Lisa Radon
She cordons off a block of 35th Avenue on July 4th, inviting the neighbors to pull out their barbecues, a ping pong table, lawn chairs, and neighbors from a couple of blocks in all directions convene to eat, drink, talk, and play from mid-afternoon into well into the night. The kids ride their bikes, draw in chalk, the teenagers light things on fire or sit on the curbs and talk.
This event takes place on what is already a particularly neighborly street. Frequently neighbors are chatting in one another's yards or on the sidewalk. But on July 4th, something different happens. Simply, traffic laws are suspended. Neighbors can walk and skateboard and bask in the late afternoon sun in the street. But participants also move freely into and out of one another's yards, and sometimes even homes, running in to get a spatula or barbecue fork. So conventions of behavior with regard to private property and neighborly behavior are temporarily stretched/altered. Moreover, things that look like "art" happen. The teenage girls draw Liberty floral patterns in henna on one another's forearms, chatting and laughing. The street is covered in chalk drawings of flowers and self-portaits of the little girls bent over the hot asphalt with fat chunks of pastel chalks in their hands. And there is performance. A number of the adult women are given hand-made hula hoops built from black tubing and colored tape. The women awkwardly grasp at deep body memory and swing their hips to turn the hoops. A little later, the teen, proto-Mark Paulines masking tape various explodables together and light the fuses.
With the way cleared by an official holiday, and a city permit to block the city off, the neighbors have created an extra-ordinary space in on an extraordinary day. And in this extra-ordinary space, a woman who might not think she might hula hoop in public (and hasn't since she was 9) might give it a whirl.
The neighbor who applied for the permit to close the street, who encouraged neighbors to bring out picnic tables and lawn chairs, who taped off the foursquare game, didn't perhaps consider herself artist or author of this event. And any documentation that happens will be shared on the neighborhood email list or the Facebook pages of the photographers. It won't see the inside of an art gallery or museum. But the fact remains that it would not have happened had she not taken the initiative in a way that looks a lot like the work that a socially engaged artist does.
Her vision for the event was of a Stone Soup nature. She created the infrastructure, set out the pot with the boiling water and a couple of stones, and the participants would the ingredients for the soup: activity, libations, shared food, the conversation, the performance (she provided hoops that needed bodies to animate them). But an event of this nature is not a staged performance; she has released a great degree of control of its outcome(s). She likely has a vision for the evening, a vision of possible positive outcomes that include connections, conviviality, fun, new acquaintances, play, good food.
She intended to make things better. And by all accounts, she and all of the neighbors who brought ingredients for the "soup" made things better, temporarily, but with a definite afterglow of new and renewed connections among neighbors built on a day's worth of memories, adding to the collective memories of neighbor interactions that have built up over time. These connections have also meant the creation of an email list that has addressed the social as well as the political, to a degree (to wit, the fate of a school building two blocks from 35th and the creation of a "green street" that intersects 35th).
Bourriaud said of 90s relational art works, "What they produce are relational space-time elements, inter-human experiences trying to rid themselves of the straitjacket of the ideology of mass communications...places where alternative forms of sociability, critical models and moments of constructed conviviality are worked out." On 35th Avenue, in a temporary return to stoop culture, the daily, mundane, human interaction of which an urban neighborhood has long been the site, these neighbors who daily are immersed in the products and tools of mass communications/mass media, emerge to a moment of "constructed conviviality" that looks an awful lot like comparable moments that have likely been happening in backyards up and down 35th Avenue since the first houses were built there, perhaps in the 20s. In this way the event and comparable events that fall under the art rubric are simultaneously nostalgic and hopeful, in the sense that creation of this temporary autonomous zone might both create meaning and have real and lasting impacts on the participants.
Why talk about socially engaged art through the lens of a project that was not initiated by an artist, not initiated through an arts institution, and not intended for an art audience? If it looks like a duck, and walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck.... In other words if an art work of this nature has simply the intention of convening a group for a collaborative, interactive event, than barring the fact that it was not created by an artist with the kind of theory in his or her pocket to wrap around the event and thereby elevate it into the realm of art with a capital A, we can consider this a work of socially-engaged art. In other words, if artists making work of this nature, who are pushing the boundaries of art ever outward into the realm of the everyday, were to achieve what must be assumed to be their logical end, that the horizon line of art as it intersects life is eventually truly breached, the work that they do will no longer be called art, they will no longer be called artists, and they will not make work in arts institutions for arts audiences but on 35th Avenue for neighbors and strays. Lygia Clark is an example of an artist whose participatory works in the realm of relations between participants followed a path away from art by artists for arts audiences and into art therapy or practical application of some of the experiments she'd previously engaged in the name of art. Beuys', "We are all artists," becomes "We are all not artists." The revolutionary artist, like all revolutionaries, has to ask him/herself, "What if we win?"
What if all of the artists at Open Engagement, for example, take the path of Dana whom I met on the first day of the conference. Dana, up from Oakland, said to me, "Some of the people here aren't as interested in what I do because it's more along the lines of activism than art." I am paraphrasing. But she conveyed a sense of feeling odd man out and hoping to feel included in the procedings of the conference. She felt that her direct activism, which Beuys would have applauded (he did help found the Green Party in Germany after all), uncloaked as it is in the guise of art, was somehow considered beyond the pale of the work being addressed by the participants of the conference. If we look at the outer bleeding edge of where many of some of the arts collectives are working, it should be a handshake away from Dana's Bay Area activism.
On a related note, today I attended a panel at Open Engagement whose participants used the terms "community art" or "community-engaged art." This meant projects that take art into underserved communities or populations that don't have the same access to the arts that the residents of 35th Avenue have. They mentioned art programs for the incarcerated. And I think Portland's p:ear, providing access to art making space to homeless youth, might be considered by these panelists an example of "community art." This is arts as activism or activism via the arts. But it struck me, sitting in that panel, that practitioners, particularly older practitioners of community art, .e.g. neighborhood or community center drop in arts programs or after school arts programs or my anarchist friend Wes in Santa Cruz who's co-created an anarchist cafe where artists, poets, and activists gather, that they might not look at this conference and see it, as Dana expressed, as a place for them. Or perhaps, and I am very hopeful about this, perhaps Open Engagement is open enough to reach out to all of the fuzzy territory where social practice art, as it's beginning to be codified by three Left Coast MFA programs, overlaps with community art, activism, and just plain neighborly good fun.
Pearl Andrews was right: the dinner party is already "the seed of the new society taking shape within the shell of the old" (IWW Preamble). The sixties-style "tribal gathering," the forest conclave of eco-saboteurs, the idyllic Beltane of the neo-pagans, anarchist conferences, gay faery circles...Harlem rent parties of the twenties, nightclubs, banquets, old-time libertarian picnics--we should realize that all these are already "liberated zones" of a sort, or at least potential TAZs. Whether open only to a few friends, like a dinner party, or to thousands of celebrants, like a Be-In, the party is always "open" because it is not "ordered"; it may be planned, but unless it "happens" it's a failure. The element of spontaneity is crucial.
The essence of the party: face-to-face, a group of humans synergize their efforts to realize mutual desires, whether for good food and cheer, dance, conversation, the arts of life; perhaps even for erotic pleasure, or to create a communal artwork, or to attain the very transport of bliss-- in short, a "union of egoists" (as Stirner put it) in its simplest form--or else, in Kropotkin's terms, a basic biological drive to "mutual aid." -Hakim Bey
Although the street party is perhaps too bourgeois an example of this kind of gathering for Bey's tastes, the fact remains that this, like art works of a similarly convening nature, have a subtle activism embedded within, if activism has to start from a sense of shared interest and community that is greater than simply proximity. Some social practice projects, knitting together, having breakfast together and the like are open to charges that they are lightweight, neither arresting art nor strong progressive social engagement. The block community coming together for food and fireworks in an odd way demonstrates that the activity at the gathering, and even the framing by the event's "author" might not be as important as we might think, and that in fact, the gathering in and of itself might function as a "seed of the new society."
But there's one more interesting issue to consider through the lens of the street party. What if the artists who attend Open Engagement all cease to identify as artists? What then? Does the activity change? Does its reception change? Does the likely set of participants change? Does it make things better? Does it make things worse? Is there value in creating work that looks like activism within the context of art? Does it create new pools of potential activists? Does it catalyze real change? Is there value in creating work that looks like a street party in the context of art? Does a street party as an art work draw different audience and create different experiences and outcomes than a street party outside an art context? And finally, I guess, what value does the artist derive from continuing to identify as artist when the work does reach the end of the world and proceeds to sail right over the edge.
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