Publication Details Paperback, 220 x 220 mm, 200 pages. ISBN 9781789383225
Author and/or Editor name/s Gretchen Coombs
Author and/or Editor bio/s Gretchen Coombs is a writer and researcher with a focus on socially engaged art practices in the US, the UK, and Australia. She is a postdoctoral research fellow in design and creative practice at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia.
Year of publication 2021
Publisher Intellect Books (UK, distributed by University of Chicago Press in the US)
Abstract An exploration of key individuals, institutions and gatherings in socially engaged art. Artists increasingly find themselves working in participatory settings where skills in social engagement are as essential as their creative skills. The Lure of the Social is a creative practice ethnography as well as an intimate and personal exploration that navigates Gretchen Coombs’s research from one end of the spectrum to the other: she works closely with socially engaged artists as part of her ethnographic research at the one end, and tries to find a critical distance to write about their art projects and the institutional structures that support their work, at the other.
Over the course of the book, readers are introduced to artists and their work, and to the key debates and issues facing this fast-growing and emergent field. The author navigates the contradictions and paradoxes of this field of practice through description and analysis and, importantly, gives voice to the artists who are working to make art relevant in times of social and political uncertainty. The problems addressed by social practices, as well as their contradictions, very much reflect our troubled political global moment. This book is a significant contribution to the field – few people have followed the development of social practices for as long as Coombs, and her dual perspective as an art critic and anthropologist make her ideally placed to describe and evaluate the institutions and practices.
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