Abstract
Despite evidence of widespread increasing interest in the arts as mechanisms for personal and social change, social work is conspicuous for its lack of organized conceptual attention to this area. This article argues that there are four potential perspectives that might be adopted as a means of expanding social work science and professional practice: the arts as adjunct to clinical treatment and healing, the arts as the “work” in social work, the arts as tool for social investment, and the arts as driver of political and ideological commitment. An argument is presented for a new vision of the profession in academic environments in which the arts are defined as one of the fundamental pillars. This might lead to reimagining of scholarship, the reconstruction of social work education, and acceleration of social reform.
The place of science in social work has advanced rapidly over the past 25 years, including a rich dialog on the philosophy of science as it applies to the social work profession. In a much less pervasive but equally important way, the question of how the arts relate—or should relate—to the field of social work has also gained traction. Discoveries in neuroscience have introduced new empirical grounding for the value of mindfulness, expressive therapies, and spirituality (Land, 2015). An expanding literature on “socially engaged art” or “social practice” that draws on traditions of advocacy and passion for social justice among artists themselves has added impetus (Helguera, 2012). In Europe, a rethinking of phenomenology in philosophy has enlivened a fresh examination of social work practice itself as art.
As a consequence, growing numbers of interested students, faculty, and professionals across the nation are investigating the effect of the arts on behavior or harnessing the arts in service of practice. A subtext among these groups is the need to harness other dimensions of human experience and understanding as a necessary counterpoise to the world as interpreted through quantitative science and technology. Artists are honored as guardians of human emotion and subjective experience. Supporters argue that the arts are liberating in a unique way, that participation and exposure engage soul and mind. Yet, this romanticism has not served our field well.
Today, we lack a robust examination of the place of art in social work. One of the primary obstacles to this pursuit is the lack of philosophical maturity in our field. Social work does not have much to draw on in constructing a new and more powerful model of the profession that includes the arts. As a consequence, formal integration of the arts in teaching, research, and practice can best be described as idiosyncratic. The form, purposes, knowledge base, and rationale for use of the arts therefore vary widely, depending largely on local and personal initiative. Perhaps most importantly, the creative activity of scholars, practitioners, and artists themselves does not translate into a cumulative literature or a systematic body of scholarship within the field of social work. We lack a knowledge base, an organized perspective that might lay out the path for more meaningful future development of the arts in social work practice. This would seem to be the most essential ingredient in forming a vigorous and more defensible area for education, research, and professional engagement. Would recognition of art as a fundamental component of professional education change how universities and accrediting bodies construct the experience of social work students and requirements in the curriculum? Would our scholarship be reimagined? Is there even a compelling reason to reexamine the field in this way?
Social work is occupied with the problems of promoting social change, advancing human potential, and increasing knowledge of the human condition. Art, as one of the earliest forms of human expression, has purposes that both overlap and extend beyond these aims. Finding the nexus between the two must begin with the identification of places of convergence. This article proposes three frameworks that capture this convergence but in significantly different ways. The points of commonality involve the definition of art as social or behavioral intervention and also involve an established institutional or professional base. These are leverage points that social work might use to raise the profile of the arts in practice or even as a new way of conceiving the foundations of our profession.
The first framework—art in clinical practice as an agent of physical and mental healing—is well established, with funded research and emerging professional recognition outside the social work field. It is most rooted as a part of specialty practices in music, theater, painting, and architecture. The second framework—art as a tool for social change and reconstruction—draws on traditions of community advocacy and other techniques that aim at altering the face of under-resourced neighborhoods and reducing social divisions. It draws upon economics, urban planning, and perhaps the settlement movement for inspiration and validation. The third framework—art as instrument for producing ideological conformity or building commitment to national policies—has been employed by governments, nonprofit entities, and others. This avenue builds on modern communication methods, marketing, and theories of psychological influence, with art as the medium for reinforcing policy aims.
In sum, the question of the arts in social work can be addressed concerning whether—and how—they might contribute to preparation for clinical practice, their potential for accelerating social reform, or their value in adding to social cohesion and commitment to shared beliefs. Each line of inquiry draws on separate traditions and wellsprings of insight.
What Is Art?
The definition of “art” is a subject that has been mixed throughout history with magic, religion, healing, culture—in short, almost every aspect of human interaction and self-expression. Debates among philosophers have raged without satisfactory resolution, leading Walton (1997), a philosopher of aesthetics, to write: It is not at all clear that these words—“What is art?”—express anything like a single question, to which competing answers are given, or whether philosophers proposing answers are even engaged in the same debate. The sheer variety of proposed definitions should give us pause. One cannot help wondering whether there is any sense in which they are attempts to clarify the same cultural practices, or address the same issue. (p. 148)
Another, possibly more productive, approach to the definition of art might be filtered through the lens of our professional orientation and all that that implies. Looking outward from our own accepted boundaries of knowledge and skill, the definition of art as an occupation rather than a profession has important consequences (Art, n.d.). Occupations are typically delineated by sets of skills that individuals use to earn a livelihood or as a way of enriching life experience. By contrast, professions as a modern bureaucratic and social invention are more complex legally and organizationally (Freidson, 1988). Occupations gradually become designated as professions when they succeed in specifying their knowledge base, drawing boundaries in relation to other disciplines, setting standards and evaluative processes for training, and committing to public accountability for ethical practice, among many other characteristics (Wheelwright, 2000). Social work today draws upon other occupations to assist in meeting professional goals and could do so as well with the arts. In this event, collaboration between artists and social workers would not require a definition of art itself but rather how art in all its manifestations would support our professional skill development.
Turning the professional lens inward to the nature of practice itself raises an entirely different potential frame of reference. As noted earlier, art was omnipresent in the earliest forms of civilization and clearly occupies some universal place in the human mind across time and culture. These properties of art have been the subject of modern ontology and phenomenology, as philosophy seeks to explain art and its effect on human consciousness and human interaction. Modern science and the scientific method have made observation and measurement the sine qua non for knowledge development. Accordingly, the science of social work today is in part dedicated to the controlled documentation of transactions and outcomes of practice. Thus far, few contemporary scholars have successfully applied science to the analysis of practice as an art form. This may require a different philosophical context than the profession has used, leading to revised ideas about how observation should take place and the criteria for measurement.
In the present article, we can only hint at the ways in which an analysis of social work practice would be affected by new philosophical underpinnings and implications for a useful professional definition of art. As an initial foray, this article suggests what phenomenology might offer, drawing on the thinking of Martin Heidegger and Alain Badiou. Both have laid a foundation for a fresh consideration of social work practice as art and the potential linkage to some aspects of science (Badiou & Toscano, 2005; Richardson, 2003).
Alternatively, again using a professional social work lens, the role of art can be defined in relation to shared societal aims as reflected in government and not-for-profit programs has taken on a new definition outside traditional spheres—first, as a form of economic investment in promoting social outcomes, and second, as governmental investment in reifying political ideology. While both practices have long-standing roots in the patronage of kings, popes, and ancient conquerors, the scale and resources are unique to contemporary society. These activist orientations implicitly support the notion that art must have a purpose. Thus, “art for art’s sake” may no longer have sufficient social justification. As a profession, social workers naturally turn to how our values of social justice, political liberation, and social well-being might be enhanced by the power of art, which is another arrow in our quiver.
In summary, art is defined in this article from four perspectives: as an assistive healing agent, as a factor integral to the interactive process between social worker and individual or group, as a social investment strategy, and as an instrument for political activism and control. The intent is to separate very different potentialities in the expanded integration of the arts and social work depending on the problem to be solved by the profession.
Art as Clinical Component to Promote Healing
The capacity of human beings for imagination and powerful subjective experience appears to have been manifested with the origin of our species somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000 years ago. Archaeologists suggest that the level of sophistication and integration of artistic behavior was comparatively little different from today and was far more advanced than other forms of technology or cultural organization. Most significantly, a case can be made that the arts were very early associated with therapy and healing, apparently as part of magical rites to fight disease and death.
Despite a relative lack of empirical evidence, this idea remains firmly rooted in contemporary literature. The arts are widely accepted as promoting health and mental health, with collateral beneficial effects on community social cohesion. At the individual level, participation and creative expression in the arts are viewed as a means of achieving recovery for those suffering from mental illness. The strengthening of interpersonal connectedness, empathy, and improved social function are also expected (Dyer & Hunter, 2009).
Art therapy has emerged as a recognized 21st-century profession, defined as a type of expressive therapy in which clients create visual art as a means of examining and recognizing their feelings. The art therapist follows both the process of creation and the resulting artwork and comments on struggles the client is experiencing with social relationships, low self-esteem, or other sources of emotional or psychological pain. The objective is to improve confidence, cope with addictive behavior, lower anxiety, and restore effective social functioning. As described by the American Art Therapy Association (n.d.), Art therapy has the unique ability to unlock emotional expression by facilitating nonverbal communication. This is especially useful in cases where traditional psychotherapy has been ineffectual. Art and art making are inherently perceptually and sensory based and involve the brain and the body in ways that verbal language does not. Art therapy provides an alternative means of communicating for those who cannot find the words to express anxiety, pain, or emotions as a result of trauma, combat, physical abuse, loss of brain function, depression, and other debilitating health conditions. (p. 1) In addition to art therapy that relies principally on the visual arts, dance therapy and music therapy also play increasingly acknowledged roles in supporting recovery and sustaining health (American Dance, n.d.; American Music, n.d.).
The relationship of art therapy to social work is self-evident, and at its most concrete level, could be built out in terms of stronger interprofessional connections such as joint degrees, enhanced specializations and electives in social work programs, and continuing education. The issue of whether these programs produce “good” art is generally subordinated to the perceived importance of participation in art activity itself. Consequently, a social worker might not be expected to obtain much mastery herself. It is also more likely that the art therapist will be assistive to the social worker, psychiatrist, or physician, in which case, art is adjunctive rather than central to the healing process. With sharpened attention to the empirical outcome measurement of art therapy, the standardization of interventions is likely to occur in the future, intensifying the instrumental focus even further.
The Arts as the “Work” in Social Work
In 1986, English academic Hugh England published Social Work as Art, which received wide circulation as a response of the social work profession to overweening empiricism and orientation toward science as the basis for practice (England, 1986). This seminal publication struck out in a fresh way to interpret what might be meant by saying that social work itself is an art. Rather than referring to social workers themselves as practicing an art, which is familiar ground in the literature, he focused on the transactional experience between the social worker and client as the source of art. He argued that practitioners draw upon their own subjective experience as the basis for giving organized meaning to the experience of their clients. As social worker and client engage with each other over time, this conscious interchange between client and practitioner generates a process of mutual discovery and creation. England describes this as a phenomenological “attunement” with the client. Attunement is accomplished primarily through intuition rather than reference to abstract knowledge or formulaic application of research-supported protocols.
From this philosophical vantage point, the act of creativity is central to the “work” of social work and lies at the heart of a social worker’s ability to imagine her client’s world. Her skill rests in the degree to which she is effective in using language that is evocative and expressive in communicating her subjective understanding. England proposes that irrespective of organizational constraints, policies, or accepted practices, social workers ultimately always ground their decisions in intuition and emotion in the moment. Thus, any theory of social work that also draws on theories of art can help explain the role of subjectivity in social work practice. England (1986) claimed that: The social worker…like the poet, must bring together disparate elements of the ordinary world, and…must do so with unusually profound understanding, for this understanding must enrich the understanding of…clients. It is in this sense that the worker is creative; [s/he] is not just a critic understanding the meaning and expression of others, but an artist giving expression to his own understanding in a way that others will value. (p. 106–107)
This way of examining experience can be closely associated with social constructionism or theories postulating that the understanding of reality is actually based on jointly constructed interpretations of reality based on social experience. These experiences become consolidated through repeated social interactions and habitual practices and subsequently form the basis for what people accept as knowledge (Lock & Strong, 2010).
In the search for truth, then, empiricism and science offer one method. The interesting aspect of England’s work and that of others is that ontological questions are not avoided but redefined. Quagmires abound in describing how objective structures can be derived from subjective experience but suffice it to say that the case can be made. Findings, discoveries, and the results of the transaction between social work and client, whether individual or societal, would then have to be measured in new ways, perhaps borrowing from art criticism. The important point is that measurement remains possible, objective states can be judged, and outcomes can be redefined. In what might be a false opposition to science and empiricism, phenomenology and related philosophical inquiry point to alternative ways in which objective methods can be found that allow for the evaluation of subjective experience. Even the characterization of change itself in an individual or society might be assessed by other criteria such as the resurgence of imagination or democratic vigor (Walker, 2017).
Art as a Tool for Social Investment
Social work bears all of the agreed-upon markers of a profession, especially devotion to social values and ethics. As sociologists have observed, the professions are given the latitude to set their own standards, discipline their own members, and monopolize their domains of practice on one condition: They must give themselves over to the service of society and endeavor on the behalf of their clients and not their own interests. They are expected to advance social ideals and reflect that commitment through a code of ethics. In social work, this translates into a sense of obligation for achieving social justice and social inclusion and the guarantees of human rights to health, housing, achievement of potential, and adequate income. These values are entirely consistent with the roots of the profession.
As public and private resources have gradually been stretched across an expanding array of social needs and wants, Western governments and philanthropies alike have grown more preoccupied with the uses and the results of dollars spent on social well-being. Accountability has reigned supreme among the requirements imposed by funding institutions. Because social work by definition relies heavily on public support, it has more or less subscribed to the idea that social expenditures should be social investments that “buy” improved conditions for marginalized or excluded individuals.
When applied to the arts, however employed by social workers or allied professions, the emphasis on economic and social payoffs has had some thought-provoking consequences. Investment in art as a mechanism for spreading social inclusion has been popular in England and parts of Europe since the 1980s and, more recently, in the United States. Both art and social work have been intimately involved in urban renewal and community revitalization; both lay claim to motivating and inspiring society’s least-resourced citizens. As an instrument of central government social or cultural policy, it remains unclear whether the investments have achieved their desired goals. More recently, local governments have taken a larger part in independently moving these projects along (Sharp, Pollock, & Paddison, 2005).
The new lexicon associated with grant seeking, accountability and empirical measures of output in social work and the arts is pervasive. The Department of Culture Media and Sport in Great Britain has spoken in recent years of “public investment to deliver outcomes,” for example, (Smith, 1999). The National Endowment for the Humanities in the United States now lists among its primary purposes the goal of “[bringing] financial benefits to a community by stimulating cultural tourism, creating jobs, and helping local businesses” (What We Do, 2017). Most major grant-making organizations in the United States mirror this orientation and therefore influence the scope and direction of the arts. For example, in a recent address, Darren Wheeler of the Ford Foundation reluctantly argued: Listen to the United States Bureau of Economic Analysis. If the issue is jobs, the arts and culture sector employed 4.8 million people in 2014. If the issue is trade, our arts and culture sector produces a trade surplus. And if the issue is the economy, just remember that the arts contributed more than $730 billion to our economy in a single year. (Walker, 2017, p. 1)
Addams’s colleague Ellen Gates Starr tried another option, which was also popular in that era—seeing art as a way of relieving the barrenness of poverty and perhaps creating hope (Stankiewicz, 1989). She believed the display of traditional art works in an environment of architectural splendor would “uplift” and connect displaced and migrant populations to the “best” forms and expressions of society. Today, critics would perhaps describe this form of art appreciation as a pathway to cultural assimilation.
Certainly, in more current language, the arts continue to be imagined as a means of increasing community participation, empowering individuals, fostering inclusion, and promoting rebirth in distressed communities (Sharp et al., 2005). However appealing this vision may be, from this rationale, the arts remain a tool, an instrument for improving social relationships and economic activity. Subjugated to this end, the debates about what is great or what is good in art fall to the wayside.
Art as Driver of Political and Ideological Commitment
Art as a reflection of political ideology and government policy aims has a long tradition in Western and Eastern societies alike. Possibly the most conspicuous and sustained example in modern history is Soviet socialist realism, which spanned from the early 1930s until the turn of the 20th century.
Soviet socialist realism is interesting because the criteria for this art form were governmentally imposed, linked clearly to basic tenets of communist ideology, and defined as the only permissible expression of the artistic impulse in society. Officials responsible for cultural policies denied the value of creativity and experimentation in art and architecture in the belief that the purpose of art was to educate the public and idealize the communist system. Art was expected to follow strictly representational lines, consistently purveying positive images of work, devotion to the communist party and class consciousness. From a Soviet political perspective, everything in life was expected to serve a purpose, to be functional, and art was no exception. Its aim was to portray the ideal of a society organized around communist principles. As Georgi Plekhanov, a Marxist theoretician, stated: There can be no doubt that art acquired a social significance only in so far as it depicts, evokes, or conveys actions, emotions and events that are of significance to society. (Schwartz, 1980, p. 110)
When does art become propaganda? This question was recently explored by Sheryl Tuttle Ross in the Journal of Aesthetic Education. She identifies four characteristics of a message that she sees as fundamental to propaganda: It is intended to exert influence by a socially organized group or political institution; it is directed at a large and important target audience; and it is designed to redirect or to confront others’ thoughts (Ross, 2002). Ross considers most definitions of propaganda as much too narrow, emphasizing the importance of the propagandist’s own beliefs and the context in which propaganda is developed. She stresses that art has been used for centuries to disseminate messages to the public, messages that offer new interpretations of old ideas or that seek to alter people’s perceptions. Because art appeals to emotion and not necessarily to truth, it is a logical medium. Ross therefore underlines the importance of assessing art in terms of both the circumstances under which it is produced and the way in which it is used by those to whom it is directed.
Quo Vadis?
There are some generalizations that can be made in bringing together the ideas presented thus far. The convergence between the interests of artists and social workers has been underscored in several ways—as a common connection to creativity, as investment in social and cultural policy, as an instrument of government ideology and control, and as congenial fellow travelers in the healing professions. It is conceivable that social workers and artists could band together, if they chose, around all of these opportunities for collaboration, joint educational projects, program development, and evaluation. However, that course of action—or, rather, inaction—leaves both fields in the same inchoate relationship they presently enjoy.
A new vision of the social work profession in the academic environment might embrace three pillars to support research, service, and education. The first pillar is science, including training in the social sciences, critical thinking and scientific reasoning, concepts of evidence, scientific research methods, and evidence-based practices. The second pillar might be social innovation, which is conceptually linked to business, engineering, economics, technology, and modern communications theory. Because the unending mission of social workers is change in social policy, communities, and social relationships, a social innovation perspective might significantly strengthen the capacity of the profession to exert influence within and outside traditional domains. The third pillar could be the arts or the shared artistic experience, with content linked to the humanities, phenomenology, techniques for the creative discovery of meaning in individual and group relationships, neuroscience, new methods of evaluation, and further investigation into the role of the arts in healing and beyond. Imagining the field of social work built upon these pillars opens up remarkable possibilities for rethinking how the profession relates to traditional partners and to partners yet undiscovered.
Footnotes
Author’s Note
This article was authored as part of the Arts & Social Work Roundtable held at the Islandwood Conference Center on Bainbridge Island convened on June 19–20, 2017.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
