Socially Engaged Art
This is the band where the work involves itself in the events outside the museum. In 1991, Suzanne Lacy coined the phrase new genre public art. It is said to be the forerunner of what later became Socially Engaged Art (when that name settled is not clear: one account credits Claire Bishop's use of it in 2006, another has it already in circulation by the middle of the 1970s). Here too the name was not an insult. It came in as a descriptive term out of scholarship. The best-known figure in this band is Ai Weiwei. In 2010 he spread Sunflower Seeds across the floor of Tate Modern. A hundred million porcelain seeds, each one shaped and painted by hand, made over two years by 1,600 craftspeople in Jingdezhen. From a distance it is a sea of gravel; up close, every one of them is different. The work does the opposite of a factory's uniformity. He has another line of work as well. After the Sichuan earthquake of 2008, he and the people with him investigated the victims of the school buildings that collapsed, because the government would not release the numbers. He laid out the names, the sexes, the dates of birth, the school years, and the addresses of the schoolchildren they gathered, as a work. The count differs between sources, running anywhere from 4,851 to 5,385. In 2011 he was detained for 81 days with no explanation given. In the way this map has put it, that the strength of the work and this fact both stand and neither one erases the other, his case may be the other way round. He stands where the work and the event cannot be told apart in the first place.