La construcción del organismo social como una obra de arte: (Repeating Beuys)

Abstract

This article consists of three parts. The first one presents the Art-Life movement (or lifelike art, as Allan Kaprow, creator of Happening, coined) and its two main trends: the Duchampian way, which lies in the expansion of the field of art by appropriating extra-artistic elements, including everyday life; and the productivist way, which contrarily aims at socializing art by applying it to the process of constructing a new social model; and then―through Beuys and the Situationist International―both trends are joined together around a common idea, the consideration of society as plastic/sculptural matter, which can be (re)created as an artwork, as an aesthEthical consciousness. Afterwards, the second part presents the so-called Social or Soft Technologies as an ongoing result of the confluence of social psychology, psychoanalytic theory and systems theory, in their joint attempt to understand the psychosocial field and address it with the purpose of evolving human relations and interactions. And lastly, the third part focuses on one of these social technologies, the 'U' process, in order to illustrate how it can be contributed substantially to the construction of social organism as a work of art.