Relationships between Art Practices, Social Space, Visibility and Management of Complexity

Abstract

Artistic practices characterised by a tendency to dematerialisation, collective creation and a conception of work-as-process, lose presence and visibility in a context marked by hypervisibility and immediacy. Given the need to make social complexity intelligible, art, within a context of overexposure, may represent a form of action which helps in visualising and in influencing aspects of reality. But if art does not manage to regenerate and diversify its mechanisms of production, it might find itself excluded from this socialising task. Artistic production, understood from a systemic perspective, may confront the management of complexity as an essence, while connecting to other areas, disciplines or ways of seeing/understanding the world which share the goal of deciphering and investigating in order to trace out possible futures, and to contribute to processes of collective emancipation. This article raises the need to redefine the contemporary art functions in relation to the social contexts in which it is articulated. Taking as reference the "productivism" avant-garde of the 20s and the theories of "systemic art" at the end of the 60s, they are related to some contemporary artistic production; those that activates experiences, make connections with specific social spaces and works from the management of complexity.

Keywords

• arte sistémico
• productivismo
• arte y espacio social
• gestión de la complejidad
• visibilidad-invisibilidad