The Artist as Changemaker

by Greg Skiano | 27 min read

I. An Oxymoron

There is a need for a common definition for “changemaker” so that it is easier to build shared community, create resources that can help anyone become a changemaker, and measure progress towards nurturing and inspiring others. Some of us at Ashoka, an organization whose mission is to create an Everyone a Changemaker world, set out to discover what it takes to be a changemaker.^[1]

— Reem Rahman, Kris Herbst, and Patrice Mobley (2016)
More than Simply “Doing Good”: A Definition of Changemaker

The goal of educating ‘changemakers’ is nowhere more plausible (or more absurd) than the institution where it could be taken most literally—that is, art school. And while the most prestigious art schools do not yet appear on the list of ‘changemaker campuses’ approved by Ashoka;^[2] and probably won’t any time soon, given the non-profit’s un-aesthetic, entrepreneurial and technocratic language; their working definition of a changemaker, as someone who takes creative action to solve a social problem, parallels a growing emphasis among elite art schools on what is sometimes called ‘social practice.’ The changemakers and the social practice artists often share similar goals (sustainability, diversity, equity, inclusion etc.) as well as similar methodologies (thinking in systems, critical inquiry, and an emphasis on collaboration, listening and openness). Crucially, both believe producing change requires creativity. Indeed, reviewing Ashoka’s typology of changemakers—including social architects, influencers, skills catalyzers, investors, inventors, and connectors—you might well conclude that (with the exception of investor) social practice artists strive to be a kind of uberchangemaker, perfectly adaptable to any ‘changemaking’ needs that arise.^[3] These artists, like any good changemaker, use all manner of experiments, tactics, and strategies in order to “bring about real-world instances of progressive justice, community building and transformation.”^[4] Furthermore, if anyone is well positioned to lead “creative action,” assuming we may rightly regard some actions as creating anything, it should be the artist, for the artist is the creator par excellence.

To create or make any kind of thing requires, above all else, a mastery of material. Artists do not acquire this mastery through scientific inquiry or propositional reasoning, but through practice. Their achievements result from know-how, and their sensitivity to material empowers the best of them to fabricate things of surpassing refinement and complexity when compared to those things produced using well-defined engineering principles. The precision and clarity of these principles, no doubt, has allowed us to manufacture awe-worthy machines; but when it comes to transfiguring material itself, if we compare, say, a particle accelerator to one of Bernini’s marble statues, there is no contest. While the particle accelerator may be a spectacular feat of engineering and power, enabling us to know or do more, it is Bernini who has superior command over his material. He possesses an almost miraculous ability to make marble behave as if it were living flesh, while the engineers, by comparison, appear bound by the given properties of metal, electricity, silicon, and so on. They cooperate with material, whereas the artist seems to overcome it. Bernini has this power precisely because he does not aim to understand marble as marble. Rather, he sees the marble only as a means to to reify his own idea.

If social change is something we do not just strive to observe or understand, but actually believe we can make, we must imagine society, and the people in it, as material that we can refashion according to our own ideas. All efforts to repair “broken systems” by “catalyzing” social change imply the same goal: the systems make the human, so to speak, and by remaking the system we can make a new and improved human, one that will be less destructive, less unreliable, more solid—more like marble than living flesh. Nor could educating changemakers mean simply inspiring them to change the course of history. Everybody already does that simply by acting, since, as Hannah Arendt observed, action is fundamentally unpredictable and fundamentally boundless.^[5] We can never say with certainty what the outcome of our actions will be just as we know without a doubt that those outcomes will ripple through time without any foreseeable end. Instead, “changemaker” implies that we can begin with a social goal, and through technical “methodologies” we can reliably reach that goal. “To have a definite beginning and a definite, predictable end,” Arendt notes, “is the mark of fabrication, which through this characteristic alone distinguishes itself from all other human activities.”^[6] Therefore, we should expect to find the best, most refined examples of this kind of social fabrication, not among scientists or engineers, who—insofar as they practice science or engineering—limit themselves to the discovery and use of rational principles, but among artists, who, as makers, transform what is given by nature according to their own ideas. In particular, we should expect the purest examples among what art critic Claire Bishop has termed “participatory art,” or the kind of social practice art “in which people constitute the central artistic medium.”^[7] Taking these artists as prototypical changemakers suggests that social change might not be the sort of thing we can make at all. “Changemaker” might just turn out to be an oxymoron.

II. A Clarion Call

I define a hack as a man who refuses as a matter of principle to improve the production apparatus and so prise it away from the ruling class for the benefit of Socialism.^[8]

— Walter Benjamin (1934)
The Author as Producer

Contemporary participatory art more or less explicitly takes up a call first issued by artists of the historical avant-garde and then echoed by subsequent generations of theorists, a call for artists to abandon traditional, mimetic forms of art, to take up a position alongside the laboring class, and to bring about the revolution promised by Marx. Among these theorists, Walter Benjamin continues to exert an important influence, and his essay The Author as Producer provides a succinct and vivid example of this call to action. In it, he argues that if writers wish to be more than “ideological patrons” for the oppressed, they must become operative. “The operative writer’s mission,” Benjamin writes, “is not to report but to fight; not to assume the spectator’s role but to intervene actively.”^[9] Here, to intervene means to adapt the apparatus, or the means of production “to the ends of the proletarian revolution.”^[10] Benjamin’s Marxist goals are less interesting here than his materialist foundation—his underlying belief that material conditions determine human relations, and not the other way around. “Social relations,” Benjamin asserts, “are determined by production relations.”^[11] This is axiomatic for him.^[12] Therefore, if the goal is to improve social relations, but those relations are determined by production relations, then obviously the artist should not focus on making autonomous things within existing production relations (since they would remain counterrevolutionary), but rather focus on altering production relations directly. Neither the Marxist character of this materialism nor the particular goal of socialism is necessary for artists to conclude that their primary task should not be creating autonomous things. All they need is the twofold belief that something is inadequate about our current social reality and that whatever determines that reality is material with specific properties that can be manipulated and worked the same way Bernini manipulates marble.^[13] If nature is too fixed, if there are laws we can and should discern if we are to flourish; or if human action is too free—or if both are true—this call to creative action is quixotic at best. The first case would be like trying to carve a swan from diamond using a plastic spoon; the second like building a table from wood, knowing at any point the fibers inside could decide to become drops of water.

Hannah Arendt wrote that “the basic error of all materialism in politics… is to overlook the inevitability with which men disclose themselves as subjects, as distinct and unique persons, even when they wholly concentrate upon reaching an altogether worldly, material object.”^[14] In other words, the plurality of humans, rooted in their ability to begin something new—to act—makes humanity unlike a material, which behaves in a predictable, knowable, and homogeneous way. It is possible to paper over the irreducible heterogeneity of humanity by appealing to the law of large numbers, arguing that even if we cannot predict each action of each individual, we can still formulate lawlike generalizations that hold for significant populations, which allows us to effectively treat the aggregate as a material. However, as Arendt points out, this merely takes the most meaningful actions and treats them as noise.^[15] The rare actions and ideas, the ones that surprise, the exceptions that prove the rule, are exactly what history is made of. Alasdair MacIntyre makes a related point when he uses the wheel as an example of “radical innovation.”^[16] It would be impossible to predict the social effects of the wheel before it was invented, even in principle, since predicting the effects of inventing it would require understanding the idea of the wheel, and having the idea of a wheel before it existed would, in an important way, already be to invent it. These rare actions, which we know will happen, are nonetheless impossible to factor into our attempts to mold society as if it were a material, and in a lesser way, each thing a person makes and puts into the world changes the way we are conditioned, further compounding the problem.^[17] There is one kind of activity, however, in which we do not disclose ourselves as agents and therefore to which the kinds of lawlike generalizations needed for changemaking may be applicable. Arendt calls this kind of activity “labor.”

The distinction Arendt makes between labor, work, and action defies easy summary in no small part because assigning one (and only one) of these categories to every real activity appears hard, if not impossible (nor does that seem to be her goal). Instead, I want to focus on one specific way she distinguishes labor. An activity is “labor” insofar as one person’s contribution may be exchanged for another’s, insofar as it is numerically quantifiable.^[18] Some cases will remain ambiguous, yes, but if we compare the assembly line ‘worker’ to an author or carpenter, we can see that who the assembly line ‘worker’ is matters less for the outcome of their activity. Laborers contribute bodily movement more than their ideas or intentions. Their bodies function as one and make labor distinctly collective. Behaving as one mass makes us material-like, and wherever a great many are reduced to mere laborers the claims of the would-be changemaker seem most plausible.

Benjamin’s praise of the Soviet press in The Author as Producer reveals as much. He tells us, “The apparatus will be the better, the more consumers it brings in contact with the production process—in short, the more readers or spectators it turns into collaborators.”^[19] In the case of the Soviet press this is accomplished, in part, by inviting readers to contribute their “questions, opinions and protests.”^[20] Notably, Benjamin completely ignores the content of the readers’ contributions. They are not individual works, but fungible and labor-like, contributing to one project, divisible among all who are willing and able to conform their efforts to the aims of the reformulated press. This “merging the artist and worker,” looks, at first glance, like the dismantling of the hierarchical relation between the author and audience, but in reality it is the consolidation of authorship at a higher level.^[21] The author, recall, was to make her task the apparatus itself (in this case the press), and to the extent that the apparatus becomes a unified work, its components cease to be so, and its “collaborators” merge into an undifferentiated, laboring mass. We see this same pattern in the recent tendency to treat curators as artists in their own right and exhibitions as works of art, and it is probably no coincidence that this tendency developed alongside participatory artwork. When artists claim the actions of an audience as a part of their own work, then it makes perfect sense for curators to similarly subsume the work of artists.^[22] Wherever work is thus transformed into labor, it tends to be subsumed into a larger ‘project;’ and this upward consolidation of authorship is essential to changemaking, since each successive layer renders the ones below it more pliable, more material.

III. A Thing

The author offers the interpreter, the performer, the addressee, a work to be completed. He does not know the exact fashion in which this work will be concluded, but he is aware that once completed the work in question will still be his own. It will not be a different work, and, at the end of the interpretive dialogue, a form which is his form will have been organized, even though it may have been assembled by an outside party in a particular way that he could not have foreseen.^[23]

— Umberto Eco (1962)
The Poetics of the Open Work

Understanding participatory art as art raises a problem: since works, and therefore works of art, must be discussed as things made by someone—as opposed to deeds, events, or ideas, which in order to become objects of our discussion “must first be seen, heard, and remembered and then transformed, reified as it were, into things”^[24]—we must ask in what sense these works are things at all. Perhaps they are examples of what Umberto Eco called “the open work”—a work which opposes the “complete” or “closed” work, that old, allegedly authoritarian thing in which the maker attempts to fix a meaning. While all works, strictly speaking, are ‘open’ in the sense that they admit of different perspectives and interpretations, and while artists have always recognized this, Eco argues that only a “gradual maturation of this awareness” led the artist to transform this ‘openness’ into a “positive aspect of his production.”^[25] Eco focused primarily on composers who required their performers to affect the final form of individual performances through chance, permutation, or structured choices, but his ideas about opening the work of art have been taken up by social practice artists who understand their participants’ actions as the completion of their own works.

Claire Bishop has criticized some participatory artists and theorists for misreading the idea of the open work. As she puts it, “rather than interpretations of a work of art being open to continual reassessment, the work of art itself is argued to be in perpetual flux.”^[26] When the work remains the transient experience of a few individuals or when the work so completely lacks structure that it cannot be apprehended at all, the art seems to evaporate entirely. In order to retain its identity as a work, Bishop realizes that social practice artists must use “social context” and participants as an artist uses any other material and not merely offer the raw experience of togetherness. Furthermore, they must leave behind some byproduct (usually in the form of documentation) by which their work can be received by a secondary audience. Without any structure defining, and thereby limiting, the experience, it cannot be said to be authored, and without the byproduct, the work cannot be discussed or critiqued in relation to other works after the fact. Thus, for Bishop, successful participatory art achieves a “double ontology,” existing both as an authored experience and a receivable thing.

The idea that participatory works exist in two ways contrasts subtly with theater. Even though a play exists as a script and is brought to life, so to speak, by different actors and in different settings, the idea of cleaving its existence as a script from its existence as a performance (though we can think about each separately) would seem artificial, as would dressing up the idea in a phrase like “double ontology.” We are still dealing with a single play, even if each performance discloses new aspects that can be meaningfully discussed in isolation.^[27] But with participatory art, the situation is different. We are actually dealing with two things: an event and an object. Phrases like “double ontology” obscure this. The participants are not like actors who create a representation of action; they are just people acting. The documentation is not like a script, which, by its nature, precedes and guides the performance; it is a historical document, which represents actions that have already passed.

In order for us to understand the event and the object as the same work, both would need to result from a singular idea, or one act of making, rather than the object being a reaction to the event. That is, the motions of the participants, while variable and perhaps unpredicted, would have to be, nonetheless, organized by the artist. The trouble is that the unpredictable character of human action militates against this organization. In the case of performative pieces, especially in the “delegated performances” that Bishop believes successfully balance the supposed ‘double ontology,’ the requisite formal organization is achieved through contractual, remunerated relationships. “In many cases,” Bishop writes, “the work of finding suitable performers is delegated to the curator, who now finds him- or herself becoming a human resources manager (negotiating qualifications, shifts and contracts).”^[28] Tellingly, contracts are a special kind of promise, and as Arendt observed, our ability to make and keep promises creates “islands of stability” amidst the unpredictability of human action.^[29] The participants may introduce some variation, but that variation is constrained by a contract, either implied or actual. Importantly, this does not turn the participants into collaborators or ‘co-creators,’ as is often assumed, but into laborers. The stable identity of a work must come from somewhere, and if not from a fixed arrangement of notes, or words, or matter, then it will come at the expense of human freedom. Whereas actors ‘co-operate’ in bringing to be a work of theater or film by their own creative contribution, and whereas musicians have always contributed to the disclosure of new aspects of compositions through their interpretation, the ‘participants’ in social practice art—and even the performers of open works described by Eco—are treated as material to be organized, by chance maybe, but always without true agency.

IV. A Conceit

The work consists of first preparing a totally empty room, with totally empty walls; one of the walls, which was made of glass, had to be covered in order to achieve a suitably neutral space for the work to take place. In this room the participating audience, which has come together by chance for the opening, has been locked in. I have taken prisoners. The point is to allow people to enter and to prevent them from leaving… there is no possibility of escape, in fact the spectators have no choice; they are obliged, violently, to participate. Their positive or negative reaction is always a form of participation. The end of the work, as unpredictable for the viewer as it is for me, is nevertheless intentioned: will the spectator tolerate the situation passively? Will an unexpected event—help from the outside—rescue him from being locked in? Or will he proceed violently to break the glass?^[30]

— Graciela Carnevale (2009)
Interview with Claire Bishop

As it turns out, it was a person from outside who eventually smashed the window, releasing the ‘prisoners,’ some of whom were so convinced that the outsider ruined the work of art that they struck their liberator repeatedly in the head with an umbrella.^[31] Describing this event, which happened in 1968, Carnevale said she used “violence as an aesthetic” to create a metaphor for the violent actions of the oppressive military regime at the time in Argentina, and at the same time she described it as a “real action of change” capable of transforming reality.^[32] She asks us to accept that there is precisely one thing which is both work and action, as she makes perfectly clear when she refers to the event—not as a happening or performance—but as a “work-action.” But is it? Granted, there is something formal about insisting that the room be “​​suitably neutral,” a perfect frame completed the moment she locked the door and left the people behind, its emptiness suggesting that it contained nothing but the movements of the people inside, constituting something akin to a kinetic sculpture. Her invocation of chance—the people were not selected but just happened to be there; their actions were unpredictable but nonetheless intentioned—harkens back to Umberto Eco’s notion of the open work. However, random chance is not the same as the unpredictability of human action. The ‘random’ set of people who decided to attend the event are not like a random set of musical notes picked by shuffling cards. It was their actions that brought them to the event, not the artist’s, and their actions belong to lives that both precede and follow this isolated event. Furthermore, the effect of a random note on a composition is only vaguely analogous to the effect a person may have on a course of events. It may make sense to say that an artist ‘intends’ a random note, or variable, when it is drawn from a clearly defined set under the purview of the artist, but claiming to intend whatever a group of people do without qualification verges on meaningless.

Carnevale’s claim to intention only makes sense if we accept a grossly simplified view of action when interpreting the event by narrowing our focus to simple questions like: will they break out or will someone have to rescue them? Will they be passive or active? Claire Bishop, in her interpretation of the event, appears to take this narrow view. She tells us that “no one inside the gallery took action,”^[33] despite people inside trying to dismantle the window, door, and padlock. Even if Bishop was unaware of these specific actions, she must have known the insiders did something to communicate with the outsiders. People do not usually break gallery windows without a reason. Yet the only action that counts for her is breaking the glass. Carnevale’s assertion that the violence of the piece is a metaphor for political oppression and struggle suggests a similar view of the prisoners’ actions. Imagine that two prisoners fall in love during the ordeal, decide to meet afterward, and eventually have a child who later liberates Argentina from a vicious dictator—or maybe becomes one himself. Either outcome could be traced back, through a series of actions and reactions, to Carnevale’s work, but that is not what she means when she says that “the end” of the work is unpredicted but “intentioned.” It seems more likely that she means something like the following: while she could not predict whether the prisoners would escape or be rescued, either outcome would have been intended, and the work ended when they left the gallery.

On the other hand, if—as she claims—the work is simultaneously “a real action,” then it could not end when the prisoners were freed, for real action is boundless, and the effects of her action necessarily extended beyond the apparent ‘end’ of the work. Describing it as a “real action of change” implies a claim to authorship far beyond the creation of a metaphor. To see why, consider what a ‘non-real’ action of change might mean, especially given the obvious fact that every action changes the course of human events. Presumably what makes this action a “real action of change” is its creative potential. A ‘non-real’ action, then, would be one that creates (or fabricates) nothing. Carnevale “really” acted creatively because she had an idea (about the nature of political oppression) and an intended end (to raise revolutionary consciousness) which determined the form of her work. There was a specificity about the change she wanted to create. Not just any change would do. Therefore, evaluating the act as fabrication would mean asking if she did, in fact, make that change. If she did not, then the work was a failure in the same way as a table that cannot stand or a cup without a bottom. Then again, even if the change she hoped for was realized, even if the participants became more revolutionary, and even in the unlikely event that they went on to overthrow the oppressive regime, so what? That in no way implies that she ‘created’ or ‘authored’ these outcomes, since the plurality of subjects, each with their own life, means that whatever they did after the event belongs, in a sense, to them and not to Carnevale.^[34]

I doubt that Carnevale or Bishop, if asked whether the artist should be considered the author of events following the performance, would claim anything so fanciful, but I suggest the way we discuss these kinds of works implies such a conceit. Consider, for example, that neither Bishop nor Carnevale mention who broke the glass. We only know it was someone outside. This is a revealing omission because an action, to be understood as an action, requires a subject. In the actual course of events, who broke the glass matters, since the experience of breaking the glass will have a different impact on that person than it would have had on another person, the two being irreducibly different. The downstream effects of the event will have everything to do with who did what and why, and yet, when the artist and critic interpret the event none of this seems to matter. We are left with the distinct impression that the artist has made something, not done something. The participants are merely parts of that something. Their behavior is treated as perfectly analogous to the properties of a material: just as an artist who understands how metal behaves can creatively ‘experiment’ with its properties, so too with people.

V. A Nightmare

The avant-garde’s dream of placing all art under direct party control to implement its program of life-building… had now come true. The author of this program, however, was not Rodchenko or Maiakovskii, but Stalin, whose political power made him the heir to their artistic project.^[35]

— Boris Groys (1987)
The Total Art of Stalinism

In 1987 Boris Groys challenged the prevailing understanding of the transition from the Russian avant-garde associated with the October revolution to Soviet realism under Stalin. Whereas art historians typically viewed Soviet realism as a regressive and reactionary development following the radical, progressive work of the earlier period, Groys argued that beneath their superficial differences, these two periods were informed by and embodied the same theoretical framework, and that, in fact, Soviet realism should be understood as a “dialectical radicalization of the avant-garde.”^[36] Groys understood that “to the revolutionary Marxist, individuals, their thought, and ‘inner world’ in general are merely part of the material that is to be ordered,”^[37] and thus remaking the world requires not reasoning and argument, but a recognition that this material is formable by creative will. If our thought and reasoning are determined, Groys concludes, “the very act of creating the new world… is irrational and purely artistic.”^[38] And while we may look back at constructivist and productivist paintings as merely “aesthetic” objects, to do so ignores the essence of their project: “the demand that art move from representing to transforming the world.”^[39] The sign that these artists failed to do so, argues Groys, is that their work never became one with society and instead remains safely ensconced (and revered) as art in museums. It was Stalin who succeeded where these artists failed by successfully making art part of the unified and total organization of society according to a unifying idea.

In Groys’s argument we see an example, perhaps the ultimate one, of the kind of consolidation of authorship which is required for changemaking. There were, superficially speaking, painters making “realist” work under Stalin, but as Groys notes, “the mimesis of socialist realism is the mimesis of Stalin’s will, the artist’s emulation of Stalin, the surrender of their artistic egos in exchange for the collective efficacy of the project in which they participate.”^[40] There is one true, consolidated author here, and that is Stalin, whose one idea leads to one total work. In a real way, then, these artists are analogous to the participants in social practice art. The participants are the means by which social practice artists make their work just as the Soviet realists are (part of) the means by which Stalin makes his. Again, this is not about the content of the idea, but rather treating people as a mass to be molded. As Hannah Arendt points out, this reductive materialism does not originate with Marx, but remains a perennial feature of political philosophy. Plato, Arendt asserts, “was the first to design a blueprint for the making of political bodies” and remains “the inspiration of all later utopias.”^[41] Furthermore, just as the Soviet realists had no more need for the radical forms of the avant-garde—their project already being radical by virtue of its total integration with the Stalinist regime—so too the superficial differences between so-called “changemakers” on the one hand and “social practice artists” on the other may indicate, not two separate projects, but rather the relative success of the one over the other.

What remains the most important question is whether or not the dream of the changemaker is even possible; and even if participatory art might appear ineffectual or irrelevant to the self-avowed changemaker, it does offer a useful microcosm for considering that question. In Carnevale’s “work-action,” for example, the fact that the person who broke the glass was outside the gallery suggests a possible answer. While we may doubt that an artist, or anyone else, can actually transfigure people as a material, there is no doubt that people can voluntarily act more like material. The participants inside the gallery understood themselves to be part of the art work, whereas the people outside did not. Should we be surprised that those inside failed to exercise their agency to the same degree as the outsider? Perhaps participatory art requires us, first, to see ourselves not as agents of change but as subjects of change before we can truly apprehend it as the artist’s work. If so, the social practice artist plays midwife to the changemaker.

Works Cited

Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.

Benjamin, Walter. “The Author as Producer.” In Understanding Brecht, translated by Anna Bostock, 85–103. London: Verso, 1998.

Bishop, Claire. “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics.” October 110 (2004): 51–79. https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_pubs/96/.

Bishop, Claire. Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship. London: Verso, 2012.

Carnevale, Graciela. “Encierro (Confinement) 1968.” The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Accessed August 25th, 2023. https://www.moma.org/audio/playlist/290/3753.

“Changemaker Campuses.” Ashoka. Accessed August 12th, 2023. https://ashokau.org/campuses.

Eco, Umberto. “The Poetics of the Open Work: 1962.” In Participation, edited by Claire Bishop, 20–40. London: The MIT Press, 2006.

Groys, Boris. The Total Art of Stalinism: Avant-Garde, Aesthetic Dictatorship, and Beyond. Translated by Charles Rougle. London: Verso, 2011.

MacIntyre, Alasdair. After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. 3rd ed. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007.

Sholette, Gregory and Chloe Bass. Art as Social Action: An Introduction to the Principles and Practices of Teaching Social Practice Art. New York: Allworth Press, 2018.

Skinner, B.F. Beyond Freedom and Dignity. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1971.

Sokolowski, Robert. Introduction to Phenomenology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

Rahman, Reem, Kris Herbst, and Patrice Mobley. More than simply “doing good”: A Definition of Changemaker. Ashoka. 2016. [⎘]