ArtistsInResidence

Just wanted to flag up this essay about art in the public realm. It was the key note opening address at a recent conference called Artists Making Places, organised by Art on the Greenwich Peninsula (www.artongreenwichpeninsula.com). definitely worth a read and very thought provoking.

'NO HIDING PLACE’

Prof. Declan McGonagle, Director, National College of Art and Design, Dublin.

“We live in a world of persons and things – which is what it is because of what has been transmitted from previous human activities. When this fact is ignored, experience is treated as if it were something which goes on exclusively in an individual’s body and mind. It ought not to be necessary to say experience does not occur in a vacuum. There are sources outside an individual which give rise to experience”

John Dewey, ‘Experience and Education’, [Collier Books, NY, 1938/63.]

There are two gable walls in Derry – where I started working as a curator in the Orchard Gallery – on which are painted huge texts. One, at the entrance to the Catholic/Republican Bogside area states, ‘YOU ARE NOW ENTERING FREE DERRY’. It marks the point beyond which, at one time, the Police and Army could not go with safety. Free Derry Corner, as it is called, has black text on a white ground. The other wall is at the entrance to the smaller Protestant/Loyalist Fountain area and states, in reversed text, ‘LONDONDERRY LOYALISTS. STILL UNDER SIEGE. NO SURRENDER. Each wall and each statement function as a marker and a boundary but they also represent foundation myths of each community. On the one hand the aspiration to freedom on the part of the Catholic community and on the other the sense of ownership of power on the part of the Protestant community, which would not be surrendered.

These walls are not within sight of each other but they set up a force field of meanings which are embedded in the public mind of both communities in the city and elsewhere. As such they are important cultural statements, legible and confirming of previously fixed positions which have been breached, not by violence but by the negotiation of the peace process. I refer to these specific sites and the context because when the Orchard Gallery opened, as the only staffed arts facility in the city in the late seventies, it was clear to me as the Curator, that as a publicly funded organisation, it would be impossible for the gallery to avoid the issues which were so dramatically visible in the public domain in Derry in that period, even if I had wanted to. As a result it became possible to begin to move away from the idea that art, or the art process, is an antidote to reality and towards the idea that art/the art process is actually a means of comprehending and potentially transforming reality; or at least creating a model of that transformation in a particular place. It became possible, unavoidable, in my view, because the drama of the Troubles had made visible certain societal processes between citizens and also between citizens and the State. These processes, relating to power relations in the society and the culture were/are not unique to the context of Derry or Northern Ireland. They were revealed, not explained by the drama of the conflict but these power relations are just as present elsewhere. They may be enacted and may function through different cultural, political and economic formats in other settings but the basic relations are still present and the renegotiation of those relations is still necessary.

Any negotiation may not be acted out as dramatically as in Northern Ireland, of course, but the sites of negotiation which emerge within now widespread urban regeneration and related community development issues, for instance, raise fundamental questions about the actuality of the public domain and also, how we as citizens, imagine our relationships with it. And I use the word ‘citizen’ here deliberately. People are not citizens in the U.K in the constitutional sense they are ‘subjects’. My use of the word and idea of citizen therefore is aspirational, in terms of citizen coming to mean participant. Use of the word citizen also raises the key issue of participation.

When the artist Thomas Hirschorn once said that his task, as an artist, was ‘not simply to make political art but to make art politically’, he identified a crucially important and defining dimension of contemporary art practice where ideas and questions of context, engagement and participation become visible. I would argue that, to make art ‘politically’ is to make art without innocence of the relations within which art and artists function and without the pretence that art and artists can occupy a neutral position, separate from socio-cultural/economic power relations in social space. An artists’ group in Copenhagen, N 55, address social and ecological sustainability but their constructed artefacts, which represent cultural and ‘natural’ life support systems, are not intended as prototypes for production though they are materially and scientifically viable as shelters with contained ecosystems. N55’s sculptural objects, using industrial and sometimes found materials, are actually devices for communication. With that understanding art becomes a means of communicating, of engaging, naming and negotiating a multi-dimensional relational field.

To make art politically, in this sense, is to take responsibility for practice in a particular setting, whether enacted in galleries and museums, in the critical or commercial marketplace or in the transactional marketplace of civil society and the social environment, in which artists and curators attempt to generate and project meaning and value. The challenge here has been taken up by a number of contemporary practitioners, building on the work of primary figures like Alfredo Jaar, whose work in this field is longstanding and seminal, and, significantly, by some theorists. And the challenge is to reconnect the meanings of art to the meanings of lived experience. This is not about creating or simply expanding audience. It is about transforming consumers into participants or, more usefully, creating the conditions where consumers can transform themselves into participants in the culture and therefore in society. It is about art as vitamin rather than tranquiliser!

It is also about situating practice in a way which forces the issue of naming those continuities in human culture – viz. what we, human beings, make and do to add value to the quality of our lives – which are often unnamed and therefore invalidated by the critical apparatus of the art sector. It is only out of this sort of [re]naming and [re]negotiation that the new forms of practice and experience can be generated and sustained.

When this approach is proposed and argued for, in practice, it is regularly resisted by some within those relationships of power, firstly, as no more than community arts and so already defined and provided for, but on the margins of the culture. Secondly, that such a reconnection - of art’s ethical responsibilities to art’s aesthetic responsibilities – would, inevitably, undermine the ‘true’ nature and purpose of art. This position, of course, presumes and pretends that the nature and purpose of art is, and can be, fixed within an agreed overarching narrative. This is no more than the Modernist viewpoint that the ‘high ground’ of human culture, now having been reached should not be surrendered.

Two key points have to be made in response to that position. The first is that new dimensions of practice, which actually set out to engage, to reconnect and to name those continuous activities designed to add meaning and value to human experience are qualitatively different from those which have already been named, and critically marginalised, as community arts, or in some cases, simplified as ‘political art’. Though aesthetically similar they are ethically dissimilar in intention and purpose – viz. in their relations with the non-artist. The area of practice I am positioning here sets out to articulate a dynamic field of reciprocal rather than rhetorical relations and proposes a shift from the idea that it is the art process which brings value to the negotiation in social space. This means a change in the usual asymmetrical relationships in such negotiations. The second point is that the defence of the ‘high ground’ depends on a highly selective and short term view of the nature and purpose of art in human culture, as limited to and by the Modernist narrative of inevitable progression, as given historical authority in the period from the Renaissance in 15th century Europe to the late 20th century in Western societies - across a range of artforms, including architecture.

What is actually needed, in my view, is a wider and longer term view of art within the ground of human culture, as it is and as it grows. The result of panning back from a narrowing, linear Modernism and of widening the lens, is a loosening of inherited constraints on definitions of value in practice and the development of inclusion and collaboration along with institutional and organisational porosity. The Liverpool Biennial [of which I am a Board member] has taken a ‘long view’ and is taking the time to build porous organisational, institutional and engagement processes by addressing and responding to the particularities of Liverpool as a context and of specific relations, within the city and between the city and wider arts/cultural sectors. A long view is crucial to this expanded process. The distribution mechanisms of galleries, museums and other institutional sites of experience, reflect what are still powerful, albeit now contested, models of conferring value on production. These are predicated on a set of relations articulated by the idea of a genius producer [the artist], a passive consumer [the non-artist] and an autonomous art ‘object’ as well as by a supportive critical and institutional framework which reinforces those definitions and sets of relations.

This model of autonomy for art, happily for some, requires mediation and therefore also privileges the gatekeeper roles of critic and curator, many of whom clearly sense the potential loss of privilege that a negotiable model of engagement, collaboration and site specific working, which the emergence of reciprocal practice represents. So it is not just the vested interests of economic exchange which try to maintain the inherited sets of relations into the present. The momentum around art in public or public art, however it is named, over the last couple of decades, in particular, is I believe a reflection of a need – felt by artists instinctively, initially, but now articulated with more critical supports - for a reconnection with lived experience based on the understanding that value lies not just in the uniqueness but also in the commonality of the artist’s experience. The term ‘Public Art’ seems to have become a settled issue. It is accepted as a category for art and non-art funding, almost a term of convenience, as if there is a consensus about what it is, how, where and when it can be generated whereas the idea ‘public’ remains a contested and unsettled concept. It remains negotiable – politically, economically, socially as well as culturally and spatially. The inherited models of artist, production and distribution, ultimately can represent a separation and disempowerment, which applies both ways. In certain scenarios the artist as well as the non-artist is disempowered, but differently. This disempowerment has not, we can now observe, been successfully challenged by, for instance community arts models. And this, despite the significant efforts of many individuals and organisations in those sectors, who, typically, seem to suffer a sort of burn out after a time. The more recent emergence, not only of another art practice, which is defined by engagement with [whatever] context as well as negotiation and collaboration, but also of another support discourse, which provides a language of validation for previously marginalised work, has named, and made visible art’s ‘long tails’. Those long relational tails can now be included in the discussion and experience of meaning and value of work in local settings. I am reminded of Bob and Roberta Smith’s project, ‘SHOP LOCAL’, which set out to acknowledge and value the culturally transactional nature and role of small shops and businesses, including their signage, in local communities. The range of negotiations and engagements between art/artists and lived experience, civil society processes and public space [or better, local settings – since everywhere is local], could now be the locus for a politically strategic - rather than an aesthetically tactical - reconfiguration of relations in the art and socio-cultural field. By that I mean a committed engagement with how the power structures of civil society operate, and on whose behalf, rather than a hunt for the next stylistic innovation in a taxi rank of stylistic innovations.

It is in this sense that I am arguing for art to be understood, as it has functioned over the longer term anyway, not as a decorative antidote to reality but as one means of comprehending and transforming that reality. The process of transformation, if based on the negotiation of a ‘New Deal’ between art/artists and society, in an enlarged field of relations made visible, can be acted out productively in traditional and/or non-traditional settings and formats. The issue is not about form or even location but about intention, meaning and relationships. The possibility of transformation only arises when those relationships are built on trust - between the art process and those who use public space as well as those who own and/or control it. Art can be one of the ways to claim rather than disclaim responsibility for that process in relation to other positions and other responsibilities in the social field.

It begins with an admission that there is no, nor should there be, any place for art to hide - least of all in public space.

Professor Declan McGonagle
NCAD. Dublin

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