Ought art to be useful as well as beautiful?
If you thought the School of Art just teaches how to make beautiful things, you’d be wrong.
According to Professor John Byrne, art should be about doing something new, rethinking how we do stuff, and increasingly making art that is “useful”.
In his new book Useful Art: How Activist Artists Can Change the World, John challenges the traditional notion of art as purely aesthetic, arguing that art can be both stimulating and useful at the same time, offering a collaborative playback of impactful and inclusive alternatives.
Art – as a creative endeavour also has the power to bring people together, he stresses, enabling them to recover values, cultivate knowledge and reclaim artistic endeavour for real-world good.
“It’s odd that we still understand art only through the prism of the recent history during which time art has been representative – capturing something on canvas, in clay, either real or imagined,” John says.
“The public viewing art in a gallery, and the systems for understanding art that go with it, is only something that has happened in the West over the past 250 years. Before this, art was commissioned by private buyers - the rich – or churches - and the 'public', as we know them now, only saw art as part of religious ceremony.
“In democratising art, we ought to look beyond the aesthetic and ask how we can use artists and their creativity to effect real-world social change.”
None of this, he emphasises, is to denigrate representative art and John says he is as inspired as the next person by a Rembrandt or a Turner. But there is another side to the coin, he states, which is what we can use art to achieve and how we can build and share as communities with art as a vehicle.
Others have cottoned on, certainly with modern museums and galleries pushing project-based activities. (‘You may have come for the art but while you’re here, give some thought to this!’)
As a Liverpool season-ticket holder, John is used to such concepts – ‘Sure, there’s a football match to watch but do consider how else we can use the power of a fanbase!’
So what is useful?
John uses multiple examples – international, national and local. One – still on the Anfield theme – looks at Homebaked Anfield, a premises used by the Liverpool Art Biennial for a community based regeneration project on the quality of life which morphed into a community-led bakery which now offers skills and training as well as award winning pies.
At a larger scale, the book features an international movement to build temporary ‘Parliament’ buildings for communities or peoples who are not nation states, like the Kurds.
Although related to the concept of the creative economy and creative industries, useful art is not so much about boosting coffers as underpinning society and giving individuals some activism or agency.
“People like Simon Schama talk about the power of art to change the world – whether it’s a political statement, like Picasso’s Guernica, or the use of divine art in the 16th Century to mollify or control the masses, but ‘useful art’ goes beyond just gaining inspiration from art to being empowered by art to do something yourself.”
Art schools are much more open now, he says to looking at art in different ways. LJMU runs a Transdisciplinary Practice Module, shared by Art & Design MA Programmes, where students often build ‘communities’ of skills for an endeavour.
“There’s a definite shift away from creating objects to co-producing change through art and design or living artfully; we do need art schools to keep up with this or they risk becoming redundant, like all those old churches with the same paintings on the walls.”
Useful Art is published by Manchester University Press and will hit the US market this spring.
