Aesthetics of Socially Engaged Practice. Interview with Wochenklasur

by Rocca Gutteridge, 27 Dec 2009

Intervention to Overcome Social Barriers
Leeds 2006

Below is an outline of an interview I undertook with the artist run group Wochenklausur last month. I was exploring the aesthetics of socially engaged practice with particular interest in Wochenklausurs’ project: Intervention to Overcome Social Barriers. Leeds 2006

http://www.wochenklausur.a/projekt.php?lang=en&id=2

Below is part of the interview, if you would like further information please feel free to get in touch. I hope you find it useful!

Rocca:
I’d be really interested if you could describe your aesthetic, as though I have never seen an image by you.

Wochenklasur:
We do not intend any aesthetics with the projects, there is no aesthetic outcome.
We do not produce images or objects whatsoever and there is a very small amount of images documenting our projects. We even forget to take images!

When we do we never have an aesthetic in mind, its
just for documentation… it’s just as a document.
There is no purpose in the aesthical outcome.

Rocca:
How about the repeated images of offices in your documentation?

Wochenklasur:
We always have some kind of office- a big calender and kind of a schedule.
We make it just to feel comfortable to work early in morning and late at night. There is no aesthetic, it’s just to be made comfortable.

The Space that is offered varies from project to project
The art and cultural institution have to make a space available that works as an office.
For the Leeds project it was just an empty space. In the part of the city where we were focused on.

It is often ugly spaces that are offered….

Rocca:
I recently did a presentation for a Public Art project in Portobello
I handed out three cards, with different examples of public art projects on each. Yours being one. I asked people to write on the cards their initial reactions to the works of art.

Their responses to your images were:

What did the project achieve?
How was the concept assessed?
The work is focussed and political.
Doesn’t appeal as an artwork.
Original Idea
Very Social

It seems clear who you want to work with for the Leeds project. (Both Art institutions and public)
Who is your audience for the documentation for your projects? Does it matter to you that a non-art audience does not so easily digest the documentation of the work?

Wochenklausur:
Our interest is in the documentation of the project, but we have no interest in making an art work out of it.

We want to attract and gain attention to specific problems in society We want to have the normal art audience involved. We want to make the concepts public….

We choose to have no aesthetic so others can copy our process. With a complex aesthetic this would be more difficult and take away from our process.

Rocca:
How do you see Wochenklausurs relationship to community art?
(To me the aesthetic is very different but the projects methods quite similar).

Wochenklasur:
We never set ourselves ourselves into a specific category of art…
In some contexts we are mentioned as community artists… (Grant Kesters’ Conversation Pieces) or Art in public space… or socially/politically engaged art.
These definitions are not set up my ourselves but by others…
Our focus is sometimes on the community… in some other projects its not.
It really depends what your calling a community? Are a group of homeless people a community, even if they don’t realise they are?

Rocca:
How do you promote your work to the public? And how can I engage non art audiences with what you are doing?

Wochenklasur:
How do people promote Duchamps’ bottle rack? When people look at it what do they look at? Do they really try to find an aesthical criteria? The work is not to look at, that’s not what he wanted…
He has an object, but it doesn’t have to be in an exhibition…
We don’t have an object, only the Results of our project and these results are not to be judged in an aesthetic way. Our work is not only a thing to think about but a thing you can change, we believe art can implicit change.

It’s not easy I know but these projects can be talked about… we can talk about the process and how you arrange it and why we call it art…
Of course we come with powerpoints and images
because it’s nice to have a picture inbetweeen the talking. But pictures can be misleading…
They can be pinned to an aesthetic value. And this is not our artwork…

Rocca:
The frequently asked questions on your website seem to be an artwork in itself: implementing change within your audiences, to get an audience to open up their minds of what art can and could be. And to highlight some of the hierarchical problems within the art world. Would you agree with this?

Wochenklasur:
The writing for the website, especially in 1993 began as a defence.
The Art scene in the early 90s were not open to our work. People were upset that a group can get money from art institutions just to do social work…
We wanted to remind them that the Art concept has always changed through history… movements have always had to define themselves in the more traditional Art scene.

We had to explain why we have the right to do what we do as art.
We used the Freedom of Art constitution… an Austrian constitution allowing the freedom of opinion and speech to do nearly everything and call it art.

We still have to explain the differences between what we do and what a social worker does… what we do is art and that’s very important.

A social worker would definitely not do what we do and we would definitely not do what social workers do.

Art theorists use a certain language. If there is nothing left to judge aesthetically, they don’t know how to cope.

It’s a problem with Art history… art is a concept of agreement, it needs a ‘community’ which reaches an agreement on whether a work is Art.
It is not something that is absolute…

It is also about knowledge and power… not every part of society has entrance to the art scene…