Reader For Whose Monument Where Part 2

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What I think is the future for w in terms of education is figuring out how to approach in a con.nected W;J.y what an-making is about-conneaed to the source ofyour own culture or ethnicity, connected to the geographic place that you came from. People would criticize that by saying, ·You're 10C3lizing and. therefore reducing the dWogue. You're keeping people from approaching global culture,· and so forth. But in tru!h global culture is coming back to the same kind of solutions that we need at a localleveI. We bave to work again in groups ofcollective consciowness. I would take our univrnity system and teach kids cooperation. I would teach them relatednes.. I would honor where they came from. I would teach them to stay sourced in wbat they know and their own cultures, and we that as the basis for teachiog. And by doing that you do a number ofthings. You teach them that achievement does not mean ignoring issues ofhomdessness or gang warfare or the failure to educate large mass.. of people. It doesn't require looking down on the work ethic of the working class. This is asmming that these students are coming from backgrounds that allow them to think of those things as imporlanL

RighL And I think rm talking about the majority here. rm not talking about the tiny, select number ofpeople who go to university who are white and upper-class or upper-middIe-class. I guess rmjumping a step ahead here to parity and to equity. We're wing a tax base for our educational systems that comes from the majority/minority and whether i(. in the California State University system or the University ofCalifornia system or the community college system we bave to educate those people or our democracy will fail. You can't any longer in good conscience continue to recruit from the majority/minority group without addressing this issue. When you say "majority/minority," are you saying that '~orities" are actually the majority?

TItat's righL Lo. Angeles, for example, is seventy percent people ofcolor. We bave to begin to address educa,ting according to the tax base or we are stealing money from the people. And it is my opinion that we are stealing money in an incredible way from the Mexican population. We have reauited for the University of California system-all nine universities-2,889 Chicano students. We bave graduated over two million Chicano students from California high schools. These statistics are for 1993-94. They are alarming. I don't think we can swtain any longer these highly rugged individualist notions. We can't. We have to cooperate because. we can't live here together anymore.

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It seems rather than cooperating in the face of shrinking resources,

people are diggingin and becomingvery resistant to sharingthose dim in. ishingresources.HowdoyouthinkmoreofthepeopleofcolorofC~or_

ni.a are going to make it into a university system that is state-run when the state itself is becoming increasingly reactionary in its attitude towards people ofcolor? Are more people ofcolor going to be allow~ in or do you see that if they do come in, they're going to be turned into these individualistic kinds of people? Do you think that there's something much more radical that needs to bappen, in terms ofedncational systems in general? Are they salvageable ordowe really baveto look atsome otherwayofedueating people for community-oriented ways of tb.i.n.ki.ng? I think all of the above. Every aspect has to be dcalt with. I think university systems ~ a whole .will come under greater and greater fire. This last year alone Cornell University, Stanford and the Unive...ity ofCalifornia at Santa Barbara bad hunger strikes and walkoutsjust for the Chicano populations. These twcuty-year-olds now are getting in there and they're saying. "Wait a minute." They're becomin~much more nationalistic. They're coming now wi~ a very sa-ong resistance to being assimilated and what I think is a very hcalthy rage. At the politica11evel we are not making great strides, but we are getting people into key positions. What is going to bappen is we're going to take the money away from them. The same way we had to do it with the arts councils and with the National Endowment. We had to attack the very premise of their funding to make them opeo it up. An African Atnerican scholar and organizer years ago told me, judy, you keep expecting justice bere because you think that if you are just logical enough and you convince people .ofwhat is just, they will simply open up the doo.... They're never going to give it up easy. It has to be a struggle." So I think there's a two-prong approach. One is to start attacking the funding base of the university system and the educational system in general, and the other is to start organizing at the student leveL Now the counter-move of those opposed to change will be that they will abandon education, which is what is now bappening within the local schools. The Save California Bill, sigoed by 600,000 people, basically says that any child ofan immigrant wbo is now illegal cannot be educated. It also says they are not eligible for health care. People are running for political office 00 the basis of taking away those immigrant rights. Essentially that meam that there will neve:T be another Amalia Mesa·Bains [California educator and artist]. Th"':"'Itne~et be another Judy Baca. We're looking at now an enOre generano~

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Oleay, now take that logically to the next step. We have eighty percent Latino school children entering into the Los Angeles city school system. A healthy number ofthem are not documented. I don't know the. percentage exactly. I guess we cait't measure it. But eighty percent ofstUdents entering kinderganen and elementary school right now are Latinos. Oleay,let's not educate them. Let's cut them loose. Let's pu~ t.hcm all on the street, even people who have been here twenty years-my grandmother was here twenty-five yean and was never documented. You've got Chiapas in about ten minutes. We're going to have a ~ mtStizD riot. We're going to have

armed resistance. How long do you think it will take these heavily armed kids. who are now cut loose from the school system, to turn the guns away from shooting each other and begin to come after those who are responsi-

ble for the conditions in their lives? That's what's going to happen. It's not sman to do this. It's not smart. It's stUpid. If they really wanted to do something about immigriuion problems, they simply would go after the employers who have a great addiction to this cheap labor source. So we are talking about three areas ofresistance: student protests, politicians saying, "Either do this or we take away your money," and people as a whole ""ring, "We don't want to pay for-your schools anymore and we'll collapse the entire educational system." Reactionary people will say, "Tough. We don't want to educate anybody." There will be a different kind of opposition to educational institutions within the Latino communities. People are saying more and more, -We .don't want to do this. You either have to open it up or lose it." They have to see that they have access to

education and that it's part of what they can do with their lives. No one should ever underestimate the commitment of the Latino community to

education. They believe that education is the ticket out and they're going to be enraged as soon as they get that they can't have it. And it's becoming more and more clear as the nu.mbcn become more extreme. I've been thinking about why this is happening and I can predia a few things. I think armed revolution is not out of the question if there is a decision to destroy the school system and not to have access for our people.

Recent repressive immigrant legislation, which will be eventually thrown out as unconstitutionaJ. may just push people over the edge. Fifteen yean ago I went before the Los Angeles city council and told them they had a gang problem that they had to approach now, and they said, "It doesn't effea us, we don't have gangs in the Valley.· The heads of the committees were from the San Fernando Valley. I said, "You will." These San Fernando Valley councilmen refused to 1001: at a city-wide problem. Los Angeles is now the gang center oCthe entire United States and right now is putting

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sa~llite Crips in Arizona, for God's sake. We have satellites moving out to Albuquerque. I was in Albuquerque last week talking to people about the Crips and the 18th Street Gang. If you don't organize them and educate them, then they will educate and organize themselves, because they are resourcefuL And if you don't give them an alternative, then they will create alternatives for themselves. Simple.

But giving alternatives to this many people means giving up some of the power, access, education, wealth, and all those things that a small number of people have been used to having all to themselves fa.; all these years. Yes. Sharing resources, not getting to come to dinner and eat it all You have very. very intense resistance to this. and I tliink that·s what you're seeing right now. Our major funders in America-
In a certain way I think it's easier to teach them connectedness than the opposite. When students come to the university they're in the process of

building self~teem. They're in the process of building an identity, and if you honor the identity they come with, if you tell th~ ·Value what you have in your own pocI:et." you aetually build a healthier hutnan being. For example, a young Korean woman came in with a photograph. It was a doisonne medallion given to the bride and groom of two stork figures, one red and one blue, with a macrame cord. It's hung in the households ofKorcan f3milies as a hridal gift to bring good luck to the bride and groom. For the student, it was just an object, one from which she was completely disassociated. She thought it was pretty but she didn't know the meaning of the object. She was going to use it in a still life that she was constructing for painting. I looked at the piece and said·, "You can't make anything until you know it, until you understand its meaning. Have you ever asked your

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mother?" "No. I don't really know what it is." TI1at objea had hung in her howehold every day and had been so devalued by the culture at large that she never thought to ask the question ants meaning. So sending her back home for an internew with her mother and a discussion of its meaning made a far more valuable conneetion for her to that image. It became aeroally a reinterpretation of the American experience through a Korean position, a one-and-a-halfposition (someone with Korean parents bom in the U.s.). She could then we that image and aerually begin to understand the power ofits sources and why it resonates. Why does it move her? Why does that particular sound move you? Why are thowands of kids listening to bantI4 music and dressing in western-like vaquero .oudits with the great big buckles and the hats and the boots? Because it's a very nationalistic movement. Because they say. -rbis music makes me cry." Why does it make you 1:Ij'? Why does it move your spirit? So you need to do two things: number one, you need to affinn their own experiences; number two, you need to te:aeh a respeaful honoring of tradition. Now this is absolutely counter to everything we are taughL Within the art world we believe that whatever is new is better. Innovation is prized above all other things. making art about art with a new twist. The standard way of teaching at the university is to ask people to source in some other artist. Who is your influence? The references are usually to white men. someone who's hot or current. Students are then taught that they mwt follow in that line. So what if you said, as I have tried to do with my classes, ·Forget thaL Make a tattoo. Study African scarification. Study the aboriginal marking of bodies as imprints on their soul What would you imprint on your soul? Make a piece of work that has function within your daily life. Make it functional." That's another no-no. Ifit's functional, it's not arL Set up problems, ask kids to take the resources of their own culture and their own experience and bring them into the cbw and share them. Talk about the experience ofothers, which is, interestiriglyenough, a common experience. whether you're a dominant
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process. Devise a process that reminds you of the tradition of ritual sand painting or that is sourced in that and then apply it to a contemporary ~e and make no objea. Do students sometimes respond, UBut how caD I support myselfas an artist making this kind of.art?"

Sure. I thin!< there1s a great push now within the state univenity system to give students praetical skills, to male them employable. But my beliefis that if you want to be employable. then don't become an artist. Become a graphic designer, become a dress designer, become a hundred other things. Focus those things that are practical skills that can be used. Aaually. if you exercise yourselfand your intellect in these ways and also devel~ op more theoretically or conceptually. in the end you are much morc employable as a fine artist as well because you are interdisciplinary. You can address the most important issues ofour time. You are problem-solv. ers based in reality. You are not carrying on an intellectual dialogue for fun and your friends. You can talk to your mother and father and are, in the end, a much better human being. You·have more practical knowledge with which you can serve the community and make the arts relevant again. I think artists have made a terrible mistake over the years. It never served us to be "inspired by angels," to be mythological creatures who are somehow touched by the gods. A dealer said to me once, "I only want to show artists who are touched by the gods." I remember her telling me that I wasn't touched by the gods. So I thought, "How do you get this touch by the gods? Who are these gods?" Then I realized it was probably some white critic and if that white critic liked you, then you were touched by the gods. So I began to value. instead, what I understood and knew. I was terrified to death that I was going to be completely unemployable and completely a failure. There were no models for me to look. at as a woman artist, as a Latina, as a person related to community, so therefore I figured maybe I wasn't an artist. TIlat was aetually incredibly liberating because then 1 could in-

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vent myself. These kids have got to invent themselves. What about you own community, the one that has allowed you to survive as an artist?

On a spiritual and emotional level there has been a community of women, some within my own culture but many not. Donna Dieteh was in·

credibly important in the process ofme growing up to be an artist. She was doing the same thing but came from a completely different experience ofa very wealthy family..And Christina Schlesinger. Both taught me something

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incredibly important. They taught me to perceive myselfas entided. I studied entidement with those women, because I had never seen anybody who felt like they deserved to have things. They really knew about entertaining themselves, getting what they wanted, feeling that they deserved to have those things, and I learned that from them. The womell's community at critical points throughout my life has been really, really important-all of us struggling against male identities within the arts, there not really being places for us. And then parallel struggles. I've always been v~ connected to the African American community be· cause of being bom in Watts. I grew up in African American and Chicano communities and developed very close relationships with key African American women who made present the parallel struggles ofother ethnic groups so that I could see things rationally. It widened my world. And then most imponandy has been an intergenerational connection with women and men older than I, liIr.e [actor] Gilben Roland. He was absolutely an amazing model for me. How did you meet him?

His wife called me. I had just done that Bill Moyers television piece and I was working on The Great Wall of Los Ang.1es (Figures I, 2, and 3) and Gia Roland called me up and said, "I want to work for you. I want to take photographs. Can I follow you around? I'm interested in what you're doing." I dido't know who she was, and so she showed up and literally every day of my life for nearly ten years she was with me. She cooked, too. Not only could she take photographs, but she could make wonderful memuJo. She fed me and fattened me up all ofthese years, making wonderful Mexican food. Then, ofcourse, I met Gilbert. Gilben was the VlUfl"TO' the ultimate VlUfl"TO. He had grace and was a man who refused to depict the Mexican people in a denigrated way. He was the "Cisco Kid." So many people later modeled what it was to be a Latino by vinue ofactions he took in his early films. His favorite words were honoT. dignity, courage. He was stalwart, patriotic. All tho,e things. So I had friends who were eighty. And then I had friends who were fourteen, who gave me a sense ofthe range ofthe world I lived in. They really gave me a sense of perspective. I think thatnunured me. Jane Rule [Canadian writer] was the only lesbian I ever met in the early 1970, who was totally connected to community. notjust an isolated women's community but a community filled with all ages and types ofpeople. All these people had in common an incredible grace. Minnah [Agins] had the same grace. You .know, this is really making me emotional because so many of them are

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dead, the eighty·year-<>lds and the fourteen·year-<>Ids. I feel such a sense of loss for Gilbert. He died the way he lived, too. Right to the end he wouldn't take his damn boots oil! Minnab was important, too. She gave me a sense of a historical contexL She told me about the hunger strikes and the bread strikes and the Detroit auto workers and I felt like I had met all these cbaraaers. I Could see first·band what they went through to do the most basic things, like.get us unemployment insurance. Was this in the 1930s? Yes, 1930s, the intelleaual Left of the thirties. Minoah was the continuation ofa long line of people who used an. When I put together her retrospective for her memorial I looked over the range of all these prints. It was an absolutely wonderful chronology of Left an making and issues that ranged from the 19305 or late 1920s to the 1980s, when she died. You could see the preoccupations of the Left. through all these different de· cades. I learned strategies for survival from the fourteen-year-<>lds and eighty-year-<>Ids, and also from staying connected to the humblest people, people who would not necessarily do good for your career, and with my &nU~

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Have your experiences with these people affected the way you approach your own work as aD artist? Cenainly. One thing they have taught me is to recognize the unrecognized seats of power. like the woman who looks out her window and watches the kids at the hus stop. That's a key role in the way that community moves. She keeps them from jumping out into the streeL The gang that occupies the park, even if it's usually only a few little guys. Some of them are often much more harmless than they're perceived as being. Acknowledging these people. It's just the same as saying, "That tree is there." You doo't pretend that the tree's not there. And you don't try to cut it down.

No. You don't say, ·Well. everything would bejust great about this piece ofland if the tree wasn't there... Instead. you come into a space and begin to figure out who's who. You look at the synagogue down the street, the passage of these p~ple on a weekly basis past the site where the mural will be. The school. a!If the movement in and out of people who come from some distance. The local people across the street and their investment in being middle-class. Understanding what it is that they value. who they are.

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Recognizing those with·the power and recognizing who's there. And then recognizing what is under the surface, almost like a spirirual half-life in the ground. Why do people get drawn, for example, to those exquisitely beau-

tiful sites along GaJiano', Coast where the Haida have been coming for potlatches for a few thousand years. People are drawn to tho,e places and they have a certain presence in the world by virtue ofthe spiritual investment of people for centuries. That's why you need to know what has happened there. You need to know who was there, who's there now and what is operating on them from another time. It's like digging up, revealing, digging away layers of information to the source ofit.

Your words remind me of the series ofmurals you did for the farmwork. ers' community of Guadalupe, California. Yes. The imagery in those four murals is an uncovering of the roots of the place. The ethnic contributors panel shows the Chinese as well as the Mexicans. A Swiss-Italian marble angd from the town's cemetery is the ,ource of the central image in the Futun 4/ Gtwdnlupe (Figure 4). Yet Guadalupe is also like every farming area. Farmworkers' issues are international issues. I respect both the -local issues and their international ramifications. I want to build associations, relationships. I was taught to make family and to honor the family and that's what I do with the 'ite, I

make it family. I tty to create order within that family, to develop some kind of community in order to approach the issue OT the site and to become makers and problem·solvers together. Do these families ever become dysfunctional? Always is probably the case! Of course. that assumes that there is a perfect family out there som~where. '

Then there is that other "family" setting, the classroom or university,

where conflict and dissention has increased as increasing numbers of people are coming in who want to see their identities reaffirmed and their cultures studied? How do you deal in a constructive way with this inevitable confiict? Well. right now there isn't really any resolution except that if you're in charge, you win. People are not ,aying, 'Okay, how do I make room for inclusion?" University professors often suffer from the same absence and poveny of thought that OUT students suffer from when we don't teach them relatedness. We don't teach them to connect. So who we have reach..

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Figure4 1'1u Fuluru{Cu.4IltJ.upe, 1988-90. acrylic on wood. S' x 7'. One aCthe fourpan~ cis on the history and futureol'Cuadalupe. CA. Municipality ofGuadalupe. Photo: Cia Roland.

iog and who we have as models are people cra.ined in the old system. who really believe that individual achievement is to be valued above all things. We should begin as scholars address in our writing, in our thinking, how we're going to move into this 21st century. into a really different time. I mean it's astOunding how different it is. I have an incredIbly difficult time keeping up within my own culture, with the changes. as it becomes ·Latino" as opposed to "Chicano" and Chicanos come into positions of power and they have to reevaluate themselves becawe they can', speak for El Sal· if one of w can ever begin speak any longer for vadorans. I don',

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Where do yon see a commonality coming into play? Is it possible? I guess what I'm advocating, for the most part, is working in smaller groups. We have to go down to smaller groups and
Yes. Not integration in the total sense, all ofus together, one planet, one people, all hnlding hands I don't think we wiD. Not in my lifetime. I've worked really hard for twenty-five yearS to make things different and I've watched most of the gains rolled bad. What about these gains? You've done local work, but you're also out there

on the national level, dealing with the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and with national commissions. There appears to have beeD, at least until recently, an iDcrease in NEA funding for community organiza.. tions. Is this good or bad? Where do you see it going? I think the NEA is not a good example because you probably would not see more money going to community groups from the NEA. But you do with organizations like the IJla Wallace Foundation.- the e. e. cnmmings Foundation, the James Irvine Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation,
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geles. It is the opposite afthe Convention Bureau, which puts out videos that say you can come to Rodeo Drive and to Universal City and they don't show one person ofcolor. OUT program is very different.· It takes tourists around the city to places like The Gnat Wall. People are .enraged about it. We got calls all the way from the U.S. DepamnentofCommerce. They fear that community-based people will destroy the tourism industry in Los Angeles, which means, basically, that we will share part of the wealth. You want to know what happened to Rodney King? Let's go out to Pacoima and the Foothills Division police station and hear the perspectives ofcommunity leaders. People are being given an alternative for the first time. And all of the tours are sold out during the World Cup soccer games. Yesterday I addressed a group of American Stuclies scholars from Syria, Israel, all over the world. There were forty chairs of American Studies Departments in various universities all over the world at The Great Wall. They want to know about race relations in America. They want to know if there is apartheid here. They want our perspective on what is happening. It's pretty exciting. There are spaces in between being made.

Do you see any down side to the increase in funding for community-based ventures by the foundations you just mentioned? Absolutely. The Lila Wallace Foundation bas been the most problematic. They've been giving major amounts of money-5 million dollars-to the Mark Taper Forum to expand their audiences. Not to build a Chicano the· ater in Los Angeles. but to put Chicano theater under an all-white board of directors that comes from the very basis ofpower and authority in Los Angeles,like the Chandlers of the LosAngtUs Times. You're never going to get that board ofdirectors to change. So what do they do? They go to a Mo:icano, Jose Luis Valentino, who was at the Los Angeles Theater Center (LATC) with the Chicano theater. Mind you, he's Mai<mw. That's very critical becawe a Chicano would never have done it. A Mtri&anc will. Because they're not born, raised here. They don't know the politics. They always feel like they can make an alliance with the Anglo. They don't have the history of racism from birth, so they're a little more negotiable. So instead of giving him the LATe when it goes under, the Mark Taper Forum says, "Hey, there's a talented young guy. Let's get him.· So they got him. They bought Chicano theater. Five years from now there won't be a Chicano Theater Center. There won't be a parallel group to the music cen~er that is ethnically run and governed and developed. There will be an inCorporation within the music center ofChicano Theater. When he leaves they'U just get a replacemenL Maybe at the end of five years they'U have

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one Chicano on the board. They'll have all of our mailing lists. They'll have Latino theater withQut the control of the Latino population. There are many examples ofthis kind ,offunding, which is not about self-empow. ermenL Now, people would argue with me vehemently about this. But I honestly believe that the only thing to do in terms of cultural development in Los Angeles is to develop parallel institutions of equal size and stature for the ethnic populations. But wouldn't you end up still having to accept money &om these same institutions? I ha'I'C another quote I wanted to read to you from Octavio Pars recent collectiou Essay. on Maican Art (1993): ~'The idea ofpuhlic art strikes me as a sentimental nostalgia and a dangerous anachronism. .• Public art has invariably been the religious an ofa state oro!a church as powerful as a state. By definition, there is uo such thingaspuhlic art made by isolated individuals or private groups•••• The phrase 'revolutionary public art' Dot oaly contains a coD~dictioD but is, in fact, meaniDgless .•• only through an abuse oflanguage ••• is it possible to speak ofa rev0lutionary art sponsored by the state."

Well, there's some validity to what he 'says. Yet if you look at The Gmu Wall, it received a certain amount of public dollars but it also received such

a patchwork offunding from so many different sources that no one source could control the conten"t of the piece. American philanthropic giving is not the same as Mexican philanthropic giving. They have no philanthropic giving in Mexico. They have patronage and they have government sponsorship, which is very direcL We have this other thing called nODprofit giving. I think it's still possible, with multiple funding sources and with an artist who is uncompromising, to create work that does challenge the status quo. I think my Baldwin Park Metrorail Project is quite revolu· tionary (Figures 5 and 6). It really challenges the whole colonial missionary system.

Did the people in charge know what you were doing? Absolutely. Because I explained it to them. And because there were enough Latinos in that group. There were also people from Arkanqs There was an African American woman who came from the oldest black family in Baldwin Park. The head of the Department of EdUcatiOD for Baldwin Park was Latino. The mayor himself was a twenty-four-year-oJd graduate of Harvard. a Latino. There was a Chicana. a working
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about the whole issue of the m<stiftu or mixing ofraces. The only problem I had was with one of the Catholics. The woman was working<1ass and vely Catholic. She just wanted to make sure I wasn't going to offend the padn from the local mission. And then when I turned him upside-down on his head in one of the images, I said, "You know, Lupe, I'm turning him upside-down and, I'll tell you the truth, in native sign language it means 'not'." And she said, "They shouldn't have done what they did." Who, the padns? Yes, the pad.... That's what she said,linaiIy. Right on, Lupe! But I gave them a complete an historical lesson. I brought the research in. Th,ey were with me through the whole process.

-so they were not only engaged through the whole process, but had declsiODamalring power, rather thaD simply beiDg in aD advisory position.

That's right. It was remarkable. Not to say they were all h1leral and incredibly progressive thinkers. They said, "We want you to do something on the missions," and I think they thought "Taco Bell" They wanted my name recognition too. They wanted to say they had Judy Baa in Baldwin Park. It's interesting. They didn't really get what that meant. They just knew that I was a famous mural painter and I was a Chicana and had worked on projects with young kids. When they told me the subjea was the missions, I said, "Okay, I'm going to do the missions but I have to tell you, I'm going to do the truth." 'Well, we wouldn't expect any less; they said. So when I started developing the information I started bringing it in because they met with me as I was progressing to the design. I started to tell them the numbers ofpeople who were murdered, the numbers of native people lost. the loss of their names. It was really also about my passion for what I was doing and my belief system. I brought in Vera Rocha, the chiefofthe Gabrieliiios who lives in Baldwin Park, as an advisor for the project. And they know her. They've always known her because she had pow-wows in their parks. And she has tweneytwO grandchildren who who are all native people there. Her fu.mily grew up in a mission. Her great-grandmother made candies. She hates the mission. She wouldn't even step on the ground. She stood on the outside wait· ing for me when I went there to pick up niaterials. So convincing people was a combination of my passion and my abiliey to articulate it and Vera's ability to speak to what it meant to her. The mission father's didn't participate except to impede the informational Bow. But I had historians who, helped me and I just started bringing in material I said, "FIrSt let me tell

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r.gu", 6 Sl4tWn. 1993. Loading platfonn. parking lot with plaza in background. sle-'COlor Plate 11.

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FRANCES POHL

you what I'm going to do. Do you know what an archaeological dig looks like?" "No," they say. So I had to go through all these photographs ofarchaeological digs. That's how I began. I showed them photographs ofar. chaeological sites. I really like the way they look. "I think this should be like an archaeological site," I said. "We're going to dig it up. We're going to dig it up and we're going to putit back in the ground. We're going to puJI away the layers of the earth, IiteraIly, and see." Then the forms in the ground. the shapes of the mission, the native village, became the design in the concrete. And they really liked that. I was listening to Lup~ talking to SOme kids on the of the dedication. She said, "Well, just think ofit'this way. It's like she took a big steam roller and she smashed everything flat,"which was a pretty dose description ofwhat I didl I wed the language ofthe redneeks in the piece: "It was better before they came." And then there's GJo. . ria AnzaIdl1a sandblasted into the big arch: "This land was Mexican once, was Indian always and will be again." And the words of this extraordinary young Asian woman, who said. "You know, it's not the adults leading only. it's the youth leading too." And so I wed that too. I had such a good time doing it. It was diflicult working with the con· traaors. And the commjssion.fough~me on a couple ofthings. which I lost. I lost the benches in the plaza area. I wanted people to be able to sit in the plaza by the monument. And I wanted them to be able to cut 1IDfI4liIDs. I wanted edible food in the planters. I did get the oak tree. which represents the indigenous people. and I got the cactus. but not edible cacrw. and I didn't get the benches because they didn't want people hanging out. So I didn'twin everything. But I really felt like it was successful. And they seem very happy with it. The mayor told me. "I go to the Metro station and I sit on the bench and look down at my feet and it says 'memory' and 'will power' and I remember what myjob is today." That's how you preserve a culture. It can still happen.

dar

Fogurc7 (Top) 77>t WoridW"u,A y.......f "";w.,. W...... _.1987-92.AaylicoDCID. 10' x SO" panels. ~:J~ IamDarion at SaDIa Buban County Courthouse. !D additiDDlD tbcfour paucbbyllaa~of"'H...u.-, Triua(>Aoftlw H.n. and N".".w.lm Ilcrir m). chis imnlbtiOn included anistA1aci BegWs pazu:l71w E"".ftlw n-N<4 e - , (1990) 00 lhc brld'taod the paoc1Dio/Qp
Fogur. 8 (BollDm)

T..""",,"'f""Hum. 1987-89,AaylicoDCID.... 10·x!O·. Socia1aod

Public Art Resource Center. Photo: Gia Roland.

1\ JUDITH F. SACA

237

CONN.CTlVE AESTHETICS, AIllT ",'TEIll INOIYtDlI"'lISI'I } Sill.

hIve been intern.lind by our whole culture and made to pervade every experience. It is nOt hud to sec how the inl1ituliorn and praClices of the aft world have been 'nodded on the same configurations of power ana profit that support '1a maintain our socie~Y'1 dominant worldview. This -business as usual" psychology of affluence is now threatening the ecosystem in

G.ifi4

which we live with its dysfunctional values and way of life; it is a single system manipulating the individual into the spiritually empty relationship of the producer to the product.

As a critic in the nineties, I am not really interested in writing catalog essayl or art reviews. what I am concerned with is understanding the nature of our cultural myths and how they evolve-Ihe institutional framework we take for granted but which nevertheless determines our

Many people arc aware that the .ystem isn't working, that it is time to move on and 10 revise the destructive myths that guide us, Our entire

lives. One question that has preoscupied me, for inStance, is what it means

cultural philosophy and its narrowness of concern are under intense scru-

to be a Msuccenful" artist working in the world today, and whether the

tiny. Among artists, there is a greater critical awareness of the social role

image that comes to mind il one we can suppOrt and believe in. Certainly

of a~t, and a rejection of modernism's bogus ideology of nClllrality. Many

it seems al if that image is undergoing a'radical re-visioning atlhis lime. The dominant modes of thinking in our society have conditioned

artists now refuse the notion of a completely narcissistic exhibition practice as the desirable goal for art, For inua'nce, performance aTlist Guillenno

us to characterize art primarily as specialized objects, created not for moral or practical or.social reasons, but rather to be contemplated and enjoyed,! Within the mo"ern era, art was dcfined by its autonomy and sclf-suffi- • ciency, and by its isolation from the ren of society. Exposing the radical autonomy of aesthelics 11 lomtthing thu is not "neutral" but is an active participant in ca iulist ideolo has been a rimar accomplishment of

G6mez·Pena nates: "Most of the ...ork I'm doing currently comes, I think, from thc realiution that we're living in a state of emergency. , .. I feel that· -. morc than ever we must step ouaide the strictly art arena; It i. not enoucii to make art. MIn a similar vein, arlS administrator Linda Frye Burnhamna claimed that gallery art has lost ill resonance for her, especially gallery art by what she terms "white yuppies. - -There is too much going on outside, ~

t e aggressive ground-clearing work of deconltruction. Autonomy, we now see, has condemned art to social impotence by turning it into just

she says. "Rcallife is calling. I call no longer ignore the clamor of diuster-economic, spiritual, environmcntal, political disaster-in the ....orld

another clan of objecu for marketin and conIum tion.

in which I move.- Perceptions such as lhese are a direct challenge to the

anlc production and consumption, competitive self-asscrtion, and the maximizing of profiu are all crucial to our society's notion of luccess.

artist's normative .ense of his or her role in the world: at stake is one's

These nme assumptions,leading to maximum energy now and mindless

............ ....

J;,

waste at the upense of poorer countries and of the environment, have also become the formula for global destruction. Art iuelf is not some ancillary

personal identity in relation to a particular view of life that our culture has made available to u~, That the art world's values, structures, and behaviors arc in great

,~

ferment has been evident for some time, and the deconstructions of the

phenomenon but is heavily impl,icated in this ideology. In the art world,

eighties continue to reverberate profoundly. A climax in these upheavals

we are all aware of the extent to which a power-oriented, bureaucratic

was reached for many with the controversial 1993 Biennial at the Whitney

professionalism has promoted a one-sided, consumeristic attitude toward art. InSiitutional models based on notici~s of product development and

Museum of American Art-the first multicultural and political Biennial-

career achievement echo the stereotypic patriarchal ideals and values that

professional elitism and that its closed, scM-referential ranks arc under

"

which dcmonstrated that the art world is·undergoing a dismantling of ill

"

eOHHlellVI UITHIT,CI, AU AOlU ,.. O,VtOIlA~"H

!uiC.blj!t.

heavy siege. Much of the new art focuses on social creativity rather than on self-expression and contradicts the myth of the isolated genius private... subjective, behind dosed doors in the studio, separate from others and the world. As I shall argue in this !Sa creativit in the modern wor gone an In an with individualism and has been viewed strictly as an indiviCluaJ phenomenon. 1 believe Ihi. conception of art i. one of the things Il1"at are now changing. As the work of arlisu who are disculSed in this book makes clear, there is a distinci .hift in the locus of creativity from the autonomous, selfcontained individual to a new kind of dialogical structure that frequently is not the product of a single individual but i. the result of a collaborative and interdependent procen. As anists step out of the old framework and reconsider what it means to be an artist, they arc reconstructing the relationship between individual and community, between art work and public. Looking at art in terms of social purpose rather than visual style, and setting a high priority on openn~SJ to what is Other, causes many of our cherished notions to break down: the vision of brisk sales, well-patronized galleries, good reviews, and a large, admiring audience. A. Richard Shus, terman write. in PrlfgmlftiJt Atsthetia. "The fact that our entrenched institutions of an have long been elitist and oppressive does not mean

.In considering the implications of this "sea change," one thing il be able to see current aeSlhetic ideology as actively contributing .to.. the molt seriou. problems of our time means breaking the cultural trance and requires a change of heart. The whole framework of modcrnist ae.thetic, was tied to the objectifying consciousness of the .cientific worldview; like scientists, artists in our culture have been conditioned not to worry about the applicationl or consequence. or moral purpose of their activity. It is enough to generate results. But just as the shortcomings of "objective· scicnce are becoming apparent, we are also bcginning to perceive how the reductive and neutralizing aspect. of aesthetics and "art for art's sake" have significantly removed art from any living .ocial context or monl imperative except that of academic art hinory and the gallery sy.-

that they must remain such.... There is no compelling reason to accept the narrowly aesthetic limits imposed by the established ideology of autonomous art.· In February 1994, I had occasion to tape a conversation with the an dealer Leo Castelli. in which he commented about the Whitney show: "It was a sca change, not just any change. Because I had to accept the fact that the wonderful days of the era that I participated in, and in which I had played a subllantial role, were over.· In HIfJ ModeT1liJm Flfi/ed? I wrote, "Generally speaking, the dynamics of professionaliution do nOt dispose artists to accept their moral role; professionals arc conditioned 10 avoid thinking about problems that do not bear directly on their work." Since writing this a decade ago, it seems as if the picture has changed. The polilics of reconcepNalilltion has belun, and the search for a ""' aceRda for art hn become. coftKious RITCh.

The /lrtiu if not wpomible to /llIyanr. His focilll roft is /lJociII1; his only wpon-_.

~

cl~arl·to

tern. We are beginning to perceive how, by disavowing art's communal dimension. the romantic myth of autonomous individualism has crippled art's effectiveness and influence in the social world. The quest for freedom and autonomy has been nowhere bette~

1&!iI1ue1itI

marized for me than in these comments: by the painter published in the catalog of hil exhibition at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London in 198]:

Jibiil'l)' comists in 1I11lfltitNdr to tht work ht dOrJ. Thtrr if no rommNllic,dion with Any pNhlic whA(Jotvrr. Tht Arl;ll clln 11111 /10 qNtJfioll, A/Ill hr milk" 110 JIAtrJllelll; hr offrrlllo jnformilliotl. lind hif wor" ClfnnOI br Nltd. II if Iht rlld prodNct which CONIIU, in my Clflt, Ihr picturt.

More than I decade old, these commentl by now may sound hopeleuly out of date. but in a more recent interview in Art NewJ, it was dear that the artist had in no way altered his views. ·The idea of changing or improving the world is alien to me and seemsludicroul, ~ Basclitz said. ·Society functions, and always has, without the artist. No artist has ever changed anything for better or wone.· Hidden Inhind the.e commen" i. the penonal and cultural mylh th.c hu formed Ihe artial'S idencity in the

modem _

,..01....

.... ..

1

_...... Plaubm wnItt' ar the tJ.Fnni"l 01 the modem .,... -tJw one can "Ply hMr ;1 by avoidi", it. And that an be done byli.lnl in tho world of art.· POt

]e..n.Paul S.nte, Ihe exillcnli,1 truth of thCl hum.n .iNltion wu ill can· tingeRer, mIn', .en.e that he doc. not belong-i. not ncteJury-lo the

universe. Since life wu arbitnry and meaninglclI, Satire advised thai we must allicarn to Jive without hope. and Ihe English writer Cyril Connolly summed up. whole cultural elho. of alienation wilh Ihne now legendary

commenl!: "It i, clo'ing time in the garden. of the West. Prom now on an artist will be judged only by the reJonance of hi••olitude and the quality of hi. despair." Wriling about ,hi. form of.~ntological distrust, this VOte of "no confidence" in the universe. Colin Wilson in An lntroduction to the NnJ.J Ex;,untiAlism refers to the paradigm of alienacion,u the "fulility hypothesis" of life-che nothingneu, estrangement, and alienation thst have formed a considerable part of Ihe image we have of ourselve•. My friend Patricia Catto, who teaches at the Kan.,u City Art In.titute, now refers to this particular mind-.et as "bad modernism," tn a course she gives on reframing che lelf, her nudents are instruct~d about the danger of believing that humans (whether they are artim or not) are somehow ouuide of, or exempc from, a respon.ibility to .ociety, or to Ihe environment. We have been taught to experience the .elf at private, .ubjective., .eparace, from others and the world. This nolion of individualism hat so compJecely ltNctured artistic identity and colored our view of art that even for an artin like Christo, whose public projecl' such II Running Fenet snd the more recenc Umbrelttu require the participation and cooperation of chousands of people, inner con.ciousnen is 1Ii11 dominated by the feeling of being independenc,.olitary, and 'eparate. tn an interview in FLuh Art,

.........-d1

The work of'ft i, irr.tiollAl"."d perh.pl ir:re!pon,ible. Nobody nteds i,. The _Tk il. huge individu.liflk ,tlluTt th.t k:inrirely dedrieri b, me.. " One ofthe greolttll contributions ofmoriern .rt i. the notio" 01inrii",iJullli,m. ..• I thi"k the .rti.t e.n do .nything he w.ntl to do. Tbi, i, why I U!"ufd never IIrxtplll commiuiorr. Irrdepe"ric"et i, molt import."t to mc. The work 0l.rt il " l(Team offreeriom.

" ChriMo'. M:fUIII of Ir'MISom" dw unw..verin.. C"t~t rnonl imp«ative dlat continua to be brand..hed pollde..l1y at welt ..a ph.ilosophieally in all the modern traditions of Weatern thought. It reverberated loudly in the intense conuoverty thai raSed for Ieveral yeus o\ler the proposed removal of Ric:hud Serra's comminioned sculpture Tilted Arc from itl 'ite at Pedenl Piau in downtown Manhattan. Although conceived specifically for the site, the seventy-three-ton leaning CUrte of welded lICel, which Wat installed in 1981 by the lilovernmem'l Art in Architecture Program, pro\led 10 unpopular and obstructive to local office workers that they petitioned to have it removed. As one employee of the U.S, Department of Education scated at tbe time: "It has dampened our spirill every day. It hu turned into a hulk of rusty Iteeland dearly, at )eut to UI, it doesn't have any appeal. It might have artistic value but just not here, .. and for those of u. at Ihe piau I would like 10 say. pleue do u. a favor lnd cake it away, ~ Serra', response, 'wash in the .pirit of ~bad moderni.m,~ Was 10 .ue the government for thirty million dollar. bee,u.e it had "deliberately induced ~ public hostility toward his work and tried to have it forcibly removed. To remove the work, according to Sern, was to dellroy it. Serra sued for breach of contract and violation of his constitutional righu: ten million dollars for his los. of nle. and·commiuion, ten million for harm to his artistic reputation, ,nd ten million in punitive damages for violation of hi. righll. In July 1987, the Pederal.Dinrict Court ruled again$! Serra, and in March 1989, the sculpture was removed from the site. What the Tilud Arc controversy fortes us to consider is whether art that il centered on notions of pure freedom and radical autonomy, and subsequently insened into the public sphere without regard for the relationlhip it has to olher people, to the community, or an, consideration eJlcepc the pursuit of art, can contribute to the common good. Merely to pose the question, however, indicate. that what hu most distinguished aesthetic philosophy in che modern paradigm i, a desire for art thlt i. ab.olutely free of the preten.ions of doing the world any good. ~I don't know what public itt ii, rcally, ~ the sculpcor Chris Burden once said. "1 . -. •• JUII

"

make arl. Public arc il something else, I'm not sure it'. art, I think it's

"

"

S,,~i

C••liA

about a social agenda.· Just at di.interested and -val.ue-free- science con-

C<)NN'C~'V'

,. ,.{;.~U' of ~hich bring. me directly to the que.tion of whether art can

tains no inner rettnint within iu methodology that would limit what it feel, entitled to do, ·value-free- aesthetici.m reveal, nothing about the,

build community. Are there viable alternative. to viewing the .elf in an individuali.tlc manner1 And if so, how does this a((ect our notion of

limiu an should respect, or the community it might serve.

·.uccess-l Can arti.ts and art institutlon.'redefine themselve. in less 'pec-

Modernittaestheucl, concerned with itself as the chief source of

~.

A"''''TleI, An An . . 'NCl'VtClUA~IlM

tatorially oriented way. in order to reg.in the experience of interconnect-

value, did not in.pire creative participation; TIlher, it encouraged distanc-

edneu-of .ubject and object interrwining-that was l~t in dualistic

ing and depreciation of the Other. hs noorelational, noninteractive, . nonparticipatory orientation did not easily ICcommodate the mort femi-

.E~ligiitenment philosophic., w~ich construeg.the world at a spectacle to be observed from afar by a disembodied eye1

nine value. of ca,..asld compu.ion, of .eeing and ~e.ponding to need. The

. When California artist Jonathan'Borofsky and his collaborator,

notion of power th.t is implied by assening one's individuality and having

Gary Glassman, tflveled in 1985-86 to three different prisons in California

one's way through being invulnerable leads, finally, to a deadening of

in order to make their video d~cumentuy PrisOfltN, they did not go in the

empathy. The model of the ani.t'll a lone genius struggling against society

mode of network reporten intending to observe It a distance Ind then

docs not allow us to focus on the bendicialand healing role of social

de.cribe the condition. they found. Instead they went to listen to the

interaction, nor does it lend it.elf to wha~philosopher D.vid Mich.el Levin c.lls ·enlightened listening," • listening that is orienled toward the,

prisonen in order to try Ind undentand their plight. They wanted to understand for themselve. what it mean; to be a pri.oner in thb fodety.

achievement of shared understandings. As Levin writes in The U,tening

to lose your freedom and live your life locked up in a cement box.

Self, ·We need to think about 'prlcticCl of the self' that Nnde1'$fo.nd the

Borofsky and Glauman invited pri.oners to talk about their live. and

essential intertWining of self and other, self and society, that are .ware of

about what had gone wrong for them. In the video .ome of the prisoners

the subtle eomplexitiu of this intertWining.·

.hare poems they have wrinen or show. artwork. they have made. Con-

Certainly the sense of being isolated from the world and alone with

versing with the video makers. they describe the oppressiveness of life

one's creations is a common experience for Irtisu in our culture. the relult

inside. prison t where everything i. programmed and people never get to

of modernism's historic failure to connect with the archetypal Other. As Nancy Pruer puu it in her book Unruly Pr.crices: '"The monologic view is the Romantic individualist view in which ...• solitary voice [il] crying out into the night againlt an utterly undifferentiated background.... There is

talk spontaneously about themselv" bec.use no one is interuted. The knowledge that one is being heard, according to Glassman, trcates a sense of empowerment.

no room for a reply that could qualify as a different voice. There i. no room for interaction.· ·The artist considers hi. isolation, his subjectivity, his individualism almoSt holy.· States film director Ingmar Bergman. -Thus we finally gather together in one large pen, where we nand and bleat about our lonelinus without listening to each other Ind without

In SUl.lnne Lacy'. Th, CrystAl Quilt, performed in Minneapolis on Mother'a Day in 1987, a procession of 4io older women. all dressed in black, sat down together at table. in groups of four, to di.euss with each other their ICcomplishmentsand di.appointments, their hopes and fears about aging, in a ceremonially orchenflted artwork. A prerecorded sound track of the voice. of .eventy-two women at the t.ble. projected their

realizing that we are .mothering each other to death." • Art cannot be a

renections loud e,!ough to be heard by the audience. ·We're no longer

monologue,- the French writer Alben Camu. once wrote. ·Contrary to

litting home in the rocking cbair and knitting, like you think of grandmas

the current presumption. if there is anY''P,ln who has no right to solitude,

in the old day•. We grandmas aren't doing that Inymore,· comments one of the women on the audiotape. '"I think 'a lot of .enility come. from the

it is the anisl."

..

",

'.

"0....." .....

fact that nobody uks you

.nYlhing,~ Slates

another.

~Nobody

uks you to

speak. Pretty soon, you lose your memory. I suffer a lot from people not listening 10 me.~ Empathic liSlening makes room for the Other and decentnli:.r.es the ego-self. Giving each penon a voice is what builds community and makes art socially responsive. Interaction becomes the medium of expression, an empathic way of seeing through another's eyes. NUke a subjective anthro-

~,,,_.,,""

u, .",_ ,....,.. ,..........

can only come into its own through d;~logue, as open converution, in which one listens to and includes other voices. For many artists now, this mnnslening previously excluded groups .peak directly of their own experience. The audience becomes an active component of the work and is part of the process. This listening orientation challenges the dominalll ocu[arcentric tradition, which.suggests that art i. an experience available

pologist, _ writes Lacy, M[the artin enters] the territory of the other, and ...

primarily to the eye, and represents a rnl shift in paradigms. As David Michael Levin states in Modtrnity lind ,h~ H~gtmony of Vision, ~This may

bC(:omes a conduit for {their] experience. The work becomes a metaphor for relationship-which hu a healing power." When there is no quick fix

be the time, the appropriate historical moment, to encourage and promote a shift in paradigms, a cultural drift that, to some eXlent, seems already to

for some of our most pressing social problems, according to Lacy, there

be taking place. I am refernng, of course, 10 the drift from seeing 10 listen-

may be only our ability to witness and feel the reality taking place around us. -This feelingnest is a service that artists offer to the world," she says.

ing, and to the historical potential for a paradigm shift displacing vision and installing the very different influence of listening."

Mter Mierle Laderman Ukeles became the unsalaried, self-appointed artist-in-residence at the New York City Sanitation Department in 1978,

New models pUt forward by quantum physics, ecology, and systems theory that define the world in terms of interacling processes and reladonal

she went on rounds with sanitation workers and foremen from fifty-nine

fields call for integrative modes of thinking that focus on the relational

municipal districts, talking widi them and getting to know them. Her first

nature of reality rather than on discrete objects. Lacy states, "Focusing on

pitee of art wu a performance work called TOllch Sliniflltion, which went

aspects of interaction and relationship rather than on art objects calls for a radical rnrrangement in our expectations of what an IItist docs. ~ It calls

on for cleven months. During that time s.he visited the five boroughs of New York and shook hands with 8,500 workers. ~It was an eight-hour-day

for a different approach to making art an·d requires a different SCi of skills.

performance work,~ she states. "I'd come in at roll call, then walk their

To transcend the modernist, vision-centered paradigm and its specutorial

routes with them.... I did a ritual in which 1 faced each person and shook

epistemology, we need a reframing process that makes sense of this more

their hand; and I said, 'Thank you for keeping New York City alive.' The

interactive, intersubjective practice which is emerging. We cannot judge

real artwork is the handshake iuelf. When I shake hands with a sanitation man ... I present this idea and performance to them, and then, in how they

the new art by the old standll.rds. "Informed by an interactive and receptive normativity, listening generates a very different cp;lttmt and ontology-a very different metaphysics," write. Levin.

respond, they finish the art." TOllch $lInitlltion wu Ukcles's first attempt 10

communicate as an artist with the workers, to overcome barriers and

open t~e way to understanding-to bring awareness and caring into her actions by limning. Art that is rooled in a "listening- self, that cullivales the intertwin-

Modernism's confrontational orientalion resulted from deep habits of thinking that set in opposition society and the individual as two contrary and antagonistic tategories, neilher of which could expand or develop except at the expense of the other. The free and self-sufficient individual has long been the ideal of our culture, and artist. especially have

ing of self and Other, suggestS a flow-Ihrough experience which is not delimited by the self but ektends into the community through modes of

Seen themselves as quintessential free agenu, pursuing their own ends.

reciprocal empathy. Because this art isliuener-centcrcd rather than visionoriented, it cannot be fully realized through the mode of self-expression; it

But if modernism, and the art that emerged with it, developed around the notion of a unique and separate self, the art generated by what I have called

"

II

SlIli G.bliJr

"connective aesthetics 6 is very different. As I have argued in The Reenchrllltment of Arl, radical relatedness has dramatic implications for our understanding of art and conlTibutes to a new consciousness of how the self is to be defined and experienced. For one thing, the boundary between self and Other i, nuid ralher than fixed: the Othtr i. included wilhin Ihe boundary of selfhood. We are talking about a more intersubjeClive version of the self that is attuned to the interre1a~i~nal, ecological, and inter.lctive character of reality, "Myself now includes the rainforest,6 writes Australian deep ecologist John Seed, "It includes clean air and water." The mode of dillanced, objective knowing, removed from moral or social responsibility, hn been the animating motif of both science and art in the modern world. Objectivity slTips away emotion, wanu only the facu, and is detached from feeling, Objectivity serves as a distancing device, presuming a world that stands before us to be .een,surveyed, and manipulated, How, then, can we shift our usual way of thinking about art so that it becomes more compassionate? How do we achieve the "world view of attachment"-atlachment to and continuity with the world-that archetypal psychologist Jame. Hillman talks about1 To see our intcrdependence and interconnectedness is the feminine perspective thal has been mining not only in our scientific thinking and policy making but in our aesthetic philosophy as well. Care and compusion do not belong to the (a1se "objectivism" of the disinterested gazei care and compassion are the tools of the soul, but they are often ridiculed by our society, which has been weak in the empathic mode. Gary Zukav puts it well in The Sedt of the SaKI, when he .tates that there i. c\,l.r.~ently no place for spirituality, or the concerns of the heart, within science,'politics, business, or academia. ZuklV doesn't mention an, but until recently there hu bun no particular receptivity there either, Not long ago, I had occasion to share a lecture podium with the critic HiltOn Kramer, who proclaimed, with the force of a typhoon, that art i. at its ben when it serves only itself and not some other purpose, Things that in his opinion have no relation to art are now being accepted and legitimized as art when, according to Kramer, art is incapable of solving any problems but aesthetic ones. I would aTKue that much of the work

eO ..... CflV. MU""llCl, H1 ~"". '''O'V'OU.~I1''

included in this book contradicts, absolutely, these comments. However, there is no denying that the art world subtly disapproves of artists who choose interaction as their medium, rather than the disembodied eye, Just IS crealivity in the Western world has been based on an understanding of the self as autonomous and .eparatt, the hegemony of the eye is very Itrong in our cullure. We arc ob.essed with the gaze. At this point, 10 challenge the vision-centered paradigm by.undermining the presumed spectatorial distance of the audience, or by empowering others and making them aware of their own creuivity, is to ris.k the complaint that one is producing not an but social work. Personally, I have never heard of a .ocial worker who wu interested in shaking hands with 8,SOO sanitation workers, or who tried to orchestrate a public conversation among four hundred older women about aging. Social workers proceed quite differently from artists in what they do. To all these objections, I can only say that comparing models of Ihe self based on isolation and on connectedness has given me a different sense of an than I had before and has changed my ideas about what is important, My conclusion is Ihat our culture's romance with individualism is no longer adequate, My own work and thinking have led me 10 a fieldlike conception of the self that includes more of the environment-a selfhood Ihat releases us into a .ense of our radical relatedness. It stems that in many spheres we have finally come up against the limits of a worldview based only on individualism, In the field of psychotherapy, to give jUst one example, James Hillman, in his book We've H.d II Hundred Yellrs of Psychotherdpy-And the World's Getting Worse, casligatCi therapy for encouraging us to disengage from the wor!d. He maintains that therapy increases our preoccupation with individual fulfillment and personal growth at the expense of any concern forcommunily or the communal good. Many hackles have been raised in the therapeutic community by Hillman'sassertion that therapy has become a seU-improvement philosophy which turns us inward, a....ay from the world and its problems, Psychotherapy is only working on the -inside 6 soul, according to Hillman, while outside, the buildings, the schools, the streets, are lick-the sickness is out there. The patienl in need of healing is the world.

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Conneclive aesthetic. 'lrikel at the root of this alienation by dissolving the mechanical division between telf and world that has prevailed during the modern epoch. World healing begins with the individual who welcomes the Othcr. In Ukeles'. work, for insunce, empathy and healing

active and ecological models emerging in our culture. I belie~e we will lee over Ihe ncxt few decades more art that is enentially locial and purposeful, and that rejects the modernist myths of autonomy and neutrality. This book bean witness to the increasing number of anists who are rejecting

out paradigm:uically. The open hand, extended to each worker, evokes

Ihe product orientation of consumer culture and finding ever more compelling ways of weaving environmental and social responsibility directly

qualities of generosity and care. We neea to cultivate the compassionale,

into their work. In this complex and worthy endeavor, I sincerely wish

relalional self as thoroughly as we have cuhivatea, in long years of abstract

them well.

are Ihe parameters, the test of whether the work is, in fact, being carried

thinking, Ihe mind geared to scientific and aesthetic neutrality. As more people acknowledge the need for ~ new philosophical framework, we are learning to go beyond our culture of separation-the gender, class, and racial hierarchies of an elite Weltern tradilion that has evolved through a process of exclusion and negation. With its focus on radical individualism and its mandate of keeping art separate from life, modern aesthetics circumscribed the role of the audience to that of a detached spectator-observer. Such art can never build community. For this we ~eed interactive and dialogical practices that draw others into the process and challenge the notion, in the words of Gary Snyder, that ~only some people are 'ulenled' and they become Itlists and live in San

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Francisco working in open and ballet and the ren of us should be satisfied with watching televi.ion. ~ Connective aesthetic. sees that human nature is

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and healing by opening up being to its full dimensionality-not just the ~e. Social cOntext becomes a continuum for interaclion, for a process of relating and weaving together, cruting a flow in which there is no speclatorial distance, no antagonistic imperative, but rather the reciproc-

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ity we find at play in an ecosy.tem. Wilhin a linener-centered paradigm, the old specializations of atlist and audience, creative and uncreative, professional and unprofeuional-disti!tCtlons between who is and who is not an artist-begin to blur. To follow this pach, I would argue, is more than just a maner of personal lute; it represents the opening of an experimental space in which 10 institute and practice a new itt that is more in tune with Ihe many inter-

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world and whowe are, between who we are and what we do. The artist E",I/. C,•• W ""j...

To search for the good and make it matter: this is the real challenge for the artist. Not simply to lransform ideas or revelations into matter, but to

make those revelations actually matter. This quesl is measured as much in the truths we IIIcmpt to cnncsh as in the clay we might aesthetically de-

~lbell.,rr;r$tic work. not only inspire the viewer but give evidence of the artist's own struggle 10 achieve higher recognition of what it means to be truly human. The works arc.testamentS to the artis!'s effon to convert a particular vision of truth into his or her own marrow.

As I meditated on the theme of th,is book, I found myself thinking about territories. both public and private..:.:aboul politicalll1rf and definilive lines, those that exclude and those that include. 1 began to reflect on the tarth and all the redrawn borders that we who are involved in public art must bring to the map if there are to be positive new directions for the world's cultures. I found n'yself contemplating, as any anist might, the corresponding territory-the terrain of the soul, that sacred space within the self that must be acknowledged and tended, that dream space where Eden and womb are ritualistically related, where conception is possible, where we can receive in order to give again. The dream space of the soul is the real terrain that we should map. If not, then nothing else that we are fighting for or against has any possibility of transformatiol): not the militarism that we resist, not the oppression we deplore, not the toxic waste dumping on the land of the poor, not the racism or the sexism that we expose. None of these concerns can be taken on unless they are examined, acknowledged, and confronted within the inner territory of the seU, the earth that, in fact, we are. The soul is the seedbed of our actions. Everything that we conceptualize, crute, or deuroy has its In:ginnings there. What we see cultivated and thriving in the outer terrain is a ma~ifestation of our inner creative or destructive impulses. There is connected'ness between what we sce in the

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tends the private garden of the soul and gives evidence of this process publicly through the art that, in turn, inspires others to tend their own gardens. The often-asked question as to liow one moves from being anist to activist I find interesting, because I do nOt make the separation in my own mind. For me, the twO roles exist as a single entity: the artist if the activiSt. Indeed, within the African tradition, the anist's work has a function jun like everything ehe in the world. As the mask is for feuivals, and the ground-drawing for marking a ucred space, and the dance for healing and drawing energies to oneself, so, too, the ritu'!s that' we perform and the monuments that we make have a function: the transformalion of self and community, which is the extended self. Art is a necessity, II the poct Audre Lorde says, not a luxury. The assumption that art could be something separate from the life that sustains us, that art is indeed a luxury, is as false a theory as the notion that the OUter terrain can undergo transformation without affecting the soul. And yet, many believe that the places outside, in the world, are the true sites of change. Notions of separation and otherness are ingrained in Western thought, and it is this very way of thinking that has wreaked havoc on the cultures of the world. While no .ingle culture has a copyright on truth, perhaps embn.cing an African view of the intrinsic connectedness of all things would help us to recan the mother from whom we have'all come. And in remembering her, perhaps we can begin more profoundly to ~re-member~ ounelves. This charge of remembering the mother is important because without it our cultural and cross·cuhuralamnesia is never lifted; our common humanity is never fully acknowledged. We never know who we are, and having no true identity, we end up like a person who suffera amnesia, fearing every face that is not the exact replication of our own. And sometimes in our desperation, we even fear our own face. We never develop a sense of continuity or wholeness among people. The cultures Ihat remember this connectedness are recalling the crucial element thai has been part of our survival since our beginning. The artists who remember our'common humanity and instigate recognition of OUf true nature are those like Anna Halprin, who would have people Iivin. with AIDS Ind thON' who ar. nor afl1icl«l cin:lc die •

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urlh in a dance in an attempt to break down the barriers of fear. They are those like Suzanne Lacy, who would produce a'cry.tal quilt of women' whose choreographed laying on of hands helped change the patterns of their Ijvu and make visible the bonding and power among them. They are Ihose like Mel Chin, who would move us into the mystery of metaphor by working with .cientists to develop hybrid plantl that ablorb poisons from the earth into leaves which can be plucked from our children's surroundings. They are those like the husband and wife team Newton and Helen Mayer Harrison, who have collaborated for over twenty years, and Mierle Laderm~n Ukeles, artist-in-residence of the New York City Sanitation Department, and Sheila Levrant de Breueville, and Peter Jemison, and many more who recognil.e the illusion of du~lity, the miracle of coll~bora· tion, and the beauty of making truth mauer. None of this is to suggest that the aesthetic quality of any work need ever be sacrificed. 1 say this knowing that it is a critical issue of public art proiectl involving community participants who Ife not necessarily artim. Somehow, it is feared, the partieipanll' aesthetics will bring down the quality of the work. But since the aen.hetic is determined by the artist, perhaps this is not the ultimate fear of thoie 'who are leery of the new, more collaboradve public art. Perhaps the greater fear is that elitism will be destroyed, that the function of art will once again be recognized, that frecdom of exprcssion will carry the impulse and stark beauty of our first breath, and that our own relevance as human beings will come to be seen in the meaning of our acts. If this is what is.o furful, then we must continue to make such art and 10 redefine the way. in which the making is itself a celebrated process. In deciphering the mystery of this process, the blues form, or formula, from African American culture can provide insight. As ethno-musicologists tell us, the blues has three lines: the first line is the call, Ihe second is the response, ~nd the third is the release. The second line might be the same as the first but with some slight variation, and the last is adeparture. The last line rhymes with the first and, essentially, set. you free. The whole notion is transcendence, as exemplified in this stanza I composed for illumation:

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WtderWII"'1oUllin't,oblu"c '.t·· ." I '"1, WilIer WilIer 10U IIin't so blUt I done ch,de,d for m1s,lflind ther,', .. ,lty in 'ON.

.

'. Thil form--call,. answer, and r~lease-is a metaphor for art iuelf and the potenlia! that it hold•. T.h~ ca.lI is iry,cited by the experiences we havt wit/1 the world, by the ~uman condition. and predicament. within our terrain thai arouse our interest or eon.ciou.ness. Next comes the response, the artist's creati!,n-th~ attempt to name, recognize, and instigate change through his or her creative .expression. But the artist's crealion is not the,end of the prt,lcess, as it.is often thought to be. The process continues u member. of Ihe community experlence the release, the inspiration that allows them to enflesh the meuage and begin activating change in their own terrain,. This basic huma,n-to-hu.man interaction signals the symbiotic relation.hip among human beings. When we understand this, we can go on to better appreciate Ihe brealh dynamic between ourselves and the trees. We can und~rstand our relationship to oceans and ozones and other zones within the universe. The blue. form is not about being down and OUt. The blues calls 10 and Ifltnsform. Ihe hollerer, and continues on to transform the community. It makes those tingers willing to "work the .ound" inlo new and knowing people who go about the business of making the truth matter. Bessie Smith could nOt leave halfway through a concert. We, as the communal singer, cannot afford to do it eilher. The P0l;t Maya Angelou reminds us that our depth of erperiencc is in direct proportion to the dedication of our artistS. Indeed, we artim have to sing the second line in such a way as 10 .ignal the possibility for variation in the song. We have to create relevant art, art that invites its audience into the creative process and empowers them. We must sing in suc~ a way as to promise our lis,tener. who would become singers that the third line is a breakthrough, proclaiming without a doubt Ihat "I done checked for myself and there's a sky in you. ~ It 'eems to me that in order for this lransformation 10 happen, we artists must prepare ourselves to respond crealively and appropriately 10

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the calls in our environment. This is no small chore, especially for those of

Though the encounter wilh dream time is enlivening, it can also be

us in Ihe public realm, who find ourselves taking on challenging, often

frightening. The problem is not our descent into the soul; il is our emer-

emotionally draining issuu; writing and rewriting proposals to obtain

gence. or coming forth. Once we emerge, we must begin reconciling what

funding for projects; meeting for what seems like an entire lifetime with

we have come to know wilh what we still sec in Ihe world. We tell our.

artistic collaborators; addressing community participanlS and relentlessly

selves there is no time to retreat; we tell ourselves anything to keep from

rallying their interest in the projeCti gelling no funding at all, or just

repeating the ritU1\1 of deparlure. But if we do succeed in avoiding future

enough 10 prescnt only hdf of the envisioned project; meeting agaIn with collaborators about the meeting on the meeting; cncounlcring those critic.

deseenu into the soul, we will more than likely faU inlO the trap of making aff Ihat is simply creative rather than truly visionary.

who thc:msc1vcs haye not decided 10 be imaginative in their own work; and, lut but nOf IUSI, never finishing because we arc still actively linening

It parallels the difference between the artist who is an observer. or reporter.

10

Ihe communilY's response and remaining sensitive to Ihe sounds and To be an artin amid all these currenlS is demanding. How is the prepare~

and one who is a participant in the creative process-a mailer of investmenl or soul involvement. Quite simply, Ihe visionary artiSI has not

feelings in both Ihe inner and oUler life. arliSl to

There is, indeed. a distinction between creative art and visionary art.

Devclopmenl of one's craft and keen awareness of one's

merely sight but vision, the light the soul makes to illuminale the palh (or us all. This notion of the visionary being aparl from life, going inlo his or

surroundings are imporlant but arc hardly enough. To be able to make

her dream space, is not synOnymous with the Western notion of the

truly visionary an, we artius must have in our lives the crucial element

mYJlic's separation. The visionary anist in Ihe communily works in the

e~lled

Ilelds of the personal self, dreams lime tmd engagement Wilh others.


own sacred space, seeking the grace needed

10

create our work. Dream

All artists are able 10 display their craft without the exertion and

time holds the turmoil and trauma of the world at bay and 1\lIows Ihe

engagement Ihat marks a performance from the soul. An artin can simply

vision

project his or her persona while remaining detached (rom the performance

10

be jiranted .nd the healing notes 10 attune us.

Some sound levels in the world's chaos can be deafening. Our work

and the audience. But if you are ·working Ihe sounds·-if you are in-

in thc OUlcr terrain can become so demanding thaI we think we cannot

volved in something that engages you; confronting your own prejudices.

stall 10 meditate. BUI this deliberate pausing is also part of our work, and, in realily, it may be the only thing that distinguishes us from those com-

fear., and limitations, father Ihan merely presenting what yOll already

munity members who simply cannot make the time to lake Ihis inner

lCrrain where the truth exposes you-then you arc quilC possibly in Ihe

~p~ce.

Yet they arc depending as much on us

10

hear the calls and to sound

the fim responses as we are depending on them to (arm a chorus for the song in order to release Ihe healing and magnify the trlnh. And as odd as it may sound, this is the native territory of the public artin. It is a space to which Ihe community, time and time again, banishes us for ilS own salva-

know, feeling your own discomfort and taking that discomfort into Ihe lCrritory of the vision. You arc close to grasping the mystery of the healing. You are then, only theil, within reach of Ihe gift that you can bring baek to the world. Once you have glimpsed this vision, then you arc indeed a panici. pam. And the dualilY between you and your audience, you and your

tion. a .~pace that we ourselves evenwally choose as 1\ healing haven "nd

work, becomes "n illusion. And you have wril1en a poem. You have done

h"lInwing cave. The soul. a difficult bUt n«:euary terrain of (ctreu, holds

a performance. You have enncshed the beaUlY. You have made il nlaltcr.

the hllleprinl, or one mighl say the ·blues-print,· of the world we inhabit.

And the community, laking part in the an, complctes Ihe laSt line of the blues refrain, initiMing a Ilew reality.

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canh, and treat it badly. Lacking a sense of microcosmic community, we I.ucy R. Lipp.rd

fail to protect our macrocosmie global home. Can an interactive, processbased art bring people "closer to home" in a soeiClY characterized by what Georg Lukacs called "transcendental home1essness"? Not since the regional art of the Ihirties have so many people looked

LOOKING "1I.0UNO

~round, recorded whatlhey see or would like to see in their own environ-

I've spent a lot of my life looking, but len of it looking around. Art hinory

menu, and called it arl. Some have gone beyond the reneclive function of

and the art world ~ make progress, focusing on an invented vanishing

conventional art forms and the reactive function of much aClivist art.

point, losing sight of the eydic, panonmic vie...... And of course iI's not

Those who have been at it for a long time arc represented individually in

easy to be visionary in the smog. Meanwhile, Huel Henderson's ~think

this book. BUI they also havc heirs and colleagues among younger artists,

globally, act locally ~ has become a lruism-an overused idea important

writers. and activists who regard Ihe relationship between people and

M

enough to remain true, The notion of the local, the locale. the location. the

people unlike them, between people and place. between people, place.

locality, thepllfce in an. however. has not caught on in the mainnream

flora. fauna, and now. necessarily. even atmosphere, as a way of under-

because in order to attract sufficient buyers in the curren! system of distri-

standing hislory and the fmure.

bution, art must be relatively generalized, detachable from politics and pain. The social amnesia and an!ihistor;cal attitudes that characterize our society at large affect the art world as well. ~Change increasingly appears

The growing· multicultural ~ (and cross-cultural. intercuhural) contributions of the lUI decade have opened up fresh ways of undemanding the incredibly enmplex politics of nature. Culture aud the conecpt of

to be all that there is, ... There i. no .ense of progress which can provide

place are in fact insepllrable. yet people (and ideologies) are often Jeft out

meaning or depth and a sense of inheritance.~' But, perhaps because we are

of art about land and landscape. As Kenneth Helphand has observed.

at a retrospective moment in hillory-nearing the end of a millennium and

landscapes (which I would dehne as place at a dinance) ~carry legacies

iu.t past the five hundredth anniversary of the mon heralded point of

and lessons~ and can create "an informed landscape citizenry.-}

colonialism-many of us are looking back to find solid ground from which

National, global. collective narratives arc especially accessible

to leap forward. into the shifting future. It seems significant that what the

through one's family history-by asking simple quenions ahout why we

hinorian Lawrencc Grossberg call. the ~vet'y comentones of historical

moved from one block or city or Slate or country to another, gained or Ion

rescarch~ can also be called the very cornerstones of the art to ....hich this

jobs. married or didn't marry whom we did, kept track of or lostlrack of

book is devoted: ~appreciation of difference, undemanding of context.

certain relatives. A starting point. for example: simple research about the

and ability to make critical comparative judgmenu 00 the basis of emp:uhy and

evidence.~l

place where you live or were raised. Who lived Ihere before? What changes have been made? have you made? When was the house built? What do the

Ecological crisis is obviously responsible for the current preoccupa-

deeds in Ihe county records have to uy about il and the land it sunds on?

tion with pbce and cOntext, as il an ongoing noualgia for lost connections.

I-Iow docs it hi into the history of the area~ Has ill monetary value appre-

The Greek rOOt of thc word ~ ecology~ means homc, and it's a hard place

Ciated or depreciated~ Why? When did your family move there~ From

to find these days. Precisely beeau.e so many people arc nOt

at

home in the

world, the planet is being rendered an impossible home for many. Uecause

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where1 Why? What Native peoples hm inhabited it1 Docs your family have a history in the area, or in any area? 00 rclativulive nearby? What is

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different now from when you were young~ Why? How does the illlerior

places are Ihe reservoirs of human content.~) Whilc place and home arc

of your house relate to the exterior? How does ill style and decoration

not synonymous, a place musl have something of Ihe home in il. In these

reflect your family's cuhural background, the places from which your

chilHng times, the concept of place has a warm feeling to it. The implica.

people came? Is there a garage? a lawn? a garden? Is the flora local or

tion is that if we know our place we know somclhing about iti only i( we "know~ it in the historical :tnd expericntial sense do we truly belong there.

imported ~ Is there water to sunain it? Do any animals live there? And on a broader scope. are you satisfied with the present? If not. are you nostal-

But (ew o( us in COntemporary North American sociely know our place.

gic for the past or longing for the future~ And so forth. Questions like these ean set off a chain of personal and cuhural

(When I asked twenty universilY studenu to name "their place, ~ most had

reminiscences and ramifications, ineludinlliines of thought about interlinking histories, the unacknowledged American class system, racial, I;cnder, and cuhural divisions and common grounds, land usc/abuse, geography, environment, town planning, and the experience of nature that has made a ~return~ to it so mythical. When this kind of research into social belonging is incorpor.lled into inleractive or participatory art forms, collective views of place can be arrived at. It provides ways to understand how human nccupallls are also part of the environment rather than merely invaders (but that 100). According to Wendelll3erry, the most consistently

none; the ClCceptions were 1Ilol0 Navajo women, raised traditionally, and a man whose (amily had been on a southern Illinois (arm for generations.) And if we can locate ourselves, we h~ve not necessarily examined our place in. or our actual relationship to, that place. Some o( us have adoplcd places that arc not really ours except psychologically. We have redefincd place as a fclt but invisible domain, [n contrast 10 the holistic, earth-centered indigenous peoples of this hemisphere (who, over Ihousands of years, had also made ch:tnges in thc land), thc invading Europcans saw the natural world M an object of plun.

inspirinll writer nn American place, Nl'he concept of country, Ilomeland,

der to be conquered, cxploited, and com·modificd. They imported denial, still a prevalent disease among their descendants. The causes of thc ex.

dwelling place becomes simplified as 'the environmenl'-that is, what surrounds us. Once we see our place, our part of the world, as JHffOHnding

hauSled resources, the scarcity of wood and arable land in an "old world ~ were nevcr acknowledged; old habits were silnply reasserted in the ~new

us, we have already made a profound division between il and ourselves. N' Real immersion is dependent on a familiarity with place and its history thaI is rare today. One way to undemand ....here we have landed is 10

identify the economic and historical forces that brought us where we

world, NAlthough a sense of collective 10llsprcad through this country at the end of the nineteenth CCntury, when mon of the arable land had ~en parceled out, most people in tile United Stales today nill want to believe that our resourcC$-watcr, topsoil, forests, fuels, oxygen-are infinite. Not

arc-alone or accompanied. (Culture, said one contemporary ;lrtist, is nOI

unrelated is the scant attcntion paid to tile ways rural and urban spaces arc

where we corne (romi it's where we're coming from.) As we look at our-

structured and how thcy affect our national psychology. (HistorinnJohn

selves critically, in social conlextS, as inhabitants, users, onlookers. tourists,

Stilgoe uys that in colonial New England, lo....ns planned in odd shapes

we can scrulini:r.e our own participatory roles in the natural processes that

were seen as disordcrly and were "more likely to harbor civil and ecclesiastical unrest.")'

arc forn1il11: our fUlures. Similarly, Ihe study o( place offers access to experience of the land itself (an
Today, according to Rosalyn Deutsch, space as a reflection of power rcluions (produced by social relations) ~is on Ihe political agenda as it never has been before. ~'This is true for artists who have been ~framing~

Jeff Kelley has distinguished the notion of place from that of site, made popular in the late sixties by Ihe term ~site·specific" sculpture:" A

landfills, shopping malls. parks, and other social Contcxts for many ycars

sile rcprescnts the constituent physical propertics of a place ... whilc

now. Yet the ovenlllOnc is nOI exuberant. I've been struck by (hrce receO!

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in its own right) has spawned

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re-mapping, re-thinking, re-photographing. Second, the tides of exhibitions

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becoming melancholic and even

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by modeling themselves on lndians even while wiping them OUt.' The resurgence of mainstream interest in Native culture in the htst lew years (A process that began in the sixties) is partly due to Indians' grass-rOOts

strength and pride at having survived, partly bolstered by their rage at the cost in Native culture, health, and land. But it is also a product of the

tic for instance, Against Nature, The Demoraliud lA.ndsolpe, The

growing recognition among Euro-Americans that the five-hundred-year-

Unmaking of NiltMe, Lost Illusiom, and Utopia, I'ost-Utopia. Thir
old dream went awry. The search for plate is the mythical search for the

ubiquitOus in both thcory and practice. The map

~s

a micro/macro visu.11

concept has lonl; becn of interest to Artists, And puticuhrly to "conceptual" and

"e~nh"

artists from 1?65 to 1975. On one hand, mapping the

turf can be seen as abetting surveys, fences, bounduies, zoning, And other instruments of possession. On the other

h~nd,

maps tells us where we arc

and show us where we're going.

axis mundi, for some place to stand, for something to hang on to. (Seneca artist Peter Jemison has said it is nm the flag but the pole and cagle on top that mean something to his people; they connect earth and sky, body and spirit.) At the same time, a de-idealization of nature and of Native attitudes toward nature is necessary bee~use anything sel on a pedestal eao so easily be undermined. A responsible art of place must be part of a centering process. Wave

Understanding our cultural geography will be a necessary compo-

after wave of exiles is still coming through this land, and we have made

neOl of the reinvention of nature. We need to stop denying difference And

internal exiles even of those who are its natives, The immigrant population

pretending a woozy universalism thM mas~s,and maintains deep social

in the United States (all of us) has no center, no way of orienting itself. We

divisions. We have to know more about our rehtionships to each other, as

tend to presume our ancestors had one, but my family, for example. con-

part of the cultural ecology, to know where we stand as artists and cuhural

standy moved around; from the 1700s on, few generations stayed in the

workers on homeless ness, racism, And land, water, euhural, and religious

same town. When a place-oriented sculptor SAyS,

rights, whether or not we ever work directly on these issues. l3ec;tuse they

left, ". I'm not sure whether she means "atl thAt remains" or "that which is left behind."

arc linked, to be ignorAnt of one is to misunderstand another. Yel such awareness demands extetlsive visual and verbal (and local) research that is nOt included in

tr~ditional

art education. Multicultural studies especially

~Plaee

is what you have

Although art has often been used in the past as propagandA for colonialism and expansionism (especially during the nineteenth· century

need to be incorporated into art about history and phtcc. If only white

movement west), and much contemporary public art is still propaganda for

history is studied, the plate remaills hidden. For instance, when I taught a

existing power structures (cspc<:ially development and banking), no better

seminar on land in Colon.do, I found I had to include the way land was

medium exiStS in this society to reimagine nature, to negotiate, in Donna

used and conceptualized by the original inhabitants, the tragic histories of

HarAway's words, "the terms on which love of nature could be part of the

Native lands and lives and of the continuing struggle on Mexican land

solution rather than part of the imposition of colonial domin~tion and environmental destruction. "10

grants, the roles of bhck farmers and cowboys, Chinese railroad

~lId

agricultural workers, and the desert internment of Japanese Americans during World War II.

The upper middle class (from which the majority of artists emerges) tends to confuse place with nature, because it has the means and leisure

White America h~s been deeply affected (so deeply it doesn't often

time to indulge its wanderlust, to travel to sites of beauty, difference, curi-

show on the surface) by the land-based traditions of Native and mestizo cultures; colonists inherited agricu1tur~1 sites and techniques and survived

osity, to have second homes on shores, in mount~ins, on abandoned farms.

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!'lut urh~n environments ~re also places, ~Ithough formed differently, more likely 10 spawn Ihe multiple selves th~1 cue cross-cultural communicatioru, th~t in fact arc the result of cross-cullUrAI communicAtion. Those of us living in any bi" city IOd~y are confronted by A vaSl mirror whenevcr we step oludoors. [t refl~lS us and thosc who, like us, live on Ihis common I;round; our appearam;;cs and livcs often differ, but we can 'I look into the Illirror without seeing them 100. The reciprocal nature of cultural communicAtion is the nail James Baldwin hit on the heAd when he Solid,

Kif I .lm nOI who YOlllhought 1 w~s, then you arc nm who you thought

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AllY "tw ltind 0/ art prll(ti(r is going 10 ba'Ur to take plAct At leal/ p/l.rt;ally ,m world. And hard liS it is to eJttlhlill, oJ/tIrlfin thr art world, leu drcumlCribrll urritor;es arc IIIl thr mOrt f'Aught wilh prril. OUI Ihere, molt Mtim Me Ilcilher we/(ome nor C'!ferli'Ue, bIOI i" lurr is fl pOlrntially lU//ocAI;ng (0("0011 ill which IIrtim Arc drludrd into [('('ling impO,'"111 for d(mrg ollly whlll is tltptcll!d o[ thclIl. We colllinlic to l
you were either.-" The
Crtllt Wflll of LOJ Angdcs, which brings together tcens from different wltma! b:tckl:roun
W(

AIl[

Not all the varied (bUl still not varied enough) rorms that have come to be Col tied "public Art· deserve the Ilame. I would ticfine puhlic an :ts

accessible work o( any kind that cues about, challenges, involves, and COIISUltS Ihe audience for or widl whom it is made, respecting eOlllmtlllilY and environment. Thl' other stuff is still priule an, no matter how big or exposed or intrusive or hl'ped itlllay be. In order to SOrt out wherc lYe SUtl
Ihight and Nancy Gonehar's Chicf/go Stories, NeWlon and Ilelen Mayer Harrison's prOflosed Boulder Creek Project, and Richard Misrach's Bravo ]0: Thr Bombing o/tht AI/ftrj(f/n Well. 2. TrAditionAl omdoor public art (not "plunk Ht," IYhich has simply becn enlarged and dropped on the sitc) that draws attention to the speeif1e

I've heen slruhblinl; with these q\lenions for a lnng lime. In 19(,71 WfOtc thAt visual an WH hovering at a ,rnssroal!s "that may well turn OUltO bc two ro~ds to Olle place: Ht a.~ ide:t and art as aet;on .... Visual Ht is still V;SIl,ll eVl'1l wilen II i~ invisible or visionary."" In 1980 [ Wl'Ot(':

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charactel'isties or funeliolls of the places where it intervenes, either in predieuble locations such ~s parks, bank pb1.u, muscum I:M'dens, and college campusl'S (slleh U Andrcw Leiccner's mining memori~1 in Frostburg, M:tryland; Athena Tacha's Memory P/II/' in S.1runt~,

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these works ohen funetion as "wlke-up art,· a eaulySl

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collective

action, Examples are Suunne Lacy's Three WeekI in M
j:UKO'S

Tht Year of Ihe

While BelAr at several siteJ in Ihe Ullited Sutes and Emore. 6.

An thM funetions for environmental awarencss, improvement, or reclamation by lransforming wastelands, focusing on natural history,

Fllture in Charleston, South Carolina). This group would also include innovative and officially funded public art and memorials with social

opera.ting ulilitarian sites, making parks, and cleaning up pollution. An

agendas and local references, such as Maya Lin's Viel11am Veleu.ns

example is Alan Son fist's TIme I.a'llluttpt ofNew York Cit),.

Memorial and Barbara Kruger's Little Tokyo mural at the Museum of Cnntemporary Art, Los Angeles.

7.

Direct, didactic l'olitic~l;ln that eommentS publicly on loeal or national iUlles, espeeially in Ihe form of sign age on transportation, in p~rks. on buildings, or by the ro~d, which marks siles, events, ~nd

3. Site-specific outdoor arlworks, often collaborativc or collective, that significantly involve the community in execution, background

invisible histories. Examples are REPOhislOl'y'S sign project in Lower

information, or ongoing function. Examples arc officially condoned

Manhman, D;lvid Avalos, Louis I-lock, and Eli'l.aheth S;sco'.~ San

graffili walls; Joel Sisson's Green Chair Project in Minneapolis; Olivia

Diego bus projeCl, ~nd H~chivi Edgar He~p of Birds's Host projects

Glide alld Jon Pounds's Pul/man Projecu in Chicago; the Borda Art

at muhiple sites.

Workshop in San Diego and Tijullna; Dr. Charles Smith's African Alneriean Heritage Museum in Aurora, Illinois; and works by many

8.

Ponable public-aecesJ radio, television, or prinl Illedi;l, such a$ ~udio­ ~nd videolapes, postcards, eomies, guides, manu~II, artists' books, and

progressive nwralislS.

posters. Examples are Carole Cond~ and Karl Ueveridge's bnok and poster work wilh Canadian unions and Paper Tiger publie-aeeess

4. Pennantnt indoor public installations, oflen with some function in

television, demonstration art IUcl, ~s the AIDS quilt, alltl the SptrlllC/e of Trtlmfnrmation in Washin~lOn, D.C.

regard to the community'S history, such as post office murals across the eoulltry and Houston Con will, Estella Conwill Majo7-0, and Joseph De [l~ee's The RwerJ at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York City. This group ~Iso includes historyspecific communi' y projects thai focus on ongoing educational pro-

9.

Actions and chain ~ctions that tuvel, permeate whole lowns, or appe~r ~fI over the commy simultaneously to highlighl or link eurrelll issues.

ceues, such ~s the Chin~town History Projeet in New York CilY and

Eomples are Joh" Fellner's stencils in the Bronx, New York; the

lhe Lowell, Muuchusem, national industrial park.

Shadow Project, ~ nationwide commemoration of Hiroshim~ D~y; antl Lee Nading's hillhway ideograms."

s,

rer'fonmnces or ritu~ls oUlsi{le of tr~dilional ~rt spaces th~t call aHell' tion to pl~ces and lheir hiSlOries and problems, or 10 a larger commu· nit)' of idemity ~nd e~perience. Like streel posters, slencils, or stickers,

ror decades

tlOW

a few artists have ventured out lmo the public

cnTlfext and tllade interactive, IMrticipatory, effective, md affective art rebting to places and the people in thcm. Since .he hIe fifties there have

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process of recognizing both limitatiOns and possibilities. We need

to

col·

labonte with snulland luge social, politic~l, specialized groups of people

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relalionships and historical Constructions of place. We need utists to guide us Ihrough the sensuous, kinesthetic responses 10 topography, lO lead us

already informed on and immersed in the issues. And we nted to teach

into the archaeology and resurrection of bO(~·bued soei~l history. 10 hrin~

them III welcome artists, to understand how art un concrelize and envi·

out multiple readings of places thatlllean different things to differellt people

silln their I:oals. AI the samt time wt nccd

~nd at different times. Anllthere is mucll we can le~rn from the ironically

to

colbborale wilh those whose

b~ck~roumls and nltybe foregrounds arc unfamiliar to us, rejtcling the

labeled "prinlilive~ cuhul'es about underst~nding ourselves H part of

insidious lIotions of"diversity ~ thal simply neutraliz.e difference. Empathy

nature, interdependent with everything in it-hecause nature includes

and exchanj\e arc key wonls. Even for interactive an workers who have

everything, even technology, created by humans, who ~re part of n~lure.

all the right ideas, elitism is a hard habit 10 kick. Nothing that excludes the

What would it be like, ~n art produced by the imagination ~nd

places of people of color, women, lesbians, gays, or working people can be

responses of;tS viewers or users1 How can art activate local activities and

called incltl.~ive, universal, or IIl:aling. To find the wholc we must know

local values? With adequate funding resources, pulllic artists might set lip

and respect aHtlle p~rts. So we need to weave a relationship and rel:iprocal theory of multi·

social ~nd political sp~ces in which energies could come together, dialogue

plicity abom who we are, what is our place, and how our culture affects

in rel~tion to the (~lnil;Ar "framing" strategy, in which what is alre.,dy

and ~lternAlives or opposition could be eoncretizcd. These might be seell

{Hlr environlllcnt. We nccd to know a lot 1110re about how our work affects

there is pUI in sharp relief by the addition of an ~rt of cal1in~ 1((entiOll.

ami dis~ffecls the people expose
.. Parasit;e" art forms, like corrected billboards, can ride the dnminam

nil! COllHllunicate. This too can be btlilt into experimelltal education in

culture physically while challenging it politically, creating openly con-

both an hislory and studio courses (the twO remain absurdly separated at

tested ternins that expose the true identities of existing pbces ~Ild spaces

lllOst schools). To return to the notion of place, an cannot be a centering (ground·

activates the consciousness of a place by subtle markinli.~ without I~;sturb·

ing) device unless the artin herself is centered and grounded. This is not 10

ing it-a booklet guide, walking lOUrs, or directional signs captioning the

say that the alienated, the disoriented, the deracinated. the nomadic (i.e.,

history of a house or a family, suggesting the depths of a landscape, the character of a community.

mmt of us) cannot make an. But some pOrlable place must reSt in our souls. Perhaps we arc lucky enough to have some sust~ining chullk of

~nd Iheir function in social control. Another set of possibilities is art Ihat

Art is or should be generous. But artists can only give what they

~n~ture~ to nourish us. Perhaps the city is iusl as satisfying. Perh~ps the

receive frOm their sources. Believing as I do that comlection to pl~ce is a

studio is the den where we lick our wounds, dream up im~ges, pl~n new

necessary component of feeling close to people. to the earlh, I wonder whal

stralegies, gather the strength 10 go out ~g~in. Perhaps the limiutions of

will make it possible ror aTlISIS to "give" placC5 back to people wlJoc~n no

the ivory &~lIery and the pages of art magazines ue stunting the growth of

longer sec them. Because land plus people-their presence and absence-is

.,n ~n th~1 dreams of striding fearlessly into the streets, into the unknown,

what makes place resonate. Alternatives will h~ve to emerge organically

to meel and mingle wilh others' lives.

(rom the anists'lives and experiences. And they WOll't unless a broader set

As "etlv;sionafie.~," artists should. be ~blc

10

provide a way to

of optiolu is laid OUt by tlH).Ie who arc exploring these ~nelV~ territories.

work ~~~inst the dominant eulture's rapacious view of nature (" Manifest

The artist hns to be a l'aTlicip:\Ilt in process as well as itS dircctor, has to "live

J)e~tiny"),

Ihere" in some w~y-physically, symbolically, or enlpntheticnlly.

to reinstate Ihe mythical and cultural dimensions 10 "public"

expel'ierlce and atlhe same time to become conscious of the ideological

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r~markably like Ronald Rugan) soothed

believing the war was a bloodless, complllcri7.cd science demonstration of gigamic proportions. Youug American men with adroit rcflues trained by a video-gamc ,ullUTe U5 inlO

demonstrated our superiority as a nation over Salldam Hussein through video-screen 51rau:g;c air striku.

From the triumphant bron7.t general on horscb~ck-thc public's

view of whidl is the underside of galloping hooves-to lIS more conlemporny corporate versions, we find cumplcs of public an in the service of dOlll;nancc. By their daily presence in Ollr lives. these utworks intend to

persuade liS of the justice of the aclS they represent. The power of the corporate sponsor is embodied in the sculpture standing in fronl of the tnwering office building. These grand works, like their military predeces· ~nrs in the parks, inspire a sense of awe hy their se~le ~nd the importance of the artist. Here, public art is unashamed in its intention 10 mediate between the public and the developer. In a "things go down bettcr with public art" menulity, the biller pills of development are delivered to the public. While percent-for-art bills have heulded developers' creation of amen;l.ulC public phces as a positive side effecI of "growth,M every inch of urban space is swallowcd by sk yscrapers and priYlli7.ed imo the so·called public sp;l.ce of shopping malls and corporate plaus. These developments prelletermine the public, selecting OUI the hamden. vendors, ;l.doleseents, urban poor. ;l.ml people of color. Planters. benches. and other Mpublic amenities" arc suspect as potential huards or public loitering places. Recent attemptS in Los Angeles to pass laws to StOp or severely resu'!cl push<:art vt'lltledorCI from sdling dOUJ,frllltU. pale/as, and raJpados made ;l.etivis15 of non~ggress;ve merchants who had silently appropriated public spaces in hq::ely Latino sections of our cilY. VcnJedrm·J.lovcd by the people for offering lUll only popular produclS but f;l.mili~r reminders of their homelanlh, provide a Latino presence in public spaces. Any loss of botanical, mercadoJ. t'endtdorel, and things familiar reinforces segregation. as ethnic peoplc disappear to another corner of the city. Lo.~ Angeles providcs clear and abundant examples of developmenl .1S a lonlto colnni?'e and d;~place ethniC communitics. Infamous dcveloplIIenu abound ill public record. if 110t consc;ousness-Dod\;er Sudium,

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culfu •• O ,oc" ..

which displaced a historic MeKican community; Bunker Hill, now home 10 a premier arts CentCr, which displaced another; and the less well documented hinory of how four major freeways inlersected in the middle of East Los Angeles's Chicano communilies. One of the mOJt catutrophic consequCnces of an endless real estate boom was the concreling of the entire Los Angeles River, on which the cilY was founded. The river, as the carth's arleries-thus atrophied and hardened-crcated a gianl scar acrou the land which served to further divide an already divided cily. It is Ihis metaphor that inspired my own half-mile· long mural on thc hislory of ethnic pcoples painted in the Los Angeles riVer conduit. Just as young Chicanos UllOO battle scars on their bodies. thc Great Wtllf of LOJ AngeltJ is a lallOO on a scar where the river once ran.' tn it rC;l.ppear the disappured stories of ethnic populations that make up the labor force which built our city. SUle, and nation. Public art often plays a supportive role in developers' agendas. In many instances. art uses beauty as a falte promise of inclusion. Bcauty ameliorates the crasure of ethnic presence, serving the transformation imo a homogenizcd visual culture: give them something beaulifullo sund in for Ihe loss of their right to a public presence. Two New York-bascd artists were seleetellto deconte the lobby of the new skyscraper of Fim Internate Bank in downtown Los Angeles. To represent muhicull\lraliSIll in Los Angeles. Ihey chose angels from the Basilica of Santa M;ui.~ rle~li Angeli nur Assisi, Italy. They Ihen tacked ethnic cmblems Onto the E'.urope~n angels, -borrowing- the pre·Columbian feathercd serpent Quctu1coul from the A7.lees. the crowned mahogally headpiece (rom Nigerian masks, and the eagle's wings from our Nalive peoples as ·cm· blems of a variety of euhures.~ Thelc symbols replaced the real voices of peoplc of color;n a city torn by the greatest civil disorder in the United States in decades. At the dedication, which took place shortly after Ihe rebellion (the Los Angele., riots of 1992). black and Lalino children un· veiled the angels in an e1aborale ribboll·culting ceremony. Hailed by the developers as a great symbol of ·unity.· these arlifacts st('lod in for the real pcople in a city terrified of thc majority of its citizens. Tragic,~JJy, the $SOO.OOO spem on this single work was more thall Ihe whole city budget

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fund public murals by ethnic artisu who work wilhin Los Angeles's

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on which this country was founded. I heri-

diverse Chinese, African American, Korean, Thai, Chicano, and Central

uge of thought that hu brought u. clear·cuuing in first growth forellS and

American neighborhoo
concrete conduits that kill river. as an acceptable method of flood control.

ill ~ n\etropol;~ of multiple perspectivu. While competition for public

cults of the exalted individual. in which personal vision and originality are

~pace v.rows daily. cultural communities call for it to be used in dr;unati-

highly valued. As a .olitary creator the artist values self-expression and

These ideas nnd their parallel in the late modernist and postmodernist

cally different ways. Whal comes into question is the vcry different sensi-

~artiSlie

bilities of ordcr llnd bellulY that operate in different cultures. When

therefore responsible only to himself rather th.1n to a shared vision, failing

C:hri~to. for eumplc, looked for the lirst time at EI Tejon Pass. he HW

to reconcile the individual to the whole. When the nature of El Tejon Pass-a place known to locals for its

potential. He saw the potenti11 to create beauty with a personlll vision imposed on the landsc1pe-1 beauty that fit his individual vision of yellow

freedom· (or separateness uther than conncctcdness). He is

high winds-asserted iuelf during Christo's project and uprooted an

umbrellas fluncring in the wind. marching up the sides of rolling hills.

umbrella planted in the ground, causing the tragic death of a woman who

The bnd became his C;l.nvas,;I. backdrop for his personal aesthetic.

had come to see the work. Christo $lid. "My project imitates rcallife." I

Native people might look at the S1mc landscape with II very differ-

couldn't help musing on what a different project it would have been had

ellt idea of heauty, a beauty without imposition. They might sec a perfect

the beautiful yellow umbrellas marched through Skid Row. whcre l.os

order eKemplified in nnWre itself, integral to a spiritu~llife grounded in

Angeles's 1<40,000 hornelen lie in the rain. Art can no longer be tied to the

place. Naturc is not 10 be umpered with; hence, a plant taken requires an

nonfunctionalist state, relegated by an "art for art's uke~ tyranny. Would

offering in return. Richard Ray Whitman. a Yaqui anist. sllid. ·Scientifi-

it nat have been more beautiful to shelter people in need of shelter, a ges-

cally cohesive-I am the atoms. molecules, blood, and dust of my ances-

ture and statement about our failure as 11 society to provide even the most

t(lrs-not as hislOry, but as a continuing pcople. Wc describe our cuhure

basic needs to the poorl Why is it not possible for public an to do Illore

as:l circle. by which we mean that it is an integrated whole.'" Maintaining

than

a relationship with Ihe dust of onc's anceators requires a generational

the people for which it is created. Developed to live harmoniously in

relalionship with the land and a respcctful treatment of other life found

public space, it could have a function within the community and even

on the land. Or perhaps Native peoples could nOt think of this area without

provide a venue for their voices.

rccalling fori Tejon, one of the first California Indian reservations estab-

art is a work by Mellicao artist David Alfaro Siqueiros on Los Angeles's

lished ncar this site in the Tehachapi Mountains, placed there 10 "protect·

historic Olvera SlTeet. This 19)) mural, paimed over for nearly sillty years

~imilate· life~

Public art could be insep..r..ble from the daily life of

for the Melliean sensibility. an imponant manifestation of public

Indians. rounded up from various neighboring HUS, most of whose cul-

by city falhers because of its portrayal of the plight of Mellic1nos and

tures have heen entirely deuroyed. In Christo's and the Native visions we

Chicanos in California. is currently in restoration. Siquciros depicted as

have tWO different aesthetic sensibilities. as divergent as the nineteenth-

the central ligures a meni7.o shooting at the American eagle aod a crueilied

century English manicured garden is from the rugged natur.11 New Mui-

Chicano/Mellieano. While this mural is becoming mIHco-lied. with mil-

can landscape of the S.1ngre de Criuo Mountains. Perhaps a less benign impliution of Christo's idea is that landscape

fe-presentation to the public. it is important to recogni?e that the same

unlouched by man i~ ·undeveloped land." This is a continuation of the

images would most likely be censored if painted today on Los Angeles's

".

lions of dollars provided by the Getty foundation for iu preservation and

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WooOIf MOHIIK!N' woo . . . . OIlU'C n l 'K. K..... C!... U . . D .OC""

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strC1:u. The subject maller is as rdevant now, sixty yurs later, as it was

message from the boy in the principal's office nid, MI need you to come

then. Murals depicting the domination of 1nd resistance by Los Angeb's

here right away because I'm going to get thrown out of school again.-

L1tinos or other populations of color provoke the same official resina nee 15

they did in

19]].

Despite these struggle~, muuls h1ve been the only

My dul with the boy, formulated over a long mentorship, W1S that he would not quit school again without talking to me fint. I arrived to find

intCTvenlions in public Ipacelthat articuhtl: the presence of ethnicity.

the principal lOwering over the young cho/o, who w~s holding his hud in

Architecturc and city planning have done liule to accommodlle communi-

a defiant manner I had seen over and over in my work with the gangs.

ties of color in our city.

This Stance, relniniscent of a w~rrior, c~l1ed unccremoniously Mholding

As competition for public space h1s grown, public art policies have

your mug, is about maintaining dignity in adverse circumstances. The M

hecome calcified and increasingly bureaucr;l!ic. An that is sanctioned has

principal was completely frustrated. MYou've wrinen on the Ichool', w111s

lustlhe political bite of the seventies murals. Nevertheless, a rich legacy of

and you simply do not have respect for other people's property. Tell me,

Illuuls hu been produced since Amrriea Tropiea/wa.s pa.inled on Olvera

would you do this in your own housd- I couldn't help but smile at his

Succt by the maenro. Thousands of public lnurals in phces where people

admonition, despite the seriousness of the situation. This boy was an

live :md wOI·k have become tangible public monuments to the shared

important graffiti artist in his community. I had visited his house and seen

experience of communities of color. Chicano munls have provided the

the walls of his room, where every inch was covered wilh his intricate

lcadership and thl: form for other communities to asSUt their presence and

writings. Two diHerent notions of beauty and order were operaling, as

anicuble their issues. Today, works appear that speak of children caught

well as a dispute about ownership of the school. The boy's opinion was

in lhe cross fire of gang warfare in the barrios of Sylmu, the hidden prob-

that he had aesthetically improvcd the property, not dcstroyed it.

lcm of AIDS in the South-Central African Amerie1n community, and the

At this time the conditions of our communities are worse than those

struggles of immiRration and assimilation in the Korean community. Thesc

that prC1:ipimcd the civil righu activism of the sixtics and seventies. Fifty-

mural! have become monumellt'lhat serve as a community's memory.

twO percent of all Afric1n American children and forty-twO percent of all

The generations who grew up in neighborhoods where the landsca.pe was doned by the mural movement have been influenced by these

Latino children are living in poverty. Dropout rates exceed high school graduation rates in these communities. What, then, is the role of a socially

works. With few avenues open to lfaining.a.OlI art production, ethnic

rcsJlolllible public utili? As the wealthy and poor arc increasingly polar-

teenagers have crealed the graffiti art that has become another method of

ized in our society, faee-to-hcc urban confrontalions occur, often with

resisting privati7.Cd public space. As the fim visual ut form entirely devel-

catastrophic consequences, Clin public art avoid coming down on the side

oped by youth culture, it has become the focus of increasingly severe

of wealth and dominance in that confrontation? How can we as artisu

rcprinls by .1lIhorities who spend fifly-two million dollan ~nnu1l1y in the

noid becoming accomplicCl to coloniution~ If we chose nOt to look at

County of Los Angeles to abate what they refer to as the Mskin cancer of

triumphs over nations and neighborhoods 11 victories and advancemenu,

society.M It is no accident that Ihe proliferation of graffiti is concurrent

what monuments could we build? How can we crute a public memory

with the reduction of all youlh recreation and aru programs in the schools.

for a many-cultured society? Whose story shall we tell?

Working with communities in producing public artworks hal put me into COntut with many of the'e youths. On one occasion, I was called

Of grutest interelt to me is the invention of systems of ·voice M giving for those left without public venues in which 10 speak. Soci11ly

to a local high school after h~ving convinced one of the young Great

responsible artists from marginalized communities have a puticul.r rc-

Wall

production tum members that he should retUrn to school. The urgent

-

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sponsibility to uticulate Ihe conditions of their people and 10 provide

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catalysu for cllangc. since perceptions of us as individuals are tied to the conditions of our communities in a racially unsophisticated society. We

COMMON WOH) Jrfl Krllry

cannot escape that responsibility even when we choose to try; we are made olthe ~blood and dust ~ of our anceSlors in a continuing history. Being a catalyst for change will change us lisa. We can evaluate ourselves by the processes with which we choose Over the pa" decade, those of us intereJ!ed in a serious and challen~in~

to make an. not simply by the lrt objects we crute. Is the artwork the ruult of a privlte act in a public space~ Focusing on the object devoid of

public Art have heard often of thc benefits of collaboration between artists

the creuive process used to achieve it has bankrupted Eurocentric mod-

and archilccts. The ccmVentiollal wiHlnm is Ihal arlist~ brin~ a frcsh, unen-

ernist and postmodernin traditions. Art processes. jun as art objects, may

cumbuccl sense of design

be culturally specific. and with no single aesthetic. a diverse society will

ties of thc artin'~ ego-celllcr sl'lmehow enliven Ihe Cltherwise COllvelltional,

generate very different forms of public

corpOratclqHe environments architects come up with too much of the time.

HI.

Who is the public now that it has changed color? How do people of

10 architectural

projecu. and that Ihe peculiari-

The artist is assumed to be freer than the architect. and freedom is usuOlcd

various ethnic and class groups use public space? What ideas do we want

to be art. The archilect is regarded as a relative technician by comparison,

to place in public memory? Where does art begin and end? Artins have the

constrained as he or she is by the legal, fiscal, and material limitations of

unique ability to transcend designated spheres of activity. What represents

Ihe trade. The idea is IhAt as artlsts and architccts ~coliabClrate~ architec-

somethiJlg deeper and more hopeful about the future of our ethnically and

ture will be made II1Me human, or M least morc art-like. Art-likeness i~ auumed to be more humalle.

class-divided cities arc collaborations that move well beyond the artist and architect to the artist and the historian. scientist. environmentalist. or social

CClnventil'lnal wisdom aside. true collaboralinll alllong afli~ts .,nd

service provider. Such collaborations are mandated by the seriousness of

architects rarely happens. Given the stereotypical ways in which we see

the tasks at hand. They bring a range of people into conversations about

each othcr, it's no wonder. What passes today for collabontion lends in

their visions for their neighborhoods or their nations. Finding a place for

faCt to be a frustrating process of compromise and concession. The archi-

those ideas in monuments that are constructed of the soil and spirit of the

tecl is almon always in charge, and artislS. who arc paid very little for their

people is the most challenging task for public artists in this time.

services. often must fight for recognition u members of a ~ design team. ~

NOTES

tion to occur. The loss of professional identity is at stake, and in corponte

Moreover, in ou, society the conditions are nOI usually safe for coltabon-

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America. professional identity is often all one has. Given this territorial antagonism and the bureaucratic hassles of thc public seclQr (which i.~ usually the designated ~ elienl~ in a public artlarchitecture projcct), many artists have simply given III' and gone back to the studio. Perhaps the most typical misunderstanding architects have about :trtists is that they want to build ~artM illlo the projcci. or Ihal they want to make the architccture itsel'; that is, that artists want to pili' at being archilects. There is ~ome truth to this. Perhaps the mosttfpical misullderuanding

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