Aesthetic Evangelists: Conversion and Empowerment in Contemporary Community Art
1995; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 22; Issue: 6 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1543-3404
Autores Tópico(s)Religious Tourism and Spaces
ResumoDuring the last few years a set of assumptions about the role of the artist has emerged in the United States as part of what is being called the art.(1) This genre of art, according to critic Suzi Gablik, takes the form of interactive, projects inspired by issues.(2) In fact, the might be more accurately termed the to the extent that questions raised by the interaction of the artist and particular, often urban, have played a central role in its evolution. Further, this work tends to be less concerned producing objects per se than a process of collaboration that is understood to produce certain pedagogical effects in and on the community. In this way the new, represents a transition from an earlier model of that involved the location of sculptural works in sites administered by agencies - either federal, state, or local governments or other administrative bodies (airports, parks, etc.) - or alternately, private locations (for example, some of the works in the Urban Landscape exhibition at the World Financial Center in Battery Park City in 1988). The growing influence of this is evident in the proliferation of articles, conferences, books, exhibitions, and commissions. It can also be observed in the changing funding mandates of major private foundations, for whom community has become the buzzword of the moment. There are a range of positions among private sector funders, from the Lannan Foundation in Los Angeles, which is shifting almost entirely from arts funding to funding for social issues, to the MacArthur Foundation - the largest private funder of media arts in the country - which has re-written its program guidelines to explicitly reject media art in favor of community-based organizations that are working to promote justice and democracy through media, to the Lila Wallace/Reader's Digest Foundation, which has developed programs to fund artists who work communities - however that might be defined. The terms public and community imply two very different relationships between the artist and the administrative apparatus of the city. The artist most commonly interacts urban planners, architects, and city agencies concerned the administration of buildings and spaces, while the artist more commonly interacts service agencies and workers (women's shelters, homeless advocates, neighborhood groups, etc.). In each case the interaction between the artist and the is mediated through a discursive network of professional institutions and ideologies that the artist collaborates and, in some cases, seeks to radicalize or challenge. The shift toward a new is evident in curator Mary Jane Jacobs's two most recent projects. The works she included in her exhibition for the 1991 Spoleto Festival in Charleston, South Carolina (Places a Past), although involving a degree of interaction between the artist and a given site, by and large remained within the sculpture/installation mode. On the other hand, the works in her most recent and highly publicized project, (Culture in Action: New Public Art in Chicago held in the summer of 1993), were developed, in Jacobs's words, with the co-participation of an artist, but also a lot of decision-making happening on the part of constituent-collaborators who are not artists - like students, and in the case of some of the other projects: factory workers, mothers in a housing development, AIDS volunteers, gang youth, and so forth.(3) The draws, both consciously and unconsciously, from the history of progressive urban reform. This is clear in its concern ameliorating problems typically associated the city (homelessness, gang culture, at-risk youth, etc. …
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