For next week we our readings are all about collaboration.
The first reading is a return to Pablo Helguera's Education for Socially Engaged Art, where we will read 2 chapters: Community & Collaboration. The pdf includes the whole book so just sift through to read those two chapters.
The second is a group conversation/interview between artists and art organizers who have a lot of experience working collaboratively in different ways.
Looking forward to talking about these with you all.
As one with a bit of a distaste for reading and writing I seem to exceed character limits left and right!
ReplyDeleteMy content can be found here: https://hsp2017psu.blogspot.com/2017/11/readings-week-7-michael.html
xoxo
m
Quotes:
ReplyDelete“This is the dark side of community-based practices - the reorganization of collaborative art practices into a kind of measurable service economy that’s based in social effect and urban development. The idea of community has become instrumentalized.” -Ashford
“It is crucial to protect the people in the community. An artist arrives, does provocative work, and then leaves the community to deal with the issues.” -Ewald
“He meant that his role in his work consisted not in telling his students what they didn’t know, but instead in helping them discover their own expertise and then decide for themselves what they needed to know. To simply provide them with information would, he felt, be patronising and would create a pattern of dependency.” -Helguera
Questions:
“For me, history defines a certain idea of authorship as shared, and the cult of biography offers another, more destructive one.” -Ashford
I would like clarification on this biography-history dynamic.
“Otherwise, like any reform within a bad system, it doesn’t mean much, if it doesn’t change things. Ongoing collaborations might work for a while, but the energy of new blood or different people is significant.” -Felshin
Is there a right/best way to go about authorship in the SEA practice? To what degree should an artist be visible or invisible? What are the ethics behind this? Is it possible that the instigating artist claims a certain amount of authorship in the beginning, but allows it to diminish over time as the project is further developed by others?
In what ways do SEA practitioners have to be cautious in working collaboratively? What is the reasoning/ethics behind meeting or rejecting the institutional demand for a “balanced” presentation of ideas/self-censorship?
Helguera
ReplyDeleteAudiences are never “others”—they are always very concrete selves. In other words, it is impossible to plan a participatory experience and take steps to make it public without also making some assumption about those who will eventually partake in it. When we organize and promote an exhibition or create a public program, we make decisions regarding its hypothetical audience or audiences, even if intuitively. (23)
Helguera
Then a profession artist or arts educator interacts or collaborates with community with little previous involvement with art, the community has an undeniable disadvantage in experience and knowledge, as long as the relationship unfolds primarily in the art terrain. In this case, the artist is a teacher, leader, director, boss, instigator, and benefactor, and these rules must be assumed fully. (53)
Ashford
The key part of collaboration is that producers and consumers see themselves differently. You do a show and there are people involved who have made something but don’t consider themselves artists. There’s a deprofessionalization of who the artist is and who the audience is. (63, 64)
Questions:
Ashford says, “In the early years of Group Material, the idea of collaboration practice meant investing in the deprofessionalization of the context and each other—people doing things they hadn’t done and rejecting those hierarchies.” (61) What are those hierarchies?
In Helguera’s, the assumption of the audience, how does this factor in the planning of a participatory experience, if at all?
Do you see yourself as a teacher in your collaboration with an audience? What are you teaching?
Quotes:
ReplyDeleteHelguera P54: "The expertise of teh aritst lies, like Friere's, in being a non-expert, a provider of frameworks on which experiences can form and sometimes be directed and channeled to generate new insights around a particular issue"
Helguera P13 "To understand what this dialogue may consist of, it is important to understand what we mean by interaction. [...] in some conceptual art, the role of the participant is nominal; he or she may be an instrument for the completion of the work (for Marcel Duchamp, for example) or a directed performer (in a Fluxus piece). There are as many kinds of participation as there are participatory projects, but nominal or symbolic interaction cannot be equated with an in-depth, long-term exchange of ideas, experiences, and collaborations, as their goals are different."
Ashford P62: "Ashford: The old fears of dematerializing art practices are coming back to, 'Where's the practice? Who's the author? What's his training?' We still hear too much about authorship and pedigree.
[...]
Felshin: [...] Unversities are being very careful these days. And I think that some of this has to do with corporate influence and funding
Ewald: People are scared to lose their funders, so self censorship comes in."
Ashford P68: "Ashford: Collaborative practices [...] enable different audiences to do things they see as instrumental. If the electoral result is not really of interest, perhaps building a homeless shelter is. The artist project attempts to create a sense of shared autonomy between groups of people. In a context lilke today we really need concrete things."
Questions:
Regarding Helguera reading: What are the lines between participation as instrumentation? What tools are there for creating strong conceptual frameworks alongside collaborative participation with non-artist communities. What are examples of "interesting/successful" involuntary participation projects?
Regarding question in Ashford reading: "How does funding - priorities and initiatives - determine practice and criticism?" Should it? What are other forms of support, how can we support ourselves to make more difficult work that institutions don't feel comfortable supporting?
Quote 1:
ReplyDeleteHelguera p. 55
“If the community makes all the decisions, the artist is operating merely as a service agent… [creating]… a feel-good action that doesn’t truly create a meaningful framework for reflection or critical exchange. Thus, to enter a collaborative process with a community requires a reflection on the terms under which the artist and the group will interact. This is a difficult task, and it tends to generate anxiety for the artist, who is under pressure to provide a strong framework for interaction while making a work that is conceptually original, provocative, and distinctive.”
Quote 2:
Helguera p. 53
“When a professional artist or arts educator interacts or collaborates with community with little previous involvement with art, the community has an undeniable disadvantage in experience and knowledge, as long as the relationship unfolds primarily in the art terrain. In this case, the artist is a teacher, leader, artistic director, boss, instigator, and benefactor, and those roles must be assumed fully.”
Quote 3:
D.Ashford Collaboration p. 70
Felshin: “…the most exciting collaborations are those that involve different people with different expertise. There may be actors, spoken-word people, artists, writers, and theorists who help to shape something. It’s not a question of hierarchy, because everyone accepts that they are skilled at something and others bring something else to the collaboration. There’s no struggle to take over.”
Ashford: “…People don’t collaborate because it’s easier, but because there are opportunities to learn.”
Questions/Comments:
1. I would like more discussion about crafting structures and tactics of collaboration in different situations, especially situations where there is a clear built-in power differential that cannot be erased by pretending it’s not there (e.g., college-educated artist wants to work with a marginalized community addressing issues the artist does not personally struggle with)
2. I’d like to complicate the question of community engagement vs. antagonism in art. The discussion doesn’t seem to acknowledge that any work of art may impact different communities in very different ways. In Sierra’s work the target seems to be capitalism and power in theory, but it seems that the direct impact—the antagonism—actually falls on the subjects of the work rather than on anyone in the Art World. Can we say that the Art World community who likes his art is emancipated/brought together by this kind of work? Interventionist political art can be directly antagonistic to institutions and structures that hold power (which maybe has something to do with the fact that it’s unpopular in the High Art World). At the same time, this kind of art can build positive relationships, agency and “emancipation” among a group of people who are pushing back against that power.
2b. Who is a good example of contemporary, Art-World-approved “antagonistic” art besides Sierra?
3. Helguera seems to center his definition of socially-engaged art around above-the-neck conceptual goals:
“a meaningful framework for reflection or critical exchange”; “making a work that is conceptually original, provocative, and distinctive”; various references to making work that “provokes debate” or “comments” on issues. I’m interested in all that, AND I’m interested in work that uses both conceptual and practical means to actually manifest change in social structures and in peoples’ lives. Who is writing about that? What is the roadmap from changing ideas to changing real conditions? Is that in the literature of organizing and advertising?
Quotes:
ReplyDelete"Social networks and other online platforms can be very beneficial vehicles for continuing work that has been started in person" (Helguera, 18)
"American educator Myles Horton once remarked: 'my expertise is in knowing /not/ to be an expert.' He meant that his role in his work consisted not in telling his students what they didn't know, but instead in helping them discover their own expertise and then decide for themselves what they needed to know." (Helguera, 52)
"You can't isolate the discussion of collaboration from politics or institutional structures, whether universities, museums, or other sites" (Phillips, 61)
Questions:
"Does SEA, by definition, have particular goals when it comes to engaging a community?" (Helguera, 11) /Should/ it have goals? Should it have intentions for the process rather than the outcome?
How can SEA help redefine (western) education as we know it? Are people becoming more aware of the institutions which govern their lives and reacting against them collectively in all spheres not only art and what role does the internet play or has it played? What are the possibilities of the internet and SEA working together in shaping institutions or dismantling them?
QUOTES:
ReplyDeleteHelguera
"The expertise of the artist lies, like Freire's, in being a non-expert, a provider of frameworks on which experiences can form and sometimes be directed and channeled to generate new insights around a particular issue." p54
Phillips
"There are collaborations that work within a closed system where there are a few variables or unknowns that can easily negotiated. And there are collaborations that are more open: the outcome and results are less predictable, often very interesting but possibly catastrophic because of that openness." p76
Ashford
"Collaboration, by definition, is an aesthetic of multiple readings. And that idea of multiple readings is threatened. People want the security and consistency of a single idea." p80
QUESTIONS:
from A Conversation on Social Collaboration:
"Other than the involvement of more people, how does collaboration change the outcome?" -Wendy Ewald
"Collaboration, like democracy, requires getting out of your mind and getting into another. Asking someone to get out of his or her mind today is not safe. How can we model the idea of a public sphere in which people feel they can experiment? " -Doug Ashford
This last questions is the one that I personally ask? How do we create a public sphere in which people feel they can experiment? This is very different than a safe public space. This is very different than experimenting in private. What does it mean to be vulnerable, intuitive and without outcome in public environments? Do kids have the permission to do this? How do we model this behavior and make is possible for others to do the same?
From Halguera, page 20
ReplyDelete“Morin’s remarkable determination has allowed her (and teams of artists) to successfully engage with communities as disparate as the Shakers of Sabbathday Lake, Maine and the monks, novices, artisans, and students of Luang Prabang, Laos. Morin acts as a catalyst for the development of artists’ projects, moving into the regions where she is interested in working several years in advance of the work period to gain the trust of the community. Her interest lies in creating projects that “strive to activate the ‘space between’ groups and individuals as a zone of potentiality, in which the relationship between contemporary art and life may be renegotiated.”
Page 54
“The expertise of the artist lies, like Freire’s, in being a non-expert, a provider of frameworks on which experiences can form and sometimes be directed and channeled to generate new insights around a particular issue.”
Page 70
Ewald:
“When I go somewhere to work, I often leave the equipment that I brought. I work with people in the community so that they can see what I do, and they can choose to continue the work. And it may be completely different....To me the value is in starting something.”
QUESTIONS
From Halguera page 12
What would help artists follow through in the more ambitious and risk-taking projects, directly engaging with the public realm successfully?
Halguera:
Are there benefits to create de-authored collaborative works? For whom?
Are there support structures to help when convincing/combatting institutions? Especially when a project is deemed “sensitive”? (from Wendy Felshin,page 61)
“Furthermore, is it still successful SEA if the community fostered by an art work is a racist hate group? This points to a larger, unresolved issue: Does SEA, by definition, have particular goals when it comes to engaging a community?” -Helguera pg. 11
ReplyDeleteGoing off of this, what is meant by "community," as far as demographics? Is there an unspoken understanding that it excludes groups like the gun rights advocacy community for example, or a country club in Dallas? If so, is there an ideological underpinning to SEA beyond just giving non-artists a voice?
Picking up on another point in the Helguera reading, what comes first; the work’s audience, or the work? Is the audience already out there waiting to be found (a marketing person would say yes), or does it coalesce around a certain work or movement of work after it’s released into the world? Or some combination of both?
“What is usually not questioned, however, is how one's notion of one's self is created. It is the construct of a vast collectivity of people who have influenced one's thoughts and one's values, and to speak to one's self is more than a solipsistic exercise--it is, rather, a silent way of speaking to the portion of civilization that is summarized in our minds.” Helguera, pg. 24-5
“This is the dark side of community-based practices – the reorganization of collaborative art practices into a kind of measurable service economy that’s based in social effect and urban development. The idea of community has become instrumentalized.” Conversation Pg. 63
Are they critiquing the role of artists in obtaining funding for community development or social services, or am I misunderstanding this quote? If so, why? Does that somehow effect or corrupt the work produced, or is it more that it feels like a disingenuous engagement with the community in question? Are they mutually exclusive?
Helguera - “Education for Socially Engaged Art_ Community & Collaboration”
ReplyDelete“To get the results they desire, artists must be clear with themselves in articulating the audiences to whom they wish to speak and in understanding the context room which they are addressing them.” (p. 25)
“The exercise of the artist lies, like Freire’s, in being a non-expert, a provider of frameworks on which experiences can form and sometimes be directed and channeled to generate new insights around a particular issue.” (p. 54)
Ashford - A conversation on Social Collaboration
“Ashford: That’s the difficulty of biographical and historical. For me, history defines a certain idea of authorship as shared, and the cult of biography offers another, more destructive one…I don’t want to get rid of biography completely, but I want also to be able…to model an idea of art making and of beauty in a way that young artists can see is not contingent” (p. 60)
“Ashford: This is the dark side of community-based practices — the reorganization of collaborative art practices into a kind of measurable service economy that’s based n social effect and urban development. The idea of community has become instrumentalized.” (p. 63)
“Things don’t loo the same. A collaborative project is never formally one-dimensional. With Group Material, projects were always multiform. Aesthetics were reflective of an idea of inclusive politics. There were traditionally modernists ideas that are really beautiful: ideas of juxtaposition and montage. Creating a third meaning is not, as the heroic defenders of artistic autonomy tell us, something that waters down aesthetic forms. We need historical, institutional, and educational contexts to remind people these collaborative projects are beautiful, not in spite of comparative forms and multiple methodologies, but because of them.” (p. 72)
Questions:
The visual dimension of politics is compelling and disturbing. We talked about the opportunities of collaboration within a democratic society, but what are the risks or problems?”
How do we navigate collaborations that both sustain and create democracy within social practice? How do we define what democratic collaboration looks like?
Can a work both engage a specific community and subscribe to the ideals Helguera describes and also antagonize community? In being specific in audience and participant identity, can a single piece act as both community engagement and antagonism? Can you think of examples?
-Kayla