Nato Thompson on 'Socially Engaged Art Outside the Bounds of an Artistic Discipline'

Have you ever been interested in the notion of art as a mechanism for creating social, political and/or legal change? We recommend checking out Nato Thompson's talk here. In it, he discusses the recent history of projects engaging with strategies such as participation, in order to create a more socially engaged, active art.

One example is the project Women on Waves - a collective which travels around the world on a ship, providing abortions to women on the open sea, who come from countries where abortion remains illegal. But how is this art? Thompson takes a quote by Donald Rumsfeld as a 'working methodology' to approach this question - "If you have a problem, and you can't solve it, make it bigger." In so doing, Thompson includes general social change projects and actions such as political protests under the moniker of 'art', even where the organisers don't consider themselves artists or their work art. This seems wildly expansive to me. In my view, socially engaged art is a tenuous practice - it has to be crafted intelligently and subtly in order to effectively operate as art, as well as achieving any substantive social aims. There is an aesthetic component to this - otherwise it's no longer art, but 'real life'. Thompson's answer to this may be that "life has a form, just like video, or painting or clay... people gather and have a form and artists and activists are using this and finding myriad ways of producing forms and social gatherings." But I'm still not convinced that making the problem bigger actually solves it.

What do you think?