5 Questions (for Contemporary Practice) with Tania Bruguera (@ Art21)

Check out the feature I did at Art21 blog with Cuban artist, Tania Bruguera, practitioner of Behavior Art and Useful Art and organizer of Immigrant Movement International, based in Corono, Queens:

While I practice that expanded version of aesthetics, my work is about the role of the artist in society and the possibilities for art to be directly involved in social endeavors. In order to get involved in social issues, it is important to truly commit to real action. The challenge is that artists are very often confronted with the institutional wall. So the work gets caught between a sort of hyperrealism and representationalism that affects the expectation of the artist, but also the ways in which the institutions are ready, or in some cases not, to deal with this kind of work. It is the old dilemma of responsibility in art and what the people in the institutions think the artist should be doing. Unavoidably the work starts dialoguing from an institutional critique standpoint. A new institutional critique where we do not wait for the institution, but we become “institution builders.” Sometimes within the inside of an already existing institution; other times ignoring them, so they have to catch up. It is positive institutional critique.
--Tania Bruguera