Outsider artistS: Ethical reflections in socially engaged practices
Author: Silla Simone
Introduction
Why should we discuss the ethics in socially engaged practices?
In recent decades, many artists have moved beyond solo practice in the white cube to work involving the audience in socially engaged approaches and to address social issues directly. These initiatives are both recognised for their social reformist goals and criticised by several scholars (1) for their direct engagement with socio-economically challenged communities. Despite altruistic intentions, many are led by outsider artists, raising questions about representation, power and artistic freedom.
Different methods and degrees of artistic control further complicate the discourse. Artist roles vary by practice, as collaborator, facilitator, educator and curator. They gather funds, define the project’s framework, and connect the projects to institutional contexts in which they are legitimised as ‘works of art’. For some artists, the work is synonymous with action; for others, it produces physical art objects.
Dismissing socially engaged practices would deprive communities of their potential benefits, while proceeding with established, but insufficiently examined conventions could perpetuate problematic impacts on those the artist seeks to empower.
Definite answers to the ethical concerns are needed to mitigate future harm and to ensure that the practices are conducted sustainably, bringing value for the communities they aim to aid. Clearer distinctions between harmful and beneficial engagement help to optimise the strategies and the use of resources for the future artists, art critics and affiliated stakeholders commissioning, funding, contextualising and promoting socially engaged practices.
In addition to reviewing the existing ethical critiques, this paper identifies gaps in the literature, highlighting areas where further research is needed. The paper takes the form of a discourse analysis, it examines effect[ivenes]s of participatory artmaking in socially challenged communities. In doing so, the paper asks: What key ethical concerns arise in the current discourse on outsider-led socially engaged practice? To what extent are the concerns justified, and what are their limitations?
An example of “outsider art” titled 'Touching Lari's face', from series Soldiers of Odin & the Stranger’ by Silla Simone. Published in The Book: Soldiers of Odin & the Stranger
2018, Sammakko.
Terminology
Mapping the discourse around participatory practices is complicated by the variety of terms used to describe them, such as community-based practices, and art-in-the-public-interest model, introduced by Arlene Raven (2). Since the 1960s, such practices have also been retrospectively referred to as new genre public art, a term coined by Suzanne Lacy to distinguish between solo-artist-made public art, and projects involving a long-term engagement with a site’s community (3).
Claire Bishop employs relational art and social collaboration to describe dialogically and collaboratively created projects. Tom Finkelpearl contests the latter for implying co-authorship and equal roles, instead preferring participatory or relational, reserving socially cooperative for projects designed by an artist (4). Grant Kester introduces the term dialogical aesthetics, drawing from Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of a dialogical art practice. To Kester, the dialogical projects unfold through a process of performative interaction (5). Similarly, Suzi Gablik calls the arts rooted in communication with ‘the other’ connective aesthetics (6). Other related terms include interventionist art, collaborative art and social sculpture, latter coined by Joseph Beuys (7).
In this paper, I use socially engaged practices as an umbrella term for participatory art initiated by artists within socially challenged communities. While broad, it captures the shared core purpose of these diverse approaches.
Limitations
This paper focuses on the artist’s direct engagement with communities and excludes several related ethical concerns. These include reproductions of site-specific works (e.g. questions of authorship, ownership, copyright and re-contextualisation), third-party influences from funders and institutions, and the art critique frameworks applied to socially engaged art. These factors are closely tied to the ethics of socially engaged practices and have been discussed by several scholars, warranting further investigation beyond this paper.
Critical perspectives
Exercising power
Socially engaged practices, sprung from the political art of the 1960s8, have consistently involved civilians in the creation of art. These exchanges, as Grant Kester points out, typically rely on a representational relationship in which the artist, typically entering an unfamiliar community as an outsider, speaks ‘through’, ‘with’, ‘about’, or ‘on behalf of’ others, becoming a channel for their experiences (9).
Equipped with cultural and financial resources to transform the community’s condition, the artist is in a position of power with artistic freedom providing an alibi to transgress cultural, racial and socio-economic boundaries, to a position of lesser privilege. Kester claims that, like a social worker, the artist believes in the universality of the discourses they employ in the process, allowing them to claim a moral or pedagogical authority in social domains, without the actual competences to answer complex ethical questions being questioned (10).
“For community artists the aesthetic plays the same role that science does for reformers or religion for evangelicals, allowing them to transcend the specificity of their own social and cultural position and sanctioning their intervention in a given community”(11).
Kester points out that for the audiences, these types of breaches are difficult to examine. The institutional authority of the artist, along with their access to media channels, can legitimise the project and create an illusion of harmony between the parties even when such does not exist. He asks, how artists negotiate between the demands of a given community struggle and a sceptical, self-reflexive attitude towards coherent forms of identity (12).
In line with Kester, Miwon Kwon argues that engaging ‘real’ people can install new forms of urban primitivism over neglected minorities. In the process, the ‘other’ becomes re-objectified for the sake of authentic artmaking (13). She points out that while the art can provide greater visibility to marginalised groups’ issues, it can also work as a means to extract the social and historical dimensions out of places to replace missing public social funding or cater to the artist’s ambitions (14).
The concerns raised by Kester and Kwon are particularly evident in the socially engaged projects involving prisons. Nicole R. Fleetwood argues that while these collaborations foster new relational practices, and often expand social and professional artistic networks benefiting inmates beyond their incarceration, the projects also turn on power dynamics in which the participants are the subject matter, even objects of art (15).
Furthermore, the notion of informed consent is trivialised in the incarceration context. Many projects shy away from expressing systemic critique and are dependent on enduring justification of imprisonment, thus becoming a tool for the prison to manage and control populations (16).
Like Kester, Fleetwood is concerned about artists’ credentials. Whereas researchers must go through a review protocol, she points out that artist proposal evaluations are often arbitrary or non-existent. Moreover, artists interested in working with inmates often lack training in working in prisons (17).
Interestingly, although prison art programmes have roots in the late 1960s and early 1970s, participatory projects facilitated in prisons are absent from the writings examined in this paper (18). Contributions discussing such projects, often under terms outsider art and art therapy, are instead typically found within the disciplines of psychology, education, and criminology (19). I argue that prison settings would offer a favourable environment for analysing the impact of different socially engaged practices. In their highly controlled conditions, characterised by repetitive daily routines and limited individual autonomy, observing and measuring individual outcomes is significantly easier than in the more variable conditions of everyday life outside a prison complex.
On empathy
Rather than following an artist-defined vision, Grant Kester advocates for a socially engaged practice model relying on the artist’s ability to listen and interact with others. Dialogical aesthetics, according to Kester, are defined by, for one, speech acts and dialogue, and two, intersubjective ethics and identity formation (20). This framework underscores the artist’s vulnerability, openness toward and willingness to depend on their collaborators, where ’artists-ness’ is synonymous with an ability to catalyse understanding, mediate exchange, sustain critical reflection and be empathetic (21).
While Kester’s makes use of empathy to disarm the artist of their authority, he also identifies a few issues within this approach. Although empathetic identification facilitates a reciprocal exchange, allows the artist to think outside their own experience and establishes compassionate relationships, it can also obscure social differences between the artist and their collaborators. Kester argues that the artist’s authority is partially established in the identification. Their past experiences are equated with those of the community, granting the artist a moral mandate to speak on behalf of others (22). This way, empathetic identification can encourage an exploitation and ‘vicarious possession’, using the other's culture for parading one’s fluency with difference (23).
While many of scholars share Kester’s concerns regarding the outsider artist, a more trusting view sees the community to be initially in the centre of practice. According to Suzanne Lacy, a beneficial and responsible intervention involves considering the artist’s intentions; the integrity is based on an integration of the artist’s ideas with those of the community. Lacy’s position emphasises the artist’s willingness to exercise empathy, as well as their expressions of responsibility (such as sustained connection beyond the projects end), as signs of ethically sound practice (24).
Mary Jane Jacob and Suzi Gablik associate solo practice with the modernist Western ideal of self- expression and even narcissism, that encourages distancing and deprecation of the ’other’. Empathic listening, an act attributed to the less self-involved community artist, makes room for the other and decentralises the ego-self, while a solo practitioner’s affirmation of individuality and invulnerability leads to deadening of empathy (25).
“This work deals with audience first: the artist brings individuals into the process from the start, thus redefining the relationship between artist and audience, audience and the work of art” (26).
While these writers express an optimistic stance, they overlook the self-sensoring empathy can lead to: a reluctance to be open about less admirable aspects of the community and their social issues. Hal Foster, by contrast, argues that fixating on the ‘otherness’ is always imbricated with one’s subconscious, and might lead to further detachment from the other. While self-reflexivity prevents artists from making assumptions, it also allows assumptions to be made, as the self-othering can easily turn into self-absorption, where ‘ethnographic self-fashioning’ becomes a practice of philosophical narcissism. Foster calls this trend of a confessional testimony a ‘pseudoethnographic report’(27). In parallel, Miwon Kwon warns against self-reflexivity potentially turning into subjective indulgence (28). Despite the concerns raised by Kwon and Foster, I argue that open self-reflexivity—whether motivated by self-indulgence or a sense of responsibility—should be encouraged. When an artist’s position, methods, and motivations are made visible, such transparency enables informed and critical engagement with the practice.
Complexities of communities
Since a community’s limits are difficult to define, how should one determine the right to speak on behalf of others? Kester describes dialogical art to be a power trade-off, whereby, by surrendering some creative authority, the artist ‘buys the right’ to speak on behalf of the community (29). Elsewhere, Kwon notes that the community’s portrayal might become overly simplified in the process of artmaking, when individual differences are absorbed into the artist’s notions (30). To Kwon, Suzanne Lacy’s project Full Circle, is an example of such overgeneralised ’mythic unity’. In its efforts to honour individuals in the city of Chicago, the project resulted in the representation of a hundred women’s unified community that merely existed within the boundaries Lacy’s imagined concept; “But whatever the individual differences, all were subsumed in the end by the artist’s search for a common denominator that celebrated an abstract gender unity, delimited in this case by a set of service-oriented characteristics that were in effect naturalized as innate attributes of women in general,“ Kwon writes (31).
In response to these concerns regarding the outsider artist, some within the critical discourse have proposed that insider status should be a prerequisite for practice, to ensure an authentic representation stemming from ‘real’ experience.
This assumption is directly critiqued by Foster, to whom the belief in the ‘other’ with authentic access to primal psychic and social processes from which the outsider artist is blocked, is a ‘primitivist fantasy’(32). Although acknowledging ’belonging’ might be useful in some cases, this potential is not a given (33). To him, socially engaged artists’ common assumptions: that artistic change happens outside mainstream settings; that the ‘insider' is the main source of resistance to dominant culture; and that insider artists have automatic access to these communities unlike outsider artists with limited access, together lead to the danger of ideological patronage (34).
In parallel, Kester calls the demand for an insider ‘the fetishization of authenticity’. Challenging the claim that an integral connection would grant the ethical mandate to speak on a community’s behalf, Kester asks how to define integral community membership in the first place. Pointing out that communities are made up of differing identities, the insider is, on that account, still inevitably speaking on behalf of others and carries the risk of inflicting harm on the community. Thus, the insider artist runs into similar problems as the outsider, inevitably shining light on certain aspects while leaving others in the shadows. From here, Kester derives that rejecting any form of practice involving an outsider artist is counterproductive (35).
Kwon supplements these remarks by pointing out that advocating a local artist closes off important ways in which artistic intervention can critique the very concept of community (36). While Kwon’s claim is presumptuous towards the insider artist’s shortcomings, it is safe to say that an insider artist’s possibilities to conduct such critique are certainly challenged by personal alliances and close proximity to the subject of the critique, factors that do not necessarily concern an outsider.
The outsider-insider question becomes even more complex when considering the varying goals of the socially engaged practice. As Shannon Jackson notes, many projects seek to enforce social bonds, while others seek to disrupt them (37). Where some critical frameworks ask whether an artistic vision enables or neutralises community voices, others start by questioning the very idea of a community (38).
The manifold discourse overlooks the possible problems of subjectivity in individual involvements within the community. The starting position of an outsider is more examiner-like due to the lack of these affiliations, but undergoing an empathic process of assimilation, evens out the differences and might just as well lead to biases and self-censoring.
As a solution, Kester suggests that each artist-community interaction should be addressed as a specific case, where the analysis is not based on a priori calculation of the artist's ‘right’ to work with the other but instead assesses the artist's capacity to treat differences critically and self-reflexively within the practice (39).
While Kester’s idea for context-specific evaluations leaves a door open for the outsider artist, it suffers from the lack framework that defines relations between community conditions, artist motivations,6intention, working methods, outcomes and other relevant factors, to guide the artist in their self-reflection. Additionally, his approach is centred around reactive critique happening after the fact, rather than pre-emptively, which is where such assessments are most needed.
Another factor obscuring assessment, as Kester notes, is that the coherence of a community is the product of changing and uncertain processes of identification (40). This means that, likewise, the status of an insider artist is not permanent, but subject to the same flux.
The case of the Bronx-based artist John Ahearn offers a compelling illustration of this instability. Chosen for the Percent for Art commission at the 44th Precinct police station in the South Bronx, Ahearn was selected by a panel including several non-art representatives and had already interacted with the local community for several years before his commission. The artist, who lived four blocks away from the immediate neighbourhood, and involved the community in the making of his cast sculptures, was still, at the works’ reveal, rejected by its members and accused of racism. Ahearn’s casts, depicting local people he met on the streets, were meant to elevate the status of those most socially challenged. Despite the intentions, the locals accused the sculptures of enforcing ill stereotypes, portraying the subjects as ugly and stemming from a white outsider’s perspective, which quite soon led to the removal of the works.
The definition of ‘geographical and social proximity’ was not enough to make the artist part of the community, even though it played a part in both parties’ shared identity. The case of Ahearn’s rejected project reveals a critical gap in the discourses cited in this chapter: in considering the insider-outsider artist dichotomy, how involved must the artist be, and which denominators should the artist have, to qualify as an `insider´? How many shared attributes are enough?
Kwon remarks that the artist’s assimilation coincides with the artwork’s integration with the site. The assimilation is presumed to be a prerequisite for the ability to legitimately speak as a representative of the community. This unity functions as a criterion for judging the artistic authenticity and ethical fitness of the artwork (41). But who is to judge the extent of the assimilation? Certainly, art critics have tried, while, again, looking at the said community from the outside, typically with less personal insight than that gathered by the artist in their efforts to engage. The belonging alone does not guarantee a fruitful outcome, which is why evaluations on the ethical fitness of socially engaged practices should be made elsewhere, in intentions and impacts, rather than based on assimilation.
Freedom of artistic expression
Before the rejection of Ahearn’s work in South Bronx, the community had embraced his earlier casts, which suggests that the issue was not simply lack of assimilation. In an interview with Tom Finkelpearl, Ahearn suggests that the ill reaction stemmed from the project’s affiliation with a city initiative, its public rather than private nature (42), suggesting that the reception of the work, may depend less on the artist than on the broader socio-political or institutional contexts. Perhaps focusing on the outsider- insider paradigm is not as useful as paying attention to the participants’ sense of ownership towards the work created, while imposing a project onto a community that does not feel the need for it will likely lead to its rejection.
Miwon Kwon argues that the desires of a particular community are not generic, nor can they be declared in advance by an outsider. According to her, the sense of identification should arise from the investment of time and energy the community invests in the project’s creation. She furthermore stresses the importance of the community’s ability be validated or affirmatively pictured through the work (43).
While Kwon’s idea of the community commitment is a useful strategy for building communal approval, her expectations regarding validation raise several concerns about artistic freedom. First, if a socially engaged project must always be affirming to its participants, it risks becoming a tool for therapeutic self-empowerment, akin to an advertisement, rather than a work of art.
Second, expecting an artwork to offer validation assumes a unified community response and imposes a homogenised group identity, ignoring individual perspectives. Third, Kwon’s demands limit the range of expressions and practices available to socially engaged artists. By favouring approaches that involve a certain degree of inclusion in the creation of the project, they exclude practices and expressions that rely on the artist exercising greater influence. Should socially engaged artists not enjoy the same aesthetic autonomy as solo artists?
Claire Bishop calls the attitude Kwon advocates ‘an ethics of authorial renunciation’ in which all forms of authorship are equated with authority (44). Bishop notes that the criticism on working methods and the democracy of collaboration tends to overlook the visual, conceptual and experiential accomplishments, and art itself becomes less important than the methods of its creation (45). When the artist’s ’self-sacrifice’ is celebrated, it follows that artists are expected to give up their authorial privileges and let the participants speak through them (46). This insistence on sensitivity and consensual dialogue turns into repressiveness, where artistic disruption, intervention and over-identifications are seen as ‘unethical’ and against the norm (47). To Bishop, this imperative is supported in most of the theoretical writing on socially engaged practices, e.g. in dialogical aesthetics, lacking commitment to visual aesthetics, resembling the intellectual trends associated with identity politics. Bishop rejects the idea that socially engaged art should not offend or upset its audience and argues that discomfort and frustration can be crucial to the aesthetic impact and are essential to gaining new perspectives (48).
Joining Bishop’s criticism on dialogical aesthetics, Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen points out their reliance on dialogue leading to empathy. According to him, putting much emphasis on mutual understanding and shared perspective downscales criticality, evading confrontational forms of artistic practice that make processes of exclusion visible. Art that becomes socially reparatory activity addressing very specific problems to highlight or solve them, Rasmussen calls ‘the art of modest proposals’(49).
Bishop further argues that many artists whose works do not refrain from the uncomfortable have close relationships to avant-garde theatre, performance, or architectural theory, rather than activism striving for social change. These artists think of the aesthetic and the social/political together, rather than letting these aspects be absorbed into the ethical (50).
Calling out the tendency towards saviour mentality and self-censorship, Bishop seems to have both more faith in the participants’ capabilities to choose and vouch for themselves and more concern for the artist’s individuality, artistic freedom and artworks’ ability to make a tangible difference. “An over-solicitousness that judges in advance what people are capable of coping with can be just as insidious as intending to offend them” (51), she writes.
With these points in mind, it is worth asking whether the perception of a community as ‘the other’ partly stems from a mindset that frames it as a group to be uplifted, validated, or helped on a journey towards artistic expression, an attitude which re-enforces the starting position; the impoverished narratives told through socially engaged practices. Although Bishop makes a strong case in her call for artistic freedom, the position of power the artist holds does open an avenue for transgression. Kester casts light on such an occasion in a case example discussing Alfredo Jaar’s commission, One of Two Things I Know About Them, staged at the Whitechapel Gallery in London in 1992. Commenting on the cultural and economic conditions of Bangladeshi workers, Jaar commissioned photographs of young Bangladeshi women, which he combined with racist and sexist descriptions, detracted from an interview with an East Indian factory owner. The irony of the installation was not evident to the subjects, who demanded a removal of the works (52).
Had Jaar exhibited the photographs without the texts, the work would have appeared to be harmonious with the self-image of the community at the expense of losing its edge. If we examine the socially engaged practices through the ideals set by Kester and Kwon, the aesthetic of consensual dialogue, Jaar’s exhibition evidently failed. Still, one might ask, if the practices are to bring about a larger societal change, the scope of an audience must be rethought to reach and speak to those outside the said community participating in the making of the work. These two audiences are not necessarily persuaded through the same strategies or ‘aesthetic’.
This brings us to an interesting point: How much credit do we give to the professional expertise of a socially engaged artist in understanding how to reach different audiences? Should a socially engaged artist go against the community’s wishes when the artist sees it advantageous to the goals of a project, or risk being reduced to a mere display of suffering?
Nato Thompson highlights the role of affect in the production of meaning in socially engaged practices, pointing out the difference between how things make one think and how they make one feel. Understanding this aspect would help understand how the artwork functions politically and socially (53).
To Thompson, socially engaged practice is not a term descriptive enough to account for its flexibility, which, according to him, is a sign of its interest in producing effects and affects in the world rather than focusing on the form itself (54).
“Determining which forms of social engagement truly lead towards social justice is a constant source of debate. Knowing this, in itself, is useful” (55).
As Thompson points out, a focus on the work's social approach and impact, as opposed to its aesthetics, helps to unpack it into words (56).
“A form of analysis that can account for this broad spectrum of difference (while obviously difficult) will at least provide a framework for interpreting social phenomena from an honest position based in reality” (57).
While Bishop and Rasmussen stress aesthetic agency, and Thompson brings attention to affect and social impact, these positions also open space to consider different media’s ethical conditions in socially engaged practices. As Alfredo Jaar’s case illustrates, the tensions between representation and the works’ impact on the two types of audiences become particularly visible in photography. Due to its straightforward nature to capture that-which-has-been in front of the camera, the photograph carries an inbuilt truth-claim and is often assumed ‘reliable’.
Socially engaged photography, according to one of the most prominent practitioners in this field, UK-based artist Anthony Luvera, only began to gain recognition as a distinct term in the early 2000s (58), which explains its absence in the discourses examined in this paper. Although the discipline’s methods largely align with other participatory practices, the medium’s indexicality introduces particular challenges around representation, publicity and consent. The potential for inflicting harm on those photographed, as well as benefits unattainable to other but lens-based media, complicates its use in socio-political art contexts and warrants attention in future discourse. As such, photography cuts to the core of questions of representation: how do different audiences interpret the artwork, and to what extent the artist should be governed by those interpretations?
Conclusion
This paper has examined the ethical tensions surrounding outsider-led socially engaged practices by analysing key arguments within the existing discourse. The study identified four central areas of ethical concerns: the artist’s authority, the impact of empathy, the flux of identity, and the boundaries between aesthetics and artistic freedom. Writers such as Kester, Kwon, Foster, Bishop, and others offer competing views on how artists should engage with communities, revealing a discourse marked by both scepticism and cautious optimism.
The discourse suggests that while ethical scrutiny is necessary, insistence on insider status, validation, or harmony can restrict artistic freedom and reduce the potential of critical artistic interventions. At the same time, artistic autonomy carries the risk of reinforcing harmful dynamics particularly when existing power imbalances are not recognised. This paper doesn’t endorse a one-size-fits-all position over another but recognises the need for a critical framework to guide context-specific evaluation of socially engaged practices. Here, the artist’s intentions and the outcomes experienced by all parties involved are if great importance.
The discourse analysis proved useful in mapping the multi-faceted and fragmented debate, though the absence of a unified terminology, along with limited empirical evidence of the results the socially engaged practices have achieved, posed challenges. The study draws primarily from theoretical literature, which, while rich in conceptual framing, could benefit from deeper integration with evidence gathered from specific practices’ impacts on the involved communities.
I found that much of the existing critique is directed at not the practitioners but the art critics evaluating the practices from a second-hand position. While these contributions show trust in the art world’s ability to self-govern, the real-time decisions faced by artists demand guidance for planning their upcoming projects. I suggest that the same critical tools offered to critics be adapted for the artists themselves—those most in need of reflective structures during the development and delivery of socially engaged work.
I conclude that ethical discourse on socially engaged art requires ongoing reflection and transparency. This paper contributes to the discourse by connecting the arguments of some of the leading scholars and indicating areas in need of development. These insights are not only relevant to artists and critics but also to curators, commissioners, and funders seeking to support practices that are both socially responsible and artistically autonomous.
All views expressed in this article are the author’s own.
Footnotes
(1) Grant Kester, Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), 140; Miwon Kwon, One Place After Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 95; Hal Foster, “The Artist as Ethnographer?” in Traffic in Culture: Refiguring Art and Anthropology, ed. George E. Marcus and Fred R. Myers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 302–303, https://doi-org.ez.statsbiblioteket.dk/10.1525/9780520354920.
(2) Kwon, One Place After Another, 61.
(3) Suzanne Lacy, Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art (Seattle, WA: Bay Press, 1995), 19; Kwon, One Place After Another, 82.
(4) Tom Finkelpearl, What We Made: Conversations on Art and Social Cooperation (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013), 4–6, https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822395515.
(5) Kester, Conversation Pieces, 10.
(6) Gablik, “Connective Aesthetics,” in Mapping the Terrain, 84.
(7) Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen, “A Note on Socially Engaged Art Criticism,” The Nordic Journal of Aesthetics 25, no. 53 (2017): 62, https://tidsskrift.dk/nja/article/view/26406/23216.
(8) Kwon, One Place After Another, 82.
(9) Kester, Conversation Pieces, 140, 147.
(10) Kester, Conversation Pieces, 137, 139–140.
(11) Kester, Conversation Pieces, 137, 139.
(12) Kester, Conversation Pieces, 130, 137, 149.
(13) Kwon, One Place After Another, 138.
(14) Miwon Kwon, "One Place after Another: Notes on Site Specificity", October, no. 80 (Spring 1997): 105, https://doi.org/10.2307/778809.
(15) Nicole R. Fleetwood, Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration. (Cambridge, MA and London, England: Harvard University Press, 2020), 7, 155, https://doi-org.ez.statsbiblioteket.dk/10.4159/9780674250925.
(16) Fleetwood, Marking Time, 7, 153–155, 163.
(17) Fleetwood, Marking Time, 162.
(18) Fleetwood, Marking Time, 163.
(19) Fleetwood, Marking Time, 7.
(20) Kester, Conversation Pieces, 108, 118.
(21) Kester, Conversation Pieces, 110, 118.
(22) Kester, Conversation Pieces, 149.
(23) Kester, Conversation Pieces, 150.
(24) Lacy, Mapping the Terrain, 33–34, 39.
(25) Mary Jane Jacob, “An Unfashionable Audience,” and Suzi Gablik, “Connective Aesthetics,” in Mapping the Terrain, 50, 80.
(26) Jacob, “An Unfashionable Audience,” 54.
(27) Foster, “The Artist as Ethnographer?”, 304.
(28) Kwon, One Place After Another, 51.
(29) Kester, Conversation Pieces, 149.
(30) Kwon, One Place After Another, 119.
(31) Kwon, One Place After Another, 119.
(32) Foster, “The Artist as Ethnographer?”, 303.
(33) Foster, “The Artist as Ethnographer?”, 303.
(34) Foster, “The Artist as Ethnographer?”, 302–303.
(35) Kester, Conversation Pieces, 130.
(36) Kwon, One Place After Another, 147.
(37) Jackson, Social Works, 13–14.
(38) Jackson, Social Works, 44.
(39) Kester, Conversation Pieces, 130–131.
(40) Kester, Conversation Pieces, 147.
(41) Kwon, One Place After Another, 95.
(42) Tom Finkelpearl, “John Ahearn on the Bronx Bronzes and Happier Tales,” in Dialogues in Public Art (Cambridge,MA: MIT Press, 2000), 91–92.
(43) Kwon, One Place After Another, 95-96.
(44) Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (London: Verso, 2012), 22, 25,https://www-fulcrum-org.ez.statsbiblioteket.dk/concern/monographs/rx913q57p.
(45) Bishop, Artificial Hells, 22.
(46) Bishop, “The Social Turn,” 178–183.
(47) Bishop, Artificial Hells, 25.
(48) Bishop, “The Social Turn,” 178–183.
(49) Rasmussen, “A Note on Socially Engaged Art Criticism,” 69–71.
(50) Bishop, “The Social Turn,”178–183.
(51) Bishop, Artificial Hells, 26.
(52) Kester, Conversation Pieces, 149.
(53) Nato Thompson, ed., Living as Form: Socially Engaged Art from 1991–2011 (New York: Creative Time Books,Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press, 2012), 32, https://monoskop.org/images/1/16/Thompson_Nato_ed_Living_as_Form_Socially_Engaged_Art_From_1911-2011_2012.pdf.
(54) Thompson, Living as Form, 32.
(55) Thompson, Living as Form, 32.
(56) Thompson, Living as Form, 24.
(57) Thompson, Living as Form, 32.
(58) Gary Bratchford and Anthony Luvera, “What We See When Invited to Look Differently: Critical Reflections on Socially Engaged Photography,” Photography and Culture 17, no. 4 (2024): 298, https://doi.org/10.1080/17514517.2024.2412462.
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