Definitional debates and approaches to assessment in socially engaged arts

Over the past four decades or so, artists have been working in forms of collaborative practice with communities using a range of emancipatory, educational, and aesthetic strategies to identify and effect local issues. Previously resigned to neighbourhood centres and church basements, socially engaged art now features in ‘high art’ venues like the Venice Biennale and in specialised university post-secondary training. At the same time, government funded strategies for community revitalisation, health and wellbeing, youth justice, and cultural diversity continue to invest in the arts to deliver social outcomes. As a result of this inter-sectoral institutional support, we now see an increased interest in evaluation.

These forms of cultural production focus on interactions and interventions within the social terrain and public space. Beyond a focus on process and relationships, the impact of these art outcomes can communicate to the public and affect broader social change. These forms can be read as part of a powerful intersection between the long political histories of art and critical education, which have both functioned as critique and resistance, even revolution of institutions. The works I discuss here draw on Western models of grassroots community arts in the UK (Kelly, 1984), partnership-based community cultural development in Australia (Hawkins, 1993), and more the recent participatory art in the UK (Bishop, 2012) as an expansion of audience engagement. Suzanne Lacy describes ‘new genre public art’ “as resembling political or social activity, but … distinguished by its aesthetic sensibility” (1994, p. 19).

Pablo Helguera’s definitional work on collaborative participation is useful to thinking through approaches to evaluation. He describes the ‘indeterminacy’ required as co-creative project development – when collaborators share the “responsibility for developing the structure and content of the work in collaboration and direct dialogue with the artist” (2011, p. 14). Each approach to practice will privilege a particular element (democracy, context, dialogue) and subsequently endorses a hierarchy of values which should result in a corresponding unique evaluative framework. Expecting pre-determined outcomes, government granting agencies develop policy orientated measures of social inclusion, wellbeing outcomes, and even economic impact, which tend to underestimate the many sophisticated aesthetic forms now at play. ‘One size fits all’ toolkits overlook the cultural complexity inherent in community relations and are unable to observe the shifts in power that co-creative projects may bring about.