relational praxis art

1. Methodology

Relational Praxis Art (RPA) is a kind of socially engaged practice, or community art form that stands in critical relation to contemporary art, even art which claims to be political - or that has political content.

What distinguishes RPA is that it attends to the relational - where relationality itself is the artist material as opposed to the symbolic objects normally understood as the work of art. RPA particularly attends to relations across difference.

The second term, Praxis, brings an understanding that liberation is the purpose of the work - and that in order to develop liberation theory, one has to dig into the specific everyday of how people reproduce their lives as a starting place for resistance practice and knowledge production.

The third term, Art, I propose is (or should be) a language that is accessible to everyone. Indeed, creative material practices are intrinsic and vital to all beings - all entities - and to the reproduction of living itself. Thus, I will describe art as a way into the politics of representation which are key to producing agency when working in marginalized communities.

2. Relational

In terms of relationality, I point to the Indigenous knowledge of these Lands (via elders and knowledge keepers with whom I work as well as scholars such as: Leanne Simpson, Glen Coulthard, Dian Million, Laura Hall, Eve Tuck and Wayne Yang and Marie Battiste to name a few) as the source of the most cultivated and potent understanding of the relational web in which we are all a valued part - human and non-human animals, the mineral and organic worlds, the sky, the water … all of existence. As Leanne Simpson says: the purpose of the relational web is to produce Life, to sustain Life through reciprocity without valorizing any entity over another.

In bringing attention to relationality, we can think about space as produced and reproduced through the relational web. Thus, the initial step of the RPA method is to acknowledge ones geographical grounding - that is the space that one physically inhabits in its various dimensions.

What is the History of the space? As a settler city, colonial/capitalism marks the Lands of Tkoronto through architecture, technology and infrastructure such as the railway, the grid of the city, gentrification, and toxification. These overlay the history of colonial violence on the Land - the underlying and persistent Indigenous inhabitation and Land based cultural practices in tension with the work-a-day life of bourgeois/settler society.

The history of a space contains our relations.

For instance, community, understood spatially, refers to any person or entity who is present locally and thus part of the relational network that forms the space. It is in space that difference is confronted - a difference that reveals and challenges.

Relational work that people do can be community building or it can be spatially segregating, it can challenge hierarchies of embodiment and oppressions or it can reinforce them.

RPA responds to who are experiencing the most marginalization in the given spatial context - those who can be located as the constitutional outside: those bodies necessarily cast out, against who the bourgeois/settler normative is defined and produced in order for colonial/capitalism to function.

For instance, in the gentrifying neighbourhood in which my work and life takes place, that is the Junction in west Toronto, you have a bio/necro political economics where low-income bodies are starved, toxified, stigmatized and threatened with faster death (social determinants of health - Dennis Raphael et al.) vs. the gentrifying body of yoga and organic food whose life is sustained.

Thus, given my background of growing up with poverty, I started working with folx from the local low-income/lumpen community: people who live at a local shelter for womyn, in social housing or various low barrier rentals, a half way house and various group homes.

Practicing RPA means that I participate in the everyday economic relations of community members as a basis to supporting their agency and capacity for day to day life, community building and political expression.

3. Praxis

The second term in RPA, praxis, is a term taken up by marxist and feminist thinkers that brings the expectation of radical and anti-capitalist societal transformation. As an aside - what I consider ‘praxis’ is also most well articulated by Indigenous scholars (particularly Leanne Simpson).

Gramsci’s (1996, 177) idea of praxis is the “philosophy of the act, but not the pure act... but the real act in the profane sense of the word.” In its broadest sense, the term praxis refers the relationship between everyday life, liberation theory, and actual liberation - working from “life to thought, not from thought to life” (Labriola in Haug 2000, 222-6).

Praxis is constituted through a series of movements: from a grounding in the material survival of communities, the messy, everyday, contradictory experience that generates lived experience knowledge, to the building on that knowledge in order to create liberation theory. Liberation theory is then practically applied to everyday life and our resistance movements. Do our movements prefigure the liberated future we want to live? A moment of reflection, reflexivity is then necessary in order to understand the critical flaws in our theory, the changing circumstances of the struggle, and our capacities as a movement - so the theory can be revised and so on, towards a transformed future.

Praxis is reflexive and continually critical.

For me, feminist epistemology and standpoint theory (Haraway, Harding, Hill-Collins) is a key addition to praxis theory. Stanpoint theory tells us that lived experience knowledge is vital to a greater understanding of social reality as a whole: there cannot be an accurate view of the world without input from all social locations.

For instance, it is not possible for someone who isn’t living rough, or doesn’t have experience of society from the perspective of a drug user, a shelter resident or a prisoner, to have that knowledge.

The epistemological condition that we have now, located as academics/ artists/activists is that relatively privileged people are extracting and constructing knowledge about the marginalized, either through our own lived experience of the marginalized, or through research methods such as surveys, focus groups and other secondary sources.

Not only is this unethical in terms of exploiting poor/lumpen peoples knowledge in a way that maintains relations of oppression, but the picture of reality that is being produced is distorted. Especially when those with relative privileges have biases, prejudice and/or ignorance about poor people and their own economic interests and investments in the hegemony of their privileged world view (even when ‘radical’).

If we do not accept and centre the knowledge of lumpen folx, then we are removing the empirical evidence that should underlie theories of marginalization. We are not engaging in praxis and our work cannot be liberatory.

5. Art

Creating representational agency via mainting connection between lumpen bodies and the critical knowledge they hold is an ethical position of RPA. Relational praxis art proposes that knowledge production with marginalized community members is readily facilitated through art methods.

Creativity and direct embodied expression is a core part of our species being and art is an open and experimental form of language that engages with sensation, feeling, psychology, thought, specificity, pleasure and lived experience. Art language doesn’t have to abide by formal rules as with other disciplines (e.g., science), it doesn’t have to be rational (but it can be), it doesn’t have to convince or make an argument, it doesn’t have to make sense -- but it also can do all of these things. Art doesn’t shy away from contradiction, fiction, irrationality, desire, surreality, anger, pain, deceit, fantasy. In other words, art can hold the contradictory, conflicted, abject and profoundly different individuality. Art also has a very strong pleasure component, making meaning through engagement with sensual materials and is thus soothing, healing and empowering.

Considering the specificities of embodiment as a dimension of creative knowledge production is enhanced through an engagement with crip/queer theory. Crip/queer approaches do not seek to rehabilitate bodies and their expression, but rather draws "attention to critically queer, severely disabled possibilities” which “will exacerbate, in more productive ways, the [multiple] crisis of authority” that hail from normative bourgeois systems (McRuer 2006, 31).

McRuer (2006) asserts the critical radicality of the severely disabled positionality in its ethical, epistemological and aesthetics of refusal and resistance.

Thus, the aesthetics of representation has political importance. It is through aesthetic domination that the messy unruly can be tamed, disciplined and assimilated (Eagleton 1990), mobilized to make difference palatable to the normative settler/bourgeois classes.

In opposition to being aesthetically tamed, RPA aesthetics are transgressive. They are determined by our individual embodiments and unfiltered creative expression, by our access, or lack there of, to materials - for instance, the digital divide is a substantial reality in the representational possibilities of lumpen community. We often have scant resources and are thus we work with what we have, deploying diy strategies using found and recycled materials - to bring about interventions into the public sphere.

Relational praxis art asserts that the marginal aesthetics of low-income community that arise out of conditions of poverty (halifax et al. 2008, 135) are a political dimension of their speech. This confronts the public with the stark difference of the lumpen body that haunts the settler capitalist city, the constitutive outside that must remain outside in order to protect the normative docile citizen.

• a brief outline of Relational Praxis Art theory, 2022