A Prism, a Urinal, a Wall and a Boat: Some Thoughts on Community Art

A Prism, a Urinal, a Wall and a Boat: Some Thoughts on Community Art

(Published in Surface and Symbol, November, 1999.)

Community art is coming up roses. Until very recently viewed contemptuously by the dominant institutions of the art world as not much more than face painting for children, it’s getting a face lift itself, entering the domain of theory, curation, debate and the benchmark of arrival, controversy. Community art is also entering the political arena, where the left accuses if of selling out the right, the right wants to appropriate it to justify “community standards” (an excuse to de-fund and censor “high” or “pure” art) and everyone means something different whenever the phrase comes up in polite or impolite conversation.

All this attention and definitional imprecision signals, I believe, a shift in the conceptualization of art itself, at least in the context of arty history and practices in the industrialized west.

I always feel a need to stress that if community art means the re-marriage of two entities, the artist and the community, then there must have at one time have been a divorce. In much of the rest of the world, the divorce never happened. The stereotype of the artist as lonely outsider, starving in a garret, whose prime function is to epater le bourgeois, is an ethnocentric and historically constructed one, prevalent in the West for a brief 300 years or so. In other cultures, the artist has performed other roles: the one in a community who expresses the will, the desire and the suffering of that community; or the one with esoteric knowledge the community supports and reveres; the one who creates history through the re-enactment of narrative; or simply the one who makes the shared public space more livable by making it beautiful.

In the last twenty years in Europe and Australia, and the last five in Canada, these ways of understanding the function of the artist are being re-examined. Community art practices are making their way into the institutional art world, and the art world itself is generating some of these practices. (Although most of my references here are to visual art, analogies can be drawn with other art forms, especially theatre and dance, but also writing, videography, new media, etc.).

In the seventeenth century, Sir Isaac Newton proved, using a prism he’d bought as a toy at a country market, that white light could be refracted into seven colours. This revelatory “experimentum cruces” was demonstrated all over Europe to astonished commoners and heads of state. Newton’s discovery sent a shudder through the soul of painting that was to last a few hundred years. The visible wold was no longer WYSIWYG, as the software interface designers say. What you see isn’t what you get, and thus painting is not representing a fixed reality. The river of art history both changed course and branched out into many different directions, giving rise to the tropes of high modernism. Painting, like science, was henceforth to be involved in questioning the surface of the visible world, the nature of its representation and eventually the nature of light (impressionism) and perception itself (cubism). Formal experimentation, the eschewing of convention, became the modus operandi of art, the quest for the essential formal nature of each medium (the utterance and gesture of theatre; minimalism in painting; experiments with concrete, imagist and sound poetry). The river forked into “art for art’s sake” and “art for everything else’s sake”, art as a means of social change. Interesting, though, that abstraction made claims for art that went beyond art. Kandinsky, for example, believed that abstract art was a universal language of pure colour that could potentially unite mankind. The idea that “everyone’s an artist” was proclaimed, although modernism came to be defined by the canonical (male) “geniuses” whose prodigious output defined the various art movements of the last century.

Which is to say, the two most important regulatory ideas of community art, that art can be a means of social change, and that everyone’s an artist, have been current for at least 100 years.

It was all up for grabs. Then one day, a gesture both inevitable and utterly surprising: Marcel Duchamp turned a urinal upside down, called it “Fountain”: and entered it in an unjuried show of art at the Armoury in New York. The gesture was meant t o shock andit succeeded. It was “avant garde”, also ironic, satirical and irreverent. Duchamp’s readymades said, this is art because I’m an artist and I say it’s art. Art is about choosing, not about making. It’s about naming, nominating. Duchamp made the urinal a fountain and a gauntlet, and we’re still talking about it. “Fountain” introduced an era of fragmentation, pastiche, quotations, appropriation and popular culture, aka postmodernism. It desacralized art and challenged the authority of the institutions of the art world: museums, art schools and academia. The year was 1913.

Fast forward, 1981. Artist Richard Serra installed Tilted Arc, a 120 foot long, 12-foot high, 73 ton curve of welded steel, at federal Plaza in downtown Manhattan. Office workers claimed it cut off sunlight and their view; Serra sued the state of New York for $30 million (he lost). About 1300 petitions were signed by people who worked in the area; the art world supported Serra, claiming that his work was being censored. In 1989, Tilted Arc was removed. The controversy was a flashpoint for debates about the relationship between art and everyone else. Were the office workers philistines whose opposition suppressed freedom of expression? Does art have are responsibility to its audience? Is there a difference between art in a gallery and in a public place?

Art for whom? By whom? Who calls the shots?

In the same year, 1981, an artist named Mierle Laderman Ukeles became artist in residence for the New York City sanitation department. For one year she went around the city and shook hands with each of 10,000 sanitation workers. Each time she shook hands, she said, “Thank you for keeping New York City alive”.* This is another way to think about public art.

Last spring, at the height of the most recent war in the Balkans, an artists’ collective named Wochenklausur (“Weeks of retreat”) was chosen to represent Austria at the 48th Venice Biennale. In the seven years of its existence, Wochenclausur has not produced a single art object. Instead they engage in what they call “social intervention art”. Operating from within the established art world, they are invited into museums where they set up an office and begin to research the needs of the community. In Vienna, they were able to provide a mobile health unit for homeless people, still in operation; in Linz, they founded a recycling cooperative to provide jobs and help the environment; in Zurich, they organized a shelter for drug addicted prostitutes. They achieved this last project by inviting groups of politicians, service providers for drug abusers, and drug addicts themselves to take a boat ride on Lake Constance for five hours. People whose public positions perhaps impelled them to take rigid stands on the question of drugs had the opportunity to discuss the problem with no interference, no media and not even the Wochenklausur artists present. In Venice, they worked with an aid agency to set up language schools for children who were displaced and living in villages in Kosovo. They held a lottery at the Biennale to raise funds for the project.

According to the group’s spokesman Wolfgang Zinggl, “The…potential to manipulate social circumstances is a practice of art just as valid as the manipulation of traditional materials.” The work of Wochenklause raises questions about the nature of art and the role of the artist in society. How is their work different form that done by social service agencies? Are they merely providing bandaids for social problems when they could be using their privileged status to ask deeper questions about society’s ills? (Why are there homeless in the first place?) Can they really be called artists? Are they building art careers and reputations on the backs of the disadvantaged people they claim to help? What’s more important, changing the world or making art? Can they be compared? Are they the same thing?

My own and many others’ community art practice involves collaboration and participatory art making in a variety of mediums. It offers an opportunity to tell our stories, to risk self-exposure in a respectful context. The philosopher Hannah Arendt believed that the antidote to totalitarianism was just this ability of narration, of speaking ourselves through and into the act of creation, of becoming visible in the social and political space we make together. As co-creators of our own stories and the artifacts which re-enact and embody them within the polis, we have an opportunity, each time, to begin, to begin again.

*Suzi Gablik, The Reenchantment of Art, Thames and Hudson, 1991.

http://wochenklausur.t0.or.at/