Abstract
How might collections preserve and reflect what is on offer by way of social practice, which includes, among other things, interactive installations, architectural propositions, public actions, community organising, the preparation and serving of food, and even policy reform? Do we collect documentation meant to evoke a past instance of socially created meaning, or something symbolic meant to communicate a poetics of a former work around a particular issue? What is the “object,” so to speak, of social engagement? What is the thing that is being collected, presented, or interpreted exactly? Things associated with social practice are entering major museum collections, at any rate, so how might these collection practices reflect this unwieldy field?
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Notes
- 1.
Lacy calls the Whisper Minnesota Project “a kind of conceptual umbrella that would embrace a series of activities” and The Crystal Quilt “an actual performance.” Interview with the artist, Sunday, July 19, 2015.
- 2.
This notion comes from Arjun Appadarai, “Introduction: commodities and the politics of value” in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge Studies in Social and Cultural Anthropology series), ed. Arjun Appadarai (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 3–63.
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Orr, J. (2017). Collecting Social Things. In: Bonham-Carter, C., Mann, N. (eds) Rhetoric, Social Value and the Arts. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-45297-5_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-45297-5_9
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