Since 2004, artist Fiona Whelan has built a socially-engaged practice in the Rialto area of Dublin City, working with stories as a way of exploring conflictual and collaborative power relations and challenging inequalities. Kevin Ryan is a sociologist, and his approach to the study of power is primarily historical. Beating the Bounds of Socially-Engaged Art? was our first collaboration, a dialogue aimed of ‘unfolding’ the field of socially engaged art by discussing some of the ways that Fiona’s practice – which is both dialogical and durational – is also in critical dialogue with its own history and conditions of existence. Making such dialogue a more conscious feature of socially-engaged art intends to transfigure the field, bearing in mind that this requires an engagement with forms of power that have become deeply sedimented. In dialogue, Fiona wrote primarily from practice while Kevin focused on social theory to frame what we described as ‘legacy issues’. More specifically, Fiona and Kevin discussed some of the ways in which the field of socially engaged art in Ireland has been formed at the intersection of the micro-political (community arts) and the macro-political (neo-liberalism); how power is refracted through the distribution and division of places and parts ie. artist/non-artist, signature practice/participatory practice, paid work/voluntary participation; how the community arts sector may have been inadvertently complicit in depoliticising inequality by adopting the language of ‘disadvantage’ and procedures of project evaluation which have since solidified as the ‘new managerialism’; and finally the relationship between theory and practice – in particular the possible shortcoming of theory that takes on a legislative function rather than entering into a reciprocal relationship with practice, so that ideas and concepts become raw material to be formed through praxis.
Field Journal, Issue 4, Spring 2016.