Christian L. Frock, KQED Visual Arts, 5 October 2011
New York's historic Essex Street Market currently houses Living as Form, a more than twenty-year survey of contemporary art engaged with social and political issues, or rather social practices. As a trans-disciplinary form of art making, social practices are challenging to categorize; other names include "relational aesthetics" and "public practices." Each term attempts to corral cultural production that zigzags between politics, activism, social services and, what Robert Henri called, art spirit. With more than 100 projects featured in the exhibition, and hundreds more catalogued online, it is a sprawling archive that simultaneously defies and embodies widely held definitions of art in the formal sense...
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