The Artmaker as Active Agent: Six Portraits

By Susan Monagan

CHAPTER 4: MARTY POTTENGER

Figure 4.1. “City Water Tunnel #3.”

Background

Marty Pottenger’s discovery of her unique theatrical voice coincided with her involvement in the feminist movement of the 1970’s. Though she had been engaged in theater since childhood and had studied theater in college, it was the politics of the era and the atmosphere of support for personal discovery and growth that led Pottenger to use her theatrical skills to help understand herself and inform her contribution to the success of the movement.

“The personal is political” was the koan of the feminist art movement, meaning that personal revelation, through art, could be a political tool. (Lacy, 1995, p. 27)

Specifically, Pottenger had been a participant at Sagaris, a five week retreat in Vermont in 1975 that has long been considered a watershed moment in the feminist movement. During the retreat, another participant, a lesbian mother, left to engage in a legal battle to regain the custody of her children which she had lost because of her sexual orientation. The women at the retreat organized a benefit evening of performance to help pay the mother’s legal costs. This was the moment at which Pottenger discovered the instrumental possibilities of artmaking and her own ability to connect her voice with her values. Pottenger reflects:

I got involved with the women’s movement and identified for the first time in my own mind as a lesbian … In the women’s movement I was just completely breathless with excitement and energy … everything fell into place and I was able to just understand things that would’ve kept me from a level of clarity my whole life and then it became clear to me that I was terrified to do improvisation. I always had been. But I realized this was why performance existed. Was 1975. … I realized intuitively in the belly of my belly I knew the only thing, the most powerful thing, I had to offer this movement was going to come out of me performing improvisationally about these issues. Like who are we? How do we treat each other? What do we want? What does oppression look like?

As confirmation of her sexual orientation moved her to the margins of acceptance in society, she felt more urgency to understand and support herself intellectually and emotionally and to use theater as a vehicle for that journey. As Pottenger became an important player in the growth of the feminist movement and the formation and dissemination of its idea and processes, both internally and externally, she supported herself financially as a carpenter, and became politically engaged in that arena as well, demanding membership in labor unions that excluded women.

At some point I think you realize that you have very little to lose by just following your own mind. If society’s made it clear that you’re not going the way it wants you to go, it kind of frees you up to just think for your self, so I didn’t feel constrained to follow a particular set of traditions.

Her performance work connected to the feminist movement was bold and very well-received, sometimes performed in the context of a “speak-out.” Though she borrowed forms from her traditional theatrical background to establish her voice, her content was often based on the issue of the day, or even the moment. The great discomfort she felt with the traditional theater, grew as her work in the feminist movement caused her to pay greater attention to her own feelings and question the meaning, effectiveness and politics of established ways of working.

I was used to the construction industry of small companies, where tangible problems and tangible results soak up much of the air time that is spent on competition and battles for control and credit in art-related industries. In college, I had in fact left the theater department for good in an effort to not be part of such destructive patterns, (Pottenger, 1998, p. 329).

Pottenger develops this idea further in an essay she wrote, “CWT #3: Making City Water Tunnel #3,” in Linda Frye Burnham and Steven Durland’s, The Citizen Artist: An Anthology from High Performance Magazine 1978-1998,

We are operating in a field poisoned with the patterns of classism – isolation and individualism not community; distrust not trust; an ideology of scarcity not abundance; greed not generosity; competition not cooperation, (Pottenger, 1998, p. 329).

Paradoxically, Pottenger would continue to use the forms of this poisoned field in order to challenge its own “destructive patterns.

…I … went to more community based projects. For me, the impulse is: what shifts things in society? That’s always…it was my question as a young one in my family like, how do my parents change from these obviously deeply troubled people? How do they change? And I knew that there had to be some way people could change but I didn’t know how they could change and over time I realized that people change by being listened to much more than by being talked to. And it ended up perhaps by coincidence matching what happens in a theater which is a profound sort of listening that doesn’t happen anywhere else.

In the late-70’s Pottenger removed herself from theater entirely to concentrate full-time on her career in the construction trades. She would return after a ten-year hiatus to launch a major undertaking uniting qualitative research, theater and the construction worksite.

The Work

City Water Tunnel #3 (CWT #3) was a five-year community art project that Pottenger began in 1993 with the support of many sources, including the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Arts Partners Program administered by the Association of Performing Arts Presenters, The Rockefeller Foundation’s MAP Fund and the Greenberg Foundation. The work is based on the experiences of those connected to the construction of New York City’s third water tunnel, begun in 1970, which will ultimately cost $6 billion and has already begun to bring drinking water to New York City’s more than 8 million residents. The tunnel - 64 miles long, 800 feet down, 24 feet in diameter – is being built by more than 1,000 people and is scheduled for completion in 2025.

Once Pottenger had secured financial support for her project, she began enlisting its popular support among the workers – in fact, the design of the project depended upon her doing so. What Pottenger ultimately succeeded in doing was interviewing hundreds of workers connected to the project –

tunnel workers (Local 147), operating engineers (Locals 14 and 15), city and state politicians, general contracting companies, upstate and watershed farmers, financial analysts, bond traders and buyers, insurers, and employees of the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP), material supply companies and more. (Pottenger, 1998, p. 313)

From the raw data of these transcripts, she chose excerpts of speech, behavior and character and used them to construct a narrative that she performed as a one-woman show.

Ultimately, Pottenger would secure thirty hours of audiotape with which she would construct the content of the project. What was unique is how she was able to use her research to get the leverage to gain access to a very closed brotherhood of workers. Having been routinely harassed as the only female worker on a construction site, Pottenger was prepared for some of the humiliation she experienced while recruiting interviewees for CWT #3, many of them “members of the only construction union that has successfully kept women out of the union entirely,” (Pottenger, 1998, p. 319). “Knowing the beast,” perhaps, enabled her to design two strategies for success. One was that she immediately edited the first few interviews she did and mounted the photos she had collected. She would then shop these “products” around to potential interviewees.

Pottenger’s technique echoes the “member checks” described by social science researchers Lincoln & Guba in Naturalistic Inquiry.

The member check, whereby data, analytic categories, interpretations, and conclusions are tested with members of those stakeholding groups from whom the data were originally collected, if the most crucial technique for establishing credibility. If the investigator is to be able to purport that his or her reconstructions are recognizable to audience members as adequate representations of their own (and multiple) realities, it is essential that they be given the opportunity to react to them.

Member checking is both informal and formal, and it occurs continuously. Many opportunities for member checks arise daily in the course of the investigation. A summary of an interview can be “played back” to the person who provided it for reaction; the output of one interview can be “played” for another respondent who can be asked to comment; insights gleaned from one group can be tested with another. (Lincoln & Guba, p. 314)

Not only were the CWT #3 tapes and photos entertaining but they demystified Pottenger’s project and let workers see each other – and imagine themselves - as subjects of an art work. Slowly, Pottenger built her reputation for trustworthiness and was able to encourage more workers to participate, widening her sphere of influence and deepening the reach of the project.

The second tack Pottenger took followed her instinct that all human beings make meaning of their work – they interpret it, they collect its artifacts – particularly a project as big and dangerous as constructing the city’s third water tunnel. Pottenger saw her role as that of a facilitator of a process of honoring, interpreting and documenting the meaning these workers had already made of their work, thereby valuing it. Though they might not consider themselves “artists,” Pottenger began a dialog that noticed that the workers were engaged in artistic practice by taking photographs, making cartoons or graffiti or saving worn-out boots and hats worn on the job. This discussion of meaning-making on the job was accompanied by a survey asking workers if they had ever engaged in the arts as a creator (taking an art class, playing the guitar, etc.). Pottenger was building a strategy that would relocate artistic creation away from the expert and improve understanding and acceptance of her project and her presence on the worksite.

Once the raw material was gathered and the construction of the one-woman piece completed, Pottenger engaged in a second planning process concerning the reception of the work. Pottenger asked herself: Who is this work for? What is its function? Pottenger had discovered, during the course of doing research for CWT #3, that though the 200 tunnel workers were part of a larger departmental workforce of about 2000 workers, only about 100 of the office workers had ever been in the tunnel. Pottenger made diligent efforts to organize tours that would bring these office workers to the tunnel. Though these specific attempts ultimately failed, she was undaunted in her goals to make the tunnel and its workers more visible to the greater DEP community. Ultimately CWT #3 would emerge as two products, the performance and a video installation of edited interviews. The video-installation toured the tunnel’s construction sites and the DEP office sites. Pottenger performed the one-woman show at lunch hour performances for tunnel workers and office workers, as well as during a traditional theatrical run of performances for a more general audience and an international tour.

Pottenger’s newest work-in-progress, Abundance uses some of the lessons learned during CWT #3 to do no less than “change, help effect our relationship to money in the United States.” Abundance’s multi-pronged design involves:

• interviewing workers at both end of the payscale – multi-millionaires and minimum wage workers from all parts of the U.S. 
• assembling focus groups to discuss emotional and psychological issues surrounding money as well as create art together 
• a film about the project
• gathering data and statistics about wealth and poverty in the U.S.
• a website with dialog, quick time movies, an online survey and a place to which people can submit artwork and,
• a theatrical performance with full cast, written and directed by Pottenger.

The Meaning

Pottenger wrote in the aforementioned Citizen Artist article:

Developing artmaking relationships with particular communities holds within it dynamic possibilities that can potentially transform the public’s relationship to art. Art/performance can play an ongoing critical role in realizing a society where solutions the size of the problems come into being. Relationships can be built and understandings can come into being that have never existed between communities, peoples, nations. Art is that significant. (Pottenger, 1998, p. 332)

Pottenger believes that “theater is this powerful, communal experience where information takes on the possibility of transformation,” (Jo, para.18). She is aggressive about applying the form for social change but she doesn’t pretend to know the “right” outcome. Like Bowers, the only sought after outcome is increased capacity for public discourse about difficult ideas.

In reference to Abundance, Pottenger reflects,

…the use of artmaking as a part of the civic dialog is what I think is the key that will really be as transformative as this issue merit: to go from taboo to transformation.

In a profile written from an interview with Pottenger, author Eloise de Leon remarks,

Pottenger's work as a contemporary theater artist involves establishing a space to bring people's voices together. The ambivalence of individual voices are transformed into a collective willingness to 'not know' everything even in the face of making serious decisions. Pottenger asks for a re-negotiation of one's position from fixed to fluid, through the telling of and the listening to stories. Her project is based on the possibility of reconciling community faced with the treacheries of past histories. (de Leon, 2001, para. 6)

Interaction

Figure 4.2

It is with a sense of urgency that Pottenger approaches her planning. She has created projects that test her assumptions about critical social problems and that, by design, activate the participants to test their own assumptions. Theater colleague Joe Lambert speaks about Pottenger’s unique ability to foster environments that encourage open and respectful inquiry:

“Her framework is political. She understands oppression. But her voice is a transcendent voice that expands the rhetorics of resistance politics...a place where anger and forgiveness, reason and redemption swirl around in pools." (de Leon, 2001, para. 18)

I asked Pottenger how she mustered the courage and stamina to withstand the constant humiliation and rejection she faced in completing parts of both Abundance and CWT #3. She pointed to the largeness of her vision and ideas as being her primary source of inspiration.

And it really is the notion of helping transform [the] United States’ intimate and national relationship to money and issues around resource and inequity that inspires me enough that I can merit that level of social engagement

Thirty years ago, Pottenger took on improvisation because she was afraid of it. Today, the design of a project like Abundance, takes her outside her own comfort zone of engagement and draws on a skill set not typically required of artists. Where does the art end and the active citizenry begin? The art becomes a vehicle for social change at the same time that the activism enlivens and animates the art.

In her essay, “Public Construction,” Patricia Phillips writes,

Can art change consciousness and affect actions? … Or is this the crazed, slightly megalomaniacal notion of the artist’s influence and role in contemporary culture? … There is rarely an observable cause and effect, a reliable reading of art, response and long-term applications … Testing the boundaries of production, artists have become agents … the work of the artist is art. In other words, the plans, preparations, and encounters with community members are demonstrated, insistent gestures that form the final results. Art requires a new reading that accepts work-production – as the site of praxis and meaning. (Phillips, 1995, p. 68)

Pottenger reinforces Phillips’ contentions with her own observations about her work on CWT #3:

For me, the art was as much in the daily organizational activities – the contacts with people, the phone calls, the public relations, permissions – as it was in the final performances, the exhibits, the video installations. (Pottenger, 1998, p. 331)

These same skills, the “plans, preparations and encounters” are being drawn upon in her current work with Abundance. Pottenger reflects on her own understanding of the location of her art:

part of the art was setting up these, interviewing like 30, 40 multi-millionaires and 30-40 minimum wage workers in all these cities and areas across the country was part of the art and not just the making for the play at all. I mean it’s part of the project cause I find its really a social change project and the play’s a part of that. I see no reason to do one without the other. The play and being an artist is a great reason to be talking to all these people in the first place. It’s the ground on which I get to walk.

In the “artist as reporter” (Lacy, 1995, p. 178) role, Pottenger assumes the methods of a social scientist and seeks a detached stance once she’s assembled a group of subjects and set a line of inquiry in motion. In anticipating her work in CWT #3, Pottenger imagines an uncomplicated role for herself, as if assuming this role would preclude the need to develop a nuanced, particular relationship.

I, as an artist, could act as the neutral, interested outsider and help this community realize a goal of their own: a public monument that makes their invisible, underground labor and sacrifice visible to the rest of us. (Pottenger, 1998, p. 326)

But her training and practice as an artist immediately put her values concerning her relationship with her “subjects” back to center stage, considering the ethics of extractive research and checking the meaning of this work with its participants.

The puzzle of how to make the work relevant to them while ultimately realizing her original intentions presents itself. Also, her roots in the feminist movement cause her to negotiate and renegotiate the power dynamics of this relationship, whether defined as artist/subject or researcher/subject. Who is this process or product for and how does participating in it affect the subject? What is the artist/researcher’s responsibility toward the subject or toward the work and what if these responsibilities appear to be in conflict, indeed irreconcilable? Pottenger reflects on this dilemma in a journal entry during the making of CWT #3 and her interaction with one of the theater piece’s primary subjects, Natasha:

Making the long trip out to where she worked several times before the performance so that we could talk in person. So the discussions would happen on her turf. That any pull on my part to gloss over the effects of what I did on her life and relationships at work would have to “answer to her” in person. To not be so sure of my intentions that I silence her real voice, picking and choosing only the “parts” of her that I want to make use of. Editing the stories from interviews with a stern careful eye toward the impacts on the people. (Pottenger, 1998, p. 322).

Pottenger’s reflective writing concerning Natasha leads her to some more general questions about the nature of intervening in the life of a community and the lives of its members. She continues:

What gives me the right to cross these boundaries? What code, what policies do I set for myself? To whom am I accountable? Who repairs the rips and tears? (Pottenger, 1998, p. 324)

The “learning community” described by Martha Bowers as comprised of community art practitioners and academics (often one in the same), can not only design, implement and evaluate mechanisms that measure effectiveness but set standards for ethical practice in community arts. They might borrow from social science a process Lincoln and Guba call “peer debriefing” wherein the researcher exposes:

Oneself to a disinterested peer in a manner paralleling an analytical session and for the purpose of exploring aspects of the inquiry that might otherwise remain only implicit within the inquirer’s mind…the process helps keep the inquirer “honest,” exposing him or her to searching questions by an experienced protagonist doing his or her best to play the devil’s advocate. The inquirer’s biases are probed, meanings explored, the basis for interpretations clarified… (Lincoln & Guba, p. 309)

Audience

Figure 4.3

Pottenger is alone at the creative center of her projects and, hence, at the center (origination and responsibility) circle (Lacy, 1995, p. 178). Neither the initial design of the piece, nor the constant retooling of that design is a collaborative process. On the other hand, Pottenger’s work is built upon the research she collects, and would have no meaning without the participation of dozens, if not hundreds, of other people. At the center of Pottenger’s creative process if the question: Who is the work for?

Borrowing an idea from Patricia Phillips, Pottenger envisions a theatrical experience that, “can convene a constituency to engage in collective exploration – even a difficult interrogation – of public ideas, individual requirements, and communitarian values,” (Lacy, 1995, p. 69). By design, Pottenger’s pieces demand participation on multiple levels. The text and characters of CWT #3, for example, came almost exclusively from the participation of the “sandhogs,” the tunnel construction workers. Though Pottenger was the sole shaper of the performance product of the CWT #3 project, her sense of establishing meaning for those she would imagine in her assembled audience determined that shape. Pottenger claims that she is even able to further shape the piece to suit the assembled audience while it is being performed.

Pottenger comments on her own relationship with her audience in a Community Arts Network piece, “A Really Big Reason: An Interview with Marty Pottenger”:

My work has afforded me a look at something that very few people get to see. And that is the detailed exchange of information that is occurring between the “silent audience members” and the performers. A communication particular enough that I can actually improvise different text during performances in direct response to who’s sitting out there, having never met them.

In fact, during one performance of CWT#3, Pottenger improvised a three-minute piece on the technical aspects of building a tunnel, after sensing that there were engineers present in the audience. “I could feel them listening. And I could identify that they were listening more keenly at that point. At the end, I often meet my audience. And sure enough, that night, without me knowing it, two of the original designers, engineers of the tunnel from the ‘50’s were in the audience – they were men in their 70’s and they said, ‘Oh, I loved that part,’ and I said, ‘That was for you.’” (Jo, 2003, para. 23).

Her sense of the central role of audience is in keeping with her stated objectives for mounting the project in the first place

I kept in mind the widest notion of audience, including the working people’s families, neighbors and friends. In the end, those wider categories of people did indeed come to the performances and gallery exhibit. I wanted to open up the possibility of deepening ties between individuals’ work lives, family lives and social lives, (Pottenger, 1998, p. 325).

In her reflections on audience, Martha Bowers mentions that the effort of building, maintaining and negotiating relationship through the collaborative art-making process is reflected in the final product and sensed by the “silent” audience members. Pottenger echoes this guiding principle that relationship defines the creative tension and core of the theatrical piece. Pottenger made the importance of this relationship more explicit during performances of CWT#3 by inviting any sandhogs, DEP workers, or other workers associated with the project in the audience down to the stage after the performance to do a “talk back” with the audience. During this time,

The audience also got to participate and watch the relationships that the sandhogs and I had built with each other. Me, a lesbian carpenter/performance artist, and them, members of the only construction union that has successfully kept women out of the union entirely. Lots of teasing went back and forth, allowing each of us to express our affection, exasperation and pride in what CWT#3 and the third water tunnel had become. (Pottenger, 1998, p. 319)

A central function of this work is that it becomes evidence of the ability to build challenging relationships.

Intention

Lacy suggests that we must look at Pottenger’s success not just within the formal standards of her medium but in terms of meeting her stated goals of the project.

I knew from the beginning that one of my goals in CWT #3 was to improve the safety consciousness and practice of the people working on the third water tunnel. One of my strategies was to make evident, through the performance and every aspect of CWT#3, the preciousness of all the people working; through making visible their love (usually unspoken) for each other, and through the quality of …CWT #3. (Pottenger, 1998, p. 325).

In the design of CWT #3, Pottenger incorporated devices that would surface “preciousness,” most notably through giving the workers voice and elevating to the status of art the icons and objects of these workers lives. By revealing preciousness, Pottenger’s logic goes, life will take on greater value and more effort will be made to preserve it, creating an enhanced safety record on the job. Pottenger began CWT#3 with an assumption that the workers are worthy of being subjects of art and are capable of making art themselves. Through this process of contributing to the piece, the participants would be able to build on their capacity for making art and thereby valuing their own experience.

Another of Pottenger’s goals is that her work serve as a catalyst for communities to engage in social change. In commenting about the ripple effect of the Abundance artmaking process, Pottenger says,

my ultimate goal is not, it’s not just a great play, or a great evening of performance or a great true thing like water tunnel (however good that was.) It’s a play that people do themselves in the community and then do community workshops and start building the networks of relationships between the business bureau, between the welfare rights advocates. …That the community ends up … being able to start these conversations among themselves.

Effectiveness

So how does Pottenger know if she’s been effective or if she’s met her goals? What is her process of evaluation? Pottenger stops short of providing evidence of improved safety consciousness on the worksite as a result of the CWT#3 artmaking process. She doesn’t, for example, administer a before and after survey of workers questioning their level of safety consciousness, as a social scientist might, seeking evidence of the effectiveness of an intervention. So if Pottenger doesn’t plan to measure outcomes, how should she make claims of what her work potentially can achieve? Pottenger does have what she describes as “evaluative markers” but they are not necessarily in synch with her stated goals. They give her evidence of the success of her work, but the definition of that success is ultimately personal.

One of Pottenger’s measures of effectiveness concerns the makeup of the audience. Is the relationship she’s built with the sandhog community of CWT#3, for example, strong enough to bring the workers to the theater to see the performance? Is the material relevant to this audience?

Do people come to the performance? … The people show up and who shows up? So people feel like it’s enough interest to take the terrible risk that being a member of a theater audience involves. And then do people send other people? … people kept coming up to me, like old people and young people and family members and their wives, they sent their wives and they sent their kids, I mean that’s unheard of really. I think it is. It’s not like their family was in the show…there’s just so many barriers.

In terms of evidence of building capacity for artmaking, Pottenger points to the initiation of an “in-house” water tunnel project and takes credit for setting the awareness in motion that would lead to such a project.

So then after the project was finished, what do you think happened? Eileen goes and DEP goes and makes their own videotape of the water tunnel #3 … their own interviews, Eileen produces it and directs it. So that’s a big outcome.

The product of CWT #3 impacted the DEP community as they absorbed it as the “audience of myth and memory” (Lacy, 1995, p. 178) but the process of creating it entered the culture to such an extent that they ended up reinterpreting, recreating and re-presenting Pottenger’s intervention entirely. Pottenger points to the continued relevance of CWT#3 as a measure of the project’s success.

Just last week the Department of Environmental Conservation, which is the state version, hired me to come to a watershed conference they had up in Fishkill and I did a performance of excerpts from Water Tunnel.

It seems clear that Pottenger does not typically build evaluation into the design of her pieces. She began, as I asked her how she might validate her outcomes, to suggest a process that would be appropriate and truthful.

I would think first-person interviews would be the only way for me to really even (know), right? To go back and ask people, what do they think the impact was, you know, of the show, very concretely, like really go back in and say what do you think changed for you, what was never the same…

This type of interpretive, qualitative evaluation, echoes the taped interview project Martha Bowers undertook in order to validate the success of her Nebraska live performance project. Sometimes funders require an evaluative process that measures the effectiveness of a project they’ve funded. In response to a recent request for such evaluation from the Ford Foundation, one of Abundance’s funders, Pottenger contacted participants in the project and asked for written feedback that would testify to the effectiveness of the project.

Figure 4.4. Marty Pottenger

Next: Chapter 5 - George Trakas
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