We know more and worry more, are connected yet left alone.
We are trying to stay on top of things yet shifting, again and again.
Are we losing what holds us together?
The frequency of having to make choices, decisions and provisions is increasingly exhausting and much so family structures. Even banal routines are to be considered with its side effects, morally-socially and in safe-guarding: letting my children walk to school unaccompanied becomes a statement since it is rated risky and those permitting are suspiciously looked at. Parenthood is under attack: not only has it become economically regimented but politically interfered with as such instrumentalised into neoliberal advocacy. ‘Better safe than sorry’ serves as an idiosyncratic common sense to sanction opportunities of experience and de facto actions. Symptoms like hyper parenting, the micro-managed family, heavily time-tabled curriculums and over-standardised playgrounds are among the advanced measures of new control I am witnessing. Complicitly, education reassures the consistency of the child’s trajectory through school auditing regimes and league tables reminding me of the syllabus at my economics studies. The child is locked into acquiring entrepreneurial and competitive qualities with the parent anxiously antedating already internalised demands of the labour market – both are becoming alienated, as such estranged in their sociability. Play too is under control: risk-assessed, supervised and pre-arranged to fit marginalised slots in a domesticated agenda. My children are part of a minority allowed to play out in our neighbourhood independently; again rated risky and irresponsible. The miniscule everyday is raised to a constant subject matter of risk and control that insulates and disaffects. If human experience and relationships are increasingly caught in risk as a default rationale then it emphasises negativity suggesting the need to be managed and minimised. Are we projecting, as The Feel-bad Britain (2007, 40) study suggests, our ‘ontological insecurity’ also onto children to seek remedy for our generalised state of uncertainty?
German sociologist Beck (2002, 21) assigns risk as systematic in dealing with the ‘manufactured insecurities’ of modern life based on the principle of individualisation. Contrary to the liberation from or loosening of social contracts and traditional assignments, individuals now face labour and consumer market conditions as the ‘institution-dependent-control structure’ (Beck 2002, 131). To achieve we are expected to purpose our human capital – skills, knowledge, experience and relationships, family and children. In that sense, the witnessing of overprotected and staged childhood is not merely a compensatory mechanism – rather an overhaul to keep up with individualisation’s demands and precautions to ‘get it right’.
Marked by the foundational shift of 'transforming human `identity' from a `given' into a `task' —
and charging the actors with the responsibility for performing that task and for the consequences (also the side-effects) of their performance..’ (Baumann 1999, XV ) individualisation becomes heavily loaded with risk and uncertainty. Subsequently, we are overstrained by the demand to produce ourselves everyday, again and again. ‘The do-it-yourself biography is always a `risk biography'.. a state of permanent (partly overt, partly concealed) endangerment ‘ (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 2002, 3) . The clash of responsibility vs. uncertainty is further undermined by the crumbling of traditional support structures like community and welfare. This complex struggle of navigating and coping on our own alienates and uncouples from primary sociality. As a result anxiety is lining our socio-economic everyday as a kind of ‘public secret’ (Institute for Precarious Consciousness 2014).
Still, despite and precisely because of the demands that are made by producing our individualised choreography and manoeuvring in flux – and to not collapse – we have a profound human need for stability. In that sense I would stress that ‘individualization also fosters a longing for the opposite world of intimacy, security and closeness’ (Beck-Gernsheim 1998, 67). Sociability. Collectivity. Relationships with friends, (extended) neighbours, family and children are changing yet are still valid social support structures in our everyday life, even if, arguably, it is struggling to oppose neoliberal autarky.
If everything is labelled ‘at your own risk’ and becomes uncertain – can art de-alienate and as such reclaim sociality? Can the artist’s imagination foster a re-imagining of social effect?
A recent debate on Art: Useful or Useless came with the objection of whether we should ‘channel our creativity into something socially useful or invest in the human necessity of having a domain .. beyond all utility?’ Despite push and pull of Art Utile and art’s refusal to fit this sounds overly dichotomous and suggests the domain of art and social as separate.
Art as a tool for social change, Tania Bruguera’s Useful Art (2011) works with aesthetic experiences as an applied dimension yet appoints art as not just ‘signalling’ but proposing and implementing solutions. As much as I want to see art with social effect, her stance seems to dismiss art’s potential to alert, disrupt, reveal and intervene without ‘doing it all’ and formats of representation. Discussing her approach, Bishop (2012, 250) argues, ‘art is not separate to the real social process’ and the ‘artistic imagination (an ability to deal with form, experience and meaning)’ is integral to the conception of projects.
If we are to look for regenerating communality as (re-)creating the social in physical spaces then recent art and cross-disciplinary projects such as Theaster Gates’ Dorchester Project , Jeanne van Heeswijk’s 2Up 2Down or Assemble‘s Granby Four Street come to mind. Despite the criticism of being instrumentalised or applying market models, these projects originate from and are a result of the artist’s imagination – and capacity to act – whether in critically reflecting the status quo, initiating, drafting or setting up an alternative mode of living together.
Fugitive Images* engaged in a long-term collaborative project with residents of the London Haggerston Estate before it was demolished. Real Estates culminated in the PEER gallery space with a multiple platform that channelled both their social process and art that came from within this community. Opened up to other engaged groups, they hosted work ‘that connect us, that illuminate, that bring pain to the surface, that inspire tenderness, that voice solidarity.’ (Real Estates 2015). They did not physically rebuild communality but were committed to make social struggle public and as such foster a re-imaging of social unity.
I would like to further unfold ‘art and the social‘ by investigating the artist’s responsibility towards the social or is art in fact intrinsically de-alienating? Also, is art’s social effect a question of audience – to be approachable beyond just the typically few? For now, I see the artist as a catalyst who utilises imagination and art’s capacity to be socially ‘effective’ – in disrupting, inspiring, offering perspectives and fostering alternative thinking and by that empowering us in our everyday life.