Hey ADAers, Great to meet a lot of you on the weekend at the Auckland Mesh Cities symposium. Had some great conversations and saw some really interesting work.
The 'Engaging Publics' conference at the AAG was on at the same time and the topics of community and socially engaged art came up a lot of the weekend. So I thought it was worthwhile to clarify a few of my critiques of it, and mention some of the ideas which have been kicking around for a few years in the UK especially but perhaps not so much in Aotearoa. Very simplified, the process goes something like this: 1. Work is done in the community. If this was simple community or social work with the goal of connecting with people or creating community, then the process would stop there, but because this is an arts project, we move on to the next step... 2. This project is converted to cultural capital by presenting it in an arts context. As I mentioned at the conference and reiterated by Bishop below, the 'proof' of successful art is often done with statistics around participation rates or anecdotes about meaningful conversations, the same kinds of metrics that governments use. In many ways, it's irrelevant whether the content of this project is critical of current social or political conditions. Indeed, as the popularity of Banksy's work attests to, this 'counter cultural' stance can often be the most effective in creating significant cultural capital. 3. This cultural capital is distributed and reconverted to financial capital. Similar to intellectual property or cognitive capital, this cultural capital enriches not just the artist but her surrounding network of cultural, civic and business institutions. This can then be capitalized on by a range of industries, the first of which are tourism boards and city councils, cashing in on their locations as vibrant, culturally rich areas unique from the cookie-cutter homogeneity of globalized spaces. 4. This financial capital amplifies the pressures on any kind of community via typical neoliberal operations. The familiar processes of gentrification are amplified, landlords increasing rent with demand and property developers producing spaces more suited for consumers higher on the socioeconomic spectrum. As Jonathan Crary has noted, these neoliberal pressures are towards individualization and atomisation, obliterating any kind of meaningful communality. And as Zygmunt Bauman has shown, this extends to architecture and civic space, replacing for example, public squares with the quasi-public shopping mall and neighbourhoods with gated communities. Obviously, this is not a rapid process with any beginning or end, but more a series of subtle transformations over a range of time frames. To be clear, this is not an attack on community or socially engaged arts as such. Instead, I think we simply need to be very aware of how these art forms are instrumentalised and co-opted, and clear about what our intentions are and what other 'stakeholders' intentions are. Despite the glut of mediocre public art projects, I still believe public and community art holds a lot of potential. This is not because it is de-facto more public or democratic than the 'elitist' white cube. As Felix Gonzales-Torres commented, accessibility doesn't equate to public engagement. Instead, public art is simply a different form, with different considerations, which has yet to be fully explored and investigated. Like Bishop, I'm interested in an uneasy public art which can't function as aspirational model, the work of Christoph Schlingensief being a prime example of this approach. I've included a couple quotes below, with links to the full texts. The problem is that neoliberal governments also instrumentalise art for social ends, privileging participatory art as away to provide homeopathic solutions to problems that are systemic. Socially participatory art often serves to fulfil these government agendas for ‘social inclusion’ (ie compulsory participation in a consumer society), even though its rhetoric is ostensibly oppositional. Both camps spurn a framework for accounting for these gestures as art: the artists because they tend to view artistic questions as elitist and synonymous with privilege; governments (ie cultural policy makers) because it is easier to deal with art quantitatively (ie as a matter of statistics - who participates, how many etc) than qualitatively. -Claire Bishop https://www.academia.edu/771895/On_participatory_art_Interview_with_Claire_Bishop Even putting aside the exploitation of the writer/artist: we have still not reached a point where we critically analyze whether or not an art/social justice project is actually left/radical/progressive; we simply assume it to be so. Art/ social justice projects are well intentioned and some are insightful, but the politics of these works rarely does much to challenge the status quo. Instead, the overwhelming message is usually that certain systems of oppression, like racism, sexism, and homophobia, are bad. There is little consideration given to a more nuanced and more devastating analysis of the ideological forces and the economic inequality that keeps those systems alive. -Yasmin Nair http://www.yasminnair.net/content/make-art-change-world-starve-fallacy-art-social-justice-%E2%80%93-part-i Within a relatively small country like New Zealand its often difficult to be critical because everyone is somehow linked and the arts scene has external pressures as it is. But I think it's important to have these conversations, not as a way to knock others down, but as a way to push our practices forward. Simply put, to make better work. best, Luke lukemunn.com twitter:@lukemunn
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