Theory
Sociological Art aimed to develop a critical analysis of art and society through interventionist artistic practices and associated writing that drew on the methods and theories of sociology. It envisioned art in terms of interaction, animation, pedagogy, and the creation of structures of exchange, provocation, and disruption of conventional social behaviors with a view to denouncing all and any forms of conditioning. As summarized by Fred Forest: “The practical aim of Sociological Art is to provide the necessary conditions of existence for various devices that frame a given efficient and effective questioning or investigation, thereby establishing the optimal conditions for a situation of intersubjectivity.” Sociological Art was a politically engaged response to an art world that was perceived as being out of touch both with the technologies and the society of its time. This stance was in strict opposition to reigning modernist and formalist dogmas that privileged medium specificity and authorial intention.
Various theoretical influences can be traced through sociological art. In a classical examine of Situationist détournement, Sociological Art aimed to draw attention to the channels of power and mass communication it was aiming to undermine. It called upon derision, simulacrum and participation in order to explode or alter a certain reality structured by the social codes of the time. Considering how ideology structured society related to contemporaneous analyses in French critical theory, such as Louis Althusser’s idea of Ideological State Apparatus as well as Foucault’s writing on power. At the same time, sub-disciplines within the social sciences emerged to study art and culture, including the sociology of art and visual anthropology, and applied novel method and theories to draw attention to art’s socio-economic frames.
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“It is not enough for theory to describe and analyse, it must itself be an event in the universe it describes. In order to do this theory must partake of and become the acceleration of this logic. It must tear itself from all referents and take pride only in the future. Theory must operate on time at the cost of a deliberate distortion of present reality.”
—Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)
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—H.L. (Henry Lewis)