I recently attended a workshop and lecture by Pablo Helguera in which he shared his practice of “social engaged art”(SEA) and social practices and its relation to art and pedagogy. According to Helguera SEA is a process based transdisciplinary practice, is performance in an expanded field rooted in the 1960’s and 1970’s, that temporarily breaks away from self-referentiality. He describes it a a practice that gathers knowledge form a combination of disciplines such as theatre, pedagogy, ethnography, anthropology, and communication. What he calls ‘art world studies’ like educational practices engages with hand on activities, audience characteristics, inquiry based methods, and collaborative dialogues. Helguera associates social engaged art with the Reggio Emilia approach, led by Loris Malaguzzi in Italy shortly after WWII (The Hundred Languages of Children). In SEA Helguera sees that it is critical to qualify the following:

• the kind of participation or collaboration
• the experience
• role of the location
• investigation of action, and
• the documentation process

He see the process of qualifying as a critical framework, similar to, but more than a set of best practices. (p. xvi) For Helguera SEA challenges the capitalist infrastructure of the art world, collecting practices, and the ‘cult’ of the individual artist. It problematizes simultaneously art and sociology.

“Thrown as we are into an uncertain context that is too diverse, fluid, and varied to retain any semblance of cohesion, in making and discussing art, we rely on our partial knowledge of present events, but increasingly we rely more on our intuition, on the collective assessments of those around us who opinion we respect most, and perhaps more importantly, on the social landscape against which a certain kind of art is starting to become meaningful.” (p. 8/9)

The workshop engaged us in 3 hypothetical scenarios of art practice to demonstrate the distinction between symbolic and actual practice. By challenging participants through description, inquiry, and dialogue to draw out and understanding of SEA.

SEA practice challenges me as an art educator to disrupt thinking about art and art education as an evaluation around an ordered debate on thinking as we have in the past, but more as a set of present moments with many contradictions, or incursions into a variety of areas of human activity, and as emancipatory and constraining process of social media.