Shirts, oak trees and social art

"The Blue Route", Kaarina Kaikkonen (2013)
at Fabrica space in Brighton & Hove

During this May it will be easy to find clothes hanging on the street of Brighton & Hove coinciding with the Brighton Festival. That will be the second part of the installation “The Blue Route” which is already on display at the Fabrica gallery. The project started with the Brighton Dome collecting old shirts from the citizens, as the Finnish artists Kaarina Kaikkonen works always with second-hand everyday objects, and it's her work to later on create this sort of collage with the clothes that match her design.

Why shirts? Easy. Because, in Kaarina Kaikkonen's own words, “a shirt is the closest to the heart. The person is there.” Such a bucolic step from the intimacy of a personal shirt to the opposite immensity associated to the colour blue that names the artwork; but in this way, once the work is finished, the spectator not only can play to find its shirt between the crowd but also ends up finding himself as part of the artwork, giving to it new subjective interpretative values. However, the citizen who has give his shirt will become also part of a social workshop once the Brighton Festival is over: all the shirts collected, the ones finally used in the artwork and the ones excluded, will be given to Oxfam. So in this case the social function of the art turns into a practical side.

Joseph Beuys' rocks at Documenta 7
as he left them

Art has always had this social function, either extolling the virtues of a particular social class as in more traditional artistic performances or as a criticism of social and political systems, a concept much more contemporary; but there are not that much the artworks in which the social function implies something beyond the concept like giving more than 100 shirts to charity. Perhaps one of the first remarkable examples of this kind of art are Joseph Beuys' “social sculptures”, a true believer in art as a power for the revolutionary change. 

Once moved the rocks and oak tree was
 planted next to their new location

Thus in the Documenta 7 in 1982 Beuys spread a pile of basalt rocks, which from an air-view could be seen as a big arrow pointing an oak tree that he had planted. Afterwards he announced that the rocks should only be moved if they planted an oak tree to its new site. As a result of this initiative 7,000 oak trees were planted in Kessel, Germany. I can be said that the social and environmental change that Beuys sought was more than achieved.

So let's not participate a little in the comments below: what do you think about “social art”? Do you know any other artworks like that? In which art social project would you like to take part? Or which one could we create ourselfs?

Ricard Gispert
@ricardgispert