Imagine you're in the middle of a fog. The fog is so thick that you can barely see the person in front of you. Artist Teresa Margolles produced a work in 2002 called Vaporisation, Vaporization. In this work, the experience I just described is what art viewers went through. But only after experiencing this did they learn that the fog was produced with the water that had been used to clean the dead bodies at the morgue. Social art doesn't only have to be about the relationships between the living. It can be about the relationship between humans, non-humans, like animal species. But in this case, it can be about the relationship between the living and the dead. For her major retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art Artist, Marina Abramovic sat in a chair all day, every day, as lines of museum visitors waited to sit down in front of her and just look at her. She did not talk, all she did was stare into the distance. The relationship between the living and the dead that we talked about in Teresa Margolles work has here become the relationship between silent beings. Living human beings. Of course, some of the visitors that I'm about to show decided to engage with her in all kinds of ways. They weren't silent. But her engagement was silent. It was simply an act of presence. That is why the work is called, The Artist is Present. And that performance gave the name to the entire retrospective. The presence of the artist in relation to the body of the viewer is one way of approaching this idea of social relation. But we could also think about the absence of the artist. Or the appearance and the disappearance of the artist. Artist Fred Wilson has now produced a couple of decades of work in relation to how people relate to institutions. In a body of work called, Guard's Views. And another one called My Life as a Dog. Wilson explored his own personal experience as a former museum guard, but also the social hierarchies and relationships that are at play in art spaces, specifically in relation to our body. In My Life as a Dog ,Wilson basically introduced himself as a gallery guide, gave nice explanations on the artwork. And then would disappear and change clothes into those of a museum guard. He would then stand at the entrance and not surprisingly would not be recognized by the very people he had been talking to before. Fred Wilson is African American. And people who often go to galleries and museums, at least in the US, are quite used to ignoring the guards. And guards, especially in cities like New York, happen to be to a large degree African American or belong to other minorities. In guard's views and other pieces he also explores these ideas. Another variation of the project is one where he actually dressed as a guard, starts to move away from that position of the guard, explaining to people who just happen to be in the gallery the artwork, etc. And people are quite distraught, they don't know what to do. Some people get very excited that a guard cares this much about the work. But others actually go to complain at the desk and say, this guard has gone crazy. He thinks he knows stuff about the art! What do these three artworks have to do with each other? The thick fog of water used to clean the dead in Teresa Margolles' work, Marina Abramović's stare in the art is present in that line of museum visitors and Fred Wilson's Critique of museum attendants and their relationship to the racialized bodies of guards. Well, this module of the Art of the MOOC, merging public art and experimental education is dedicated to the idea of embodied knowledges. Women, minorities, and majorities of color worldwide have long understood that knowledge is hard or impossible to separate from one's gender, sexuality, or skin tone. Linking socially engaged art to performance art, gesture, and writing without words, as the colonial fuhrers have called it. This lesson will rely more heavily on the very embodied knowledges of our guest presenters to understand the sustained critique that much social practice has launched against western paradigms that separate information from matter. Reason from affect, mind from the body, the worker from her labor, the individual from the collective. This lesson's practical components will ask students to actively think from their particular sight of enunciation through their particular embodied knowledge.