in 2013. In this space, informal language-learning
workshops, a café set up by refugees, concerts, readings, and
art workshops all take place. Naprushkina wrote a book
about this work, in which she describes the day-to-day busi-
ness of the project, including visits to government offices,

35 Ahment Ögut and The Silent University, “Reclaiming Knowledge,” in Steirischer Herbst
and Malzacher, Truth Is Concrete, 114–15.
 19
Margit Czenki, video still from film project with found footage from refugees, artsprogram
Friedrichshafen, 2016. Courtesy of Margit Czenki.

Karen van den Berg

Neue Nachbarschaft // Moabit, Berlin, 2016. Photo by Karen van den Berg.

administrative procedures, the negotiation of expectations,

etc. What is important here is that within the project there is
a long-term artistic engagement with self-governance. New
Neighborhood // Moabit is therefore based primarily on a
deep knowledge about tacit exclusion mechanisms and the
strategies of empowerment to overcome them. Naprushkina,
20

whose works were shown at prestigious platforms like the

7th Berlin Biennale in 2012, initially shelved her other exhi-
bition activities for this project to ensure that she was able to
give the project sufficient time.
Another example is the Berlin-based architects’ and
artists’ collective raumlabor, which conducted a series of
collective refugee platforms. They organized a large ongo-
ing urban gardening project, called Coop Campus—Die
Gärtnerei, in Berlin in 2015 together with the citizens’ ini-
tiative S27 and the Evangelischer Friedhofsverband Berlin
Mitte. In January 2016, raumlabor also transformed the ex-
Socially Engaged Art and Fall of the Spectator

hibition space at Zeppelin University in Friedrichshafen,

Germany, into a meeting place for students, refugees, lo-
cal residents, and university staff. Under the headline
“Learning Community,” furniture was built, curtains were
sewn, and regulations adapted to change the space into a
platform to host dance performances, photography, theatre
and print workshops, dinner parties, lectures given by the
refugees, and other events that enabled the establishment of
close contact and friendships among the participants. This
project, too, was not about creating a work of art but about
creating a situation in which new forms of encounters could

Raumlabor, Learning Community, Transcultural Kitchen, White Box, Zeppelin

University, Friedrichshafen, March 2016. Photo by Tim Schleicher.
 21
be tried out. Over the course of half a year, the student ini-
tiative welt_raum and two master’s students organized many
events together with the refugees.36
Projects like these are indeed reflected upon and discussed
in the art world, but they are not predicated on an imagined
audience that might marvel at their existence. Rather, es-
sentially the same people meet regularly and undertake or
produce something together. Gardening, cooking, building
furniture, and simple architectural projects are particularly
widespread. These grassroots activities are not artistic activi-
ties in the strictest sense. What is interesting, however, is that
many projects co-initiated by artists prefer these grassroots
activities to the production of amateur art. At the same time,
some projects make explicit reference to the art world. The
Grandhotel Cosmopolis, a hotel founded and run jointly by

Karen van den Berg

artists, volunteers, and refugees in Augsburg, Germany, in
2012, for instance, uses Beuys’s notion of “social sculpture” in
the promotion of their project.37
Despite such references, none of these projects are made
for an audience. They are by no means “spectator art”—nor do
they seek a notion of authorship that would subscribe to the
recognition mechanisms of the art world. In this sense, they
are best described as art-related cultural projects. At the same
time, however, they benefit enormously from the knowledge
base, the know-how, and a particular kind of self-motivation
acquired within the art field and its educational institutions.
In his book Dark Matter, artist and activist Gregory
Sholette has convincingly argued that all those actors whom
the art field tends to sideline, those artists who do not ap-
pear in the exhibition system, are not only essential to the
survival of elite art but are also important to agitate elite

36 See welt_raum website, http://welt-raum.org/; the two students were Luzia Gross and
Caroline Brendel.
37 See “Concept for a Social Sculpture in the Heart of Augsburg,” Grandhotel Cosmopolis,
June 2014, https://grandhotel-cosmopolis.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/GHC_3spr
Konzept_A4_view.pdf.
22

art.38 One of the reasons for this is that, as cultural laborers,

those artists who are excluded from or may have denounced
the art field’s apparatus of recognition are to some extent
forced to shape new social contexts and formations—and
these approaches might then reflect back into the art field.
These mechanisms are diametrically opposed to the
fourth and final subcategory of art-related refugee projects
that I would like to introduce: cultural projects using art in-
stitutions as platforms for social work. These examples all use
cultural institutions as a reputational resource and a site for
social work. A number of projects of this kind exist in Europe,
Socially Engaged Art and Fall of the Spectator

especially in the German-speaking theater system. The free

performance venue Kampnagel in Hamburg, for example,
invited the artists’ group Baltic Raw to build semilegal ac-
commodations for refugees on the site. These were developed
together with the refugees from Lampedusa according to
their needs. From 2014 to 2015, a group of refugees lived on
the Kampnagel grounds, protected by Baltic Raw’s definition
of the shelter as a permanent performance called EcoFavela
Lampedusa Nord.39
Other theater institutions host informal language courses,
provide meeting spaces, and even offer living space.
For many years, a program called Montags Café at the
Schauspielhaus Dresden has offered a weekly intercultural
get-together to learn German and other cultural activities.40
The Austrian conceptual artists’ collective Wochenklausur
achieved international fame employing this approach. They
often siphon funds from the art world to carry out their
social projects. Even as early as 1999, they used the money

38 Gregory Sholette, Dark Matter: Art and Politics in the Age of Enterprise Culture (London:
Pluto Press, 2011).
39 “Ecofavela Lampedusa Nord 2015,” Kampnagel, accessed March 14, 2019, https://www
.kampnagel.de/de/programmreihe/ecofavela-lampedusa-nord/?programmreihe=11.
40 Montagscafé, “MONTAGSGALA: ‘Das Aufstehspiel,’” Facebook, December 11, 2018,
https://www.facebook.com/montagscafedresden/photos/pb.1680988942178044
.-2207520000.1546940424./2227457894197810/?type=3&theater.
 23
attached to their invitation to the Austrian Pavilion at the
Venice Biennale to facilitate language courses for Albanian
refugees in Kosovo.41
To what extent does it makes sense to discuss such
projects in the art context? Why not simply subsume them
within the context of social or cultural work? One possible
answer is that these projects translate artistic know-how,
imagination, and a sense of possibility to design new forms
of community. But something else is crucial here: in the case
of the projects based within art institutions, such questions
are answered in a different way from the case of artist-run
social shelters. In order to obtain funding, the operators of-
ten refer to the artistic character of their projects. In the case
of art institutions, they are obliged to do so. The director of
Kampnagel, for example, was confronted with a lawsuit for

Karen van den Berg

the misappropriation of funds filed by the German far-right
party Alternative für Deutschland.
What becomes clear in the face of such incidents is that
in democratic societies the legally secured concept of artistic
autonomy maintains an experimental free space that is still
regarded as a necessary corrective against the doctrine of an
administrative regime and its self-contradictions and that
provides spaces for trying out alternative social forms.

The Production of the Commons

In the twenty-first century, despite the importance placed
on artistic autonomy, a contrary trend can also be observed.
In his essay “Production and Distribution of the Common,”
published in 2009, literary theorist Michael Hardt argues
that in the age of information- and image-based industries,
the three fields of politics, economics, and art all resort to

41 “Language Schools in the Kosovo War,” Wochenklausur, accessed March 14, 2019, http://
www.wochenklausur.at/projekt.php?lang=en&id=12.
24

the same mode of production.42 According to him, all three

areas are oriented toward the production of social relation-
ships and ways of life. Hardt calls this production of life
forms “biopolitical production.”43 In so doing, he distin-
guishes himself from Rancière’s conception of aesthetics.
Hardt criticizes the French philosopher for his conception of
aesthetics, art, and politics and accuses him of understand-
ing social relations or the sphere of community as if they
were a priori. In contrast, Hardt emphasizes that the space
of the communal is something that first and foremost has
to be created. Common goods “such as information, cultur-
Socially Engaged Art and Fall of the Spectator

al products and code, are not natural,” Hardt states.44 “The

common is dynamic and artificial, produced through a wide
variety of social circuits and encounters,” he continues.45 A
world in which economies and production become increas-
ingly “informationalized,” and in which politics “involves
not only the distribution but also the production of the com-
mon,” 46 emphasizes the creative nature of not only artistic
practice but also of economic production and political ac-
tion, writes Hardt. His hypothesis, then, is that “we are liv-
ing through a period of transition in which these forms of
immaterial production are becoming hegemonic in the econ-
omy, which means […] not that they will become numerous,
but that their qualities will be progressively imposed over
other forms of production.”47 Within these circumstances,
Hardt continues, artists might take on a new role, but it is up
to them whether they will allow themselves to be collected
by new forms of biopolitical capitalism and economically

42 Michael Hardt, “Production and Distribution of the Common,” in Being an Artist in Post-
Fordist Times, ed. Pascal Gielen and Paul De Bruyne (Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 2009),
45–53.
43 Ibid., 52.
44 Ibid., 47.
45 Ibid.
46 Ibid., 51.
47 Ibid.
 25
driven creativity, or whether they will reorganize the social
world in defense of the common good and social justice.
What I would like to make clear in recourse to Hardt is
that creating a new sphere for the commons is precisely the
impulse of the projects above that are beyond the spectator
system. It seems to have become increasingly important that
artistic tasks shape social situations, and perhaps this is, in
fact, the beginning of a larger movement. In any case, the con-
viction that one can change something in the social world by
artistic means and in art-related environments seems to be
particularly true when the projects are not simply symbolic
actions in the spectator system, but rather actions in the social
world with a symbolic and aesthetic dimension. So, if we ask
why all these art-related projects beyond the spectator system
occur, one answer is because society’s demands for the con-

Karen van den Berg

struction of a new social fabric have become so challenging
that it increasingly requires imagination, a strong sense of
possibility, and a sensibility for emancipatory ideas—which
is precisely where artistic knowledge comes into play. As a
result, the relationship between the art field, the social sphere,
and politics has shifted so that it is no longer convincing and
helpful to distinguish between useful but possibly banal vol-
untary social work on the one hand and a distinct and elitist
artistic practice on the other.

Tracing Socially Engaged Art

back to Social Sculpture, Beuys,
and the Situationists
It may have been noticeable at this point that my consider-
ations are very much focused on European examples and
that my typology excludes examples of artistic activism
that could otherwise be assigned to protest culture. There
are different reasons for this: one is that this contribution is
not an extensive and representative collection of examples;
26

another is that I would like to distinguish political activism

that operates as a kind of protest intervention from those
projects of socially engaged art that work more cooperatively.
I am not drawing this distinction because I don’t appreciate
what Yates McKee has called “strike art,” 48 and I do not use
the term “spectator art” in a derogatory sense. Rather, I use
those terms to confine myself to the tradition of those proj-
ects that try to directly shape the social world through the
design of everyday situations. This differentiation seems to
make sense to me, as protest art and sustainable projects like
the abovementioned New Neighborhood // Moabit and the
Socially Engaged Art and Fall of the Spectator

Grandhotel Cosmopolis are characterized by different epis-

temic constellations.49 I have therefore excluded the whole
tradition that can be traced back to the Guerilla Art Action
Group or Art Workers Coalition or those recently active in
the United States, for example in the context of the Occupy
protests. Instead of lumping all artistic forms of political and
social activism together, I would prefer to discuss the specif-
ic tradition of socially committed art that is often associated
with Suzanne Lacy’s term “new genre public art” or Joseph
Beuys’s notion of “social sculpture”—and, as already noted,
this tradition is less spectator directed. So, let me finish my
considerations with some remarks on Beuys’s term “social
sculpture” followed by some brief notes on the international
Situationist group.
From a historical perspective, Beuys came to be a central
figure for the so-called social turn in art because his main
project was essentially the reinvention of the role of art in so-
ciety at large. His concept of artistic practice in many respects

48 See McKee, Strike Art!

49 For this reason, the well-known collective Zentrum für politische Schönheit (Center for
Political Beauty), for instance, is not mentioned in my typology despite its many (mon-
strous and hyperrealistic) theater projects referring to the refugee issue with which they
challenged ethical sensibilities in Europe. See Karen van den Berg, “Riskante Manöver:
Das Zentrum für Politische Schönheit (ZPS) und die politische Wahrheit der Illusion,” in
Haltung als Handlung—Das Zentrum für politische Schönheit, eds. Raimar Stange, Miriam
Rummel, and Florian Waldvogel (Munich: Edition Metzel, 2018), 304–20.
 27
was much more radical than Lacy’s pragmatic micro-
political interventions.50 This is because Beuys was con-
cerned with the development of an understanding of art in
which artistic practice is understood as an anthropological
activity and not as a social field in which the existing ques-
tions and discourses of the art establishment are negotiated.51
Beuys wanted to create a radically inclusive concept of art
that could be applied to the creative dimension of all pos-
sible human activities—and paradoxically, because of that,
he was confronted with general incomprehension. What
interested him was the epistemological capabilities of art.52
Beuys repeated this tirelessly in countless performances,
sculptures, lectures, self-initiated discussion forums, and
appearances as a public intellectual. All of his efforts were
aimed at developing an art practice that could deal with rel-

Karen van den Berg

evant questions of the present human world. He was con-
vinced that the traditional concept of art “lives in a niche
existence in society”53 and that the art of his time did not
relate, in its creative power, to all people who form society,
and certainly not to all the problematic areas, which in his
view urged radical transformation and what he called an
“upsetting of principles and ideas.” 54
What is important, however, is that Beuys never focused
his considerations on individual micro-solutions, but rather
—and many of his critics found this offensive, unspecific,
and metaphysical—he aimed at a cosmological expansion of

50 See Cara M. Jordan’s essay in this book.

51 See Joseph Beuys, Kunst = Kapital: Achberger Vorträge (Wangen/Allgäu, Germany: FIU-
Verlag, 1992), 45; Volker Harlan, Rainer Rappmann, and Peter Schata, Soziale Plastik:
Materialien zu Joseph Beuys (Achberg, Germany: Achberger Verlag, 1984), 20; and Volker
Harlan, Was ist Kunst? Werkstattgespräche mit Beuys (Stuttgart: Urachhaus, 1986), 15, 27.
52 See Harlan, Rappmann, and Schata, Soziale Plastik, 20; Joseph Beuys, Aktive Neutralität:
Die Überwindung von Kapitalismus und Kommunismus: Ein Vortrag mit Diskussion am 20.
Januar 1985 (Wangen/Allgäu, Germany: FIU-Verlag, 1994), 13, 123ff.
53 Harlan, Rappmann, and Schata, Soziale Plastik, 17; see also “Beuys im Gespräch mit
Hermann Schreiber,” Lebensläufe, BW, 1980, uploaded to YouTube as “Beuys Interview
(1980),” YouTube, BeuysTV, April 30, 2011, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZ
TZW-k-TB8. All translations by the author.
54 “Beuys im Gespräch mit Hermann Schreiber.”
28

human consciousness, or what Hegel might have called the

Weltgeist (world spirit).55 Beuys did not seek to solve any social
micro-conflicts; instead, he saw the task of art as making an
epistemological contribution to the evolution of mankind.56
Under this horizon, he then realized practical projects. He saw
humanity placed in a position of responsibility to take its evo-
lution in its own hands. This included an almost anarchistic
idea of human self-administration, which is difficult to recon-
cile with our modern bureaucratized and differentiated soci-
ety. Beuys was convinced that people had long since reached
the point of being able to administer themselves—and he was
Socially Engaged Art and Fall of the Spectator

therefore highly committed to direct democracy.57 He also

represented a decidedly postmaterialistic worldview and, in
so doing, tried to understand physical phenomena, such as
temperature, as spiritual processes.58 His demand to form a
fundamentally new relationship to the world and its cosmo-
logical order also led him to become a founding member and
candidate of the Green Party.59 At a time when the postwar
experience, nuclear power, space travel, and the social revo-
lutions of the ’68 movement were important factors, he saw
mankind at a cosmological point of change.60
That Beuys founded the so-called German Student Party
in 1967 in reaction to the murder of Benno Ohnesorg during
student protests in Berlin; that he set up his Organization

55 See Georg Friedrich Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2004), 458; Harlan, Rappmann, and Schata, Soziale Plastik, 92; Joseph Beuys, Bernhard
Blume, and Rainer Rappmann, Gespräche über Bäume (Wangen/Allgäu, Germany: FIU-
Verlag, 2006), 22; and Beuys, Aktive Neutralität, 9; Beuys, Kunst = Kapital, 45.
56 Joseph Beuys, “A Public Dialogue in New York City 1974,” in Joseph Beuys in America:
Energy Plan for the Western Man, ed. Carin Kuoni (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows,
1990), 25–37, 26; see also Beuys, Kunst = Kapital, 46.
57 See Harlan, Rappmann, and Schata, Soziale Plastik, 16ff., 33; see also Beuys in a panel
discussion 1970 with Arnold Gehlen, Max Bill, and Max Bense, moderated by Wieland
Schmied, “Wochenendforum: Kunst und Antikunst,” Ende Offen, n.d., uploaded to
YouTube as “Beuys vs Gehlen: Kunst - Antikunst,” YouTube, Lars Knacken, September
25, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2VLsaY4KGYs.
58 See Caroline Tisdall, Joseph Beuys, exh. cat. (New York: Thames & Hudson, 1979), 83;
Harlan, Rappmann, and Schata, Soziale Plastik, 20.
59 See Harlan, Rappmann, and Schata, Soziale Plastik, 62ff.
60 See Beuys, Kunst = Kapital, 45; Beuys, Aktive Neutralität, 9.
 29
Karen van den Berg

Poster designed by Johannes Stüttgen for the German federal election in 1979 showing
Beuys’s work, Der Unbesiegbare. Photo by Ute Klophaus; courtesy of alamy and © VG
Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2019.
30

for Direct Democracy through Referendum in 1970 and

founded the Free International University for Creativity and
Interdisciplinary Research (FIU) in 1973,61 to which he and
Heinrich Böll wrote a manifesto for a freely accessible edu-
cational forum; that for many years he was a board member
of and participant in the summer academies in Achberg,
Germany, where people were concerned with the reinven-
tion of a society beyond Marxism and capitalism and dis-
cussed a so-called third way with the leaders of the Prague
Spring;62 and that he became cofounder of the ecologically
and peace movement–oriented Green Party in 1980 and also
Socially Engaged Art and Fall of the Spectator

was nominated as a candidate all prove, impressively, that

his activities repeatedly went beyond the scope of the exhi-
bition nexus.63 At the same time, Beuys was also very suc-
cessful in the exhibition system and, unlike Hans Haacke
for instance, never specifically dealt with its production con-
ditions. He wanted to transform museums into universities
rather than abolish or question the economy behind them.64
The relationship between Beuys’s object- and image-
oriented work and his appearances as a public intellectual
was perceived in very different ways. Arthur Danto, for ex-
ample, regarded Beuys as one of the three most important
artists of the twentieth century. In his preface to the antholo-
gy Joseph Beuys: The Reader, he writes: “Joseph Beuys, togeth-
er with Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol, are the artists
one must turn to in order to understand the present shape
of art—the Founding Fathers of contemporary sensibility.”65

61 On the Organization for Direct Democracy, see Harlan, Rappmann, and Schata, Soziale Plastik,
33, 108ff. He founded the FIU together with the artists Klaus Staeck and Georg Meistermann,
as well as with the journalist and later founder of the first art ranking, Willi Bongard. See
Beuys, Kunst = Kapital, 20, 78; and Harlan, Rappmann, and Schata, Soziale Plastik, 15.
62 See Harlan, Rappmann, and Schata, Soziale Plastik, 12.
63 Ibid., 62ff., 129ff.
64 See Joseph Beuys and Frans Haks, Das Museum: Ein Gespräch über seine Aufgaben,
Möglichkeiten, Dimensionen (Wangen, Germany: FIU-Verlag, 1993); and Joseph Beuys and
Rainer Rappmann, Was ist eine Freie Akademie? (Achberg, Germany: FIU-Verlag, 2014).
65 Arthur C. Danto, “Foreword: Style and Salvation in the Art of Beuys,” in Joseph Beuys: The
Reader, eds. Claudia Mesch and Viola Michely (London: I. B. Tauris, 2007), xiii–xviii.
 31
The decisive factor for his assessment was above all Beuys’s
social turn in his understanding of art. Nevertheless, many
art historians still draw almost exclusively upon Beuys’s sub-
tle drawings, sculptures, and installations, and see him above
all as an important figure within the exhibition system. But
since Beuys’s public presence had something messianic about
it, he also gathered followers who understood his pictorial
works only as relics of his political activity. Beuys himself re-
peatedly spoke of his art as a “vehicle” for the initiation of a
universal process.66 Art historian Theodora Vischer, however,
has taken the position that Beuys’s appearances as a public
intellectual must be separated clearly from his artistic work.67
To American audiences especially, Beuys’s bonds to Rudolf
Steiner and his sometimes pretentious self-staging were per-
ceived as obsolete and premodern.68 However, the history of

Karen van den Berg

his reception cannot be dealt with here in depth. His reflec-
tions on social sculpture are more relevant to the present dis-
cussion on the development of socially engaged art.
Shortly before his death, Beuys spoke of a striking expe-
rience he had as a young man in 1938 when he came across
a photograph of a sculpture by Wilhelm Lehmbruck. He
said that this experience triggered his decision to become
an artist because he felt that Lehmbruck had succeeded in fab-
ricating mental sculptures that “listen” to their beholders.69
According to Beuys, Lehmbruck’s fragile sensual figures ar-
ticulated a certain state of consciousness and in so doing
transformed materiality into something spiritual.70 That
Lehmbruck had made such an impression on Beuys also

66 “Wochenendforum: Kunst und Antikunst.”

67 Theodora Vischer, Joseph Beuys: Die Einheit des Werkes: Zeichnungen, Aktionen, Plastische
Arbeiten, Soziale Skulptur (Cologne: Buchhandlung Walther König, 1991), 35ff.
68 Claudia Mesch and Viola Michely, introduction to Joseph Beuys: The Reader, eds. Mesch
and Michely, 5.
69 Joseph Beuys, Mein Dank an Wilhelm Lehmbruck, ed. Eugen Blume (Munich: Schirmer
Mosel, 2006), 17.
70 See ibid., 21.
32

articulates something about Beuys’s concept of social sculp-

ture that does not necessarily refer to an encounter or in-
teraction between people—and is therefore different from
Bourriaud’s concept of relational aesthetics.71 Social sculp-
ture is, rather, the momentum of a universal connectivi-
ty between natural materials, artifacts, humans, and even
animals and plants.72 It is telling that Beuys understood
thinking as a sculptural process of transformation.73 His
understanding of social sculpture was wide ranging—one
can even understand objects like the Earth Telephone (1968)
as social sculptures, not merely the more famous example
Socially Engaged Art and Fall of the Spectator

of 7,000 Oaks (1981–87), a project in which the artist had

seven thousand trees, each of which could be purchased
together with a basalt stone, planted in and around Kassel
and other cities worldwide.74
More important than the involvement of human actors
for Beuys’s concept of social sculpture is its cosmologi-
cal dimension, which he also expressed in his statements
that the student party he founded was the largest party
in Germany and that most of its members were animals.75
It was precisely this spiritual dimension that gave Beuys
the reputation of a premodern artist and supplanted the
radicalism of his statement “everyone is an artist,” with
which he articulated his conviction that all possible pro-
cesses in life could potentially be shaped from an artistic
point of view. As Beuys said, art must always be “in pro-
portion to what people need, otherwise it is actually point-
less to make art.“76 The attitude expressed in this statement

71 See Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics.

72 See Beuys, Kunst = Kapital, 45.
73 See Harlan, Rappmann, and Schata, Soziale Plastik, 93.
74 See Fernando Groener and Rose-Maria Kandler, eds., 7000 Eichen: Joseph Beuys (Cologne:
Buchhandlung Walther König, 1999).
75 See Caroline Tisdall, Joseph Beuys—Coyote (1976; repr. Munich: Schirmer/Mosel, 2008),
11.
76 “Wochenendforum: Kunst und Antikunst.”
 33
marks a decisive turning point to a notion of art in which
art is conceptualized as a useful activity—an activity that
aims for social transformation.
Now, however, it seems important to take a closer look
at the environment in which Beuys developed these consid-
erations. Beuys’s assertion that “everyone is an artist” did
not come out of nowhere. The artist drew on many ideas of
the Fluxus movement, of which he was a member.77 Fluxus
had promoted “living art, anti-art, and a nonart reality, to
be grasped by all people, not only critics, dilettantes and
professionals.”78 They also propagated a transfer of artistic
practice from the spectator system into everyday life. Beuys,
in a certain sense, went one step further in that he consid-
ered art to be the only way to fundamentally transform and
effect change in the world.79

Karen van den Berg

The impulse to bring art into life is as old as the avant-
garde movements of the early twentieth century and is by
no means an invention of Beuys or the Fluxus movement.
Additionally, the format of holding hearings and marathon
discussions was widespread in the student movements of
the 1960s. However, the way Beuys consistently used the ex-
hibition system to discuss political and social issues or im-
plement environmental projects must, nevertheless, be seen
as something fundamentally new. Against this backdrop, it
would be a major misunderstanding to see Beuys’s found-
ing of parties, the Organization for Direct Democracy, and
the FIU as activities independent of his artistic work. If one
takes seriously that Beuys regarded the transformation of
the social sphere as an artistic process, then these activities
belong, without any doubt, to his artistic practice.80

77 Tisdall, Joseph Beuys, 84–88; Harlan, Rappmann, Schata, Soziale Plastik, 23ff.
78 “Fluxus Manifesto,” in Happening & Fluxus: Materialien, ed. Hanns Sohm (Cologne:
Kölnischer Kunstverein, 1970), n.p.
79 See Harlan, Was ist Kunst?, 15; “Beuys im Gespräch mit Hermann Schreiber.”
80 See Joseph Beuys, “Die Gesellschaft als Kunstwerk,” in Beuys, Kunst = Kapital, 15ff.
34

In order to understand Beuys’s idea of creativity, it is cru-

cial to see that his slogans, such as “art = capital,” are anything
but a neoliberal creative imperative. For him, this creativity
addressed the possibility of humankind shaping the living
environment—in terms of freedom, self-determination, a
kind of postmaterialistic economy, a spiritually motivated
ecology, in a sort of self-responsible evolution. As mentioned
above, Beuys believed that this possibility of transformation
could be based solely on art.
However, there is an essential element in Beuys’s under-
standing of art that has led to his work not always being re-
Socially Engaged Art and Fall of the Spectator

garded as an important source for socially engaged artists

of the twenty-first century. One of the main reasons is that
Beuys always retained the sole power of interpreting the con-
cept of social sculpture. It was not possible—as it was in the
case of institutional critique81—to transform his concept into
a movement, and this was determined by Beuys’s unswerving
author-centered understanding of art.82 Even in the founding
of political parties and associations, Beuys always stood out
as a charismatic leader.83 He based his ideas of sociality on
a concept of subjectivity that, despite all of its cosmological
associations, first and foremost decides for itself and draws
creative forces from itself.84 In this respect, Beuys was an old-
school epistemologist. He did not develop practical concepts
for a redistribution of the means of production, as Benjamin

81 See Hito Steyerl, “The Institution of Critique,” Transversal Texts 1 (2006), http://eipcp.net
/transversal/0106/steyerl/en.
82 See Karen van den Berg, “Damit wir uns besser fühlen? Eine kleine Kartierung sozial
engagierter Kunst,” in Intermedialität und Performativität in den Künstlerischen Therapien,
ed. Peter Sinapius (Berlin: HPB University Press, 2018), 186–221; see also Karen van den
Berg and Jörg van den Berg, “Von der Honigpumpe zum freien Wohnen auf Zeit—
das Neue in der Kunst der neunziger Jahre und die Konsequenzen für die Institution
Museum,” Museen im Rheinland 4, no. 99 (1999): 3–8.
83 When Beuys was asked why he was always the only one named when people speak
about the FIU and if it was because he was a star, Beuys responded, “Yes, I am the star in
a way. It’s true. I admit this, but I try to use this position.” Such pronouncements show
that Beuys was deeply convinced that great social and evolutionary changes always em-
anated from the individual. Joseph Beuys in America, ed. Kuoni, 44.
84 See Beuys, Blume, and Rappmann, Gespräche über Bäume, 55.
 35
Karen van den Berg

George Maciunas, Fluxus Manifesto, 1963. Offset, 8 3/16 x 5 11/16”. The Gilbert and
Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection Gift, 2008. Acc. n.: FC1080© 2019. Digital image,
Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence.
36

had demanded. Achieving and shaping a new social order

remained the responsibility of the individual. The founding
of the FIU has therefore always remained a utopian concept
only realized as temporary events—even though Caroline
Tisdall prepared an EU-financed feasibility study for it and
the city of Düsseldorf had provided a property.85
Beuys’s insistence on the individual responsible person,
his perpetuation of author-centered art forms, and, above all,
his almost cultish self-staging have made him an inappropri-
ate model for the next generation of socially engaged artists.
Rather, they tend to gravitate toward the Situationists, who
Socially Engaged Art and Fall of the Spectator

developed the radical idea of the “creativity of the many” and

thus formulated the phrase “every human being is an artist”
in their manifesto in May 1960. The Situationist manifesto
states: “At a higher stage, everyone will become an artist, i.e.,
inseparably a producer-consumer of total culture creation.”86
Unlike Beuys, the Situationists promoted a redistribution of
means of production and in so doing took a Marxist perspec-
tive: “Against the spectacle, the realized situationist culture
introduces total participation.” The manifesto further says:
“situationist culture will be an art of dialogue, an art of inter-
action.”87 The Situationists, too, were concerned with a con-
cept of art that shapes life: “Against preserved art, it is the
organization of the directly lived moment. […] Against par-
ticularized art, it will be a global practice with a bearing, each
moment, on all the usable elements.”88
What makes the Situationists’ ideas more relatable for
many current projects of socially engaged art than Beuys’s
spiritual and epistemological approach is the fact that the

85 Joseph Beuys, Report to the European Economic Community on the Feasibility of Founding a
“Free International University for Creativity and Interdisciplinary Research” (London: Free
University Press, 1975).
86 “Situationist Manifesto,” May 17, 1960, repr. Internationale Situationniste, no. 4 (June 1960),
trans. Fabian Thompsett, available at Situationist International Online, accessed March
14, 2019, www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/manifesto.html.
87 All quotes are taken from ibid.
88 Ibid.
 37
Fabric—Planung als Plattform, screen shot of the presentation of results, Lörrach,
Germany, 2019. Photo by Karen van den Berg.

group around Guy Debord developed concrete methods

Karen van den Berg

and focused on the reorganization of production “on the
basis of the free and equal association of the producers.”89
One example of a method developed by the Situationists
is the psychogeographic exploration of cities. These expe-
ditions served to open up a knowledge of dissident among
the many—which they thought could be found on the
streets. The method of purposeless wandering, described
as dérive,90 was later taken up by the Right to the City
movement in the 1990s. It is still used by cooperative artis-
tic urban development and planning projects, such as the
Hamburg PlanBude (Planning Booth) and Fabric—Planung
als Plattform (Fabric—Planning as Platform) in Lörrach
(near Basel), in which teams of artists, architects, and people
from the neighborhoods work together on the production of
desires to redefine and shape their city district through an
inclusive creativity of the many.91

89 Ibid.
90 Guy Debord, “Theory of the Dérive,” Les Lèvres nues 9 (1956): 6–10.
91 See Fabric website, https://fabric.place/; Hanna Katharina Göbel, “Users with/out
Bodies,” City 21 (2017): 836–48.
38

The Situationists introduced this radical idea of a cre-

ativity of the many, but—compared to Beuys—their proj-
ects experienced little resonance in the art world. Another
impediment was that, paradoxically, the Situationists them-
selves were extremely exclusive and their impulsive de facto
leader, Debord, continually excluded members because
he did not consider them radical enough.92 What becomes
clear in the case of the Situationists, however, is the process
of the turning away from the aesthetics of reception toward
an aesthetics of collective action. While Beuys’s theoretical
reflections on social sculpture and his anthropological con-
Socially Engaged Art and Fall of the Spectator

cept of art questioned the role of art as an institutionalized

concept, he simultaneously functioned within existing art
institutions. In sharp contrast to Beuys, the Situationists
did not leave a legacy of imaginative monuments of other
possible models of mankind. They left behind euphoric and
playful revolutionary scripts for artistic production strate-
gies. Despite the fact that the Situationists left spectator art
and followed a regime of direct action, their internal strug-
gles and excessive group dynamic revealed how much they
were still stuck in an exclusive and orthodox concept of the
avant-garde.
In the case of Beuys, the reception of his ideas was
blocked by his self-mythology and the personality cult that
he himself provoked. At the same time, however, it was pre-
cisely the interest in his staged public persona that made
him famous and also fueled the success of projects outside
the exhibition nexus. But Beuys—despite all his activities be-
yond the exhibition nexus—never totally left spectator art.
Rather, he transferred a hegemonic author-centered habitus
from the art world to other areas where he, as a charismatic
speaker and missionary teacher, animated his audience to
take a creative approach to all manner of tasks.

92 See Kristin Ross, “Lefebvre on the Situationists: An Interview,” October 79 (Winter 1997):
69–83.
 39
Since the 1970s, the self-image of artists—especially in
the field of socially engaged art—has changed significant-
ly. If we look at contemporary artistic practice, it becomes
clear that understanding art as an activity that brings about
social transformation beyond the spectator system is no lon-
ger uncommon. Nevertheless, it must be said that the exhi-
bition apparatus has remained the hegemonic place of art.
Therefore, it is important for many artists to operate in both
fields. A number of artists have even succeed in both: they
use the platform and recognition provided by the spectator
system to receive funding and permissions for socially en-
gaged projects. Projects like PlanBude, for instance, might
not have been so successful in their fight against real estate
consortia in the city of Hamburg had a prior project involv-
ing members of their team, Park Fiction, not been exhibit-

Karen van den Berg

ed at documenta 11. Conversely, it also seems increasingly
important that artists from the spectator system prove that
they are capable of making a direct impact on social life.
Art in the author-centered exhibition apparatus and those
activities that work with artistic means in the field of social
work are never completely independent of each other. On
the contrary, the two different regimes (as Rancière would
call them) are intertwined and often compete. The still hege-
monic exhibition apparatus with its author focus contradicts
the collective approach of socially engaged art—and an exit
from the author-centered exhibition apparatus is often still
equated with an exit from the art world and a loss of pres-
tige. It is associated with a transition from reception aes-
thetics and spectator art to an art of direct action in socially
engaged practice, which represents a major epistemic shift
from working for an anticipated (art) audience to working
with people who are directly affected. Social commitment
art that directly intervenes in the living conditions of others
cannot be symbolically pursued, staged as a performance,
or even simulated; it must be negotiated with all affected
40

participants. Armen Avanessian described this transition as

one from aesthetics to poetics, in other words, as a transition
from reception-oriented to action-oriented art.93 And such
an action-oriented art practice is more than a new “ism”; it
results in a new role for the arts at large and in a field of
practice to which the traditional concept of authorship and
spectatorship no longer seems suitable.
Socially Engaged Art and Fall of the Spectator

93 Armen Avanessian, “The Speculative End of the Aesthetic Regime,” Texte zur Kunst 93
(March 2014): 40–66.