Telling and Listening in Public: The Critical Discourse

What is the nature of the contemporary critical discourse about community-building narrative performance work? How do we talk critically about this work? What is the nature of the critical discourse in the organizing community about artfully using theater and story to achieve organizing outcomes?

In partial answer to these questions, we might consider the following: a recent critical controversy, an example of enlightened writing, some critical tools described by two artists who engage in community-building performance, and a look at organizers who have turned to the arts to achieve their goals.

The arts have grown dynamically in the past 20 years, challenging critics in their accustomed role of observer, commentator and evaluator. Artists in all disciplines have made great strides creatively and as cultural animateurs, turning theatrical convention on its head and challenging the concepts of interacting with their audiences, the function and character of audience itself, the artist’s place as an active participant in community, and the measures of the quality and effectiveness of their work. Many artists agree with California artist Suzanne Lacy, who claims that "criticism has not caught up with practice," and unless it does, "its ability to transform our understanding of art and artists’ roles will be safely neutralized."

The lid blew off the critical community in 1995 when esteemed dance critic Arlene Croce published a piece of criticism in The New Yorker titled "Discussing the Undiscussable." Her article was a refusal to review — or even to attend — a performance of "Still/Here," a work by the black, gay, HIV-positive choreographer Bill T. Jones at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Croce objected to the introduction into the performance of audio- and video-tapes of "real" people who were neither dancers nor actors, but people terminally or gravely ill with cancer and AIDS, talking about their own lives. She called it "victim art" that placed itself "beyond criticism" and "unintelligible as theater."

"I can’t review someone I feel sorry for or hopeless about," she said. Their very presence in the work manipulated and intimidated the audience into a position of sympathy and pity, said Croce. Calling such a strategy "intolerably voyeuristic," she went on to attack all forms of "issue-oriented" art. She claimed that advanced culture was being turned into "utilitarian art" by "community outreach," "multiculturalism" and "minority groups," rendering it nothing more than "socially useful."

This essay produced a firestorm. In many subsequent issues, The New Yorker published responses — for and against Croce. The issue turned up everywhere from college classrooms to daily newspapers. The right hailed the retreat of liberalism, while liberals saw the article as an attack on issues they regard as vital — identity, adversity, survival.

Joyce Carol Oates in The New York Times saw the article as a sign of the outworn critical voice. She sketched the history of criticism, concluding, "Throughout the centuries, through every innovation … criticism has exerted a primarily conservative force, the gloomy wisdom of inertia, interpreting the new and startling in terms of the old and familiar; denouncing as ‘not art’ what upsets cultural, moral and political expectations." She suggests that if this is an era, as Croce charges, when critics seem expendable, "the news will not be greeted as a disaster in all quarters." Finally, she declares, "Criticism is itself an art form, and like all art forms it must evolve, or atrophy and die. There can be, despite the conservative battle cry of ‘standards,’ no criticism for all time, nor even for much time. Ms. Croce's cri du coeur may be a landmark admission of the bankruptcy of the old critical vocabulary, confronted with ever-new and evolving forms of art."

To Croce’s condemnation of art that celebrates "the political clout of the group," rather than transcendent art by an individual, critic Homi Bhabha responds in Artforum: "What most disturbs Croce is its form as a collective representation, its articulation of art’s ‘subject’ as a group identity. She cannot envisage an art that would short-circuit the sublime, transcendent option to plug into a dialogue with a community that establishes its solidarity and group identity through celebrating a desolate interruption, a cessation — death, mourning, melancholia."

Critic Maurice Berger, in his introduction to his book The Crisis of Criticism, observes that critics are subject to a lethargy that "exemplifies one of criticism’s gravest problems — a tendency that lowers the profile of art in society and affirms most Americans’ belief that the arts have little or no relevance to their lives." Berger believes that the strongest criticism for today can serve as a dynamic critical force, "capable of engaging, guiding, directing and influencing culture, even stimulating new forms of practice and expression."

The Croce controversy shone a strong light on criticism, sparking a reinvigorated concern with that form as both a negative and positive force in culture. It also brought to light for the first time the position of criticism vis a vis community-building narrative performance work. As this new and popular work rises in public profile, critics either turn away in frustration or struggle with ways to write about it, finding the old tools fairly useless.

The rise of political consciousness and postmodern theory over the past 40 years has been a powerful challenge to criticism. The active critic of today knows s/he must engage not only with the work s/he is writing about, but with the history of conventional writing about art.

In her 1994 history of El Teatro Campesino (the community-building theater of the Farm Workers Union), Yolanda Broyles-Gonzalez departed from convention when she rejected what she calls the "great-man/text-centered/chronological linear" tradition in which the company has been written about. Existing writings about the company are classically male-centered, she says, and they tend to separate it from its collective origins and history, and equate the story of the company with the story of its director, Luis Valdez —- thus the "great man" theory. And centering on the chronology of the company or the texts of the play — a classic tool of past scholarship — "wholly obscures," says Broyles-Gonzalez, "the living relations of production which enabled those texts and are encoded in them."

Previous historians produced material that, she says, "was gathered, arranged and presented along particular lines reflective of the author’s unconscious yet very real politics, be it of gender, of class, of race or of culture." She includes in these prejudices Chicano research’s own internalized oppression, positioned as it is within "dominant academic institutions." These influences were compounded by an effort by Luis Valdez himself to control Broyles-Gonzalez's research and manuscript. She says she met with particular resistance when attempting to gather and publish material about the contribution of the women of the company. "What was not understood," says the author, "is that a more inclusive and nonlinear treatment of El Teatro Campesino serves to empower the collective while in no way diminishing the important contributions of Luis Valdez or any other individual."

Thus, says the author, "El Teatro Campesino history has been shaped into a male-dominated hierarchical structure that replicates oppressive dominant tendencies within society." When writers use that approach, she says, "many dimensions of the company’s history recede into oblivion: the reality of collective creation; the contribution of women (and other men); the entire Mexican working-class experience and popular tradition of performance…; and the material social process of production." She says she spent ten years seeking to bring these dimensions back into the company’s history for her book. For this task, she relied on her own first-hand observation of the company at work, on archival written materials, on work diaries of various ensemble members, and especially on oral-history interviews with members of the company, none of whom had ever been interviewed by any writer.

What might be some specific guidelines and tools for the critical engagement of art, criticism that is up to the task? Artist/scholar Suzanne Lacy, in her essay, "Debated Territory: Toward a Critical Language for Public Art," takes up the question. Lacy is a performance artist, primarily trained in visual art, not theater. She is a maker of what she calls "new genre public art," and has created many large community-building performance works involving as many as 400 "nonactors."

A central challenge to criticism, says Lacy, is that the audience for art has "virtually exploded." As artists choose nontraditional sites for their public artworks, or choose to work with "nonartists" in venues other than professional theaters, their whole context begins to change. Taking her parents, working-class people who live in the small town of Wasco in California’s San Joaquin Valley, as an example of citizens who are now regularly observing various trends, controversies and experiments in the arts, she notes, "When artists decided to address Mom and Dad in Wasco as one potential audience, criticism itself had to change, since the nature of meaning is perceived so differently by various audiences."

Lacy points to current criticism as rife with notions of interaction, audience, artist’s intentions and effectiveness, and to each notion she adds suggestions for expanding our critical approach.

Interaction or audience engagement: Critics must spend time developing a more sophisticated view of the artist’s interaction with the audience, says Lacy. She see the artist moving along a spectrum of communication, at times serving as a subjective experiencer of the world who offers the audience empathy with the subject of the artwork; sometimes as a reporter, an information gatherer, calling the attention of the audience to the facts of a situation; sometimes as an analyst, drawing away from the idea of the artist as producer of beautiful object and toward intellectual endeavor; sometimes as an activist, as catalyst for change, using a set of skills not commonly associated with artmaking — acting in collaboration with others, with an understanding of social systems and institutions.

Audience: Contemporary critics, following the lead of artistic practice, says Lacy, have begun to deconstruct the audience along lines of gender and race and class, but rarely do they observe the relationship of the audience to the artwork: To what degree does the audience’s participation form and inform the work? Audiences might also be, she says, originators, responsible for the work. They might be collaborators and co-developers. They might be volunteers or performers. Even if they are "only" attending the performance or the exhibition, especially in community-based work, they might be more deeply engaged than a conventional audience, for example, as friends and family; or they might be deeply engaged in the topic or location of the artwork, as survivors of an epidemic or residents of an endangered location. There are other audiences for a work who experience it only through the media, which might even be part of the artist’s intention. Depending on how far-reaching the "story" of the work expands, it can actually pass into the myth and memory of a community, and be what Lacy calls "a commonly held possibility."

Intention: When an artist clearly states his/her intention, says Lacy, the critic is faced with evaluating a "materialized belief system," which forces a confrontation with the critic’s own beliefs. When this confrontation is severe, the artist threatens the stance of "objectivity" that critics assume. Lacy believes it is incumbent upon critics to enter the discussion personally and philosophically, acknowledging upfront the world-view to which they ascribe. In addition, the audience’s beliefs become a part of the work as well.

Effectiveness: Traditionally, says Lacy, art is assumed to be effective if it is judged beautiful, despite differing cultural constructions of beauty, and also if it is judged transcendent or revealing. Critics flounder in the face of any other measure of effectiveness. An effective work could be one that reflects harmony or causes change, it might cause short-term change or long-term change, might suggest or cause a change not preferred by the critic, might effect a smaller or larger number of people, might be a finished work or a proposal, might be accepted or rejected by its community, might simply model a possibility — and still be fairly called effective. Contemporary work operates in both the social and aesthetic realm, and our methods of measurement must be complex and multilayered, says Lacy.

There are some practical uses of criticism, beyond those already cited. One such use is as a direct response to the artist who requests criticism or feedback from his/her peers, with the goal of improving the work itself. Choreographer and community artist Liz Lerman has published a Critical Response Method, created in collaboration with some 200 members of an organization of community artists in the southeast, Alternate ROOTS. Each year at its annual meeting, ROOTS offers peer critical response to works by the members, many of them wrestling with the questions raised above. In this environment, criticism goes head-to-head with community-building narrative performance work. After years of struggle toward a workable, humane, useful method, Lerman and her colleagues came up with one that is being used across the country today. Lerman asked the question: "What if critical sessions were indeed in the control of the artist(s)?"

This live, dialogue-based method revolves around the assumption that the artist(s) may want to hear responses to the work, but may be in a state that makes it difficult to hear those responses. (This is particularly true when the "artists" include "nonartists" or community members, and especially when the subject matter is socially thorny, as it often is in ROOTers’ work.) This method also assumes that participating critics/observers actually want the artist to make excellent work, and can form their own opinions into a neutral question. Finally, it requires an experienced facilitator to keep the dialogue on track.

The process begins with an affirmation: honest positive feedback from the critics/observers about aspects of the work as it was presented. Step Two allows the artists to ask questions first, and they must be specific, expressing their exact concerns about the work or parts of it. In Step Three the critics/observers ask the questions, addressing some crucial part of the piece — not with an opinion, but with a query to the artist. Step Four is "opinion time," and the critic begins by telling the artists s/he has an opinion about something in the work, and asking if the artists want to hear it. The artists can say yes or no. Step Five is set aside for subject-matter discussion: Sometimes the subject of a work is so evocative — or provocative — that both artists and responders may want to get into an examination of it, or the contribution of personal material about it. Step Six, if the session gets that far, can become a real work session, in which artists and critics literally work on parts of the piece in a "lab" setting.

Those who have used the process effectively have found it produces better art, better relations among artists and critics, and better dialogue about art itself.

California educator Mat Schwarzman has written in High Performance magazine about the interaction between artists and organizers when trying to reach a mutual goal, and his work is at the crux of a fin de siecle change in attitudes about the ways we look at art. In "It's About Transformation: Thoughts on Arts as Social Action," he describes a barricade of prejudices against each other thrown up by both artists and organizers, a resistance being worn down by "the growing authority of ‘Third World,’ Environmental, Feminist and Queer social theory and social change models that view art and culture as an important site of struggle." To fully heal the breach and allow organizers and artists to work together for change, he addresses some basic ideas about the arts that must change first.

Schwarzman points out that many regard the arts as inherently progressive ("good") — a dangerous assumption given how the Nazis used it. He eschews the insistence of activists that art-for-change can and must be scientifically measured for "success," and points to useful anecdotal evidence gathered in the patterns of personal, community and social histories, asserting that such anecdotal evidence is good enough to prove art’s worthiness as a change agent. He dispels the notion that art is about objects, a commodity, and paints it instead as a living process that changes the way people view themselves and the world. He goes on to address context, audience and creativity itself. Once all these things have been taken into account, says the author, "We will also need to articulate a differentiation between art that is about politics, and art that is political. It is not enough for art to represent a political event for others to observe. It must also provide a context within which others can take action."

All of this, he says, requires a literal transformation in the way artists and organizers view their most deeply held beliefs. "It is, in the end, the very notion of social change that requires our mutual attention and interrogation. We need to integrate materialist analyses of structures of power and oppression with intuitive analyses of the human spirit."

Schwarzman gets specific in "Drawing the Line at Place: the Environmental Justice Project." The article details the process of an effort among a large coalition of artists and organizers to create change in "Cancer Alley," a 90-mile-long stretch of terrain on the Mississippi River in Louisiana that is reported to have the highest rate of cancer in the world, thanks to corporate environmental degradation.

The most visible product of the collaboration was a theater festival of new works in and around New Orleans. The project director, Roxy Wright, told Schwarzman that he felt the role of the theater artists was to "provide their organizing partners with the opportunity to have their stories portrayed publicly and proudly. Each of these organizing groups has a wealth of stories, but nobody gets to know them, inside or certainly outside the organization. That’s what we can make happen." To this end the artists used "story circles" to gather stories from the participants. "I have seen it time and time again," said participating artist Adella Gautier. "When people have the chance to witness their collective stories, they get energized, more critical, and more powerful as a group."

But the going wasn’t smooth. Schwarzman details the adjustments each group had to make in order to overcome tensions and prejudices about the value of each other’s processes and approaches to the work. It is here that criticism came to its most useful moment, and everyone involved learned the importance of the way we look at and talk about "the work." The final solution to the tension was to bring in a mediation team, who helped them "draw a collective picture of what they each imagined their relationship to be, from the other’s perspective." It showed, said mediator Ted Quant, that "from the standpoint of the organizers, the artists were an elitist, separatist group in an ivory tower who were not interested in getting their hands dirty. From the standpoint of the artists, the organizers had no respect or understanding for what they bring, and instead wanted to turn them into organizers." The solution, said Quant, was that "the artists have to be able to stand firm, with integrity and awareness of what they bring to the table, and make no apologies for it. At the same time the artists also have to listen to the organizers and acknowledge that they do have to get down and dirty. The truth of the art will only be reflected through the experience of the artist, so they have to be there to get it."

Schwarzman's article, itself a work of criticism, may have afforded these activists the chance and the impetus to look at their own processes more closely and to talk more deeply about the interrelated uses of art and activism.

Roadside Theater of central Appalachia takes a grassroots approach and puts the audience at the center of the critical dialogue. Sometimes its plays are developed from community "story circles." The technique is often used at the conclusion of a performance, also, as a means to invite audience members to talk about how the performance relates to their own lives. Says Roadside’s director Dudley Cocke, "Audiences are interested in a play’s story and how it connects to their story. By the stories they tell — and how they tell them — we can judge how well the performance went. One of our plays, a co-production with an African-American company, examines black and white history and issues from a working-class, southern perspective. So in the post-performance story circles you have black people and white people from the same community talking about race and class based on their local, personal experience. Their stories become a powerful subtext for the actors at the next performance."

This kind of critical dialogue does not ignore beauty and transcendence, the typical concerns of contemporary U.S. criticism: "Truth and beauty," says Cocke, "are inseparable, and to separate them or ignore one in favor of the other, as often happens in contemporary criticism — and art making — is a mistake. What happens when you separate the dancer from the dance?"

The intimacy of a fine performance, then, prompts deeply personal stories from its witnesses. "When the performance is successful," says Cocke, "the stories in the circle are subtle, sometimes sly, complicated and intimate — like life. The play has been the occasion for the audience members — individually and collectively — to plumb their own feelings and thoughts. This is what is meant when an actor or director strives to be good enough to get out of the play’s — and the audience’s — way."

In conclusion, it is clear that the arts are transforming communities and community building is transforming artists, and both are asking criticism to turn the corner into the 21st Century.

Berger, Maurice, "Introduction: The Crisis of Criticism," in Berger, Maurice, ed., The Crisis of Criticism (New York: The New Press, 1998)

Bhabha, Homi, "Dance This Diss Around," Artforum, April 1995. Reprinted in Berger, Maurice, ed., The Crisis of Criticism (New York: The New Press, 1998)

Broyles-Gonzalez, Yolanda, El Teatro Campesino: Theater in the Chicano Movement. (Austin, Tex.: University of Texas Press, 1994)

Croce, Arlene, "Discussing the Undiscussable," the New Yorker, 26 December 1994/2 January 1995. Reprinted in Berger, Maurice, ed., The Crisis of Criticism (New York: The New Press, 1998.

Lacy, Suzanne, "Debated Territory: Toward a Crucial Language for Public Art," in Lacy, Suzanne, ed., Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art (Seattle, WA: Bay Press, 1995)

Lerman, Liz, Are Miracles Enough? Selected Writings on Art and Community (Washington, D.C.: Liz Lerman Dance Exchange, 1995)

Oates, Joyce Carol, "Confronting Head-on the Face of the Afflicted," the New York Times, 19 February 1995. Reprinted in Berger, Maurice, ed., The Crisis of Criticism (New York: The New Press, 1998.

Schwarzman, Mat, "Drawing the Line at Place: the Environmental Justice Project," High Performance #72, Summer 1996. Reprinted in Burnham, Linda Frye and Steve Durland, The Citizen Artist: 20 Years of Art in the Public Arena (Gardiner, N.Y.: Critical Press, 1998).

Linda Frye Burnham is a writer and founding co-director of the Community Arts Network. She is based in Saxapahaw, N.C.

Home

About CAN

APInews

Reading Room

Resources

Forums

Site Map

What's New

Search Site

Telling and Listening in Public: The Critical Discourse

Comments