3 key ideas from the text that resonated with me:
-When an artist is identified as a catalyst of a project, they are aesthetically distanced from the community that they are working with. The sense of “authority” that the artist has often stems from the collaborative aspect of community-engaged art, in which the artist surrenders some of their creative independence in order to incorporate the group’s ideas. Though their “sacrifice” makes them feel entitled to speak on behalf of the community, we must acknowledge that the differences in challenges between artist and community cannot be reconciled/understood through the artist’s expression of their own vaguely related experiences.
-Faith was very present in previous relationships between artist and community; Evangelism reinforced a divisive structure that distinguishes one person as a “bad" subject/individual in need of reform, and the other as a “good" subject/“enlightened reformer”. There are traces of this relationship in today’s community-engaged art, due to the assumption that the artist is empowered while members of the community are in need of empowerment.
-Historical discourse of Victorian-based ideals presumes that the cause of poverty/disenfranchisement is individual rather than systematic, and because of this attachment to an individual alone, they are established in the art context as “material” that is easily transformable. The Victorian model unfairly implies that each individual is morally/emotionally flawed, and that artists who enter these communities are in a position to “fix” the disempowered. We must recognize that people are in certain situations not only because of their individual actions, but also due to the many extraneous economic and political forces at play.
3 questions inspired by the text:
- If this work is more concerned with the “process of collaboration”, could such things as Theater of the Oppressed workshops (without a public performance) be considered contemporary community-engaged art?
-When developing work with a community that is not politically-coherent, what are some of the best ways to educate an artist about the community dynamic in order to avoid paternalism? With the artist in an authoritarian role, even if their focus is completely on bettering subjects of the community, is paternalism inevitable?
-In art/media that involves confessionals, how can we incorporate personal testimony (to preserve authenticity) while avoiding moving too far into a territory of self-actualization and therefore failure to recognize the broader social/political conditions that contributed to the individual’s issues?
-When an artist is identified as a catalyst of a project, they are aesthetically distanced from the community that they are working with. The sense of “authority” that the artist has often stems from the collaborative aspect of community-engaged art, in which the artist surrenders some of their creative independence in order to incorporate the group’s ideas. Though their “sacrifice” makes them feel entitled to speak on behalf of the community, we must acknowledge that the differences in challenges between artist and community cannot be reconciled/understood through the artist’s expression of their own vaguely related experiences.
-Faith was very present in previous relationships between artist and community; Evangelism reinforced a divisive structure that distinguishes one person as a “bad" subject/individual in need of reform, and the other as a “good" subject/“enlightened reformer”. There are traces of this relationship in today’s community-engaged art, due to the assumption that the artist is empowered while members of the community are in need of empowerment.
-Historical discourse of Victorian-based ideals presumes that the cause of poverty/disenfranchisement is individual rather than systematic, and because of this attachment to an individual alone, they are established in the art context as “material” that is easily transformable. The Victorian model unfairly implies that each individual is morally/emotionally flawed, and that artists who enter these communities are in a position to “fix” the disempowered. We must recognize that people are in certain situations not only because of their individual actions, but also due to the many extraneous economic and political forces at play.
3 questions inspired by the text:
- If this work is more concerned with the “process of collaboration”, could such things as Theater of the Oppressed workshops (without a public performance) be considered contemporary community-engaged art?
-When developing work with a community that is not politically-coherent, what are some of the best ways to educate an artist about the community dynamic in order to avoid paternalism? With the artist in an authoritarian role, even if their focus is completely on bettering subjects of the community, is paternalism inevitable?
-In art/media that involves confessionals, how can we incorporate personal testimony (to preserve authenticity) while avoiding moving too far into a territory of self-actualization and therefore failure to recognize the broader social/political conditions that contributed to the individual’s issues?
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ReplyDeleteThree Ideas
Artists meaning to advocate for, or create work regarding certain aspects of, a community without including the community or engaging the community in a dialogue surrounding the work, can do harm via presuppositions generated from a place of privilege and authority as the artist. This is evident in Jaar’s installation in which none of the Bangladeshi women be re-presented were consulted or included in the process, therefore reinforcing the existing system of oppression.
The working class is exploited as a “malleable” material for a capitalist government to manipulate according to their own needs. A social model based on archaic, Victorian values, allows for the upper classes to create for themselves a clear good/bad dichotomy that remarks only on the “moral regeneration of the poor over any real concern with systematic changes in the surrounding society” in which those classes exploited are expected to take responsibility for their own exploitation (15).
In Dedeaux’s installation regarding the possibility of transformation and hope of reform for prison inmates, her depiction of the inmates as a prison community individualized, and cut them off from other important communities they were a part of (racial, socioeconomic, etc.), and reinforced the construct of the savior artist reforming those without authority in the conservative system.
Questions
How should an artist go about engaging with a community that may include many sub-communities or be intersectional?
When seeking funding for a community project, is there a way that artists can circumvent the conservative idea of public art being privately funded as an act of philanthropy over necessity?
How can an artist from outside a community provide the tools and platform for a community to create art that represents itself, rather than re-presenting for or to that community?