Unravelling The Narrative

Through two exciting and diverse socially engaged practices by artists in Australia, we look at what it means to reject the narrative and celebrate the unfinished, the open-ended and the cyclic reality of human engagement.

- Daniel Connell

There is a common belief that successful art allows an audience to follow a pattern. The more successful the art, the more the pattern is hidden only to be revealed to a discerning few through closer inspection and discovery. And this can be the root of an elitist notion of art: the ones who see and know the pattern are the ‘in’ crowd. Is it possible to undermine that model? Can an art form reject the patternmaking entirely and challenge our primal desire to follow one? That which I believe is coming closest to this in the most exciting way is SEP or socially engaged practice. SEP is differentiated from other forms of art precisely by its refusal of classification as either the old ‘community arts’, a form of social therapy, or the objectification of arts as a saleable package. A key quality of SEP is that it rejects the narrative. It celebrates the unfinished, the open-ended and the cyclic reality of human engagement. SEP often takes a position and then goes backwards – unravelling, unwrapping, dismantling; examining while just being and then moving forward into relationship development.

I want to discuss two interesting SEP projects which highlight this simultaneous reversal and progression: Standing Up Standing Out by Tutti Arts and The Circle and the Square by Suzanne Lacy.