Practicing in Public

Participants stand on the porch of The Borough House as part of the Latitude 32° – Navigating Home performance. Photo by Alicia Kozikowski

The artmaking process is a process of not knowing. It is true that we can ground our knowing in models and best practices, and through new art genres and mechanisms that realize inclusive, collaborative, participatory, remedial, and transformative ways of working. But more important than these tools are the critical questions that drive our work—the aims that are at the core of our practice. They are the threads that link the projects and the chapters of one's professional life; they also keep us from repeating and merely replicating work. It is these core aims that allow us to both know (based on our past experience and that of others) and to trust in our not knowing (so that we can reinvent according to new circumstances, and realize each project in its own time and space).

This model—one of knowing but also not knowing—came to my attention in the process of co-inventing a three-year research consortium program called, "Awake: Art, Buddhism, and The Dimensions of Consciousness." "Awake" brought together a dedicated body of museums professionals from around the U.S. to plan exhibitions and public programs, but more significantly, to find ways to think more deeply about audiences. It was there that I became familiar with the Buddhist concept of "the mind of don't know": not a place of nothingness but "emptiness," a space of full potentiality. Then I began to understand how, as a curator, I could create an "empty" space, a space of potentiality, so that something new could eventually come to fill it: a space for artists to create, for viewers to experience. This empty space is the working space of artists driven by questions that go to the heart of why they need to make art, and for whom artmaking is a process of clarifying questions (not finding answers) because, for them, this critical questioning is a way of art, a way of life and a way of thinking. I found that supporting and empty space requires the full engagement and creative energy of both curator and artist. As artist Ernesto Pujol has said: "This relationship requires a lot of respect, trust, humility, and selflessness from both, yet a certain belief in oneself. More than that, it takes a certain conviction about things bigger than ourselves."

Supporting an empty space is also about supporting ideas—your ideas and those of others. This place of possibility allows us to practice with openness and flexibility. Working with an open mind, we can listen to the community and value what they know and bring to the process, shaping the work as well as its meaning and informing its outcome. In this, my process of working involves a practice of various roles: listener and facilitator, provoker and friend, sociologist and social worker, educator and presenter. It has been necessary to be willing to share and exchange, to learn and change.

I have had the opportunity to test this practice of "the mind of don't know" in my work for the Spoleto Festival USA in Charleston, South Carolina, through the "Evoking History" program that began in 2001. While this city is not on the contemporary art map, it is a place that I have been fortunate to revisit through my work for over a decade now. Charleston is compelling as an environment permeated with memory. Most cites depend on monuments to tell the stories of the past and they build commemorative works in place of memory; but Charleston is a place of memory—a memory that lives on in the people, in the land, and carried by waterways that connect it at once to the world and its interior. Its living memory is its "monument" to the past.

"Evoking History" began with listening to others' experiences, their stories, to put a human face on history. In the first year, artists were translators of personal and cultural experience—"tricksters," as Lewis Hyde calls them— evoking the metaphorical comparison of the artist to the legendary figure of the boundary-crosser. The trickster works between polarities, with complexity and ambiguity; the trickster is the "joint-worker" who shifts the joints or workings of society, shifting patterns in relation to one another: dismantling the hierarchy, de-centering it, and making evident the divisions or joints of society and keeping those lines or joints flexible, porous, and receptive to change, rearticulating them, and even bridging or translating differences. In 2001 I think the artists' work crossed boundaries as evidenced by the reaction of Kendra Hamilton:

I never got to tell you how I felt. But that experience seems to have completely healed the wounds that I've been carrying around in my heart from growing up in that sick and seductive city since childhood. Now, when I return to Charleston, to visit my family or do research, it's without that dull ache that used to start throbbing as soon as the pine barrens gave way to the low marshy flats surrounding the city.

There was another boundary crossed—that of "insider" and "outsider." The participating artists primarily came from other places, but the audience was overwhelmingly the local community. The artmaking process had to grapple with this dichotomy of local/non-local. What we found was the presence of insider and outsider aspects in each one of us: locals finding that their stakes as insiders can both inform and isolate them from their neighbors; and insiders and outsiders finding that they share many of the same issues, irrespective of demographic or geographic indictors. And what emerged was a dialogue that is both specific and universal but a dialogue, nonetheless, that sought to clarify some large questions of culture.

In 2002, the emphasis moved from listening to others' experiences to experiencing art. Unlike the previous year, these projects were not grounded in extended, collaborative processes, but lay in a single artist's vision which seemed to resonate with the history of Charleston. Then in 2003 we sought to create a space for speaking, literally making an installation that could become the public "stage" for a performance that was to be a civic conversation. On this occasion nearly 100 citizens, from the Mayor to rural youth, came to talk about issues of home, community, and Charleston's future. The audience "eavesdropped" on these simultaneous conversations; then in the evening's next act they, too, shared their views on sustaining community.

The future is not known yet and even for the artists' projects completed, one can fairly ask: "Will it make a difference?" I'd like to think invested process is never a failure because it always makes a connection, a stronger idea, maybe a change of heart, maybe a change in a place.

[Making Art/Making Home Main Page]

Mary Jane Jacob is an independent curator based in Chicago and organizer of Spoleto Festival USA's "Evoking History." Her book co-authored with Jacquelynn Baas, "In the Space of Art: Buddha Mind and the Culture of Art," on the relationship of Buddhist thought and contemporary art, is forthcoming from the University of California Press in fall 2004. She also teaches at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago where she is initiating a program in Public Practice.

Original CAN/API publication: October 2003