New York’s historic Essex Street Market currently houses Living as Form, a more than twenty-year survey of contemporary art engaged with social and political issues, or rather social practices. As a trans-disciplinary form of art making, social practices are challenging to categorize; other names include “relational aesthetics” and “public practices.” Each term attempts to corral cultural production that zigzags between politics, activism, social services and, what Robert Henri called, art spirit. With more than 100 projects featured in the exhibition, and hundreds more catalogued online, it is a sprawling archive that simultaneously defies and embodies widely held definitions of art in the formal sense.
Curator Nato Thompson challenges viewers to consider the greater good as a measure of artistic validity: to what extent have these works impacted their communities? Here social relevance is privileged over aesthetics. The question of whether these works are conferred art status is a tedious semantic debate — whether their existence matters in the world at all is a more pressing measure of value.

Mierle Laderman Ukeles, “Maintenance Art Performance Series” 1973-74
The works address many issues facing the global community at large, including food production, the prison system, reproductive rights, and immigration issues, among others. Documentation of Mierle Laderman Ukeles‘s career-long investigations into sanitation work, for example, is presented alongside take-away printouts of Ukeles’s “Manifesto for Maintenance Art” (1969) and notes for other projects with the New York City Department of Sanitation. This is also a pointedly international survey that addresses projects in far reaching locales such as Czechoslovakia, Russia, Mexico, China, and Thailand. Adjacent to the Ukeles’s display are a series of monitors featuring videos by Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei and Russian collective Voina, among others. Additional material includes documentation of unauthored community movements, such as this year’s demonstrations in Tahrir Square and spontaneous gatherings in Harlem, New York on the night of the 2008 presidential election. (Occupy Wall Street began the week prior to the opening, otherwise this spreading national movement might also have been featured.)
Each project has been reduced to the summation of its ideas for the exhibition. Video footage, photography, and/or ephemeral collateral are presented alongside didactic text. In this sense, navigating the exhibition is like surmising the layout of a book. (A catalog will be published in 2012; presumably it will embody a handheld experience of the exhibition.) If it seems like an overwhelming confluence of information, it is. But it is also energizing to see so many artistic endeavors geared towards an active engagement with the world. Seeing so much can only possibly generate more.