The Challenge of Uninvited Guests: Social Art at the Blue House

Abstract

The Blue House was an ambitious and multifaceted social art project conceived and conducted by Dutch artist Jeanne van Heeswijk from mid- 2005. The project involved artists and others undertaking social art research practices to investigate the then newly established, highly planned neighbourhood of IJburg in Amsterdam, the capital of the Netherlands. In this paper I examine how 'The Blue House' illustrates the potential of sociality in art by encouraging engagement with others, and thereby ultimately fostering world-making relations through diverse intersections of art and daily life. I will argue that as art, 'The Blue House' makes evident the relational nature of the world that scholar Sen-Ami Scharpstein locates both within the individual and across the globe at large. In this sense, I examine how The Blue House encouraged individual capacity for agency or making worlds in the relations and creative projects established between individuals, but also how, beyond the local, members of 'The Blue House' also engaged social issues of global significance, such as the effects of global capitalism and significance of notions of citizenship and personal sovereignty in a progressively interconnected world. In generating temporary interventions into everyday life, I highlight how 'The Blue House' evidences artists exploring their personal capacity for world-making, and social art practice 'becoming art of the world'; following art historian Terry Smith's definition of contemporary art. In becoming art of the world, I also show how the resident artists were unintentionally implicated in areas of state social policy, and creative industry imperatives. As such, this essay provides a rare opportunity to observe the local and global intersections between art, state and industry through a social art lens that is 'The Blue House'.