Shannon Jackson
Shannon Jackson is a scholar, teacher, and convening in the fields of socially-engaged art, experimental performance, and video/media art. Throughout her work, she explores the political dimensions of art in terms of its themes, its media, its social practices, and its material infrastructure. In this essay, she sets the New Patrons protocol in relation to a range of debates within the field of social practice.
Jackson has lectured widely in venues around the world, including New York, London, Venice, Paris, Berlin, Shanghai, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Capetown. Amongst her other books and essays, publications focused on socially-engaged art include: Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics; Public Servants: Art and the Common Good; and Valuing a Labor in the Arts, a special issues of Art Practical.
“The citizen, acting alone or in a group, becomes a patron when he recognizes within himself what lies at the basis of creativity for the contemporary artist: the same desire to express himself freely, the same determination to resist standardization, the same need to imagine himself in a different way and to invent new paths.” 1
That is one of many propositions offered by François Hers, the self-identified founder and catalyst of the New Patrons project. Whether excavating his manifesto-cum-handbook, The Protocol, or his subsequently published Letter to a Friend about New Patrons, Hers proposes a socially vital practice for the arts, joined to a philosophy and a system that redirects both artistic and political energy. 2 Authored by Hers, revised and expanded to keep pace with its influence, “The New Patrons Protocol” is grounded in a belief in the mutually reinforcing circuit between art and democracy, or between cultural practice and political practice. 3 For the arts, this means re-welcoming “citizens [who] still remain the great absentee from the art scene,” especially after an individuated conception of artistic autonomy (insidiously joined with the individuating tendencies of the art market) sequester the arts from social engagement. Meanwhile, for democratically-inclined citizens, the welcome happens in reverse; citizens decide to place the arts into the core of a democratic process, remembering that artistic zones are places where they can “exert, test, and solve” fundamental needs and can devise “new types of relations to oneself and to others, to time and to the environment.” 4 Hers’s own position within this expanded field is both inspiring and equivocal. While prioritizing the collective, Hers simultaneously claims a kind of authorship; his “utopic proposition has given birth to hundreds of artworks.” 5 Tacking between a collective protocol and an art world protocol that celebrates (and sells) works of individual genius, Hers is centered and de-centered at once. As such, his own position anticipates the puzzles and possibilities faced and negotiated by all kinds of New Patrons practitioners – whether mediators, artists, supporters, or the self-actualizing patrons themselves. Arguably, that complex position—along with its utopic proposition—has its parallels in a number of allied movements and artistic tendencies in the first twenty years of the 21st century. In what follows, I offer a meditation on the protocols of “The Protocol” next to those of other allies and social practices, suggesting that New Patrons is both symptomatic of its time and an originator of a catalytic model – a proto-Social Practice – whose potential is still unfolding.
The biographical story of François Hers both chimes with and deviates those of other figures in the international field of socially-engaged artistic practice. Coming of age in the fifties and the son of an influential diplomat, he received early inspiration from DADA and other expansive artistic experiments. However, in embarking upon a career as a photographer, he found himself embroiled in modernism’s formulas of artistic autonomy and professional legitimation. Hers bristled at a model of artistic success wherein the artist is “doomed to remain the lonely hero of his own story.” 6 The reorientation that would become New Patrons thus came from an artist who wanted to see himself placed differently in a social field, who wanted to be differently commissioned, differently curated, differently engaged with the receivers, beholders, and citizens he sought to address in his work. As the 20th century gave over to the 21st, other artistic figures appeared to have similar ideas. Amongst the most renowned, for example, was Hers’s fellow Frenchman, Nicolas Bourriaud, who found himself curating a range of works wherein artists offered propositions and installations that claimed “sociality” as a primary artistic material. Bourriaud put the name “esthetique relationale” to this tendency, prompting a range of practices and debates, celebrations and condemnations, that vetted the artistic integrity and political responsiveness of relational aesthetics. 7 Placing New Patrons next to relational aesthetics is an exercise in comparison, but also contrast. When set against these debates, Hers’s practice stands out as one that prioritizes the necessities, crises, conflicts, dreams, and ambitions of “the people”; their collective investment in a work radically redefines the concept of artistic “ownership.”
As a number of other allies and critics took stock of ever-expanding social art form, they coined, rejected, and revised an ever-expanding series of terms to characterize it – community art, political art, activist art, institutional critique, socially-engaged art, new genre public art, social practice. While Hers may have been less aware – and less than curious—about these debates and redefinitions, the New Patrons protocol tacitly advanced and partook of the energy and vocabulary of this network. Indeed, the first stage of its platform—supported by the Fondation de France—featured many of the artists and conveners linked to these movements, as well as the Conceptual practices that preceded them: Vito Acconci, Jean-Luc Brisson, Dominique Gonzalez-Förster, Christian Boltanski, Daniel Buren, Liam Gillick, Lucy Orta, Andy Goldsworthy, Bruno Serralongue, and many more. As New Patrons have expanded internationally within the European Union, emerging artists along with established artists – Superflex, Ugo Rondinone, Martha Rosler, Ulla von Brandenburg, and on and on – continue to accept commissions. Along the way, New Patrons’ economies of support have morphed and expanded, as have its forms and regional collaborations. While the New Patrons protocol is symptomatic of socially-expansive aesthetic tendencies, there are also distinctive attributes. To the formal preoccupations of Bourriaud’s relational aesthetics, New Patrons offers a wider and more consistent focus on systems of governance. Next to metaphoric or predominantly formal investigations of social structures, New Patrons bushwhacks a path inside social systems, including those that attend to education, public housing, refugee rights, aging, unemployment, and more. And finally, amid generative if occasionally haphazard processes of public art curating, New Patrons protocol is indeed a protocol, an evolving codification of an inverted and capacious process for making art amid the neoliberal flaws and utopian possibilities of actually existing democracy.
Let’s start with the generative codification. Indeed, let’s start with the celebrated space of initiation in a New Patrons project, that is, the New Patrons themselves, and the role of the commanditaire(s), initiator(s), or Citizen-Patron(s) whose interests, values, and needs launch the project. Right away, this space of initiation differs from that of a traditional art process as well as contemporary art production, the one that begins in the brain (and heart) of the artist who seeks to bring something into the world. In the sphere of New Patrons, the world comes first, assembled from the reflections and associations of citizens who have the sense that a collective artistic process could catalyze their world, re-shape their world toward a different future. Francois Hers has observed that art has for too long come from the perceived inner necessity of artists. As an artist he did not want this pressure anymore, and wanted to hear instead about the inner necessities of others. He wondered why the needs of the artist were considered more credible than the actual needs of “ordinary” people. 8 Of course, within the wider sphere of socially-engaged art, one could say that many artists have already backgrounded themselves in this way in order to foreground community practice. Indeed, Grant Kester’s model of a dialogical art – inspired by groups such as Wochenklausur (Austria), Ala Plastica (Argentina), Superflex (Denmark), Huit Facettes (Senegal), and Ne Pas Plier (France) amongst others – chimes with the re-orientation and re-definition of the Artist that New Patrons requires. “We typically view the artist as a kind of exemplary bourgeois subject, actualizing his or her will through the heroic transformation of nature or the assimilation of cultural difference—alchemically elevating the primitive, the degraded, and the vernacular into great art. Throughout, the locus of expressive meaning remains the radically autonomous figure of the individual artist. A dialogical aesthetic suggests a very different image of the artist; one defined in terms of open-ness, of listening and a willingness to accept dependence and intersubjective vulnerability. The semantic productivity of these works occurs in the interstices between the artist and the collaborator.” 9 Whether under the banner of community art or social practice, whether through a platform like Project Row Houses in Houston or Blade of Grass based in New York, many civic-minded artists have learned to subordinate their own vision or pre-determined goals to the needs of a community. Rick Lowe started Project Row Houses by, in part, letting it start itself, facilitating if not exactly leading community dialogues in and about the homes of an under-resourced Houston neighborhood. At the same time, it was Rick Lowe himself who would win a Macarthur genius grant, exemplifying the tangle between a collectivized practice and singularizing professional practices.
That tangle is replayed and negotiated in numerous projects. Take Jeanne Van Heeswijk—also a winner of numerous awards, including Creative Time’s award for public art practice. Consider her concept of “urban curating,” a term she coined to describe a process of her own self-embedding as a citizen in various communities in order to involve neighbors in all aspects of her projects, from initial planning to final exhibition. Here again, we might find similarity and difference with New Patrons. Van Heeswijk’s process has been refined and elaborated through a range of projects that focused particularly on redefining markets and plazas in Rotterdam (e.g. Freehouse Zuid), Amsterdam (Face Your World), or Kaiserberg (The Resistance of Small Happiness); it continues in variously visual, sculptural, and discursive forms in the thirteen editions of “Public Faculty” series. On the one hand, Heeswijk has cultivated the skills of listening, participation, and a kind of self-subordinating within the public practice of art. On the other hand, the act of self-subordination can appear to be an act initiated by herself, still her own act of artistic volition rather than an act assumed by a New Patrons process that did not assume her primacy in the first place. So, one might ask, whether and how the New Patrons model is distinctive, much less new? Is it a codification of a socially-engaged art model that is already evolving in many pockets around the world? Perhaps the decision to codify, to name this role, is what makes it distinctive. As such, it joins with the principles behind the Blade of Grass platform, the first foundation established in the United States exclusively devoted to socially-engaged art, committed to offering “resources” to artists who serve as “innovative conduits for social change.” 10 But whereas a great deal of socially-oriented art generically refers to “the community,” New Patrons projects give those community members a name that has agency. Indeed, if many community art initiatives still direct their resources primarily toward the needs of community-oriented artists, New Patrons mobilizes those resources for Citizens and their needs in the first place. A group of New Patrons is not one that waits for the socially-engaged artist to listen to them, à la well-intentioned community art; it is a group that assembles to be heard before the well-intentioned artist has arrived.
Let’s continue with another distinctive codification within the New Patrons project, the Mediator. Here we find a bridge-builder between the New Patrons and the art, or between a fortified “community” and the artistic practices and infrastructures needed to make the project into a reality. Once again, we have a new name from what might sound like a familiar practice, but also some unfamiliar practices. Is the Mediator a kind of Curator? The person who frames a project, gives it context, communicates to installers, all the while being in dialogue with the artist? Well, yes and no. Yes, only insofar as the field of socially-engaged art has redefined the curatorial role. In selected projects and organizations throughout the world – say the Oakland Museum of California or progressive biennials in Liverpool or Mercosul – curators have also become initiators who start with “community” first, that is, those who host focus groups and embed in neighborhoods before any kind of curatorial vision is established. Rather than “curating” a show and then asking the “education” wing or “programming” coordinator to reach out and find a public for it, socially-engaged curating finds its public first. Indeed, some institutions are endowing their “education” wings with curatorial status, thereby redefining and redistributing curatorial power. Flying in the face of inherited curatorial models, this one unsettles the tacit hierarchy behind curation and its intended public. So, one might ask again, is the New Patrons’ Mediator “new,” or a codification of a figure that is also evolving in other pockets of the artworld? And here we have another yes and another no. Yes, the Mediator role is a way of naming a tendency that one can spy elsewhere in the recent history of socially engaged art. Consider how Suzanne Lacy described the conditions in the United States that enabled New Genre Public Art to unfold, a model that combined the mixed media practices of “new genre” art with a focus on turning “public art” into a truly publicly-engaged practice of “social intervention.” Interestingly, as these practices expanded and as their community relationships were foregrounded, a “new genre” of experts emerged as well. Here is Lacy:
“Throughout the seventies, administrators and arts activists lobbied for percent-for-art programs, and these, combined with NEA grants and private sector money, fueled public art. The size of commissions created a viable alternative to the gallery system for some artists. In time, and partly because of pressure to explain the work to an increasingly demanding public, a new breed of arts administrators emerged to smooth the way between artists, trained in modernist strategies of individualism and innovation, and various representatives of the public sector. Collaboration with other professionals, research, and consultative interaction with civic groups and communities became more common, and teams of artists, architects, designers, and administrators were formed. Except in unusual circumstances, the full creative and cooperative potential of such teams rarely materialized.” 11
Here again, we find allied symptoms and tendencies in a wider field of socially engaged work, including a sphere where a “new breed of arts administrators” anticipates the function of a Mediator in a New Patrons project. But, we might also note what new kinds of roles, experiences, training, and expectations become possible when that figure has this name. In substituting the Mediator for curator (or arts administrator), we add a range of other skills to the curatorial function. This figure is a kind of ambassador for the project amongst many forces and demographics, with the expectation that the diplomatic function stays central rather than peripheral to the process. The Mediator draws from methods that recall participatory design in architecture, or stage management in theater, and indeed, as we will see, a New Patrons Mediator needs to be ready to support all kinds of aesthetic practices beyond the object-based installation of the artworld. Notably, however, the aesthetic function stays prominent in New Patrons descriptions, as the Mediator builds bridges between New Patrons and the aesthetic tendencies and formal strategies of artists. As Francois Hers said in “The Protocol,” the mediator “brings his responsibility as an expert into play.” 12 Here is another place where these projects alight upon a now classic social practice puzzle and keeps it in the foreground. Within the long genealogy of “committed art” from Theodor Adorno until now, there has been constant debate about the instrumentalization of the arts —and therefore neutralization of the arts — when overtaken by social commitments. While the “social” needs of New Patrons initiate an artistic project, the Mediator is tasked with making sure it stays artful, that its aesthetic strategies and eccentricities do the unique work that art can do in and with the world. Together, these joined processes ensure a systemic orientation and artistic one, a model in which the engagement with social infrastructure can still have an aesthetic character. 13
The Mediator’s role in the selection process is also an interesting one for how it navigates the relative autonomy and heteronomy of traditional artistic roles and processes. On the one hand, the heteronomous elevation of social community and commitment is quite evident in this platform. On the other hand, the Mediator does not launch a call for participation or delegate selection to a jury, thereby retaining his/her own autonomy as an expert. Once selected and contracted by the Patrons, the artist too is granted the privilege and responsibility of a certain degree of aesthetic autonomy, charged with mobilizing his/her experiences and forms while knowing that the Mediator will translate those forms amongst involved constituencies. Once again, the parameters that govern New Patrons artistic practice recall the puzzles of social practice, while offering a structural solution for navigating them. The inverted and democratized process of patronage de-emphasizes the privatized autonomies of artistic entitlement and self-authorization. At the same time, the mobilization of aesthetics within the social and political realm is calibrated, the heteronomous risks of instrumentalization tempered by an appeal to aesthetic expertise and to the integrity of aesthetic form. It might sound like a way to have one’s cake and eat it too. And indeed, the descriptions, definitions, revisions, and re-definitions describing the New Patrons website bespeak a desire to have and do both. The codification of roles for New Patrons is clearly hard won; their detailed prose suggests that a range of experiences, successes, failures, and midstream modifications undergird the definitions. Along the way, all participants explicitly or implicitly seek a sweet spot in the autonomy/heteronomy dialectic. Of course, statements about “lower fees” or the “emancipation” of the artwork assume the lucrative elements of a gallery-based visual art practice, rather than the typically less lucrative practices of those who work in dance, theater, music, landscape architecture, architecture or the experimental domains of film. It dovetails with what John Roberts elaborates as a “second economy” of socially-engaged—still avant-garde—artwork, works that have little relationship to the institutions of the traditional art economy: museums, auction houses, and commercial galleries. 14 Once again, this “second economy” still measures its distance from one version of a “primary” economy, a primarily gallery-based visual art scenario that other types of performing artists and designers did not occupy in the first place.
And now we have the Artist—or artistic group—who enters into the process, a delayed arrival when compared to a traditional art model that would begin with the volitions and intentions of artistic genius. Instead, the integrity – and “raison d’etre” (to quote the Nouveaux Commanditaires website and myself above)—begins with the goals of the Patrons themselves, goals that are modified and shaped by a Mediator who suggests an artist appropriate to the project. Notably, the selection process replicates and deviates from an artworld model in important ways. One mode of deviation appears in its open-ness to form. Depending upon the nature of the project, an artist from fields beyond the visual arts might be selected, including “literature, music, theater, dance, architecture” or, as in the case of The Temple of Refuge a comic book designer. 15 Such openness means that the Mediator must have artistic literacy and networks in a variety of forms—he or she might even suggest a particular format or discipline and be able to mobilize appropriate infrastructures for their development. It also begs the question of whether the New Patrons are at risk of pre-deciding a medium – pre-deciding the shape of a park or pre-fantasizing in comic book form – or whether they will remain open to different formal solutions.
At the same time, it is interesting to note what happens when we start to welcome socially-engaged art that measures its distance from forms such as architecture, literature, or theater, ie. that measures itself from the traditions other than those of visual art. Consider the social practice group—and New Patrons group—Rimini Protokoll. For Rimini Protokoll, a group that measures its distance from theater rather than from the visual artworld and gallery system, the “amateurs” are the experts. They foreground the expertise of everyday actors as the agents behind the creation of the artwork, even if they are also the theme of the artwork. Everyday experts are both the propellers of an artwork and the subject of its investigation. Such an inverted dramaturgy drives projects such as the serially-site-specific “Cargo Sofia” (2006), the global-local performances of “Call Cutta” (2004), the 100 series recreated for multiple cities, as well as theatrical enactments of primary theoretical texts such as Das Kapital and Wallenstein. Asked Rimini Protokoll member Daniel Wetzel,
“can you deal with dramatic texts in a different way from embodying them on stage? Can’t you seize the drama by the scruff of its neck? – the fact that you identify with a character in the play and therefore want to follow its story; that it tells you something because something has happened in your own life that makes you connect to it. We experimented with this very connection and said, let’s get rid of this whole process of actors performing a text so that people in the audience can relate to it – let’s put the people from the audience on stage and work with them on this connection.” 16
In this case, Rimini Protokoll is not so much socializing an individuated – and ”lonely hero” – practice of visual art; they already come from the un-lonely domain of theater. However, theater is here transformed by a reversal of principles and a substitution of artistic authority, replacing the professionally-trained actor with a citizen actor who—not unlike Francois Hers’s ideal citizen –“recognizes within himself what lies at the basis of creativity for the contemporary artist: the same desire to express himself freely, the same determination to resist standardization, the same need to imagine himself in a different way and to invent new paths.” 17
That desire for self-determination, that resistance to standardization, sits delicately next to the desire for collective coordination. Indeed, the dialectics between autonomy and heteronomy recur within other dialectics, including those that navigate relations between individual and collective needs, and between private and public funds, resources, and governance systems. The need to do such navigation certainly appears in the decision to include “Politicians and Sponsors” as New Patrons collaborators. The belated arrival of this figure differs from a traditional public art model, the one that typically gives the agency of public art commission to a public sector entity. Importantly, the provisional composition of a New Patrons group sidesteps such a model. Recall that “the patron can’t be a corporation insofar as establishing a dialogue and taking on such a responsibility is necessarily attributed to individuals.” 18 New Patrons thus not only reorients the social claims of the artistic process, it also redefines the public process by which public art is made. By altering the process of art production, patrons are effectively re-sensitized as responsible and agential citizens within a civil society by not delegating the selection of public art to a public governance system. At the same time, these projects still need public systems—as well as private ones – to implement a project. Whether in civic processes of permitting, urban planning, historic preservation, land rights, and alternative-use provisions, New Patrons must mobilize public processes for support and, sometimes, as a kind of artistic material. Once again, the 20th and early 21st century history of socially-engaged art intermittently demonstrates this kind of systemic organization. Consider Stephen Willats who focused on a range of social sectors but especially on housing estates in the United Kingdom and throughout the E.U. “Pat Purdy and the Glue Sniffers Camp” (1981) along with “Brentford Towers” (1985) exemplify a process that engages first with a community of residents and then a coterie of civic leaders in order to evolve a form appropriate to their values and needs, including stories, visualizations, and alternative maps that express their personal behaviors and life trajectories of neighborhood residents. Willats also served tacitly as a public landscape designer, notably around a Brixton skateboard park in “The Kids are in the Streets” (1982). In his own discursive framing of his practice, such as Art and Social Function from 1976, he sought to join with “any artist thinking of enacting different paradigms for an art intervening in the fabric of society.” 19 Once again, an infrastructural engagement is both aesthetic and social. Notably, in most of his projects and writings, Willats constantly endeavored to reconfigure the traditional order of the artist-artwork-audience relationship. Whether in “Existing Artist-Audience Relationships” or other visualizations, he critiqued models that assumed an artist-centered principle of succession, offering instead charts and diagrams with circles and reciprocal arrows that imagined mutual relations of exchange.
And of course, one of the central reasons to codify the role of “Politicians and Sponsors” is because these projects will require funding, funding far beyond the resources of a neighborhood group of autonomous individuals. Whether public funding, private funding, or (what in the United States would be) a third category of philanthropic or nonprofit funding, New Patrons taps a mixed economy to support a mixed media practice of public aesthetics. In so doing, we can also spy a platform that, once again, walks a careful line amongst competing claims. It is a line walked amid debates on the future of civil society and the public sphere. New Patrons’ desire to “emancipate” art from the speculative art market recalls the Habermasian public sphere protected from the world of commerce; by placing the agency for initiation in the hands of “autonomous individuals,” however, it also seeks to achieve the flip side of the Habermasian dialectic, that is, activating a public sphere that sits apart from the encroachments of the state. 20 And yet, as all post-Habermas, neoliberal subjects know quite well, there cannot be a pure position of action untouched by either. The modified and constantly revised goal must involve a steady, delicate, and occasionally ambivalent choreography amongst different claims and relations of power, including those that purportedly but never actually divide the commercial sector from the public sector.
Ultimately, New Patrons and its protocols redefine the parameters of art and the parameters of the public sphere simultaneously. In so doing, they resonate with some of the core aspirations of social practice, especially the reversed dialogic mode elaborated by Grant Kester. “While it is common for a work of art to provoke dialogue among viewers this typically occurs in response to a finished object. In these projects, conversation becomes an integral part of the work itself. It is re-framed as an active, generative process that can help us speak and imagine beyond the limits of fixed identities and official discourse.” 21 Whether tacitly or explicitly, New Patrons thereby functions as a proto-social practice that both exemplifies and complicates the debates that have surrounded socially-engaged art. New Patrons projects are like and unlike the social and architectural inventions of key figures in the social practice field. The comparisons and contrasts I started above could continue with many more examples, whether Rirkrit Tiravanija in Chiang Mai, Thailand, Laurie Jo Reynolds’s “legislative art” at the Tamms supermax prison, or Tania Bruguera’s Arte Útil. 22 In each and every one of these comparisons, we can find both similarities and differences with the values and histories of New Patrons. Tiravanija’s social reach might still be artist initiated. Reynolds and Bruguera’s orientation toward concrete political change and direct practice might chime with some aspects of New Patrons, but as Sören Meschede has argued, the latter’s focus on exemplary utilitarian cases might foreclose our ability to celebrate other kinds of Citizen-led experiments that may falter or even “fail” while nevertheless generating important publicly-minded memories, effects, and connections. One thing is surely the case: while New Patrons may be symptomatic of movements and tendencies of its time, it is also an originator of a catalytic model. Its vocabularies and protocols codify roles and clarify processes in a way that is distinctive, detailed, and rare in its precision. New Patrons, furthermore, has developed as a network and alliance amongst seasoned practitioners, allowing its methods and codifications to be debated, tested, and developed further. At this moment in the still early 21st century, it is time to take stock of and to honor an incredibly wide range of New Patrons work. Its strength lies, not in whether it is proto-Social Practice or post-Social Practice, but in the public values it molds and models, in the social connections it produces and sustains, and in the thrill and power that all of us citizens feel when we realize that we too could be New Patrons after all.
1 François Hers, Le Protocole (France: Les Presses du Réel, 2002), p. 22.
2 François Hers, Letter to a Friend About the New Patrons, translated by Emmelene Landon (France: Les Presses du Réel, 2016).
3 See also François Hers, „Das Protokoll der Neuen Auftraggeber“, neueauftraggeber.de/de/das-protokoll-der-neuen-auftraggeber/
4 François Hers, „Ambition“, Les nouveaux commanditaires, www.nouveauxcommanditaires.eu/en/22/ambition.
5 Hers, Letter to a Friend About the New Patrons, p. 9.
6 François Hers, Jean-François Chevrier and Roman Cieslewicz, A Tale, Thames & Hudson, London and New York, 1983.
7 Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, translated by Simon Pleasance and Fronza Woods (France: Les Presses du Réel, 2002).
8 From correspondence between Francois Hers and Alexander Koch, July 2021, Hers writes, “I would consider it fiction to be seen as the only person having seen the ne-cessity to create our epoque. A fiction born since the Romantics and in which our soci-ety is so grateful to us to consider that the intimate necessity of the artist is emblematic for the intimate necessity of everybody/anybody. But could it be different since, after the French Revolution, the necessity of political and religious powers could not any-more impose themselves and it was imaginable that the people have their own power.”
9 Grant Kester, Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art, University of California Press, Berkeley 2004.
10 A Blade of Grass, abladeofgrass.org
11 Suzanne Lacy, „Introduction“, in: Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art, Bay Press, Seattle 1995, p. 22.
12 Hers, Le Protocole, p. 23.
13 See Shannon Jackson, Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics, Routledge, London 2011.
14 John Roberts, Revolutionary Time and the Avant-Garde, Verso, London 2015.
15 See “About this comic,” Temple of Refuge, www.temple-of-refuge.net/en/info/.
16 Peter Boenisch, „Other People Live: Rimini Protokoll of their ‘Theatre of Experts,’” Contemporary Theatre Review 18(1), p. 109.
17 Hers, Le Protocole, p. 22.
18 „Patrons“, Nouveaux Commanditaires, www.nouveauxcommanditaires.eu/en/23/patrons.
19 Stephen Willats, Art and Social Function: Three Projects, Ellipsis, London 2000.
20 See Nancy Fraser, „Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy“, Social Text, Nr. 25/26 (1990), p. 56-80; see: Jackson, Social Works.
21 Grant Kester, “Conversation Pieces: The Role of Dialogue in Socially-Engaged Art,” in Theory in Contemporary Art Since 1985, edited by Zoya Kucor and Sion Leung (London: Blackwell, 2005), pp. 154.
22 The Land Foundation, Chiang Mai, Thailand, www.thelandfoundation.org/about; Laurie Joe Reynolds, Tamms Year Ten (2008-2013); Tania Bruguera, Arte Util, www.arte-util.org/about/colophon/.