For a large print version please contact the engage office: info@engage.org
This PDF is an extract from engage publication:
• engage review Promoting greater understanding and enjoyment of the visual arts
• Art of Encounter
• Issue 15 – Summer 2004
• 68 pages
• ISSN 1365-9383
The original publication is available from engage as below, subject to stocks.
This text is copyright, and is made available for personal/educational use only, and may not be used commercially or published in any way, in print or electronically, without the express permission of the copyright holders engage. engage reiterates its gratitude to the authors and editors concerned, many of whom work without fee. For more details of engage see end.
Contents
The Photographic Issue 15 – Summer 2004
Editorial
Foreword
Claire Doherty The institution is dead! Long live the institution! Contemporary Art and New Institutionalism
Declan McGonagle A New Modernity and the Need for Participation
Alan Dunn Who Needs a Spin Doctor? Part Two
Sarah Carrington Thoughts on Politicised Art in a De-Politicised Society
Barby Asante Notes from the Field
Carmen Moersch F rom Oppositions to Interstices
Jane Trowell Museums of...?
Judith Stewart Ten Years Behind? True Stories of Life in the Provinces
Jenni Lomax and Katherine Wood interviewed by David Butler
Reviews On Kawara: Reading One Million Years (Pam Meecham) Artists as Agents for Social Change (Malcolm Miles)
Xanthoudaki, Tickle & Sekules (eds) Researching Visual Arts Education in Museums and Galleries (Hannah Fussner)
Editorial, Art of Encounter
Karen Raney
Art is continually evolving, and so are the institutions which shape our ideas about it. This issue of engage concerns an area of current practice referred to as ‘collaborative’, ‘participatory’ or ‘socially-engaged’ art. The activities and motivations of artists working in this area vary greatly. Those with roots in gallery art will have a different emphasis from those with roots in community art, public art or gallery education. But some shared ground can start to mark out the field we are talking about. Art work tends to be about organising encounters and events, rather than about making objects. It involves the activity of non-artists - whether it is the passing gallery visitor who completes a work by interacting with it, or people deeply involved in setting the agenda of a long term project. The model of ‘research’ or ‘social experiment’ rather than ‘expression’ hovers over such work. The emphasis is on collective rather than individual creativity, public rather than private concerns.
Guest-edited by Anna Harding, engage 7 looked at a range of practices which operate outside of museums and galleries. However, those institutions themselves are in the throes of responding to, and catering for the needs of, participatory art. The aim of this issue is to explore what impact the range of participatory practices might be having on the direction and culture of art institutions. How are institutions trying to stimulate and nurture this kind of work? How are they dealing with the practical problems of project-based work that has different time scales and distribution mechanisms? Are buildings being used differently? How do galleries handle the afterlife of projects - in terms of relationships with participants, and in terms of preserving and documenting a work without misrepresenting it? Where do the challenges and risks lie?
Claire Doherty opens by examining the phenomenon of ‘New Institutionalism’, a curatorial buzzword referring to the capacity of institutions to be self-critical and create change from within. In the context of contemporary art, New Institutionalism offers a building-based model for presenting and discussing art, but one that is shaped by the needs and philosophies of participatory practice. New Institutionalism is not new, but we are experiencing a particular moment of interest in its ideas, an interest fed by a generation of ‘performative’ curators and ‘nomadic’ artists whose work embraces open-endedness, viewer participation, transient encounters. Enter a gallery today and you may be invited to play table tennis, sit down and read some photocopied texts, vote, have your picture taken, or select a piece of used clothing. Doherty suggests that one must look closely at what kind of ‘participation’ or ‘interaction’ is actually occurring in each instance. If a work is heavily stage-managed to be a set of prescribed behaviours, it may do little to surprise, inspire or hook the visual imagination of the visitor.
Sarah Carrington, a freelance curator, examines some effects of the ‘social inclusion’ agenda which museums and galleries are caught up in (see engage 11). Carrington suggests that, contrary to its claims, participatory art can actually de-politicise both participants and artists. Politically-motivated projects, when located in an institution, can become comfortable, user- friendly and ‘soft’. Radical discussions of difference, identity and racism may be watered down in the rhetoric about cultural diversity. The need for a ‘multicultural happy ending’ may encourage a kind of game-playing, where socially-engaged arts projects are used by galleries to tick boxes and attract funding. Judith Stewart, too, reflects on the pitfalls of attempting to use the arts as an instrument of social policy. An artist and curator, she perceives a widening gap between gallery and non-gallery art, and between the elite ‘centres of excellence’ and smaller local venues. Without the necessary support, financial and otherwise, social inclusion projects can be disappointing to participants as well as to artists, whose talents and energies may be largely misused. Her plea is for galleries to tackle social inclusion less through ‘inclusive’ projects and more through art itself, to show work which stimulates ‘complex thinking about the issues that lead to a need for social inclusion in the first place.’
Alan Dunn gives an account of tenantspin, a remarkable webcasting project run by elderly high rise tenants, in association with FACT in Liverpool. It developed through a commissioning agency (FACT’s Collaboration Programme) bringing an artists’ group (Superflex) in to work with a community on the regeneration agenda. What made tenantspin something more than a frustrating, box-ticking exercise? For one thing, it was a long- term, many-headed project. The control was in the hands of the participants. Artists were invited in at various points, as advisors, stimulants for further webcasts. Perhaps most significantly, tenantspin was a non-gallery project, and the FACT building could be used in a highly flexible and open way: part community centre, part studio, part laboratory. After an initial inward- looking phase where the tenants strove in their webcasts to represent themselves to others, they turned their attention outwards, and tackled such topics as pensions, the paranormal, computer games, care in the home, crime, communism and CCTV. The project evolved into a tool to develop social relations in the community. While the ‘identity’ phase is relatively easy to showcase, in Dunn’s view it is this second, more active, wide-ranging and less containable sort of participation that insitutions need to learn to support.
Artists Barby Asante and Jane Trowell present two very different ways of relating to art institutions. Asante describes projects she ran for three London galleries: inserting texts in public spaces, being a Wig Therapy consultant, conducting a series of walks. She tailored the projects to the particular gallery, its local context and its audiences. Asante sees her work as experimentation, ‘a form of practical critical theorising about society, communities and what we know about them.’ She makes use of residencies and gallery projects, on and off-site, to initiate dialogues with different groups of people. Though she is aware of the transformational possibilities of her work, social change is not her goal. For Jane Trowell, in contrast, social change is the drive behind the work. PLATFORM uses collaborative methods deliberately to ‘explore and advance social and ecological justice.’ This political agenda entails a critique of many social institutions, and PLATFORM has chosen to work outside of formal art contexts, not to involve themselves with commissions, exhibitions or gallery education. Instead they create temporary, participatory works like ‘The Museums Of’ which are not collections of things but of people, experiences, exchanges. Trowell admits, though, to questioning their decision to have no visibility in the gallery system, particularly as art institutions evolve to take participatory practices on board.
Participation and inclusion are central aims of gallery education. In what ways have institutional changes been driven by gallery education? Carmen Moersch gives a useful history of the Whitechapel Gallery in the 1970s, a period when the education agenda was pointing the way forward. Three decades ago, this gallery was struggling with a very contemporary dilemma: how to connect to and have a profile in the international art world while remaining relevant and available to the local community. The gallery’s first education officer, Martin Rewcastle, took a quasi-curatorial role by inviting artists to do projects inside the gallery space. As the gallery space was reorganised, the exhibitions programme began to link ‘high art’ and education in a manner reminiscent of what is now known as integrated programming. A question to ask now might be: how wide is the gap between authored, ‘signature’ participatory art - in which an artist uses human interaction to produce meaning - and art practice with roots in, and supported by, education programmes? As Doherty points out, the criticism of such participatory works as Demo Station No. 4 at the Ikon Gallery, Common Wealth at Tate Modern, and Utopia Stations at the Venice Biennale, is that the nature of the participation may be less than dynamic, surprising or liberating. When galleries champion participatory art, does it become subtlely forced in order to generate a product, or to prevent failure?
Declan McGonagle uses the word ‘participation’ in the sense Joseph Beuys used it, meaning ‘negotiation of meaning and value in the art process.’ Real participation presupposes a model of civil culture - one ‘belonging to citizens’ - rather than signature culture. He advocates a new organisational model, through an account of the changing ethos of the Dublin City Arts Centre - now to be called ‘City Arts’. The dropping of the word ‘centre’ was deliberate - to draw attention away from a single physical place and towards its multitude of functions. As it is in agencies like InIVA and FACT, flexibility in the use of the building seems to be key. Dublin City Arts has a building which is ‘home base’, and a developing ‘away process’ in which programmes are located in specific communities throughout the city. Alongside the 19th century model of the artist as genius producer, artisan, and articulator of private experience, the artist now is a negotiator, a researcher, an anthropologist, someone who sets up encounters and provokes dialogue.
Jenni Lomax of the Camden Arts Centre and Katherine Wood of firstsite paint a similar picture of the gallery as more social space than showroom. They speak of their buildings in the fluid vocabulary of ‘experience’. The function of the rooms is negotiable, allowing for unforseen uses, as when artists took over the Reading Room at the Camden Arts Centre. It is interesting that when this centre closed for refurbishment they did not find another venue, but instead chose to work with artists who engage more directly with people. Now that the centre is open again, work generated off- site during the period of closure is being drawn back into the gallery to see how it functions there. Wood mentions the responsibility firstsite feels to local artists and their professional development. Both directors consider the long-term sustainability of projects to be important, and that their use of space and resources needs to be led by the aims of artists and the particularity of art works.
Every discourse in its enthusiasm generates blind spots and oversimplifications. In my view, we must be careful in our assumptions about passivity, participation, and engagement. Standing silently in a room and looking at an art object is not necessarily a ‘passive’ experience, just as performing some pre-set activities does not amount to the unqualified good, ‘participation.’ Using the imagination is an intensely active, and in the end, socially-engaged affair. As the current phase of participatory practice matures, perhaps we are in a position to draw distinctions within the field, and to evaluate its achievements and its problems. What remains fascinating is the perennial tension between art as object and art as a kind of social sculpture, between the aesthetic impulse and the impulse to intervene directly into lived reality, to seize art’s power to effect real change. As McGonagle points out, art is already a social process, a transaction between the self of the artist and the other of the non-artist. What participatory art does, perhaps, is to thrust to the foreground, and make explicit again, the project of commonality which all art shares. Art institutions will continue to twist and turn to find their place in this project.
Art of Encounter is a collaboration with Arts Council England.
Foreword
Vivienne Reiss Interrupt co-director, Senior Visual Arts Officer, Arts Council England
This issue of engage journal has been informed by ‘Interrupt: artists in socially-engaged practice,’ a series of five symposia initiated in 2002 by the visual arts department at Arts Council England.
Socially-engaged, collaborative and situated art practices have a substantial history often formed by artists stepping outside the various institutional frameworks of commissioning, exhibiting and critiqueing contemporary visual art. These artists often work with initiatives which have specific educational and social agendas and outcomes. Interrupt was a collaboration with a number of galleries and higher education institutions. The aim was to stimulate discussion about the question: 'Where does socially-engaged, participatory and education arts activity stand within current debates around contemporary arts practice?'
Interrupt brought together artists, educators, curators, producers, cultural theorists and commentators to explore the diversity of approaches and to describe and contest this field of practice. This collaboration with engage is one manifestation of Interrupt. The Arts Council will continue to work with partners across the cultural and education sector to critically engage with, and develop, this area of arts practice. Details of Interrupt can be found at www.interrupt-symposia.org
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
engage is a registered not-for-profit educational association which promotes access to and understanding of the visual arts through gallery education and cultural mediation nationally and internationally.
engage has a membership of over 1000 worldwide, including galleries, arts centres, museums, artists studios, artists, curators, teachers, students as well as gallery education and cultural mediation staff and freelancers. engage works in three key areas: action-research (including the Collect & Share lifelong learning network in Europe – see www.collectandshare.eu.com), professional development, advocacy (see www.engage.org).
engage is building an international online case study database, and a resource and library of relevant reports, evaluations, and research. engage welcomes offers of material to make available to the sector through these channels.
To enquire about copyright, to subscribe to the engage journal or join engage, or to offer material for the database or website, please email info@engage.org
engage is grateful to the Arts Councils of England, Scotland and Wales, to the Depts of Culture and Education in England, to the British Council and the European Commission, and to the Esmee Fairbairn and Baring Foundations for ongoing support.
This PDF is an extract from engage publication:
• engage review Promoting greater understanding and enjoyment of the visual arts
• Art of Encounter
• Issue 15 – Summer 2004
• 68 pages
• ISSN 1365-9383
The original publication is available from engage as below, subject to stocks.
This text is copyright, and is made available for personal/educational use only, and may not be used commercially or published in any way, in print or electronically, without the express permission of the copyright holders engage. engage reiterates its gratitude to the authors and editors concerned, many of whom work without fee. For more details of engage see end.
Contents
The Photographic Issue 15 – Summer 2004
Editorial
Foreword
Claire Doherty The institution is dead! Long live the institution! Contemporary Art and New Institutionalism
Declan McGonagle A New Modernity and the Need for Participation
Alan Dunn Who Needs a Spin Doctor? Part Two
Sarah Carrington Thoughts on Politicised Art in a De-Politicised Society
Barby Asante Notes from the Field
Carmen Moersch F rom Oppositions to Interstices
Jane Trowell Museums of...?
Judith Stewart Ten Years Behind? True Stories of Life in the Provinces
Jenni Lomax and Katherine Wood interviewed by David Butler
Reviews On Kawara: Reading One Million Years (Pam Meecham) Artists as Agents for Social Change (Malcolm Miles)
Xanthoudaki, Tickle & Sekules (eds) Researching Visual Arts Education in Museums and Galleries (Hannah Fussner)
Editorial, Art of Encounter
Karen Raney
Art is continually evolving, and so are the institutions which shape our ideas about it. This issue of engage concerns an area of current practice referred to as ‘collaborative’, ‘participatory’ or ‘socially-engaged’ art. The activities and motivations of artists working in this area vary greatly. Those with roots in gallery art will have a different emphasis from those with roots in community art, public art or gallery education. But some shared ground can start to mark out the field we are talking about. Art work tends to be about organising encounters and events, rather than about making objects. It involves the activity of non-artists - whether it is the passing gallery visitor who completes a work by interacting with it, or people deeply involved in setting the agenda of a long term project. The model of ‘research’ or ‘social experiment’ rather than ‘expression’ hovers over such work. The emphasis is on collective rather than individual creativity, public rather than private concerns.
Guest-edited by Anna Harding, engage 7 looked at a range of practices which operate outside of museums and galleries. However, those institutions themselves are in the throes of responding to, and catering for the needs of, participatory art. The aim of this issue is to explore what impact the range of participatory practices might be having on the direction and culture of art institutions. How are institutions trying to stimulate and nurture this kind of work? How are they dealing with the practical problems of project-based work that has different time scales and distribution mechanisms? Are buildings being used differently? How do galleries handle the afterlife of projects - in terms of relationships with participants, and in terms of preserving and documenting a work without misrepresenting it? Where do the challenges and risks lie?
Claire Doherty opens by examining the phenomenon of ‘New Institutionalism’, a curatorial buzzword referring to the capacity of institutions to be self-critical and create change from within. In the context of contemporary art, New Institutionalism offers a building-based model for presenting and discussing art, but one that is shaped by the needs and philosophies of participatory practice. New Institutionalism is not new, but we are experiencing a particular moment of interest in its ideas, an interest fed by a generation of ‘performative’ curators and ‘nomadic’ artists whose work embraces open-endedness, viewer participation, transient encounters. Enter a gallery today and you may be invited to play table tennis, sit down and read some photocopied texts, vote, have your picture taken, or select a piece of used clothing. Doherty suggests that one must look closely at what kind of ‘participation’ or ‘interaction’ is actually occurring in each instance. If a work is heavily stage-managed to be a set of prescribed behaviours, it may do little to surprise, inspire or hook the visual imagination of the visitor.
Sarah Carrington, a freelance curator, examines some effects of the ‘social inclusion’ agenda which museums and galleries are caught up in (see engage 11). Carrington suggests that, contrary to its claims, participatory art can actually de-politicise both participants and artists. Politically-motivated projects, when located in an institution, can become comfortable, user- friendly and ‘soft’. Radical discussions of difference, identity and racism may be watered down in the rhetoric about cultural diversity. The need for a ‘multicultural happy ending’ may encourage a kind of game-playing, where socially-engaged arts projects are used by galleries to tick boxes and attract funding. Judith Stewart, too, reflects on the pitfalls of attempting to use the arts as an instrument of social policy. An artist and curator, she perceives a widening gap between gallery and non-gallery art, and between the elite ‘centres of excellence’ and smaller local venues. Without the necessary support, financial and otherwise, social inclusion projects can be disappointing to participants as well as to artists, whose talents and energies may be largely misused. Her plea is for galleries to tackle social inclusion less through ‘inclusive’ projects and more through art itself, to show work which stimulates ‘complex thinking about the issues that lead to a need for social inclusion in the first place.’
Alan Dunn gives an account of tenantspin, a remarkable webcasting project run by elderly high rise tenants, in association with FACT in Liverpool. It developed through a commissioning agency (FACT’s Collaboration Programme) bringing an artists’ group (Superflex) in to work with a community on the regeneration agenda. What made tenantspin something more than a frustrating, box-ticking exercise? For one thing, it was a long- term, many-headed project. The control was in the hands of the participants. Artists were invited in at various points, as advisors, stimulants for further webcasts. Perhaps most significantly, tenantspin was a non-gallery project, and the FACT building could be used in a highly flexible and open way: part community centre, part studio, part laboratory. After an initial inward- looking phase where the tenants strove in their webcasts to represent themselves to others, they turned their attention outwards, and tackled such topics as pensions, the paranormal, computer games, care in the home, crime, communism and CCTV. The project evolved into a tool to develop social relations in the community. While the ‘identity’ phase is relatively easy to showcase, in Dunn’s view it is this second, more active, wide-ranging and less containable sort of participation that insitutions need to learn to support.
Artists Barby Asante and Jane Trowell present two very different ways of relating to art institutions. Asante describes projects she ran for three London galleries: inserting texts in public spaces, being a Wig Therapy consultant, conducting a series of walks. She tailored the projects to the particular gallery, its local context and its audiences. Asante sees her work as experimentation, ‘a form of practical critical theorising about society, communities and what we know about them.’ She makes use of residencies and gallery projects, on and off-site, to initiate dialogues with different groups of people. Though she is aware of the transformational possibilities of her work, social change is not her goal. For Jane Trowell, in contrast, social change is the drive behind the work. PLATFORM uses collaborative methods deliberately to ‘explore and advance social and ecological justice.’ This political agenda entails a critique of many social institutions, and PLATFORM has chosen to work outside of formal art contexts, not to involve themselves with commissions, exhibitions or gallery education. Instead they create temporary, participatory works like ‘The Museums Of’ which are not collections of things but of people, experiences, exchanges. Trowell admits, though, to questioning their decision to have no visibility in the gallery system, particularly as art institutions evolve to take participatory practices on board.
Participation and inclusion are central aims of gallery education. In what ways have institutional changes been driven by gallery education? Carmen Moersch gives a useful history of the Whitechapel Gallery in the 1970s, a period when the education agenda was pointing the way forward. Three decades ago, this gallery was struggling with a very contemporary dilemma: how to connect to and have a profile in the international art world while remaining relevant and available to the local community. The gallery’s first education officer, Martin Rewcastle, took a quasi-curatorial role by inviting artists to do projects inside the gallery space. As the gallery space was reorganised, the exhibitions programme began to link ‘high art’ and education in a manner reminiscent of what is now known as integrated programming. A question to ask now might be: how wide is the gap between authored, ‘signature’ participatory art - in which an artist uses human interaction to produce meaning - and art practice with roots in, and supported by, education programmes? As Doherty points out, the criticism of such participatory works as Demo Station No. 4 at the Ikon Gallery, Common Wealth at Tate Modern, and Utopia Stations at the Venice Biennale, is that the nature of the participation may be less than dynamic, surprising or liberating. When galleries champion participatory art, does it become subtlely forced in order to generate a product, or to prevent failure?
Declan McGonagle uses the word ‘participation’ in the sense Joseph Beuys used it, meaning ‘negotiation of meaning and value in the art process.’ Real participation presupposes a model of civil culture - one ‘belonging to citizens’ - rather than signature culture. He advocates a new organisational model, through an account of the changing ethos of the Dublin City Arts Centre - now to be called ‘City Arts’. The dropping of the word ‘centre’ was deliberate - to draw attention away from a single physical place and towards its multitude of functions. As it is in agencies like InIVA and FACT, flexibility in the use of the building seems to be key. Dublin City Arts has a building which is ‘home base’, and a developing ‘away process’ in which programmes are located in specific communities throughout the city. Alongside the 19th century model of the artist as genius producer, artisan, and articulator of private experience, the artist now is a negotiator, a researcher, an anthropologist, someone who sets up encounters and provokes dialogue.
Jenni Lomax of the Camden Arts Centre and Katherine Wood of firstsite paint a similar picture of the gallery as more social space than showroom. They speak of their buildings in the fluid vocabulary of ‘experience’. The function of the rooms is negotiable, allowing for unforseen uses, as when artists took over the Reading Room at the Camden Arts Centre. It is interesting that when this centre closed for refurbishment they did not find another venue, but instead chose to work with artists who engage more directly with people. Now that the centre is open again, work generated off- site during the period of closure is being drawn back into the gallery to see how it functions there. Wood mentions the responsibility firstsite feels to local artists and their professional development. Both directors consider the long-term sustainability of projects to be important, and that their use of space and resources needs to be led by the aims of artists and the particularity of art works.
Every discourse in its enthusiasm generates blind spots and oversimplifications. In my view, we must be careful in our assumptions about passivity, participation, and engagement. Standing silently in a room and looking at an art object is not necessarily a ‘passive’ experience, just as performing some pre-set activities does not amount to the unqualified good, ‘participation.’ Using the imagination is an intensely active, and in the end, socially-engaged affair. As the current phase of participatory practice matures, perhaps we are in a position to draw distinctions within the field, and to evaluate its achievements and its problems. What remains fascinating is the perennial tension between art as object and art as a kind of social sculpture, between the aesthetic impulse and the impulse to intervene directly into lived reality, to seize art’s power to effect real change. As McGonagle points out, art is already a social process, a transaction between the self of the artist and the other of the non-artist. What participatory art does, perhaps, is to thrust to the foreground, and make explicit again, the project of commonality which all art shares. Art institutions will continue to twist and turn to find their place in this project.
Art of Encounter is a collaboration with Arts Council England.
Foreword
Vivienne Reiss Interrupt co-director, Senior Visual Arts Officer, Arts Council England
This issue of engage journal has been informed by ‘Interrupt: artists in socially-engaged practice,’ a series of five symposia initiated in 2002 by the visual arts department at Arts Council England.
Socially-engaged, collaborative and situated art practices have a substantial history often formed by artists stepping outside the various institutional frameworks of commissioning, exhibiting and critiqueing contemporary visual art. These artists often work with initiatives which have specific educational and social agendas and outcomes. Interrupt was a collaboration with a number of galleries and higher education institutions. The aim was to stimulate discussion about the question: 'Where does socially-engaged, participatory and education arts activity stand within current debates around contemporary arts practice?'
Interrupt brought together artists, educators, curators, producers, cultural theorists and commentators to explore the diversity of approaches and to describe and contest this field of practice. This collaboration with engage is one manifestation of Interrupt. The Arts Council will continue to work with partners across the cultural and education sector to critically engage with, and develop, this area of arts practice. Details of Interrupt can be found at www.interrupt-symposia.org
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
engage is a registered not-for-profit educational association which promotes access to and understanding of the visual arts through gallery education and cultural mediation nationally and internationally.
engage has a membership of over 1000 worldwide, including galleries, arts centres, museums, artists studios, artists, curators, teachers, students as well as gallery education and cultural mediation staff and freelancers. engage works in three key areas: action-research (including the Collect & Share lifelong learning network in Europe – see www.collectandshare.eu.com), professional development, advocacy (see www.engage.org).
engage is building an international online case study database, and a resource and library of relevant reports, evaluations, and research. engage welcomes offers of material to make available to the sector through these channels.
To enquire about copyright, to subscribe to the engage journal or join engage, or to offer material for the database or website, please email info@engage.org
engage is grateful to the Arts Councils of England, Scotland and Wales, to the Depts of Culture and Education in England, to the British Council and the European Commission, and to the Esmee Fairbairn and Baring Foundations for ongoing support.