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The Artmaker as Active Agent: Six PortraitsCHAPTER 2: METHODOLOGY Sculptor Ed McGowin testified before a congressional committee as follows:
I began to assemble a list of artists to whom I wanted to talk and an accompanying list of questions I wished to ask them. I wanted to know about their experience of bridging expertise, demystifying the role of the artist as sole interpreter and in possession of an unintelligible and elitist language of interpretation of experience.
My process of assembling names of potential interviewees was based on my own curiosity. I had read Marty Pottenger’s essay “CWT #3: Making City Water Tunnel #3” in The Citizen Artist. I had seen George Trakas present the design of his waterfront park at a contentious community board meeting held in my Brooklyn neighborhood. I had attended a workshop led by Martha Bowers called “Making Change” about artists engaging with communities at Brooklyn Arts Exchange. Friends or colleagues, hearing of my work, recommended that I contact certain people. I sought to represent a range of experiences and artistic media because I had a hunch that what these artists had in common had very little to do with form and had more to do with a shared worldview. In order to uncover the working theory and underlying motivations of these artists I engaged each of them in an interviewing process. Perhaps because their work lies outside the mainstream of formal discourse about art, there is very little written about them. Particularly absent is analysis of this work by mainstream art critics who generally write about the formal considerations of resulting art products which, as has been said, is only part of the artistry of community-based practitioners. I read what I could about each artist and, perhaps more importantly, went to see their work to see which questions it posed to me. I created an informal script of questions for each artist but sought to create an interviewing atmosphere wherein the artist could freely share his experiences and motivations with me. My instinct was that if the interview could take more of the form of a conversation -- albeit one with me doing less of the talking -- I would get more insightful and candid answers to the questions I was posing. I went into each interview looking to uncover a career narrative that would lead to a sense of why this artist sought to engage their public more directly. If they began to tell a story that exemplified a turning point in their career path, I pushed them for greater clarity and detail. I also wanted to know if they considered themselves to be leaders in their community and to reflect on the unusual combination of skills they had accessed or developed through this long experience of engagement. Interviews were scheduled and conducted at a time and place convenient to the interviewee. One took place in a dressing room during breaks of a show in which the interviewee was performing. Two took place in the interviewee’s home. The other three took place in public gathering places. Each interview lasted about an hour. I transcribed the interviews myself and was struck by the loss of meaning and intention between the actual experience of the interview and the resulting audio record. Without the non-verbal communication expressed during the interview, the record lost the experience’s original energy and a sense of the interviewee’s attitude toward what he or she was describing or working through. This loss was further exacerbated when the audio was translated into the written word. Without vocal tone, volume, pitch and accent, a level of clarity dropped out of what had been a fairly coherent exchange. Almost all of the interviewees, for example, at some point, took on someone else’s character and voice, changing accent and tone, while telling a story. The nuance of the interviewee’s relationship with this person is lost in the written transcript. I began to sketch out concept maps of each interviewee in an attempt to recover the intimacy and a sense of the feelings expressed and exchanged during the interview. I used markers, watercolor and photos on 11”x17” pieces of paper as I tried to locate my personal reactions and impressions of this person. I drew iconic symbols to represent the person. For instance, I drew a fleur de lis on Marty Pottenger’s page to represent Joan of Arc. Pottenger’s tenacity, warrior stance and the “against all odds” scope of her work present parallels to me with the myth that describes Saint Joan. In the concept map, these images were interwoven with words, quotes from the interview, my written impression of their work or interpretation of their ideas. For example, Martha Bowers is a choreographer who works with both trained and untrained dancers to create pieces. During the interview she presented a non-verbal image of how high the community member’s leg could go versus how high the trained dancer’s leg could go. This visual image became the organizing principle of the Bowers concept map because it clearly demonstrated her commitment to uncovering and revaluing the expressive potential of non-expert participation in her art form, and the use of that expression to tell unheard stories.
The concept maps helped me arrange spatially the most dominant ideas that had emerged from the interviews. Using very simple symbols, images, phrases and terms I represented the artist’s working theory. The concept map creation stage was an important point of synthesis for me as I attempted to make sense of the data I had collected from these artists and enabled me to begin to create a written document of the artist. I then sat down to create written portraits of each artist, borrowing the concept of written portraiture in the social sciences from Harvard education professor Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot as described in her book, The Art and Science of Portraiture:
Lawrence-Lightfoot’s dynamic, conceptual approach to “capturing” her subject reflects my own consciousness of negotiation and relationship while writing. These written portraits are organized around the three central research questions. Each question is represented in the portrait by a subject heading:
A parallel task I did at this time, at the suggestion of my committee, was to begin clustering segments of all six transcripts that appeared to be related. In doing this, I began to see that certain themes were emerging and I created headings for them such as “teaching,” which represented how the artist saw his or her role as an educator, in both formal and informal settings, or “public life,” in which the artist spoke about enlivening public places through creating or presenting artwork within them and, thus adding to the discourse about public space and participation in civic life. Seven themes emerged. In addition to the two already listed, they are: “activism,” “optimism,” “relationship to hierarchy/criticism,” “populism,” and “characters/relationship.” Not all of the artists spoke to every theme. Only two, for example, commented on their “optimism” while five spoke about “activism” either in terms of how participation in social movements has affected their path as an artist or how they see their work as an artist supporting a broader social movement or social change agenda. This thematic clustering exercise allowed me to focus, capture and begin to organize some of the meatier parts of the transcripts while seeing characteristics, concerns and ideas that these practitioners shared and were, perhaps, shared across the field as a whole. In addition to identifying shared themes across artists, I sought a critical framework through which to view the work of each artist. I found it in Suzanne Lacy’s essay “Debated Territory: Toward a Critical Language for Public Art.” Arguably the seminal book calling attention to the presence of a community-based art form, Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art, is a collection of essays edited by Suzanne Lacy and published in 1995. By gathering together the writing of art critics and artist/practitioners of community-based art, this book paints a dynamic portrait of a field difficult to articulate because of the distinctiveness of each of its parts. In Mapping the Terrain, Lacy sought to connect-the-dots. The essays are arranged by tasks such as describing a paradigm of community-based art or defining the appropriate role of criticism in an emerging art form. I have included portions of essays from Mapping the Terrain by critics Patricia Phillips and Jeff Kelley in the artist portraits that follow here. In “Debated Territory: Toward a Critical Language for Public Art,” Lacy addresses the thorny problem of judging or critiquing new genre public art that remains unresolved ten years after the essay was published. If it is no longer appropriate for community-based artists to be judged by the formal standards of their own discipline, how should they be judged? How does one address wherein process may be just as artful as product? Lacy identifies four criteria that address the properties unique to community-based art. After having written about each of the six artists’ “background,” “work,” and “meaning” in the artist portraits, I went on to assess their community-based practice using Lacy’s four criteria: interaction, audience, intention and effectiveness. I wanted to analyze the artists’ way of working in a targeted way and to test Lacy’s criteria. Interaction
Lacy’s “interaction” is the extent to which the artist moves outside the work, bringing it and herself into the world. Lacy uses the model of a continuum, with the caveat that this linear progression is deceiving as, in practice, the artist may move from one role to another and back as conditions necessitate. The departure from traditional art training and practice is that the community-based artist feels it important to develop herself fully in each of these roles: experiencer, reporter, analyst and activist. Audience
Lacy’s “audience” considers levels of participation, and models this concept as concentric circles, radiating out from a central, creative ideator. These positions do not remain static, however. As soon as the initial conceiver has passed this idea along to other participants, for example, she may retreat from the center. Patricia Phillips, in her article “Dynamic Exchange: Public Art At This Time,” describes the centrality of considerations of audience in art that is received more “publicly.”
Intention What is the artist trying to “do” with his work? Does he dare hamper the essential “don’t know” element of artistic process by hemming it in with stated intentions? The realities of funding sources may have decided this conundrum for him. As community-based work intersects with human service agencies and community development and planning personnel, it must be held accountable in the language of social science metrics through a system of grants. But this is new territory. As Arlene Raven writes in Mapping the Terrain, “Make no mistake: accountability is a concept, like community, at odds with tradition in art,” (Raven, 1995, p. 169). Effectiveness How does the artist know if her intervention has been effective? How does she prove this? How does she measure this? Intention and effectiveness are inextricably linked because, as Lacy says, “intention portends criteria for evaluation.” And yet, she continues, “one evaluative criterion heretical to common assumptions about art is effectiveness,” (Lacy, 1995, p. 182). As I began to subject the transcripts to analysis using Lacy’s criteria, I realized that I had unanswered questions and wanted to go back and reinterview the artists. I figured that if I sent them a draft of the portrait I had written of them, they would be more likely to comply with my request for more of their time. The response to the drafts was overwhelmingly positive. In fact, it became clear to me that I was providing these artists with a very valuable service in feeding their words back to them. Martha Bowers wrote to me, “I have actually found it helpful to look at your piece about me before I do presentations of my work,” (Martha Bowers, personal communication, March 7, 2005). I had sought the artists’ verification of basic facts as represented in the portrait. Very little was changed along these lines but some artists wanted to add more detail to certain project narratives or to “clean up” their speech. One artist might want to just delete her “y’knows” or “likes” while another wanted to delete entire portions of transcript text or transpose her speech into a written format. I explained to the artists the constraints of working in a social science paradigm, that I was required to fidelity to the intention of the original text but that changes could be a negotiation between us, so that the artist would feel that she was being represented fairly and the interviewer could present the portrait as a true representation of what she had originally experienced in the interview. I have solved the problem of distinguishing multiple voices in the portraits typographically by representing the interview transcript text (the artist’s voice) in bold, and any written text quoted, by the artist, critics, etc. in italicized, unbolded, block quotes. Any other text can be assumed to be my own voice as author of this paper, unless placed within quotation marks.
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