Fugitive Sites, Fugitive Meanings

Fugitive Sites: New Contemporary Art Projects for San Diego-Tijuana
Edited by Osvaldo Sánchez and Cecilia Garza, 272 pages with 241 colorplates
Published by Installation Galley, San Diego, California, 2002
$29.95 plus shipping from http://www.insite2000.org

"Fugitive Sites" is a book about a binational project called inSITE 2000-2001, curated by Susan Buck-Morris, Ivo Mesquita, Osvaldo Sánchez and Sally Yard. We rarely do reviews on CAN, but when we saw this book, we were impressed with its graphic richness and its implied dedication to values promoted in the community arts field, or, as Arlene Goldbard and Don Adams have christened it, the "community cultural development" field. We asked Arlene Goldbard to see if the project, as reflected in the book, measured up to its stated intentions. –Eds

This large-format, photo-filled, bilingual book is a kind of catalog and essay compilation that doesn't really contain enough images and descriptions of work to suffice as a catalog, nor enough compelling thought and observation to hold one's attention as an essay collection. But it does succeed impressively at one thing: it creates a great big colorful cloud of sizzle around a not very impressive hunk of steak.

Reading this book, I found myself reacting far more to the character of discourse it captured — its language, its evident intentions, its opacity — than to the examples of art work that are its ostensible subject. In part, this is probably unavoidable: Much of the work presented in inSITE 2000 was installation or performance, fleeting and ephemeral, of a type that must be directly engaged to be understood. A few still photographs from a video or a performance piece seldom convey enough about the work itself to substitute for a direct encounter. Some of the pictures and descriptions made me wish I'd seen some of the work, which is perhaps all that can be expected of such a publication. But I found few of them as provocative as the claims made on their behalf by the project's curators and commentators.

"Fugitive Sites" focuses on inSITE 2000-2001, jointly sponsored by Installation (a San Diego-based nonprofit gallery) and the Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, a program of Mexico's Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes. It charts one recent chapter in the history of a biennial project that commenced with inSITE 1992 to commission works of visual art to be sited near the Tijuana-San Diego border, making reference to the potent and fluid meanings assigned to such borderlands. According to the Directors' Statement in the catalog (by Michael Krichman and Carmen Cuenca), the curatorial team (this and all other quotations are from Fugitive Sites) "proposed to break with the tradition of inSITE as a large-scale display of temporary works, and to think about focusing away from any traditional notion of exhibition at all. Rather, what the curators had in mind was the installation of a cultural practice in the region." They felt freed by this change "to think about the ways in which artistic practice might engage various sectors of our two communities."

Community cultural development, I thought, reading this description. Great! But a paragraph or so later, I began to have my doubts. "It was the curators' interest," they wrote, "to focus resources on works that were rooted in the development of processes that would engage publics from the inception of project development." I made a marginal note proposing a simpler way to express what I at first thought the curators had been trying to say: The curators wanted to support works that were participatory from the outset. But I had misunderstood. The vocabulary of postmodern art discourse is vague, elastic and suggestive rather than explicit. Statements are made at a remove from the concrete: Holding people to a promise to support truly participatory projects seems a much clearer matter than vetting their performance against the intention to "focus resources on works that were rooted in the development of processes that would engage publics." How is "focusing resources" different from actually supporting? How is being "rooted in the development of processes that would engage" different from actually engaging? How can it be determined whether such intentions have been realized or not? In fact, inSITE 2000 projects were selected on the basis of proposals from artists, with no mention of a requirement that members of the public be engaged in their formulation. It appears the curators wanted an atmosphere of participation without disturbing the conventional role of the artist as the sole authorized operator of imagination. By "engaging publics," it was clear the curators meant that they hoped the public would be affected:

The collaborative impact of the inSITE 2000-01 projects will be to challenge the syntax of the city that orders and organizes the multiple economies of daily life, determining circulation, power lines, and institutional access. If syntax is the structure by which meaning assumes form, its disruption can be a political act, providing space for new cultural articulations.

Say what?

When I understood that the entire project, which had been framed in language asserting the power of art to address social realities and conflicts along the border, was congested with this sort of impenetrable art-speak — that's when I began to get agitated. Certain words pepper this volume, creating a regular — even monotonous — prose rhythm: "practices," "interventions," "negotiation," "mediating," "discursive," "processes," "representation," "resistance," "transgression" and so on. Again and again, the essays seek to situate the inSITE 2000-01 works within the art world, making reference to their formal properties and high-art influences, to their potential power to transform what the authors see as the practice of art. There is minimal mention (in some cases no mention at all) of the ways in which these projects might have affected the people of San Diego and Tijuana who lived with them. Instead, the project's promise is mostly seen by contributors to this volume as suggesting some new art-world possibility. For example, Néstor García Canclini writes:

Contemporary art — which has for so long recycled traditional and modern popular culture, the processes and symbols of ancient and non-Western cultures, spaces and trajectories that were not created to express artistic aspirations — is now seeking to determine if it can transform the concept of art. Frontiers — scenarios where objects and meanings are constantly exchanged and transformed — are the ideal forums for the airing of these new interrogatories.

What does it mean, I wondered, that the curators of this project are simultaneously so eager to appropriate the democratic and participatory ideas of community cultural development and to insure their project is seen as legitimate within the art world, as strongly rooted in its subculture, its customs, vocabulary and habits of mind?

I suppose the positive spin is to say this signals success. The argument put forward by community artists' work — that the process of true collaboration in self-expression and social imagination helps to emancipate the participants, equipping people for more and more meaningful participation in the social arena — seems to have hit home, at least to the degree that art-world-oriented artists now wish to incorporate such ideas into their own proposals. Even paying lip-service to these ideas is an improvement over the typical invisibility of community-based work, and extrapolating from the bits of evidence provided by "Fugitive Sites", it appears some of the artists paid more than lip-service to this intention.

The negative spin is to say that even radical ideas of liberation and self-determination can be turned into art-world commodities with the clever application of jargon and a determined inattention to results. In this spirit, the curators allowed a statement by artist David Ávalos to appear as part of "Fugitive Sites":

My question to inSITE is which community really is being engaged? Which community is really supporting inSITE? Which community benefits? Why is it that you know how many of the intellectuals that have been gathered here have been made aware of Alfredo Jaar's project, have been asked to converse with them, have been invited to converse with him? How many of them have been asked to speak with Michael Schnorr who for six years has been involved with community groups, activist groups in the San Diego/Tijuana region to bring forward what the brutal outcome of Operation Gatekeeper is? And if you want to know more about that operation and the people who have died as a result of it, you can go to a Web site, www.stopgatekeeper.com, and find out what some of the local communities are doing. This is a question for inSITE as well. Are they bringing people together with those artists who are working with that other community, with the working class community, the union community and so forth? Which community is being formed? Which community is being engaged? Which community is being served?

When it comes to art, I confess I am a liberal. I think there is room for every type of art in the world. Even those works I may personally find objectionable tend to be less harmful in social and human terms than many of the other things people do for their livelihood or recreation: polluting the atmosphere, manufacturing weapons, coercing others into gratifying low desires. I enjoyed looking at some of the pictures in "Fugitive Sites" and reading somewhat fewer of the essays and artists' statements. Within the intentions stated (most of the project descriptions that appear in this volume draw heavily on the artists' original proposals), some of them seemed intriguing, for instance, Krzystztof Wodiczko's massive video projections of the words and images of women who work in the maquiladoras along the border, and Alfredo Jaar's project that released a cloud of white balloons in commemoration of those who have died attempting to cross the border. Alberto Caro Limón's project seemed like straight-up community arts, creating a park in collaboration with the children who use it. There may be a great deal more here that is worthy of attention and even admirable in light of the values associated with community cultural development. But without the ability to scrape away the encrustation of text and peel back the layout that forms this project's public face, announcing, "This is Art with a capital A, stamped for approval by cutting-edge intellectuals," I just have no way of knowing.

Clothes don't make the man, it is said, but sometimes they tell us a lot about how he wants to be seen. I wonder if there could have been an inSITE that took the underlying cultural development intentions stated by the curators seriously, one that had addressed the worlds of San Diego and Tijuana, rather than the art world? I wonder if the substantial resources made available for a project swathed in art-world clothing would ever have gone to one that dressed more modestly and effectively as community arts? I wonder if the appropriation of community-arts concepts by art-world projects will in some way add to the support available to community artists? I guess I can hope.

There is one ground for recommending this book. Community artists, if by some miracle you find yourself in possession of enough resources to publish a thick, full-color, coated-paper, fully bilingual report on your work, here in one handy volume is everything you need to know in order to avoid (presumably unintentional) self-parody. Using "Fugitive Sites" as a negative object-lesson, take care to avoid: typography eccentric to the point of incomprehensibility; documentation of projects so scanty as to make the reader guess what they might actually have been; verbatim transcripts of panel presentations that amount to a free-association salad with a buzzword garnish; and language that on every page cries out for the editor's red pen.

Arlene Goldbard (goldbard@wwcd.org) is a writer and consultant based in Richmond, California. She is co-author of "Creative Community: The Art of Cultural Development" and "Community, Culture and Globalization," two volumes on community arts that can be obtained free from the Rockefeller Foundation by going to the Publications section of its Web site, clicking on the title you wish, and following the link at the bottom of each page for online ordering.

Original CAN/API publication: May 2003