A major insight emerging from this exploration is the mode of social potential, which Hwa Young describes as “Art for Civil Servants”. This art aims for social engagement, positive social change, and developing the presence of disenfranchised voices informing these social changes. However, where the practice diverges from socially engaged art practices that emerged during the New Labour era in Britain, and still dominant, is that they do not entangle the socially transformative effect of the artwork with the redemptive quality of art experiences for socially excluded people. The benefit of art experiences for socially excluded, disempowered people is not a given – and certainly it must be implicit that people from all backgrounds are under no obligation to like, engage, or learn from any given artwork. Certainly barriers to benefiting from art are not all to do with access, or even understanding, but must also involve an awareness of the material conditions of the subject – their ability to use the motivation or awareness developed through art to affect change in the world. The fallacy that participation is a given ethical and socially transformative form, oppositional to the elite form of the art spectacle is what Claire Bishop critiques in Artificial Hells, noting the ways in which Arts Council England substituted “community empowerment” as an aim with “social provision”, suggesting that contact with art is in itself socially just, with ‘creative rewards of collaborative activity’ the role of art in society.
Running contrary to this position, the principle of Art for Civil Servants is that the people who benefit from an artwork’s propositions, might not actually need to be the ones who see it. In proposing this, the artist is acknowledging that although grassroots activism and social mobility through creativity is a strong proposition, and contemporary artivism projects such as Liberate Tate have used art and art contexts to effect social change by putting pressure on institutions through engagement and awareness raising with the public, more immediate changes might be effected by engaging directly with people who currently have agency over policy and its execution.
Art for Civil Servants is exactly that: art whose aesthetic, formal and conceptual properties are developed with a specific audience of governmental staff in mind. In a sense this is an art coming from quite impatient principles. It is an art of an age of austerity, where social mobility has broadly failed people at the same time as urgent and life-or-death decisions are being made on communities’ behalf. Probationary is an example of an artwork that seeks to bring the affective, empathic potential of art into a situation where it can humanise and inform live policy decisions, specifically around the way that probation systems administer funding, freedom and finance to offenders as they seek to re-enter their lives in challenging circumstances. The principle here is that these men are better served by generous, humane thinking at policy level, than they are by contact with humane and nuanced art experiences. In Austerity Britain, art infrastructure is frequently instrumentalised by government policy, who necessarily and understandably seek to off-lay some of the functions of civic society – particularly social welfare outcomes – onto Arts Council and other culturally-funded projects. Probationary is an example of an art project which runs contradictory to this flow of resources, while taking advantage of the new proximity of social provision and the arts.
Commonly, the involvement of policy designers and civil servants in creative experiences, has been associated with the field of “human centred design”: initiatives such as the UK Governments’ Policy Lab think tank. Examples of this include “bias busting” workshops, where civil servants use creative tools to role play and re-assess ways of working and thinking about policy design. Probationary has similar principles to this kind of activity, in that it uses cultural and visual stimulation to invite a re-assessment of working practices. Importantly, it is also a cultural practice that requires its attendees to participate in “work mode”, so although it might draw out human qualities, in particular empathy, it asks that these participants respond to the work in the light of the power and responsibilities they hold within existing social structures.
Where Hwa Young’s “found format” works diverge from the field of “human centred design” though (Hwa Young was herself previously a designer for Samsung, so is aware of the cultures and temptations of this field), is that rather than seeking answers – and in particular techno-centric solutions that are common in initiatives such as Policy Lab – they remain interested in the provocation of thought and feeling in relation to their subject. Reflecting on the role of art in policy, civil servant Stephen Bennett concludes artists could be considered ‘experts’ at probing our emotions, and should be encouraged to interpret facts into emotional experiences. He cites three examples of how art and artists could benefit policy, however, he uses art, design and creativity interchangeably – a common trope in the deproletarianisation of artists, redirecting social activism towards existing policy aims.
There is a great deal of excellent work (Koestler Trust, Vox Liminis) being done to explore the therapeutic potential of the arts in the criminal justice system, but the aim of this work is not only to effect change at an individual level, but to seek transformation at a systemic level too. As a critical media practice, Hwa Young’s “Art for Civil Servants” imagines people working in civic infrastructure as the media-layer of governance, and the gameplay as method rehearsing new interactions within this media layer. In the case of Probationary, the artwork utilises the space afforded to the arts in the criminal justice system, critically exploring and challenging existing understandings of the experiences of the probation system directly with those who carry them out. The artwork does not contain answers to the challenges faced by men on licence, but rather it acts as a circuit by which these challenges can be routed back into the mechanism that has produced them.
Partners on the project have broadened to include the Howard League for Penal Reform, a national charity working for ‘less crime, safer communities, fewer people in prison’. This partnership will allow the artist to trace the impact that Probationary can have on the lives of those on licence, as well as the wider potential of this mode of collaborative work between academic, artistic, and penal reform sectors. The cross disciplinary approach is a recognition of “art as a form of experimental activity overlapping with the world, whose negativity may lend support towards a political project (without bearing the sole responsibility for devising and implementing it), and – more radically – we need to support the progressive transformation of existing institutions through the transversal encroachment of ideas whose boldness is related to (and at times greater than) that of artistic imagination”
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