by John Cloud Kaiser
Spring 2006
Abstract
This report examines the history and current field of Community Based interactive and collaborative public art, and quantitatively and qualitatively tests a participation based public art project, arguing that other projects could achieve more meaningful and empowering participation by incorporating a participation based approach into their work. This report focuses on the participation based approach’s ability to change the public artist’s role into that of democratic participant, making possible new modes of public dialogue by creating and implementing interactive projects that reach out and involve public participation in the creation of collaborative art pieces.
Introduction
The field of community based public art is one that has come into being over the past three decades. There is a growing interest, especially in public cultural institutions and organizations, in the topics of interactive and collaborative community based public art because many are seeking ways to bring an understanding of abstract and nonrepresentational art to the general public outside of the insular “art world”.
Public art is generally defined as art pieces that exist outside of the museum. Traditionally, public art has existed in the form of public sculptures such as statues in parks. In the second part of this century, public art began to include large abstract sculptures displayed in public parks and plazas; art placed in the public. Community Based Public art intends to take the concept of public art a step further, by actually creating the art with the intention to best serve the site it will be displayed within in, and that site’s community. Instead of just dropping off a confusing sculpture in a park, community based artists try to create their art in such a way that it actually engages the community, involving, educating, and empowering them in a meaningful relationship with the art piece. Community based projects are created to be site specific, to meet the needs of the community the art is publicly displayed within, and in the most effective cases, to involve the community in actually participating in creating the art piece.
This paper examines first, the field of community based public art and the significance of it’s goal of “democratizing art” through involving the greater public in participating with art. As stated by Joshua Taylor, previous director of the National Collection of Fine Arts at the Smithsonian Institution community based art creates “an elite experience for everyone” (Zolberg, 1994, p.49). It is shown that art institutions such as the Smithsonian, experts, and artists across the field, agree that opening up the mysterious yet empowering experience of art to the general public are the goals of community-based public art. Secondly, a variety of community based art projects across the field are examined and it is argued that their successes and shortcomings with “democratizing art” and gaining meaningful and empowering public participation with art, are based on how well their projects truly incorporate a participation based approach. In order to further show the importance of the participation based approach to community based art, a participation based public art project was enacted and tested. This was a pilot test, in which data was gathered through both quantitative questionnaires and qualitative ethnography, and triangulated in order to provide analysis that shows the success of the project and the importance of doing further research. This community based art project engaged the public in adding creatively to a public, participatory, collaborative art piece, conceived and hosted by the author’s art collective, Free Style Arts.
Free Style Arts creates community based public art projects which utilize a participation based approach. A participation based approach to art is one in which the context of the art piece is created by the artist with the intention and strategy of getting the public to participate in freely creating the content of an art piece. The artistry of this approach involves balancing the goal of successfully generating wide participation in the project, with the goal of having the participation offer as meaningful an experience with art as possible, for the participant. This approach intends to achieve through art what Bertolt Brecht hoped for when he stated in 1932, “the finest possible communication apparatus in public life… would be if it knew how to receive as well as transmit, how to let the listener speak as well as hear, how to bring him into a relationship, instead of isolating him.” (1932, p. 52)
The piece being tested consists of a context (large blank canvases), presented to the public in a public space (artists wear large blank canvases on the front and back of their bodies, like an old sandwich board advertisements, and stand on a busy sidewalk), in which the public is invited to creatively interact with the context, creating a collaborative art piece (ex. passersby are assertively invited by the wearer of the canvas, to choose a paintbrush from the cups attached to the canvas and paint whatever they wanted on the canvases). When the piece is “done” it becomes only a documentation, because it is only when the piece is being interacted with, that it is on display as art.
Like most community based artists, this paper works within assumptions and limitations of the conceptual framework of Post-structuralism, in that this study starts from the standpoint that each person interprets language differently because of their own unique perception. Because this study intends to decentralize control over the public perception, discourse, and control of art, the goal of this study is like Foucault’s, “an insurrection against the centralizing power effects that are bound up with the institutionalization and workings of any scientific discourse organized in a society such as ours.”(1976 ,p. 9). Post-structuralist Brenda Marshall states, “discourse is the combination of a practice and a mode or structure of speaking” (1992, p. 99). This study starts from the standpoint that to democratize discourse one must engage in democratizing the mode and structure art is represented and perceived within, in order to spread and instill in the public the interpretive abilities necessary for meaningful discourse. This study argues that the mode or structure an art piece is represented and perceived within can be democratized by altering its structure so that it invites the public viewer/perceiver of the art piece to directly participate in the creation of the art they are viewing by adding to it. Miwon Kwon (2000) emphasizes the importance of art projects which have “engaged the ‘politics of representation,’ self reflexively incorporating within the work an acknowledgment of, and critique of, uneven power relations enacted by and through representation.” (p. 76)
Community Based Public Art
The field of Community Based Public art has taken on many titles, such as Interventionist, Dialogical, Site Specific, collaborative, and interactive. The goals of this kind of public art is to democratize art by involving the public in participation with art experiences. The term community-based public art is used here to include all of these artists who, responding to the critique of the museum context, create art projects that intend to involve the general public in participation with art experiences at public “sites”.
In “Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art,” Grant Kester’s (2004) definition of a socially engaged art practice is one in which the aesthetic experience is constructed so as to challenge conventional social perceptions, through non-object based artistic practice that is more concerned with achieving communication and praxis through artful dialogue. Public site specific art theorist Miwon Kwon (1997), defines this kind of art as intending, through making art public, to involve the public more in participation with art experiences, stating, “a dominant drive of site oriented practices today is the pursuit of a more intense engagement with the outside world and everyday life- a critique of culture that is inclusive of non-art spaces, non-art institutions and non-art issues (blurring the division between art and non-art)” (p.91). William Cleveland, founder of The Center for the Study of Art and Community, describes what he calls Arts Based Community Development as “Arts centered activity that contributes to the sustained advancement of human dignity, health, and/or productivity within a community. (2004, p. 6) Curator Nato Thompson (2001), in “Art as Social Catalyst” states, “All of these socially experimental strands share transgressive elements that could be defined as the privileging of discourse, a skepticism of the totalizing and alienating tendencies of exhibitions,an implicit interest in democratic structures, a continual effort to be relevant in everyday life, and a steadfast concentration on participation.” (p. 43)
The Criticism of Art Museums
Since Napoleon turned the Louvre’ into a public art museum 200 years ago, the public museum has existed with the purpose of providing experiences with the new advancements in culture to all of the public, not just the elite. The Smithsonian Museum was founded by Congress in 1846 as “an establishment for the increase and diffusion of knowledge among men.”(Protzman, 2005, p.58). Critical Theorist Jurgen Habermas describes the immense importance and purpose of maintaining taxpayer funded public programs that uphold the public sphere. “A sphere which mediates between society and state, in which the public organizes itself as the bearer of public opinion, accords with the principle of the public sphere- that principle of public information which once had to be fought for against the arcane policies of monarchies and which since that time has made possible the democratic control of state activities.” (Habermas, 1989, p. 137)
Over the past three decades art museums have been criticized for not successfully reaching out to the general public. The criticism focuses on the fact that art museums are too threatening to those with lesser education, because viewing art normally requires an “educated eye”. These criticisms therefore conclude that art museums actually still only cater to the educated elite. Without specific education, the meaning of an art piece is not comprehensible and therefore the art becomes intimidating and off-putting. According to theorists Bourdieu and Darbel (1990):
When the message exceeds the limits of the observers apprehension, he or she does not grasp the ‘intention’ and loses interest in what he or she sees as a riot of colors without rhyme or reason, a play of useless patches of color. In other words, faced with a message that is too rich, or as the information theory says, ‘overwhelming’, the visitor feels drowned and does not linger. Works of art only exist for those who have means of appropriating them, that is, of deciphering them. (p.38-39)
Although, the doors of the museum are open to all, the museum environment is actually threatening to most of the general public, therefore reproducing the hierarchical social class structure of society. “If the love of art is the clear mark of the chosen, separating, by an invisible and insuperable barrier, those who are touched by it from those who have not received it’s grace… museums betray their true function, which is to reinforce for some the feeling of belonging and for others the feeling of exclusion.” (Bourdieu and Darbel, 1990, p.38)
Art Museums Respond to Criticism by Supporting Community Based Public Art
As is seen in the Smithsonian’s interest in “democratizing art”, many public art museums and organizations have taken these criticisms seriously and intend to better engage and involve the general public in participation with art. This means they want to support community based public art projects. Theorist Irene Winter (1991) states, “If the museum claims as one of its goals the understanding of another culture, time, or place, then the nature of the contextual must enter into its discourses on acquisition and exhibition policy”. (p. 38)
Art Museums find community based art to be important as a means of better involving those outside of the museum, and as a way to reveal how art is interpreted differently when presented in varying contexts outside the museum. The language of exhibition policy and curation is changing to incorporate community based art. Curator and critic Nicholas Bouriaud describes the practice of making art that references and dialogues with it’s environment and community, as relational aesthetics; “artistic practice considering the ensemble of human relationships and their social context as a starting point- instead of an autonomous and private symbolic space.” (1998, p.14) No longer is art seen as separate from the environment it is displayed within. Community based art is also becoming described as an effective way to question the relationship between art institutions and their control over how art is perceived by the general public and culture of a community. Curator Okwui Enwezor, describing the goals of Documenta XI, writes that the exhibition’s organizers wish to highlight “the relationship between subjectivity and agency, between artistic practice and intellectual discourse, and between institutions and social spaces, all of which are intimately connected to the ways we conceive of notions such as civil society and citizenship.” (Thompson, p. 42, 2001)
The Art Historical Development of Community Based Art
The MassMoCA, with it’s recent show, “The Interventionists”, a display of public artists’ work (2004), showed it’s intention to accomplish community based art’s goal of involving the public more in art by curating art that exists outside of the institution, and to place community-based public art into the dialogue of art history. Gregory Sholette writes about the connection of community based art to the historic tradition of the avant-garde in the show’s accompanying catalogue, “The most striking similarity between the artists in this exhibition and the historic avant-garde is a mutual interest in temporal systems of organization and public circulation rather than the traditional practice of creating discrete, fixed art objects.” (Sholette, 2004, p.135) He places community based artists into the history of the critique on the art object within the museum space, which began with the anti-art practices of the Dadaists and Futurists in the early part of the 20th century, grew with the morphable games and projects of the Situationists and Fluxus artists in the mid part of the century, and continued with the stripping down of context by the conceptualists and minimalists in the 1960’s and 70’s. According to “The Interventionists” co-curator Thompson (2001), art from the 1960’s and 70’s such as Joseph Beuys’ Social Sculptures and Alan Kaprow’s Happenings, transcended the art object by including their environment and audience into the art making process, because, “both, envisioned and developed participatory spaces that included art, artists, pedagogy and play.” (p.43)
Over the past 40 years, the re-examination of the art object and it’s relationship to the environment it is displayed within, is due to rising awareness among artists that an art pieces context effects the way that it is perceived. Community Based Art is at the forefront of today’s examination of the effect of context on art and art on context, but it’s developments were built on the ideas and discoveries of earlier artists. Conceptual and New Media artists of the late 60’s and early 70’s were especially innovative in reevaluating the art object in relation to it’s context and the accompanying perceptual biases. These artists such as Bruce Nauman, Dennis Oppenheim, Yvonne Reiner, Trisha Brown, Alan Kaprow, and Yoko Ono, and Marina Abromovic, as well as the less performanced-based work of Richard Serra, Nancy Holt, and Sol LeWitt, and others, were proposing the idea that the perception of the art object was always inherently related to it’s context, and could appear differently depending on where or how it was viewed.
Up until then, artists had created works of art that were all meant to be displayed in the museum or gallery context, without considering that the environment their work was displayed in effected how their art object was perceived. They didn’t take context into account. Would an art piece look the same on the walls of a mud hut as it would in the Louvre? Theorists like Marshall McLuhan in the new field of “the Media” were also engaged with many of the same questions of context, making statements like, “The Medium is the Message”, meaning that the context a message exists within overrides and changes the content of the message.
Many artists in the Conceptual and Minimalist movements in the 60’s and 70’s felt that the artist’s and the audience’s own perception should be seen as part of the context that their art was perceived within. According to writer Rosalind Krauss the issue of context these artists were critiquing was the idea that “the notion of a medium (context) contains the concept of an object state, separate from the artist’s own being, through which his intentions must pass” (1976, p. 53). Many of these artists’ such as Alan Kaprow and Yoko Ono intended to become, along with their audience, literally part of the context for their art, allowing for improvisation and varying outcomes.
Some of these artists’ work, such as that of Bruce Nauman, Vitto Aconchi, and Marina Abromovic took the investigation of art and context one step further to discover how the body itself in space was a medium for art. How was the artist, him or herself, an element of context? Critic Rose Lee Goldberg (1975) agrees that the art of these body artists was directly about examining the body of the artist themself as an element of context stating that, “Rather than simply delineating the limits of spaces, ‘space as praxis’ extends our perception of space itself and body space. For it is in space that we feel these art propositions” (1975, p.131)
Group Material evolved the investigation of the human and environmental context’s effect on art, in 1981 with their “Peoples Choice” show, which consisted of art brought to the gallery by the public community in New York’s Lower East Side. All of these artists dug deeper into the issue of art and context by stating the need for art to be made public and accessible. They made known the need for community based art, by pointing out the limitations created by contexts such as a museum and the advantages resulting from creative expression.
Public artists of today, instead of continuing the direct institutional criticism are using the knowledge of contexts that thinkers of the last century have brought to light, in order to put the aspects of those discoveries that are meaningful to the general public into action by reaching outside of the museum context with new approaches. Community based artists are not content with creating critiques which are only heard by those educated in the arts. Instead community based art projects intend to respond to previous critiques by bringing art experiences directly to the public, in ways the public can engage with, such organizing a public mural created by community members, instead of a doing painting by an individual artist presented in a museum. Sholette writes that contemporary community-based art’s approach is new and revolutionary in an art historical sense because it centers on encountering the public space outside of a gallery or museum. He writes that “significantly, this indifference towards the valuable artwork is different from that of Conceptual Art in the 1960s and 1970s since it is neither calculated to be an end in itself nor intended to function as a critique of art’s institutional circumstances. Instead this work turns outward and away from the institutional art world.” (Sholette, 2004, p.135)
Now, community-based public art projects intending to engage the public in participation with art are supported by major institutions, happen frequently in many different public contexts, and influence other fields. Kwon states that:
“Contemporary site-oriented works occupy hotels, city streets, housing projects, prisons, schools, hospitals, churches zoos, supermarkets, etc. and infiltrate media spaces such as radio, newspapers, television, and the Internet. In addition to this spatial expansion, site oriented art is also informed by a broader range of disciplines, (i.e. anthropology, sociology, literary criticism, psychology , natural and cultural histories, architecture and urbanism, computer science, political theory) and sharply attuned to popular discourses (i.e. fashion, music, advertising, film, and television.” (Kwon, 1997, p. 92)
Community based artists create art that is in dialogue with it’s environment, including the physical space and the pre-existing perceptions of the inhabitants of that space, so it can be applied to almost any situation, increasing communication by involving art. When community-based public art projects do happen inside of a museum it is only to showcase projects that they have done outside the museum or to attempt to truly bring the public sphere into the museum.
Applying a Participation Approach to Community Based Public Art
Despite the field’s intentions to more fully involve public participation in art, the role of the community based public artist still retains the object based idea that art is a one-way conversation by an individual “expert” creator with a public audience. Curators of public art still think in terms of artmaking as an individual creation. Thompson states that even in public art, “it seems that the economy of the individual still haunts curatorial practice.” (2001, p.45) Because artists still embrace the traditional role of “the individual expressive artist” most community-based public art projects actually ask for very little public creative participation, and therefore
they encounter the public but at the same time unknowingly exclude the public, leaving the public observers mystified by the same demeaning codes that museums are criticized for and public art is intended to diminish. Dipti Desai states, “The proliferation of these commissioned community-based, collaborative works forces us to be reflexive about this institutionalized turn to ethnographic practices. Many famous artists now fly around the globe producing site-specific art in different locations and employ… pseudo-ethnography, as they do not engage the community in any real way” (2002, p. 308) Hal Foster critiques the actual public participation asked by most community-based art projects stating, “almost naturally the projects stray from collaboration to self fashioning, from a decentering of the artist as cultural authority to a remaking of the other in the neo-primitivist guise” (1999, p.197) In “on Photography” Susan Sontag (1978) described this kind of artist/documenter, who does not involve the subject in a participation with creating their own representation, as a “predator”. (p.48) Desai states that achieving participation in representation is already considered necessary for anthropologists and should be considered by community-based public artists, “we need to re-examine critically this trend in the art world of artists doing ethnography, which for the most part does not even begin to address, let alone critique, issues of ethnographic authority, participant-observation,… and other hallmarks of ethnographic methodology.” (2002, p. 308)
Bourdieu and Darbel, strengthen the argument for acknowledging and engaging creative viewer participation, by explaining that the viewer of an art piece always participates in it’s creation to some degree, “the history of the instruments
of perception of a work of art is the essential complement of
the history of the instruments of production of the work, inasmuch as the work of art is in a way created twice over, by the artist and by the spectator.” (1990, p.42)
Community based public art requires community participation in order to be successful, because it’s goal is to spread the experience of art to the public. Therefore, the more the public participates in the creation of art, the less alien it will feel, and all the more the art becomes “ours”, bringing the general public into a dialogue and building public comfort with art at the same time. Sholette describes the necessity of public participation in community-based public art, in order for art to be spread to the public, stating, “Its immaterial bias is not fixated on rejecting commodity fetishism, a near impossible objective, so much as it is focused on scattering art into the public sphere. In this sense the work ideally becomes property or experience of an unknown recipient. She or he is likely to be a non-art lay person carrying out the logic of the intervention without necessarily recognizing its artistic origins.” (2004, p. 136)
Many community based art projects, however, don’t really engage the public in meaningful dialogue because they don’t ask the public for the participation and collaboration required for real dialogue to take place. Kester explains that meaningful, collaborative, socially engaged art works are structured on processes of exchange and dialogue that unfold through time. He argues that dialogue is central to these art works and that they intend to “unfold through a process of performative interaction” (2004)
Examining the Use Of Participation in the Artwork Of Community Based Artists
Community-based public art’s goal centers around engaging the public in meaningful, collaborative, participation with art, in order to initiate dialogue. By actually involving the viewers in the dialogue, through including them as creators of the art, the viewers become empowered because their unique expression is given voice and they become familiar with the arts. This inclusion of the general public in dialogue through art, is what is meant by “democratizing art.” It is important to examine methods that more successfully accomplish these goals of community-based public art. A variety of approaches by community based public artists across the field are examined here. It is argued that their successes and shortcomings with “democratizing art” and gaining public participation in art are based on how well their projects truly incorporate a participation based approach. First, the works of certain community based artists who don’t include much viewer participation in their work, are critiqued as not effectively including the general public in dialogue through art. Secondly, the artwork of other community based artists who do, more effectively, include viewers in participation with the creation of the art, are described and analyzed.
Many artists describe the goals of their work in the terms of community-based public art, intending to involve their audience in a meaningful participation with art. However, rarely do they actually give up their control of the content and aesthetic to their public participants. One approach used by community-based artists is to create art projects with a certain public communities’ assistance such as seen in projects by artists such as Judy Baca, Tam Ochiai, the Critical Art Ensemble, and Cory Archangel. Although they are collaborative, interactive projects, the participants are actually given very little opportunity for creative input. Instead, they are more like workers, following instructions, helping the artist build the artists own creation. They interact with the work but not creatively. This type of art is reminiscent of the flux boxes created the Fluxus artists of the 1960’s and 70’s, in that the boxes existed as interactive art pieces that contained instructions for nonsensical actions that the viewer was to carry out, but didn’t ask for much creative participation, just the following of instructions.
In 1989 Judy Baca arrived in the small rural town of Guadalupe California. She invited young people to interview the townspeople about it’s history and used the disparate results to create a mural assisted by volunteers from Guadalupe. The town’s varying views of history brought up discussion amongst the townspeople. She states “I want to use public space to create a public voice for, and a public consciousness about people who are, in fact, the majority of the population but who are not represented in any visual way.” (Baca, 1998, p.1)
Baca involved the town in a dialogue, but through their participating in expressing their history, not their art. The community participated in the mural only through their answers to the interview questions. The artistry of the mural was still only Baca’s individual artistic representation of Guadalupe, since the people were just assisting her in her artistic depiction of the town’s history, and therefore did not entirely fulfill her goal of creating a public voice.
Political theorist and organizer Paulo Friere stated that the education and dialogue necessary for political equality and democracy, does not come so much from what is given to the public, but instead from the ways that the public are asked to participate. Friere states that public empowerment results from building the public’s confidence by asking for their help, because empowerment comes “from the levels in which the people perceive themselves, their relationships with others and with reality, because this is precisely what makes their knowledge.” (1990) The participation based art approach intends to engage the general public in actual creative participation with collaborative public expression as a means of building self confidence in themselves as capable public participants.
Baca’s project could more fully accomplish her goals of community empowerment by applying a participation based approach. This could be accomplished by asking the public to use their own material or materials provided by Baca to actually paint their own representation of their view of history on a collaborative mural. Baca could paint her view of history on the mural too. In this way the public would be truly participating in an art experience.
Artist Tam Ochiai’s tail (exercises in punctuation) presented through Team gallery this year in New York City, is the result of a rather unique collaboration between the artist and 32 children, ages 2 to twelve. Ochiai invited children from the Chelsea Recreation Center’s summer camp program to collaborate on his installation. These neighborhood children, most of whom have never had any interaction with the network of galleries, were armed with colored pencils. Ochiai handed out catalogues of his art and a number of his own drawings and sketches. The children were encouraged to “copy” Ochiai’s works onto the walls of the gallery. Ochiai stated in the show’s press release, “Some succeeded at the ‘task’ while others, insisting on their own originality, ‘failed.’” (TEAM, 2005, pg. 1)
Ochiai is bridging the relationship between the public and the private by bringing public members unfamiliar with art into an art context, and he is even critiquing the role of the art “expert” by having children draw his work on the gallery walls. However, by the very choice to not let the children draw their own pictures, he excludes the participants from creative participation and therefore also from meaningful public participation with art. A participation based approach could be applied to this project by having the participating children first draw sketches, then have them trade sketches, and finally have each child try to copy the other’s sketch onto the wall.
The Critical Art Ensemble (CAE), is a collective of five “tactical media artists” who created an installation “Free Range Grain” for “The Interventionists” show at MassMoCA (2004). Through the use of an on-site laboratory, CAE artists were there in person to test foods brought in by visitors for Genetically Modified organisms (GMOs). According to the CAE their approach, called Tactical Media, is “situational, ephemeral, and self terminating. It encourages the use of any media that will engage a particular sociopolitical context in order to create molecular interventions and semiotic shocks that contribute to the negation of the rising intensity of authoritarian culture.” (Sholette and Thompson, 2004, pg. 115)
The CAE describe their artwork as dialogic, and it does initiate public interaction and is conceived by a collective instead of an individual. However, the artwork asks for no creative response or interaction from their participants, just the delivery of foods, so the artwork is not involving the public in a dialogic experience with art, and therefore it is not truly creating dialogic interventions through art that CAE agrees are needed to negate authoritarian culture.
A participation based approach could be applied to “Free Range Grain” in order to involve participants in dialogue through art, by having them creatively express their reaction to the food tests done by the CAE, through the creation of a related collaborative art piece.
In 2003 Cory Arcangel, who’s work has been shown as part of the 2004 Biennial at The Whitney Museum of American Art, and the art collective Beige, collaborated to present a participatory video installation at Team gallery, . Arcangel and Beige hack Nintendo game chips and alter their contents. One work, Shoot Andy Warhol , is a working video game that can be played by visitors in the gallery. One gains points by shooting Warhol, but lose points if one accidentally shoots Colonel Sanders, the Pope or Flavor Flav.
This collectively conceived piece chose not critique the “gallery as context”. Instead they chose to utilize the variability allowed through the context of a video game, as a means of involving the public in participation with art. The work also reminds viewers that information technology has completely changed the traditional public forums for dialogue by expanding exponentially the amount of people that we can communicate with, the interfaces we communicate through, and the amount of information that we can relay. However, this art piece still does not ask the public to creatively participate. The participants go through the motions of playing a skewed video game, but they are not invited to creatively participate and therefore are in actuality excluded from participation.
Marshall McLuhan, one of the media’s earliest and most important pioneers and thinkers described how the contexts of information technology, especially in the media, heavily effect how we perceive the content presented to us. He predicted that as the media environment took over more and more of our lives, it would be the artists that could best navigate that multi-contextual terrain because of their ability to interpret the effects of context. Now, with the spread of the internet it is apparent that McLuhan’s predictions are becoming reality. A participatory approach to community based art intends to help spread art experiences to the public in order to allow everyone experience with what an artist’s approach is like, so that the public, too, can navigate diverse media contexts and thereby more accurately interpret media content as informed citizens.
Arcangel and Beige’s pieces could more effectively spread an understanding of the effects of Information Technology’s various contexts by incorporating a participation based approach, because the viewers would then be involved in creative, and therefore intuitive, participation. This could be done by having the actual rules and images of the video game itself made to be interactive as a medium for a collaborative digital art creation. In this way public participants more comfortably and effectively have an interaction and involvement with the art piece.
Another approach used by community-based artists to involve the public in participation with art experiences, is to build environments that intend to create public forums for dialogue through art. Artists such as Bonnie Sherk, The Art Of Change, e-xplo, William Pope.L and many others, create such environments that intend to create public forums for dialogue. However, although they do bring art to the public outside of the museum, these public art installations mainly only ask for the public to be viewers, not participants. Because these art pieces don’t include the general public in participation with making the art, they are not including the public in dialogue. Instead the art installation’s are just aliens in the public landscape. The installations, because they don’t ask for any artistic participation from the viewers, are just public one-way conversations. Only those members of the public who are already confident in expressing themselves through art, will be confident enough to utilize an art based public forum for dialogue while everyone else is left mystified. Most of the projects do offer corresponding workshops that do teach the public about art. However, the art pieces themselves have no built in elements that offer the general, uninitiated, public an experience with the language and coding of art. By creating a situation where only the art initiated can participate, and even they are unclear on the limited participation being asked of them, these projects reinforce the role of the artist as having individual control over representation and actually serve to make the non-art public feel unknowledgable and excluded from experiences with art. Public artist and writer Kristen Dufour describes the goals of this kind of public installation, stating, “emerging activities should be directed towards the local population, for example by introducing new models of sociality/communication and developing alternative public “meeting” spaces” (2002, p. 214) Dufour’s description reveals the element in their approach that they have overlooked, because by directing the activities “toward” the local population instead of “with” the local population, these artists are still forcing the divide between art and public.
Artist Bonnie Sherk creates site specific environments. Her first project was the Crossroads Community (The Farm) in San Francisco from 1974-1980, which led her art form to be that of creating public parks as site specific environments. Her Public Parks are described as personal landscapes for public community participation, such as a dead-end section of a freeway that for one day was covered with live turf and palm trees, and was occupied by a cow and Sherk herself. The art installations are described as becoming “an oasis in the desert” serving as a public community gathering space. According to Sherk what she is “looking for (is) a space where different kinds of artists and also non-artists could come together and break down some of the mythologies and prejudices between different genres, styles, and cultural forms” (1998, p.24)
Sherk’s Public Parks do bring the art space out into the public, bringing to life some of it’s most abandoned spaces, and they make themselves available to all of the public, however the Public Parks do not actually have any element of their structure which successfully reaches out to involve the public in participation with the site. Only private groups that are invited to the site for meeting and rehearsals actually participate with the space by using it as a site for artistic dialogue, but there is no understandable invitation offered to the public to participate in art experiences. At most the public visitor might stroll around the Public Park but not have any real art based experience, and therefore not experience Sherk’s goal of artists and non-artists coming together to break down mythologies and prejudices surrounding art and culture.
Sherk’s projects could incorporate a participation based approach in order to elicit creative public participation, by inviting the public visitors to the parks the opportunity to creatively add to the park it’s self, perhaps by offering each visitor a few flowers and inviting them to plant them where they choose, or by inviting the visitors to add to a collaborative art piece situated in the park.
The Art of Change is an art collective that creates public art installations that intend to function as public forums for dialogue through art. On their website they describe their project, “Future Town and Beyond” (2001-4) in Gravesend England as “a three year project working with people to explore their futures, through workshops, a website and outdoor mega-screen projections. Taking inspiration from the ancient Roman Forum, the goal of their art installations is to create “a hub of debate and interaction, a crucible of ‘citizenship’ and place of beauty - we are bringing this concept into the 21st Century through our ‘Global Town Square’ initiative.” (The Art of Change, 2004, p.3)
“Future Town and Beyond” did bring art out of the museum context and into the public and it involved, empowered, and educated members of the public who were motivated and confident enough to take part in the workshops. However, the project only involved members of the public in a creative public dialogue if they joined the groups that got to participate in the project’s video making workshops, thus somewhat reinforcing the concept of the art elite. The only physical manifestations of the art project that are made public are the large outdoor projections and those are at that point finished. Therefore, this project invited no participation on the part of the majority, non-art, public audience thus failing to fulfill Art of Change’s goal of creating a hub for public debate and interaction.
Political theorists Hardt and Negri investigate the ways that public forums for dialogue can be changed in order to allow for more democratic participation. Their conclusions help show how building the non-art public’s confidence in abstract communication is the next step in creating the public dialogue intended by the work of Sherk, and The Art of Change. Hardt and Negri’s recent groundbreaking books, “Empire” and “Multitude” describe our planet as one giant Empire, a new global order made up of “a new form of sovereignty” (Empire, 2001, p.32) consisting of corporations, global wide institutions, and other “command centers”. They perceive the challenges posed by Empire to upholding democracy and they conclude that the solution would be in the form of a communication system for the multitudinous public masses that is defined by it’s acceptance of diversity rather than for it’s commonalities. They state that the challenge for the multitude in this new era is “for the social multiplicity to manage to communicate and act in common while remaining internally different.”(Multitude, 2001, p. 86)
The participation based art approach begins to instill in the general public a comfort and confidence with using the art, the interpretive language of expression, because it builds artistic confidence and ability in each person it reaches. If offered gently, even if the experience is brief, an experience with a brand new language and freedom can be epiphinal. The more knowledge of art’s usefulness is spread to the general public, the more this artistic expressive and interpretive ability will enable the public to be conscious of the impact of the contextual on their statements. With a consciousness of the contextual, the public will also be more able to interpret the common meaning in all of the contextually diverse statements that bombard everyone from all angles in the media reality of today, making public dialogue more intuitive, empathetic, and intelligent.
E-Xplo, is an art collective that develops maps, routes, sound and film materials as reflections of a multifaceted investigation into location, context, social identity, landscape, and the public space of information. According to e-Xplo their goal is to develop “projects which engage a space and the people who inhabit it” (2003, p.2). Their piece “Domestic Disturbance; Fight or Flight; or Shelter” was exhibited as part of the Inside/Out Festival for New Art in Berlin. E-Xplo situated their work inside a bunker, where a 16mm film was shot and projected, composing a piece that used words, sounds, radio broadcasts, personal narrative and the images of the film. E-Xplo hoped to “take the viewer/listener to another site” and to allow the public the opportunity to fulfill, “the desire to create a vocabulary for oneself” (e-Xplo, 2003, p.6).
“Domestic Disturbance; Fight or Flight; or Shelter” did involve bringing art outside of the traditional museum setting in order to make it more public, and it captured the actions of the general public, however it didn’t ask for any real creative participation from the audience and therefore didn’t successfully accomplish it’s goal of creating “another site” that is truly public, because it repeated museums’ mistaken practice of excluding the general public from creative participation and dialogue with art. e-Xplo’s installation was more of a documentary they directed, about the public, and not so much an art piece where the viewing public was “engaged” in documenting themselves.
William Pope.L’s “Black Factory” (2004) is a roving public art installation, in the form of a large panel truck with fold out tables and shelves and even a giant inflatable igloo that can expand through a window into a museum or other indoor space. The truck and its fold out elements become display spaces for the objects that Pope.L collects from public participants around the country. On certain days he invites the public to participate by bringing in three to ten objects that speak of blackness. The objects are then either photographed, displayed in the inflatable igloo, or pulverized and recast as items such as rubber ducks, that are sold at the “Black Factory.” Pope.L explains that his piece is “aimed at anyone interested in in issues of what makes us different” (Sholette and Thompson, 2004, p. 36)
The “Black Factory” does indeed bring art into the public through its ability to rove through different public contexts and it does involve public participation. However, the piece does not ask for much creative public participation because very few people outside of the art world actually bring objects to the “Black Factory” and because the bringing of an object gives participants more of an experience with being a curator, than with being an artist. Pope takes the objects the viewers choose to bring, and as The Artist, he makes them into art. Although Pope.L’s goal is to reach those people effected by issues of difference, “The Black Factory”, by not engaging enough of the public in creative participation, does not successfully reach out to those in the public who have already been declared “different” from those in the art world, and therefore his art project continues to uphold that exclusionary relationship.
Although many community based artists have yet to apply a participation based approach to their art and role as an artist, there are those who do involve their viewers in participation with the creation of the art itself. The art pieces directed by artists such as Rirkrit Tiravanija, Suzan Lacy, and Tim Rollins more successfully democratize art, because they are created to include the public in creative participation. Therefore, their art does successfully involve the public in dialogue through art
In 2004 the Guggenheim Museum awarded the fifth biennial Hugo Boss Prize to Thai artist Rirkrit Tiravanija in recognition of his profound contribution to contemporary art. Since the early 1990s, Tiravanija has explored the aesthetic paradigm of interactivity. He has cooked and served food to his audiences, set up a recording studio in a museum, reconstructed his apartment inside a gallery for visitors’ use, corresponded via the Internet while on an American road trip with Thai students, and provided opportunities for numerous other everyday activities to occur within art spaces. Guggenheim curator Joan Young states, “Tiravanija is a catalyst; he creates situations in which visitors are invited to participate or perform. In turn, their shared experiences activate the artwork, giving it meaning and altering its form.” (Young, 2004, p. 2)
Tiravanija uses day to day systems for dialogue, such as a dinner party, to reach out and successfully gain participation in his heavily attended projects. The experience that the public participates in is one that blurs the line between what art and life, because the art project they are participating in is a non-art everyday experience like a party or a meal. It is important to draw attention to the functions of such community rituals, in order to show how collaboration and dialogue is natural to humans.
A critique of Tiravanija’s approach to obtaining participation is that, although his work reminds participants that art and life are connected, and that the rituals and frameworks of dialogue in life are an art form in and of themselves, the participants are only participating in going through the familiar motions of a party; chatting and eating. The participants did not use or learn any modes of expression beyond the familiar territory of talking and body language, so they did not learn any new modes or freedoms that would allow for more effective public dialogue and interpretation.
Suzanne Lacy is an internationally known artist whose work includes installations, video, and large-scale performances on social themes and urban issues. One of her best-known works to date is The Crystal Quilt (Minneapolis, 1987) a performance done with 430 participating older women, broadcast live on Public Television. During the nineties she worked with teams of artists and youth to create an ambitious series of performances, workshops, and installations on youth and public policy, documented by videos, local and national news broadcasts, and an NBC program.
Lacy successfully involves the public in participation by enlisting large quantities of people from the community into art groups that collaborate creatively in the creation of an art piece. The projects make clear to the public participants that they can be involved in an experience with art, and self expression, without mastering the exclusive art world. Lacy’s projects have used art to initiate dialogue between groups that usually can’t communicate because of stereotypes and prejudgement. A variety of her art projects have brought together local teens and police by having them collaborate on projects together. One project’s video, “Youth, Cops, and Video Tape” (Oakland, 1995) was found to be so important that it became used in actual police training and is still used today.
Tim Rollins, a member of Group Material in the early 80’s, went on to establish a serious artistic collaboration with a group of students he called the Kids Of Survival. Tim Rollins and K.O.S. have worked together collaboratively since the early 1980s when Rollins, a special ed teacher assigned to public school 52 in the South Bronx, established the Art and Knowledge workshop for students with learning disabilities. Out of this grew a collective art practice based on texts which the group studied together. Typically, pages from literary classics were laid on canvas to form a ground, then overpainted with imagery that had evolved through discussion as an embodiment of motifs and issues central to the given material. Since 1984, Rollins and K.O.S. have exhibited their works in museums and galleries around the world including the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Rollins, involved members of the local South Bronx community in a deep participation with creating art, by enlisting them into the K.O.S. None of the participants in the K.O.S. had previously had any art training and as members of a low socio-economic community they were not likely to have the time, money, or education that could bring them to become regular visitors to art museums. Through his trust and acceptance of their creative participation, Rollins empowered his participants, giving them artistic voice and the confidence to express themselves and better interpret the statements of others. Through art, the participants became able to enter into public dialogue as citizens.
In order to engender today’s public with effective abilities in communication and democratic dialogue, it is not enough anymore for community based public artists to just incorporate the concept of participation into artwork. Successfully obtaining and involving creative public participation needs to be considered central to a public art piece’s success. Public artists need to incorporate a participation based approach into their projects in order to change their role into that of team member, host, and democratic participant, creating and implementing interactive projects in public that successfully involve the large portion of people in the general public who rarely engage in the arts, in a participation with a meaningful and empowering experience with art. The more institutions and organizations support these kind of projects, the more they will see the public truly manifest.
Concluding Thoughts
Open and collaborative art making is revealed to actually be an intuitive language, because it is a natural way of self expression and empathy building between peoples, that transcends textual codes. As a mode of communication that conveys messages which are interpreted through intuition as opposed to intellect, open and collaborative artmaking allows dialogue between people that don’t speak the same language, or are trying to communicate with too large a population. This form of empathetic, intuitive communication can remove roadblocks that exist in many fields such as education, the media, and politics. Open and collaborative art making is shown to be an intuitive language that is incredibly meaningful for communicating an understanding between peoples, when textual communication is unable to do so. As this report has shown, theorists like McLuhan, Friere, Habermas, and Hardt and Negri, among others, allow us to see how, in terms of perception and representation, the context, not the content, is in charge of shaping the message. This means that “the medium is the message”, or in other words, that in order for language to be more representative, it’s actual structure must change, not just what is being said. These theorists explain that, accompanying our textual and numeric languages, a new system for communication must be created to serve the newly globalized world, which is filled with a tremendous variety of people, all communicating differently at the same time.
An approach to language must be developed that allows everyone to retain their individuality and complicated uniqueness, but at the same time also allows everyone to understand the basis of what each unique person is trying to communicate. This new manifestation of language is an approach where content must be interchangeable, understanding intuitive, and the context approachable, an approach to language that solves the question that Hannah Arendt asked in the 1950’s, “If the free development of each is the condition of the free development of all, what is it that is going to hold these freely developing individuals together.” (Garcia, 1998, p. 436) In this global, postmodern landscape it is the skill of interpretation, strengthened through art experiences, that allows citizens to figure out what the other is saying enough to come to consensus amid seeming communication overload. In “Tactical Media”, David Garcia (1998) finds that such an empathetic language or system has yet to be initiated, stating “no theorist of the modern has yet succeeded in building an effective theory of political community. We still have no true public realm, but only private activities displayed in the open.”(p. 436) The participation based art approach is a large step towards achieving an approach to language that will allow commonality and dialogue through interpretation, despite differences in expression and perception.
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