Browsing by Person "Schrag, Anthony"

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A Collective Timeline of Socially Engaged Public Art Practice 1950-2015
(Routledge, 2015-11-19) Cartiere, Cameron; Hope, Sophie; Schrag, Anthony; Yon, Elisa; Zebracki, Martin; Cartiere, Cameron; Zebracki, Martin
A visual timeline of significant contributions to Socially Engaged Practices. All histories are subjective. We cannot hope to fully capture the timeline of socially engaged artworks over the past half- millennium, but we can present a highly subjective one that acts as a starting point for inquiry. In the spirit of the collaborative underpinnings of 'new genre public art' we present selected, intertwined histories chosen by five individuals. These individuals operate from diverse locations within the eld, and their selections reflect varied interests -- from activist to aesthetic, from historical to happenings. While the legacies of socially engaged art stretch back much further, the boundaries for this timeline are 1950 - 2015 to allow for a relatively focused chronology of an already complex and expansive topography
ArtWar [Practice Research Case Study]
(Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh, 2019-09-23) Schrag, Anthony; Luostarinen, Nina; Moys, Anthea; Bruce, Katie
Description: The researchers developed art-based, creative games that responded to the particular location and context of the case studies. The games were adapted from play theory, and specifically explore physicality and conflict. For example, The islands of Vallisaari and Kuninkaansaari are former military bases, situated only a few kilometers from Helsinki harbour. They were integral to Finland’s conflicts with both Russia and Sweden, and therefore inherently linked to questions of conflict, identity and nation. The game for this site began with two groups being tasked to develop a manifesto and flag for their own ‘Micronation’, and in this they collaboratively explored their political, social and cultural beliefs. In the second part of the game was designed around a traditional ‘capture-the-flag’ game with each group was assigned one of the two islands to defend from the opposing team/Micronation. In GoMA and Aarhus, the games was designed around a board-game divided into ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’ that responded to the location, and teams competed to invade opposing territory on the board which then translated to performing these playful acts in the real territory on which the game design was based.
ArtWarPlay
(CounterPlay, 2019-04-07) Schrag, Anthony; Luostarinen, Nina
The benefits of being a bit of an asshole? [Oral Presentation]
(University of Malta, 2019-10-12) Schrag, Anthony
The Careful Turn: The problem with care within socially engaged art
(Routledge, 2025-07-18) Schrag, Anthony
The concept of an ‘ethics of care’ is a gaining in attention within the cultural sector, both in regard to how participants and communities are approached, but also in how organisations might ‘care’ for their artists. Drawing from Belfiore's seminal 2022 article “Who cares? At what price? The hidden costs of socially engaged arts labour and the moral failure of cultural policy,” this text reflects on this question of ‘care’ as an infrastructural concern, relating to the formalisation of management structures, and the ethical considerations this would engender. The text follows the development of this ‘ethics of care’ through its nascent phases within the domain of nursing, and delineates the authors understanding of ethics and morals. He then moves on to complicate notions of care by invoking Ranciere's text The Ethical Turn and Bishop and Mouffe's notions of dissensus, and how this complicates both the role and function of ‘art’ but also the pragmatic concerns of management (of both artists and socially engaged art projects). This chapter ends with an example from the author's own artistic practice and calls for reflection on how relational and human processes such as ‘care’ can structurally fit within bureaucratic infrastructures of management.
ChaosPlay
(2025-02) Schrag, Anthony
Research Inquiry: ChaosPlay aimed to interrogate the rigid boundaries between who is the “artist" and who is the “audience” in order to develop new forms of participatory engagement within festival contexts.
Cheeky little monkeys: Emancipation and art in regards to education versus participation
(Engage: The National Association for Gallery Education, 2019-05-31) Schrag, Anthony
The inception of the Social Exclusion Unit in 1997 by the recently elected New Labour government saw participatory art projects being applied to the issues of community cohesion and social inclusion with the explicit aim of the artistic works to seek consensus and eradicate social division. However, society is inherently dissensual, it is wrought with friction which can never be dissolved and as Rosalyn Deutsche clarifies: 'Conflict, division, and instability, then, do not ruin the democratic public sphere; they are conditions of its existence’. This dichotomy between intention and reality reveals the issues of power at play, and the complicated problems related to the instrumentalisation of artistic works within the social realm.
Chewing and Pooing: The digestive system as a metaphor for practice-research in participatory contexts (Panel)
(2018-04-20) Schrag, Anthony; Hope, Sophie; Shaw, Becky
The commonality between the panel leaders lies in our use of participatory art methods to explore particular contexts (e.g. hospitals, public galleries, call centres, local authorities) in order to explore the material processes and conditions of these places with the people who work in them. Hope will present Manual Labours: Building as Body taking Nottingham Contemporary as a case study, Schrag will present Fight Club: Physicality and Office Workers within Glasgow City Council and Shaw will present Hiding in Plain Sight: Moving between Care and Research at Florence Nightingale School of Nursing and Midwifery. We propose a panel in which we will each present our methodologies, making use of the metaphor of the digestive system to find out what is being ingested, masticated and digested, and by whom, and what is being excreted at the end of our research processes. We are interested in exploring the processes of exchange, interaction and co-production in the process of investigating the functions and malfunctions of organisations. What is it that is participatory about this practice-research? What are the intersubjective relations between artist-researchers and participants? How can the fleshy, pulsating, masticating, symbiotic aspects of the digestive system help and/or hinder doing practice-research in these settings? We will examine how the artist-researcher and participant fits within the metabolism of the body in which they work and how possible it is to challenge the relationships they have with the specific contexts they work in. We invite feedback and discussion on diverse methodologies which use participatory art methods to explore working environments, examining where the metaphor of digestion fails and where new metaphors, systems and imagery might be needed.
Community Contexts Over Solutions: Observations from The Rural Art Network, Scotland
(Taylor and Francis Group, 2025-03-18) Tully, Kyla; Schrag, Anthony
The utilization of arts and culture within public engagement has been of increasing interest to policymakers and funding bodies as a response to socioeconomic issues within Scotland’s rural and remote areas. However, the arts and cultural organizations undertaking projects related to community engagement often navigate these issues in isolation: the contexts experienced by remote and rural organizations that might contribute to, and benefit from, knowledge-sharing with other similar organizations also inhibit the development of community between said organizations. This text illustrates the facilitation of such knowledge-sharing through a Community of Practice and introduces findings from the resulting Rural Art Network Scotland.
Coproduction of knowledge for practice through a participatory action research and process evaluation project (Lydia Osteoporosis Project 2, LOP 2)
(BioMed Central, 2018-08-17) Smith, Margaret Coulter; Schrag, Anthony; Kelly, Fiona; Pearson, Claire; Bacigalupo, Alison
Background - Participatory action research (PAR) is active, collaborative and seeks to develop knowledge from everyday occurrences (Reason and Bradbury 2013). A creative movement workshop developed from the Lydia Osteoporosis PAR Project 2 (LOP 2) and enabled volunteer local research collaborators and participants to articulate new practice knowledge.
Creative interpretation of global flooding - experiences from the Philippines, Vietnam and the United Kingdom
(UKRI, 2022) Manley, Nicole A L; Tankiamco, Xilina; Galindo, Angelo Carlo L; Schrag, Anthony; Nyuen, Tuan Anh; Dao, Thuy Hang; Duong, Tat Thanh; Guzman, Maria Aileen Leah G; Garcia, Andres Payo
Cultural policy and participation – attempts to bring the periphery to the centre, and its failures [Oral Presentation]
(Bifröst University, 2019-08-28) Schrag, Anthony
Over the past few decades, Socially Engaged Art practices have flourished in response to the participatory policy turn (Saurugger, 2010). Similarly, there is a increasing concern that if culture should be funded by the public purse, it should demonstrate public benefit. Participatory/Socially Engaged Art practices have therefore been ideologically framed as necessarily socially productive and positive processes, and cultural policy has focused much attention upon these fringe activities, dragging them towards the centre of cultural production. From the a practitioner’s perspective, however, these policies were seen as an ’instramentalisation’ of artistic processes in order to elicit specific political control: Jonathan Vickery (2007) claimed that government administrations were using culture to ’construct civic identities’ that were amenable to the state. Indeed, the blurring of the explicit and implicit uses these policies (Ahearne, 2009) seems to demand the central tenet of these artist expression to be ameliorative, to end social conflict, and smooth the turbulence of social tensions. However, this paper understands that democratic (cultural) processes must include conflict. As Rosalyn Deutsche argues: ’conflict, division, and instabilitydo not ruin the democratic public sphere; they are conditions of its existence.’ (1996). This presentation therefore examines the practical and conceptual concerns which occur when cultural policy instrumentalises Socially Engaged Art in such a way. It is presented from the perspective of a practitioner, and includes 2 case studies which explore the issues when cultural policy (in the UK) pulls peripheral cultural activities away from their natural home on the edges into the centre.
Culturally relevant practice in the arts
(Critical Publishing, 2023-05-26) Schrag, Anthony; Marcus, Geetha; Van de Peer, Stefanie
Education or participation? [Oral Presentation]
(University of Malta, 2019-10-12) Schrag, Anthony
Enstranglements: Performing within, and exiting from, the arts-in-health “setting”
(Frontiers, 2022-01-05) Williams, Frances; Shaw, Becky; Schrag, Anthony; Clift, Stephen
The following text explores performative art works commissioned within a specific “arts and health” cultural setting, namely that of a medical school within a British university. It examines the degree to which the professional autonomy of the artists (and curator) was “instrumentalized” and diminished as a result of having to fit into normative frames set by institutional agendas (in this case, that of “the neoliberal university”). We ask to what extent do such “entanglements,” feel more like “enstranglements,” suffocating the artist’s capacity to envision the world afresh or any differently? What kinds of pressures allow for certain kinds of “evidence” to be read and made visible, (and not others)? Are You Feeling Better? was a 2016 programme curated by Frances Williams, challenging simplistic expectations that the arts hold any automatic power of their own to make “things better” in healthcare. It included two performative projects – The Secret Society of Imperfect Nurses, by Anthony Schrag with student nurses at Kings College London, and Hiding in Plain Sight by Becky Shaw (plus film with Rose Butler) with doctoral researchers in nursing and midwifery. These projects were situated in a climate of United Kingdom National Health Service cuts and austerity measures where the advancement of social prescribing looks dangerously like the government abnegating responsibility and offering art as amelioration. The text therefore examines the critical “stage” on which these arts-health projects were performed and the extent to which critical reflection is welcomed within institutional contexts, how learning is framed, expressed aesthetically, as well as understood as art practice (as much as “education” or “learning”). It further examines how artistic projects might offer sites of resistance, rejection and mechanisms of support against constricting institutional norms and practices that seek to instrumentalise artistic works to their own ends.
Enstranglements: Undercover in Arts for Health
(Taylor & Francis, 2022-10-03) Shaw, Becky; Schrag, Anthony; Williams, Frances; Smith, Sarah (Smizz)
Exploring the Boundary-Crossing Nature of ‘Creative Placemaking’: The Stove as ‘Adaptor/Converter’
(2022) Schrag, Anthony; McKinnon, Caitlin
The Stove is a cultural organization based in Dumfries and Galloway, in the South of Scotland, that works alongside their local community within their particular context, with a vision to “use arts and creativity to encourage, to gather, learn and bring life back to our town centre and wider region.”[1] Such place-based, community-oriented, creative activity, however, is not a new phenomenon and there are significant historical examples that exemplify this practice: From 1968 to 1978, the artist David Harding became Town Artist during the construction of Glenrothes New Town (Scotland) in which he was committed to “involve the people of the town in making their own contribution to their own physical and cultural environment.”[2] The Black-e (Originally the Blackie) in Liverpool similarly began operating in 1968 as the “the UK’s first community arts project”[3] where artistic practices were central to address the concerns of local communities, and has been operating for over half a century now. The Craigmillar Festival Society[4] began in 1962, operating with a cultural methodology to speak to the site-specific concerns of the local population including industry, employment, identity, among other subjects and, despite a pause from 2015 – 2021, has recently been reinvigorated by citizens of Craigmillar looking to artistic activities as a way to speak to their specific contexts. More recently, other similar projects such as Rig Arts (Inverclyde) or WHALE Arts (Mid Lothian) operate in their localized area, using a creative methodology to explore the intersection of people and place, including interventions into education, social life, civic governance, and food production.[5] Alongside these artistically driven projects, there are a multitude of place-oriented policies and funds within the UK that have guided a host of short- and long-term projects, including the Creative People and Places fund (Arts Council England), Place Partnerships (Creative Scotland), Place, Space & People, and Spatial Policy (Arts Council Ireland), and Ideas, People, Places (Arts Council Wales), to name a few.
The failure of participation: The demos is in the detail
(Routledge, 2022-08-25) Schrag, Anthony; Cartiere, Cameron; Schrag, Anthony
The Failures of Public Art and Participation
(Routledge, 2022-08-25) Cartiere, Cameron; Schrag, Anthony; ; Cartiere, Cameron; Schrag, Anthony
Finish what you start... (Ken leikkiin ryhtyy, se leikin kestäköön) – Exploring place through play
(HUMAK (Humanities University of Applied Sciences) Publications, 2018-12-12) Schrag, Anthony; Luostarinen, Nina
On May 26th, 2018, the Lights On! project delivered a new experiment exploring the heritage sites of the islands of Vallisaari and Kuninkaansaari, just outside Helsinki. The project was developed in collaboration between Nina Luostarinen (Lights On!/Humak) and Anthony Schrag (Queen Margaret University), and developed around their shared interest in ‘Play’ and ‘Place Relationships’. The collaboration was highly productive, and often felt more like fun than work, which replicated in the project itself.