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The Artmaker as Active Agent: Six PortraitsCHAPTER 9: CONCLUSION This concluding chapter will explore three ideas that have emerged from this study:
The artists represented in the profiles in this paper have seen enormous change in the field of community-based art. What was once a loose confederation of individuals entering into prison art programs or making public murals at housing projects, has recently gained considerable attention and grown to the point where the Maryland Institute of Art now offers a degree in community-based art. Though still decentralized and underfunded, the field of community-based art now has vehicles that artists use to gather and exchange ideas and techniques. Artists in their 40’s and 50’s, such as the subjects of these interviews, have come to definitions and practices of community-based art which are deeply personal. Their aesthetic sense, artistic practice, choices of, for example, target audiences, subject matter and materials are idiosyncratic and bound up with the artist’s identity. Even so, these six interview subjects share many underlying motivators that can be grouped under the following headings: teaching, activism, populism, relationships, public life, optimism, and their relationship to criticism and hierarchy. Teaching These artists strongly identify their work with teaching, though even the concept of “teaching” here has many interpretations. Jennifer Miller jokingly describes her work with students at UCLA, “And I try to do as much political indoctrination as I can! Absolutely.” Many of these artists have taught in formal settings, with all different age groups, from young children through graduate students. But even beyond the formal label and accompanying authority conveyed with the role of “teacher” in a classroom, these artists have seen the action of teaching as a key component of the relationships they build through their art. In fact, art at times becomes the form or pretext for teaching about other topics such as assumptions about gender identity, as in the case of Circus Amok, or environmental stewardship, as in the case of George Trakas. These artists take advantage of familiar teaching and learning relationships and employ them to open and change minds. The artist’s strong identity with teaching suggests potential for further development along formal education lines, either through degree programs like that of the Maryland Institute of Art or through funding art in education programs such as those developed by the Aesthetic Education Institute. Also, educational institutions, especially colleges and universities, can take the lead in forming collaborations with local community development organizations, social service agencies, economic development organizations and local arts organizations to develop community assets and serve community needs through targeted, local projects, serving their own missions as well as those of their co-collaborators. Activism Most of these artists have come of age with, and engaged in, a notion of activist politics that involves, as Jennifer Miller put it, “a certain degree of outdoor, sign-holding activity.” The day before I interviewed Jennifer Miller, in fact, she had seen Martha Bowers in Manhattan at a massive protest against the Iraq War. These artists have taken up political protest from an outsider stance and their role as artist can reinforce this outsider relationship with power structures even further. However, all of these artists, with the exception of Miller, have engaged deeply with the agencies of their local governments while maintaining activist goals for social change. These artists indicate a desire to challenge the status quo, even if greater access to power through experience has changed the nature of this activism. Depending upon the context and the subject, these artists may occupy both an outsider and insider position in relationship to power and access. All of these artists understand that their artmaking, particularly its funding, lies within a political context. They are mindful of the various constituencies served by their art and the implications of a “useful” art: to whom it is useful and why. Like the diversity of fields represented by the Bruner/Loeb symposium, the audience for discussing the implications of public art is broadening. Community-based artists develop experience working closely and effectively across disciplines. They bridge language and paradigms and are able to facilitate collaboration, particularly when their values are engaged. Populism These artists hold a populist world view, defined here by a dedication to representing the rank and file of the populace. They seek to reimagine and reengage a more diverse audience with their work. Many of these artists tell stories about their frustration with needing to explain the art-historical context of contemporary artwork or, as sculptor Ed McGowin puts it, the “hole in the ground or … pile of rocks,” (Art in Architecture, House Hearing, p. 17.) They express a desire to move toward an art that is accessible and relevant to their audience’s experiences and lives. The member of this audience, perhaps anonymous, is one that is typically shut out of a privileged interpretation of work, either by his degree or type of formal education, social class or interest level. In many of these artists’ work, there is a connection with the industrial history of a place or population and they use this history and the history of work as subject matter. In CWT #3, Marty Pottenger assembles a piece that is about and for a blue-collar audience. Martha Bowers defines the co-learning between her professionally trained artists and her community dancers as the heart and soul of her work. George Trakas describes creating a place where workers can hang their tools and proudly exclaims, “these workers don’t give a hell about art!” It is important to these artists that their work be understood as “work” and not as art – and particularly not just an elitist definition of art - exclusively. They seek to demystify the process of creating art and reveal, and at times share, its craft. They often relocate the audience from passive recipient toward cultural participant, privileging, as Bowers describes it, “the authority of lived experience,” as opposed to technical expertise. If we seek to develop a civic populace and a workforce that is more creative and entrepreneurial, it is important to broaden an interpretation of what is art, and what constitutes participation in the arts. In the report, "Reggae to Rachmaninoff: How and Why People Participate in Arts and Culture," authors Chris Walker, Stephanie Scott-Melnyk, and Kay Sherwood hope to "inform those who aim to broaden and diversify cultural participation … and promote the role of arts and culture in strengthening American communities," (Walker, p. 4). In their research, they find, for example, that "people are more likely to attend arts and cultural events at community locations than at specialized arts venues," (Walker, p. 10). This report locates art beyond a community’s conventional art institutions: art museum, symphony, ballet, and opera. Community-based artists can help us find this art in our communities and deal respectfully and sensitively with the social class issues that crop up when defining cultural forms and assigning them value. Relationships These artists see the development of relationships as central to the meaning of their work and give evidence that cultural participation promotes relationship building. These relationships may be short-term, as is the case of Circus Amok’s afternoon interventions with the communities for which they perform or they may be as long-term as the many years Marty Pottenger spent with the workers of the Third Water Tunnel to create CWT #3. The relationships are as much a part of the artmaking as the art product. Both Marty Pottenger and Martha Bowers describe being greatly challenged by the trustworthiness and honesty required to create work with communities. Doug Rice describes the relationships built as being the vehicle through which the art making moves. These relationships need to be carefully developed if the work is to focus on the unheard stories of participants, as in the case of Martha Bowers, or the unmet needs of participants, as in the case of George Trakas. There is an acknowledgement here, too, that these relationships are immensely important to the artist personally and connect him to a vitality that drives his creative process. These community members become the artist’s muse. These relationships change the artists and allow them to grow, not just as artists but as individuals, citizens and members of communities. In hearing these artists take on the voice and character of individuals with whom they’ve worked, one gets a sense of the joy and meaning these relationships provide. Working closely with individuals allows artists to broaden their experience and change to accommodate it. There is very little understood about the centrality of relationship building in community-based art but it is the place where the field most closely resembles community development and community organizing for change and social justice. These fields as well as specific place-based or issue-based organizations, could potentially share experiences and training in order to penetrate communities more effectively and develop events and programs that interpret the experience of places and communities through artwork. These types of partnerships are being explored by public art projects such as New*Land*Marks in Philadelphia of which George Trakas is a part. Public Life All of these artists present work in the public realm. All have expressed concern with the erosion of public life and civic participation in recent years and with the encroachment of private interests into public space. They see their work as stemming this tide, albeit in a small way, and seek to preserve the role of shared space in creating and recreating a “public” in an era where no single definition of “public” is accepted across the populace. Thematically, much of this public artwork asks questions about civic identity and multiple identities within a community and helps to define what “public” means. These concerns are central to Barnaby Evans’ WaterFire, for example. Art events create shared experiences that lead to the participation that is essential to democracy. These artists situate themselves within a larger web of individuals and organizations that gather to collaboratively plan and execute events. Indeed, Doug Rice appears to see “web-building” as one of his primary functions. These groups not only create products - in the form of festivals, art shows, or concerts - but they also, perhaps more importantly, build their capacity for working together. This capacity can lead to greater participation and more effective planning of the institutional, economic, and political aspects of civic life. Planners, developers, architects and members of city governments can learn a great deal from partnerships such as WaterFire and the Providence River Relocation Project. WaterFire is credited with having animated a public space and creating a shared urban experience that has successfully encouraged the city to develop further programming, artistic and otherwise, in public spaces. Optimism There seems to be a series of personality traits shared by these artists that is connected to optimism and a positive worldview. These individuals operate on an assumption that they can change the world, even if upon further analysis, they may retract that stance. They seem to have an ability to rejuvenate themselves and they approach their goals with persistence and tenacity. Their success with groups with whom they are collaborating seems to rely on a degree of personal charisma and charm as well as an emotional intelligence and extraordinary communications skills. They are able to flex leadership skills to direct group processes and inspire confidence in their ability to lead and direct a project. This ability to establish rapport and mutual trust seems to be a necessary ingredient for successfully creating artwork responsive to communities. Physically, these artists, as a group are loud, talkative, and they are natural storytellers who are animated in their speech and expressive with their voice and body. What each of them is saying is different but how they are saying it is strikingly similar. Just as with leadership more generally, leadership of community arts projects can emerge from an individual with any personality type. Still, it appears that the ability to feel and demonstrate enthusiasm about one’s work seems to lubricate the processes of engagement into which these artists enter. These artists have continually referenced the organizational and interpersonal skills required to successfully lead projects. This would suggest that learning skills within a leadership context is essential for those wishing to do this kind of work. These artists must acknowledge that they are being perceived as leaders, and are flexing leadership skills, even if they don’t necessarily connect with the label of “leader.” As directors of community arts processes, they must acknowledge responsibility for harnessing the energy and power their personalities and these processes can create. Relationship to Hierarchy/Criticism Nearly all of these artists gave specific instances of being pushed away from, or repelled by, the culture of criticism in their respective fields. Barnaby Evans describes being snubbed by the employees of the gallery in which his own work was showing. Martha Bowers describes moving toward community-based work to avoid the arbitration of careers in the dance world by a handful of extremely powerful presenters and critics. These artists have sought to bring in new audiences for their art and connect to a vitality that they felt was being siphoned off by an elitist and market-driven cultural system. These artists broke with the more traditional career paths of their fields because their work required an alternative value system to that which perpetually relies on art products to critique and sell. WaterFire, for example, is immensely successful as a work of art and as a civic celebration, however, there is very little about the piece itself that can be sold or generate revenue. The piece has “use” value as opposed to “exchange” value. Doug Rice has said that the greatest value of the work on ARTWalk is that it is developed locally and subjected to a local process of critique; the ARTWalk process is grassroots by both design and implementation. Because they are operating outside the mainstream, many of these artists have had the freedom to pursue “local knowledge” with communities, the representation of which may not have significant or obvious value to those outside these local areas. This pursuit may lead these artists to stretch definitions about what is “good” about their art and to perhaps develop a separate process of valuation and criticism for every project they undertake. This leads to a discussion central to the field of community-based art: whether it is possible or desirable to establish criteria for criticism that can be applied to projects across the field.
This is the breach into which Suzanne Lacy jumped with her four criteria for evaluation of new genre public art: interaction, audience, intention, and effectiveness. Having used these criteria to analyze the work of these six artists, I venture to critique their effectiveness. Lacy’s “interaction continuum” did not represent these artists as they saw themselves. These artists are “out in the world” more consistently than the continuum suggests. The artists saw themselves as “analysts” of their fields and social context and as “activists” - championing specific issues - but never as reporters, presenting the observable facts of their subject. They always seemed to interweave their values with the subject or frame it in a subjective way that included a specific, actionable intention. They did not describe their role with communities as anything akin to the “artist as experiencer” role, either, though this role may be tied up in an individual process of creation and reflection. Other roles that were consistently referred to by these artists or were observed by me to be central to their definitions of themselves are: artist as leader, artist as teacher and artist as interpreter. The second criterion, “audience,” was essential for understanding these artists’ work and the theory they had developed to explain and understand it. Artists spoke of developing new audiences, engaging audience directly and reconfiguring their relationship with their audience. Lacy’s model of concentric circles representing the change and movement of these artists among and between their audiences helped define the different types of audiences each of these artists was describing. The third criterion, “intention,” was tied in with these artists’ approaches to problem solving; having decided what a problem was the artists made plans to address it. Some artists felt more comfortable than others in stating intentions directly, perhaps indicating vestigial attachment to the “useful art” taboo. Occasionally, “intentions” as indicated by specific objectives lacked clarity or connection with achievable outcomes. Marty Pottenger, for example, says she mounted Abundance in order to change the relationship U.S. citizens have with money. This goal, given her suggested means of attaining it, seems unrealistic and should be subjected to a greater process of analysis and scrutiny. Though intentions are used and expressed by these artists, they are not necessarily being employed as effectively as they might be in order to focus and drive a project. Like “intention,” the fourth evaluative criterion, “effectiveness,” is essential but these practitioners are unprepared to discuss it coherently. The field appears to be a long way from establishing metrics that make any sense to the practitioners or funders of this work. Questions of effectiveness of community based art drew on experiences the artists had had with evaluation through other fields of study. Martha Bowers, for example, referenced her experience working with education evaluators as an artist-educator. The greatest value of Lacy’s criteria is that they are basic lenses through which to view a variety of cases. They bring up central questions, particularly about the direction toward which the field is moving. Should artists become better at discussing their intentions and the effectiveness of their work? Should metrics be established for evaluating this work? Another question Lacy does not address in her essay is: who is doing the critiquing? Who is employing these criteria? Are we creating a new type of art criticism or should this evaluation be done by the communities themselves? Organizationally, should the community-based artist be responsible for stating formal intentions and measuring effectiveness or should this be something of a team effort with competencies for coordinating, measuring, reporting, proposal writing, etc. shared across a presenting group? Based on the analysis of these artists’ experiences, I offer two recommendations:
Without a more rigorous approach to documentation of work and systematic analysis of effectiveness, community based artists will have difficulty withstanding the criticism of Miwon Kwon (as referenced by Patricia Phillips) who wonders if it is possible to,
Phillips asks whether the nature of art and cultural criticism must expand to bring realistic expectations to this field or whether the paradigm upon which the field is built should be changed to make it less resistant to analysis and criticism.
Just as this work asks questions about the composition of a shared “public” it is also legitimate for that public to discuss which experiences and relationships it wants represented in shared spaces with language that is both specific and inclusive. This would be a “community criticism,” that is mindful to local conditions but flexible enough to be broadly applied and understood. Patricia Phillips writes of the new role this artistic practice presents for critics:
What are these new, inventive, intellectual partnerships Phillips imagines? As soon as we cross social, academic or professional lines - as community based art does - definitions, and hence, criticism becomes difficult and yet avenues of great freedom and creativity open up. Jeff Kelley describes the “gaps” this way,
Much new genre public art occupies an edge between art and social science. Artists use data collection methods such as interview processes, focus groups, primary and secondary textual analysis, etc. to make their art. This space between art and science may overcome some of the limitations of each tradition in responding to and interpreting human experience. Suzanne Lacy positions new genre public art at this edge but chides practitioners for being less than rigorous in using scientific methods to measure the effectiveness of their work, for behaving more like artists, in essence, than like sociologists.
Though public art might benefit if artists take up Lacy’s challenging call to adopt and adapt the tools of social science to measure effectiveness, unexamined is the assumption that the sociologist’s foray into the world is effective. The sociologist’s research does not necessarily “change its constituencies’ beliefs or practices,” (Lacy, 1995, p. 183). Choosing criteria for measurement and then measuring may create a legible research project but does not necessarily create change. Also unexamined is the sociologist’s, often hidden, “unexamined political notions,” (Lacy, 1995, p. 183). Questions about the relationship between the researcher and the researched have challenged social scientists for decades. The strength of artistic practice, from which social science might learn, is the centrality of the deeply reflective, questioning artist who seeks to fetter out, rather than sublimate his own assumptions, prejudices and passions. While Martha Bowers may use social science research methods when conducting, for example, focus groups to determine the most pressing issues effecting a community, she places her own intentions squarely on the table, even as she examines and questions them, always understanding that the ultimate goal is to keep going forward. It was Martha Bowers who said she “wished she had someone like that,” while discussing the possibility of artists partnering with evaluators with whom they could work to design appropriate tools for measuring the effectiveness of their projects. Social scientists Yvonne Lincoln and Egon Guba in their book Naturalistic Inquiry, propose a peer audit for social scientists that might work in a community arts context. Hundreds of researchers have used the inquiry audit approach since it was published in 1985. Below, they describe the “inquiry audit” in which one researcher reviews the work of another over time.
Ideally, this inquiry auditor is a colleague of the community-based artists who understands enough of the complex variables of the project to perform an informed review but who is also sufficiently removed from this project to keep assumptions, biases and conflicts of interest to a minimum. If the field of community-based art can adopt not only critical criteria, as Lacy proposes but critical techniques, like the inquiry audit, it can become more legible to potential collaborators.
Patricia Phillips suggests we proceed with caution, however, when hemming art in with the standards of other disciplines. Can too much emphasis on effectiveness dilute what is most artful about community-based artmaking?
As exciting as the potential for collaboration between social science and community-based art may be, it is important to remember how and why artistic process is distinct from scientific process and to preserve the integrity of each while exploring the gap between them.
The evidence these artists give of the unique capacity of their work to bridge difference is essential study for those wishing to animate discourse about public life. The splintering of community life along lines of color, social class, religion and politics -- among other divisors -- has created a breach into which forces that seek to further the specific, rather than general, interests of the few have jumped. Further study needs to be done of how community-based art bridges difference but it can be done only if more projects tackling a range of issues and subjects are supported, both financially and conceptually, in a variety of communities. Artists need to be given time and a variety of experiences from which they may hone their craft. Communities need to become accustomed to using the techniques of community-based art making to identify their assets, address their needs, celebrate their strengths and mourn their losses, in short, to shape their collective identities. Community-based projects are unique because they teach active citizenry to both artist and non-artist participant, by building the capacity to interpret and represent shared experience. This capacity has real value to those attempting to address local problems using locally appropriate tools and engaging local stakeholders. The power of art to engage is enormous; the skill and sensitivity with which these artists have engaged communities is inspiring.
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