Social Sculpture Forum, UK 1991-1998 and the Social Sculpture Research Unit in Oxford, 1998.
The following events motivated the formation of the UK-Social Sculpture Forum, which contributed in 1998 to the formation of Social Sculpture Research Unit at Oxford Brookes University.
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Tate lectures 1990 – 92
Arising from a series of lectures at the MEAD Gallery at Warwick University, related to the touring Art from South Africa exhibition, on which I was exhibitor and cultural representative, I was invited to give a number of lectures at Tate Britain on Art and Politics, and another for a Blake conference which I titled: William Blake, Joseph Beuys and Regeneration. My aim in both was to open up a deeper and more coherent understanding of the field of social sculpture: to differentiate Beuys ‘expanded conception of art’ from Rosalind Krauss’ ‘art in the expanded field’, and in relation to the William Blake and Regeneration conference to make connections between Blake and Beuys and highlight the relevance between ‘regeneration’ and consciousness.
In the discussion following my lectures two things struck me. The one was the lack of understanding of what Beuys had intended with his provocative statements to do with social sculpture, and an almost complete lack of awareness of the fate and nature of the FIU as well as what was currently happening in the field. I was also struck by the cynicism and assumption – emphasised by curators like Rudi Fuchs and artists who had been with Beuys for a couple of days at the Honey Pump – that when Beuys died, so did the FIU and his social sculpture ideas.
In a way it seemed that many they saw them as yet artist’s manifesto. Several participants contacted me after each lecture, wanting to continue the dialogue about social sculpture and transformative process. Alec Leggatt from the Photographer’s Gallery, at my first Tate talk and equally interested in empowerment and self organisation, played an important role in this early group and in the invitations for me to speak on such topics at the Photographer’s Gallery in London.
[CC Shelley Sacks]
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Thought Bank II – at the Demarco European Art Foundation, Edinburgh, 1994 and at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Edinburgh, 1995
This project developed for the 1994 Edinburg Festival, with its emphasis on the potential we have to ‘see the phenomena’ of our society and then to explore and rethink the attitudes and values with which we create them, opened up discussion about the role of imagination in transformation, and what was meant by describing the Thought Bank as a ‘Social Healing Arena’. In August 1995 a group developed in Edinburgh to explore the notion of ‘social healing’ in these works and the connections between this and the social sculpture ideas. Another group of people interested in social sculpture was gathering.
[CC Shelley Sacks]
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Social Sculpture workshop programme – Edinburgh 1994
Parallel to Thought Bank II I facilitated a one-week programme for 25 participants, including two poets from Canada and an engineer from Panama. At the end of the programme it was clear that this was only the start of the discussion about the social sculpture ideas. I was gradually becoming more articulate about what the ‘creative strategies’ I had begun developing in the interdisciplinary arts programme at Nottingham Trent University in 1993, had to do with a ‘phenomenology’ and ‘theory of knowledge’ mentioned by Beuys in 1969, in his outline curriculum for a new interdisciplinary school.
[CC Shelley Sacks]
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The Art and Social Healing Group 1994 – 1995
This group emerged, motivated in part by the questions of Dio Mock and others that I met at a conference on Beuys at Tate Liverpool in 1994. It was at this conference that contributors like Rudi Fuchs responded to questions about social sculpture and the FIU with much cynicism and a clear lack of awareness. After the conference a group began to meet with me in Nottingham to explore these ideas. We reflected on the difference between a useful criticality and an undermining cynicism. Several members of the group joined the Art and Social Healing module at Nottingham Trent, which was later to be described as ‘witchcraft’ by the new Dean. Perhaps this was because its popularity with students from many disciplines beyond the Art Faculty was difficult to comprehend. This group grew and morphed and went through several iterations. The thread that ran through it was an exploration of Beuys’ social sculpture ideas and the FIU in relation to Suzi Gablik’s notion of ‘connective aesthetics’, Paulo Freire’s education for empowerment, and developing transformative pedagogies and ‘expanded art’ practices.
[CC Shelley Sacks]
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Glasgow Forum – 1995
In 1995, the Goethe Institute in Glasgow – led by Susanne Abegg and supported by Marlies Pfeiffer – supported my request to fund a four-day international gathering for 60 people interested in Beuys’ social sculpture ideas. A key motivation for the event was to present what was really at the heart of the social sculpture ideas in the UK and to offer a glimpse into how they were being worked with in Germany. Another motivation was to bring together the growing group of interested artists, curators and practitioners from other disciplines to explore and develop ways forward for working in this field. The event was initiated by contributions form Johannes Stuettgen, Rhea Thoenges and Peter Schata. Every participant was invited to contribute a shorter paper or details of a practice. The Goethe Institute funded a publication of all the contributions. 300 hundred copies went into libraries and arts organisations round the world and it was soon out of print. Although the meeting was problematic in many respects – the way it was facilitated did not encourage careful listening and dialogue – this became a motivation to find a form for conferring and thinking together that went beyond talking heads and the most powerful getting their way.
[cc Shelley Sacks]
Key texts from this publication will be made available here.
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Launch of Social Sculpture Research Unit – 1998
Consolidating the Social Sculpture Forum and creating the Social Sculpture Research Unit at Oxford Brookes University was a proposal of SSRU Research Associate, Graham van Wyk. He felt it would not only give a credibility to the discussions and debates that were weaving their way through many fora, but that it would also be an opportunity to develop the emergent social sculpture practices and reflections on them as genuine research.
Caroline Tisdall and Johannes Stuetggen were invited to be the SSRU’s ‘patrons’ and both spoke at the launch event. Many of Beuys’ UK collaborators were present as well as members of artists’ collectives active at the time. The new SSRU logo – that emphasised ‘imagination’ was indirectly attacked a few days later in a newspaper article by a radical curator as being outmoded romanticism that was no longer of any use. Needless to say, this emphasis on the nature and role of the imagination in transformative social process has become increasingly more significant. It has also proved to be the key that enabled me to unpack capacities in the field of social sculpture and relate them to ‘theories of knowing’ that Beuys indicted in his first new school curriculum were so central to interdisciplinary creativity and the field of social sculpture. But no one really knew why and how. In 1999 the MA in Contemporary Arts and music was developed at Oxford Brookes, following a huge victory for our new undergraduate curriculum, which had recently been awarded 23/24 in the national teaching assessment, and a programme that had not been recognised at all went form nowhere to 3 out of 81 arts programmes in the UK league tables. Key figures from the Arts Council linked to the department at the time, were amazed by the potential of this ‘creative strategies’ approach, even at a first year level.
[cc Shelley Sacks]