Exchanging Gifts in Charleston, South Carolina

Charleston today is a boomtown, a Southern city flourishing with revitalization. The new Charleston’s image is glamorous and sophisticated. Unfortunately, for myself as well as the bulk of the population and potential audiences of the city, art in this tourist mecca of the South remains a small-town affair. The new Charleston is eager to flee from its racist, segregated past but is less willing to confront its demons than paper them over with new glitz. Neither the art venues of the old nor the new Charleston have been inclined to examine the facade, nor really look at the communities – in many cases suffering communities — that make up a real city. The situation undermines the city’s burgeoning reputation as a cosmopolitan centre.

Across the U.S, the “new cosmopolitanism” is characterized as inclusive, boasting a broad cultural mix. But the gentrification of Charleston’s arts community has only produced a new version of parochialism. Instead of pulling in diverse audiences — particularly from among the poor, the city’s disenfranchised minorities, or even middle-income residents — arts events draw the same old crowd, even in the so-called culturally liberated local galleries and performance spaces. Anyone who isn’t a complete stranger to Charleston can place an imaginary diagram over the average audience and trace the lines of social networks. The patterns will tell you who is connected with which gallery, which social circle, which clique, and how they happen to be in attendance at this particular venue. Art marketing trumpets the city’s gentrified downtown and targets the city’s old money rich, its summer tourists or the trend-obsessed superficiality of its newly affluent. One local theater has taken to blatantly advertizing its mission to develop an audience of young urban professionals. To judge by the city’s public-relations machine, no local residents exist but the handsome, idealized urban professionals. Who else really matters?

Charleston is the home of Spoleto, a two-week arts festival whose international fame intensifies the city’s tourist-centric focus. Local organizations feel pressured to imitate Spoleto’s supposed sophistication. In the meantime, they guard their resources, disinclined to work with each other or conceive of audience development as anything but a tool of commercial self-interest.

Can the city described above be a home to community-based art? Or are the problems described above so typical of changes that have beset so many American cities over the past decade that Charleston is neither the best, nor the worst place to try? Community-based art certainly has been tried. Charleston has been the locale of several Spoleto-sponsored cultural exchange/community-based art projects over the past eight years — and I will forthwith compare Spoleto’s Longitude 35/Navigating Home (2003) and the artist-sponsored (through artists’ grants and public funds) The Future Is on the Table (2008).

Jean-Marie Mauclet and Gwylène Gallimard are French natives who have lived in Charleston for more than 25 years — locals in the truest sense of the word. They organized The Future Is on the Table, a two-month-long series of exhibitions, performances and dialogues centered on the themes of water, shelter and the exchange of gifts. The main event occurred on September, 13, 2008: a massive opening at the City of Charleston’s Gallery at Waterfront Park, featuring collaborative work by Gallimard and Mauclet, Rajni Shah, Omari Fox, Arianne King Comer, Delphine Ziegler, Aurore Gruel, Wok Marcia Kure, Phinias Chirubvu, The Arpan Cooperative of India and others. The list included local and international participants.

I believe that all art is noble and all community-based art is damn hard work. The projects produced under the umbrella of Spoleto have been socially contentious and have all highlighted important issues. However, in my personal experience as a ten-year resident who has occasionally been called upon to work on community art projects, while watching artists, curators and cultural workers come and go, I have never seen a project built on the tenets of community participation that turned out as successfully as The Future Is on The Table — a self-described experiment in “gift-exchange economics.”

This is what I have witnessed: Over the past ten years, I have seen very smart and savvy visiting artists perplexed and frustrated by Charleston and its weird mix of cosmopolitanism, apathy and disenfranchisement. I have seen them wrestling with ways to partner with communities at the same time as those communities are being gentrified away. I have watched them try to work in Charleston’s public schools (still largely segregated public schools, but of course), which rank among the worst in the nation. I have sympathized because I could tell these visiting artists were overwhelmed by the collective weight of these issues. Where was the possibility of progress? Should they make art, or fashion a protest movement? The strictures they worked under seemed to leave them with either/or choices — too little room to maneuver, too many reasons to rant, too little freedom to dream.

Every community-based situation is different; artists with socially conscious intentions may plan to organize, heal, bond with or assist a stressed community in its grieving process. The achievement of these goals depends upon connecting with the citizenry so powerfully that audiences feel engaged enough to help create a project. At some point — whether at the beginning, in the middle or at the very end of a project — the audience must feel connected, less passive, less isolated within social boxes. Charleston exists between the proverbial rock and a hard place. Spoleto audiences preferred to avoid local issues; forging links within Charleston’s economically deprived minority communities was an uphill struggle. Spoleto artists searched for something elusive — something that they needed in order to build momentum, a kind of collective image or metaphor.

That was the difficulty faced by Suzanne Lacy and Rick Lowe during Spoleto 2003 when they produced Longitude 35/Navigating Home. Suzanne Lacy is a renowned community artist with credentials a mile long and a heart as big as a river. From our first meeting, I was impressed by her commitment and her thorough preparations. Like a sociologist, she armed herself with a mountain of statistics acquired from the local chamber of commerce. Lacy expressed to me her dismay with much that she uncovered. Charleston County, for example, was not only among the lowest-performing school districts in the country, it ranked among the counties with the highest rates of school expulsion, meaning the county had taken the next step in undermining the intent of public education by using expulsion as a disciplinary tool. If nothing else, Lacy came to Charleston with her eyes wide open regarding the rift between Charleston’s surface glitz and the communities that have been left behind by the push to gentrify.

I knew that Lacy was my kind of visiting artist when she confessed to me in a hushed, private whisper: “I think the best I can do here is to get people talking.” Lacy’s idea “to get people talking” was Longitude 35/Navigating Home, located in Ansonborough Field. The project combined elements of an old-style Charleston porch conversation and a performance piece.

Ansonborough Field was the site of a black community that was razed in the early ‘90s — a casualty of the politics of gentrification. Local artisans and architecture students filled an empty section of Ansonborough Field with 18 platform-like “porches” honoring the fallen community. Each porch in the vast field was sufficiently large to seat a table of “performers.” Lacy peopled the platforms by sponsoring a series of interviews that produced a group of 75 willing Charlestonians of various ethnicities, backgrounds, income levels and, most important, points-of-view. The participants were energized to freely express themselves in the course of their interviews. They ranged from bartenders and day laborers to socialites with blue-blood family names to Charleston’s own mayor, Joseph P. Riley.

One summer day in early June 2003, the 75 participants were seated at tables with assigned discussion topics. The topics were previously unannounced. The scenario was a kind of enforced meeting of like and unlike minds, corralled together under unusual circumstances to talk over “touchy” subjects such as race, poverty, gentrification, property rights and public education. The conversations were intended to be public (a crowd of watchers could wander among the tables and listen without interrupting) yet intimate. The performance was to conclude with a powerful visual element as the seated participants rose and led the crowd of watchers toward a catered indoor meal. Lacy’s vision was poetic. She imagined a processional beneath the dying evening light, accompanied by a chorus of conversations that spawned new dialogues into the night. Longitude 35/Navigating Home would have been so unusual it could have become the stuff of Charleston legend.

Though Lacy’s concept was worthy, the stumbling block was meteorological. The sky collapsed on the day of the performance. Longitude 35/Navigating Home was transported to the cover of a makeshift alternative location, cramped and decidedly less poetic. Inclement weather aside, Longitude 35/Navigating Home still accomplished something. It fell short of its considerable ambitions. The disruptive roar of the storm resulted in a degree of confusion. Ill luck kept the public performance from entering local lore. While the dialoguing undoubtedly benefited individuals, the sum effect failed to resonate, mutating into a significant happening. Suzanne Lacy later wrote in an essay for CAN that the spectacle at Spoleto 2003 was “a gathering like no other in this area, of rich and poor and middle-class, white and black and Filipino, old families and recent immigrants, young and old.”

That it was. Suzanne Lacy wielded every tool at her disposal (listservs, contact lists, big names and Spoleto connections) to patch together a sundry audience. Longitude 35/Navigating Home was still “staged” rather than a “natural” gathering of diverse individuals. How else could it have happened? To ask that question would be to begin to tear down Charleston’s invisible walls. I never witnessed anything like it again until the day of The Future Is on the Table’s opening at the City Gallery at Waterfront Park.

Why did The Future Is on the Table succeed? I am certain that everyone in the field of community arts has at some point experienced a well-funded and enthusiastically supported project that under-performed. In the wake of so much goodwill, sponsors and participants alike felt tongue-tied, unable to say What went wrong? I am stymied by the happier question. I know that I am attracted to a pair of quotes. The first is from Gwylène Gallimard’s diary of the show:

The other is a comment from Conner Hansen, a student/observer documenting the opening at the City Gallery at Waterfront Park:

Can those quotes help me grapple with the answer to the question What went right? Keep them in mind — while we forge ahead.

Technically, The Future Is on the Table should be known as The Future Is on the Table Part 3. For parts 1 and 2, Gallimard and Mauclet developed smaller, more localized projects. Part 3 internationalized the idea of a project highlighting water, shelter and gift exchanges. The couple built 56 plywood stools on which were painted a map of the world. They mailed cards en masse inviting artists worldwide to participate in an international gift exchange: Participating artists would receive bundles of six or seven stools and, in return, produce their own Future Is on the Table performances/exhibitions. The cards read:

The responses trickled in. In France, a group of artists, dancers and musicians collaborated to use the stools in a multimedia performance, “A Table of Ice,” against the lovely backdrop of the Doubs River frozen over in winter. In India, the women of a collective of seamstresses and wearable-art designers incorporated the Western stools into their traditional workspace. In London, an experimental theater artist working with gift exchange gave away the stools in a public performance. In upstate South Carolina, a spoken-word poet used the stools as lecterns in a series of impromptu spoken-word harangues.

A simple idea. The Future Is on the Table’s framework was elementary but underpinned with mature thought on the nature of modern society and globalization. The gift exchange of 56 stools was a global act, a response to the usual politics of international exchange. Globalization in its normative function implements monetary partnerships at the cost of increased standardization, mechanization and cultural erasure.The concept behind a barter of stools (illustrating a map of the world) in exchange for personal gestures or collective cultural responses was to mirror international global exchanges without the habitual result of destabilizing local cultural traditions, or the customary degeneration of handcrafted and handmade objects. Every artist who accepted a bundle of stools responded by creating “seating spaces” around a metaphorical “table of the future.” They also agreed to come to Charleston to participate in a grand finale. This was the meaning of “gift-exchange economics” — an art project that created links that valued local communities, built upon noncontractual agreements and accentuating personalized interactions.

The project was international in scope, but, as planned, local in its last stage of implementation. Gwylène Gallimard and Jean-Marie Mauclet spent some five years visiting foreign countries, assisting their collaborators and shepherding the artists toward Charleston. Throughout August and September 2008, international and local artists involved came together in provisional housing. Beyond the group’s shared responsibility for putting up the main exhibition, there was the job of introducing the project to the city.

Artists Rajni Shah, Delphine Ziegler, Aurore Gruel and Marcia Kure gave public lectures at the local College of Charleston. Fiber artist Arianne King Comer and the Arpan Cooperative conducted a sewing circle. Rajni Shah oversaw a month of impromptu “gift exchanges” with random strangers. Marcia Kure worked with teenagers from Charleston high schools. Phinias Chirubvu — a stone carver from Capetown, South Africa, who was the sole artist Gallimard and Mauclet had never met before his arrival in town — remained the longest and spent a full two months as the artist in residence at Wilmot Fraser Elementary School. Back home, Phinias Chirubvu was both a professional stone carver and an unpaid mentor to a few dozen South African youths, helping them to become self-sufficient in a county in which employment opportunities were few.

Fraser Elementary (to offer a personal aside) was the site of an earlier Spoleto-sponsored project. I was involved in a collaboration with Fraser Elementary that saw a photographer and gardener and a poet (myself) visiting the school. The plan was that we would conduct workshops and develop community liaisons. The project was timed to occur during the hectic rush of Spoleto, which resulted in constant scheduling conflicts. All three of the artists involved suffered from split commitments. The administrators at Fraser attempted to facilitate the encounter for us, which was both appreciated and bewildering given that we believed our duty was to facilitate for them. I have no doubt that Fraser’s reputation as a low-performing school tripled the desire on our part and theirs to see the project work. But we failed to find a common language in which to make joint decisions. The dialogue between the teachers and administrators at Fraser Elementary and the visiting artists was beset by misunderstanding, despite an excess of goodwill. Recalling my time at Fraser, I think of Gallimard’s comment on the frames of works of art. The first project was an unfortunate example of how the frames can remain high walls dividing the “artists” from the daily operations of the school. I am struck with admiration for the groundwork that was laid for Phinias to function as a workmanlike member of a school community. I savor memories of him chiseling stone from nine to five almost every weekday until his face was easily recognized in the hallways. Phinias’ prior background in working with “at risk” youth in his own country made this particular gift exchange especially cross-culturally enlightening — and seamless.

The gallery opening for The Future Is on the Table was an audio/visual potpourri. The project was intended to encourage any kind of participation — in any medium. Whoever participated (however they participated) was commemorated with a place in the show. The City Gallery is at once a light, a charismatic and a heavy space — whose vast glass windows charm and whose imposing exterior threshold resembles the entrance to a city hall or a Russian politbureau building. Before the doors opened, the dancer Aurore Gruel, accompanied by local musicians, performed on the massive staircase. She interacted with a block of ice that represented her origination point in the project (a performance on the frozen Doubs River). The dance built tension toward the extravaganza; after it finished the waiting audience filed inside.

They entered the mystery. The sense of curiosity was palpable. What is this supposed to be? Relative to most art openings in Charleston, The Future Is on the Table was enigmatic. Musical. Visual. Literary. Its open-endedness confounded the press. It eluded the easy categorizations and the typical tropes of Charleston press releases. Should we list this under art openings? Or is it experimental theater? And explain to me about the stools again? It was a healthy challenge for the press to grapple with a collaborative project that was built upon a metaphor. The metaphor was the state of the globalized world. The project involved a variety of collaborators (in any medium) in the same sense that it involved a variety of subjects. If The Future Is on the Table was repeated a second time with a new set of collaborators, the results could — with no loss to the integrity of the concept — be entirely different. The next set of collaborators might even include you.

The interior of the City Gallery was described to me as “a cross between a visit to a children’s museum and a labyrinth.” Rows of colorful oblong “carts” presented gifts that visitors were free to appropriate. A great tree of Indigo occupied the center space. (Think Yggdrasil, the mythological Norse world tree, in indigo blue.) Overhead hung a mammoth illustrative cloth piece, batiqued by Arianne King Comer and embroidered by members of the Arpan Cooperative of India. The Arpan women were also featured in a video installation. Omari Fox offered spoken-word poetry. It was a show of circles: A sewing circle; a table circle (a sitting table incised with a world map); a hip-hop circle. In keeping with the themes of water and shelter, Nigerian-born Marcia Kure displayed a giant walk-in burka decorated to resemble a teenage girl’s private room, housing diary entries and assorted memorabilia from student assistants. The students of the Clemson Architecture Center of South Carolina designed a drip-dropping “waterfall” illustrating the architectural principles of “phreatic shift.” (The plop-plop persisted throughout the four-hour opening.) Films from earlier aspects of the ongoing gift exchange project filled the residual space. Outside, Rajni Shah’s assistants investigated random reactions to “gift” dollar bills. The floor plan was laid out less for the interest of the lone aesthetic eye than for the benefit of a sizeable crowd to roam and continually stumble upon new curiosities. There were big multimedia pieces as well as little novelties for the ambling senses. It was an art forest.

Did the crowd see the connections between the parts? The distinct approaches to themes of water and shelter? How the drip-dropping water fountain was an echoing reminder of the pulse of life? And the environmental necessities of living? How the indigo tree represented the protective shade of homely trees of the South? How the repressive burka was reinterpreted as a symbolic shelter? How the participation of a group of oppressed women of India and a South Carolina hip-hop team represented sites of collective communal resistance? Did the crowd understand the critique of exchange value? The conflict between gift-exchange economics and the new global economy? Did they make the connection that the stools were ironic dollar bills? (These ideas were spelled out more literally in the accompanying catalogue, if visitors delved so far. The catalogue was nontraditional too, by the way. It was held together by binders, like a school notebook, so that new pages and sections could be continually added. To displace a dominant narrative and a hegemonic format, the catalogue essays were presented simultaneously with readers’ responses/critiques/marginalia.)

My satisfaction with the opening was based upon my perception of what the crowd did perceive. Let me verify my impressions in the light of the quote cited earlier, written by an observer. “The art could be seen physically of course, but there was also the art being constructed out of invisible connections between people as they interacted.” Why so? Partly because the project was like a map that demanded that viewers assist one another in coordinating points. The Future Is on the Table was intentionally overabundant. It was crammed so full that the materials spilled beyond the walls of the main space. Parts of the show were exhibited in “rival” exhibition spaces, namely Charleston’s stodgy Gibbes Museum of Art and the nearby North Charleston Cultural Art Center. The accompanying lectures and public discussions were held in diverse venues such as the College of Charleston and the downtown Redux Contemporary Art Center. It was often remarked in the days following the opening that The Future Is on the Table was the first Charleston show in which so many local venues worked together. The frequency with which the remark was made reveals something about the show’s influence on the crowd — and the crowd’s reluctant acknowledgement of the state of affairs in Charleston. Isn’t a cooperative attitude the first step towards a humanized agenda? A meaningful invitation? Why shouldn’t liberal, idealistic art venues blend their audiences? Especially if the results are (like the Waterfront opening) both educational and fun? Rather than extolling the gain when “invisible connections” are formed, why don’t we lament their routine absence? Without heavy-handedness, by show rather than tell, the project raised the bar for a potential conversation about audience diversity. It put the issue on the table.

The project linked communities beyond the shores of Charleston and thereby commented on the cross-cultural currents woefully lacking inside Charleston. The opening was preceded by sufficient dialogue and groundwork development, so that when the representatives of international and local communities came together it wasn’t merely in a photo-opportunity setting, characterized by colorful props and politesse. The communion occurred against a backdrop of thoughtful art pieces that expressed questions and formulated challenges. It was also an environment that invited spectators to, in turn, formulate their own answers — via artistic expression. The audience understood that the project was a challenge and an invitation. The challenge was to the homogenizing tendencies of globalization — with a knowing wink at the gentrification of Charleston.

Every passing year Charleston becomes less affordable for anyone but its wealthiest and savviest residents. The young tend to show the most willingness to toil to maintain appearances. Every year downtown Charleston becomes flashier, trendier, costlier and younger. Every three or four years a large swath of the city evaporates — another working-class community falls to the tide of “development.”

Longitude 35/Navigating Home and The Future Is on the Table tried their best to inculcate the city with other sets of values, but aren’t those the values art administrators everywhere give lip service to? I certainly hope outreach coordinators and directors of programming were taking notes. When I think back, comparing Longitude 35/Navigating Home and The Future Is on the Table, I would pinpoint the primary difference in the “feel” of the respective projects. The Longitude 35/Navigating Home performance felt staged and administrated. The Future Is on the Table’s opening day felt spontaneous. Musical. Carnivalesque.

It was both a serious occasion and a spontaneous joy that was followed by at least two forum discussions, examining the issues raised. I don’t mean to suggest that the art was merely a carrot to bring Charlestonians to the forums. Artists think in terms of creative expression. The art represented the most complete account of the participants’ emotions, intuitions and convictions. The forums were a refinement, a comment upon gestures of personal expression for purposes of clarification, group discussion and collective activity. The forums were less well-attended than the opening day. Given the topics (globalization, art practice, the Global South, Western values and the Islamic burka, gentrification and gift exchanges) the attrition was no surprise. One of the forums drew 50 people. This is an accomplishment in Charleston — a city where the social lines are so broken that at the height of the Iraq War an anti-war rally will draw 10 to 12 demonstrators.

To judge by the Charleston response, The Future Is on the Table’s gift-exchange project beguiled by using the logic of metaphor. How apropos for the city. Gift exchanges seal bonds. They enhance shared values. They imply potential new beginnings. The metaphor allowed Charlestonians to enter into a sensitive conversation in individual (and perhaps safe) ways, interpreting the show as having universal, international or specifically local connotations. The opening brought the world to your own backyard, if that was how you approached the show, or it transformed your backyard into a microcosm of the world. A group centered around the South Carolina membership of Alternate ROOTS has made plans to sustain The Future Is on the Table’s concept by initiating guerilla gift projects about town – accessible and unpretentious art happenings that encourage and will hopefully solicit responses. If that happens, then in gentrified Charleston (as in the Native American cultures of centuries past) gifts will continue to circulate.

Darryl Lorenzo Wellington is a poet and social critic. His writing often appears in Dissent.

Notes
Dancer Aurore Gruel performed with the following musicians: Jason Brogan, Bill Carson, Nathan Koci, Sam Sfirri and Ron Wiltrout from The New Music Collective and Hazel Ketchum from The Hungry Monks. Gwylène Gallimard and Jean-Marie Mauclet were invited to do a presentation about The Future Is on the Table at Columbia College Chicago in 2008.

Home

About CAN

APInews

Reading Room

Resources

Forums

Site Map

What's New

Search Site

Exchanging Gifts in Charleston, South Carolina

Comments

Home About CAN Welcome About CAN Community Arts 101 Contact Us APInews APInews Conferences/Events Reading Room Essays Special Projects Bridge Conversations Making Exact Change The CAN Report The Citizen Artist Performing Communities Everybody Say Hallelujah Connecting Californians Spirit of the Northwest The ROOTS Reader Links Page Resources Bookstore CANuniversity Community Arts 101 Community Arts Perspectives Cross-Sector Resources Places to Study Studies and Statistics Weblogs CANblog Guest Blogs CAN Blognet CANtv Forums Forums Home Conversations Opportunities Special Conversations Site Map What's New Search Site