Reflections

The process of planning requires not only imposing order on ideas but translating these ideas and their order onto the world. When a city or town or area is planned, there is a point at which the planner, in order to plan, must anticipate the behaviour, the desires, expectations and therefore the future of the people who live there. In prescribing the way a place will be, one prescribes a certain behaviour for its residents. In The Uses of Disorder [1] Richard Sennett examines the effect of the unpredictability of people on projected plans. Any challenge to a plan from an individual or group, he writes, is deemed not as a natural part of social development but as a threat to the whole plan. Interest on the part of citizens is seen as interference. The current Planning Bill being forced through the English parliament establishing an unelected, unaccountable Infrastructure Planning Commission to make planning decisions testifies to the dominance of this idea [2]. The pursuit of a cohesive, harmonious, idealised community, argues Sennett, requiring the projection of a solid group identity, does not allow for any unexpected conflicts. As such it is a means of ‘denying the idea of history’- that a society will come to change beyond the expectations of the past. The artist has in recent times come to be employed in his capacity to contribute to this harmony, in his role as a socially engaged artist. Artwork will normally come about through an exploration of a place and its residents’ memories, shared experience, commonality and cohesion.

The problem with town planning as an order-imposing discipline and the problem with socially engaged art at this point converge, with respect to the expectations placed on the residents of the ‘community’ which is the subject of the planning or project. In the same way that planning requires people to behave in a predictable way, a socially engaged art project expects people to perform a very particular role, though this will not always be clear at the outset. The structure of a social engaged art project will normally run along the following lines (this is drawn from research material including the CABE report Artists and Places: engaging creative minds in regeneration [3] ):

An artist is employed within a regeneration or social engaged art project to bring his or her maverick creativity into play in a place which someone considers in need of this input. Particular types of places and ‘communities’ are liable to have artists invited to work in them and this invitation will often come from a third party involved in the area with feelings of responsibility for shaping its future, for giving something, to help. The success of a social engaged art project will normally lie in the amount of or quality of engagement which an artist has with people in this area, the amount of interest that is paid to their work, the willingness of people to participate or contribute to a project which is the brainchild of the artist. This is effectively a somewhat traditional approach to art making, with very particular, if unstipulated, delineations between the roles of the funding administrator/project manager/curator, financially remunerated artist, unpaid ‘community’ participant/audience, with participants effectively the material and their behaviour part of the process of making artwork.

The ameliorative aspects of a socially engaged art project may not necessarily reflect what the art offers to residents of a particular geographic area but to the conscience of the project manager and the artist. The project manager wishes to offer something to a place, wants to communicate with its residents and anticipates what the artist can offer as an intermediary between the professional and the citizen. The artist is invited to step in and out of both the professional and non-professional domains. The artist facilitates the professional’s communication with the people whose lives he or she shapes. For the artist who no longer understands the production of artwork itself as a political act, the socially engaged art project offers the opportunity to get his or her hands dirty in the grist of the real, to offer his or her ability to produce art for the people, with the people, to perform a more direct role in social change.

The outcomes of a socially engaged art project may be described in terms of its process but a tangible artwork is often required. By translating the soft experience (reminiscence, memory, nostalgia) of participants in the area into a soft artwork (something poetic fabricated using participant contributions, such as a radio broadcast or patchwork quilt), the artist brings together a coherent whole to represent some aspect of the cohesive ‘community’. This methodology has come to be one of the unspoken terms of engagement in a socially engaged art project. Expectations of who will become involved in a project are confirmed through its completion, with a few interested, generous people with time to give themselves mediating between the artist and the rest of the ‘community’ by making introductions, acting as a guide to the area and so on. Encountering outright hostility may be rare, but meeting with people sceptical, too busy or just not interested in the project is to be expected.

Lack of participation in a project on the part of members of the ‘community’ may occur for a number of reasons. Perhaps people are themselves organising creative activities which they have invested in for a longer period of time, through which strong and rewarding bonds have been formed. Perhaps they are suspicious of the motivations of the project. Perhaps they have other things they prefer or need to do. To treat lack of participation in a socially engaged art project as a failure or to ignore it out right is a mistake. To understand more about the reasons for lack of interest in a project is to learn more about a place and the people that live in it; their interests, their knowledge, their ideas and ways of being, as individuals and as groups. To be curious about this is to recognise people as autonomous beings whose behaviour, desires, ambitions, hopes and dreams one cannot predict or pre-empt.

Idealising coherent, strong ‘community’ images denies room for the unknown. Abstracted quantifiables of success for a socially engaged art project reflect not only an instrumental approach to art and creativity, they deny the possibility of recognising the unpredictability and ultimately the freedom of human beings. Attempts to remain in control of a situation, to direct a project whilst denying the existence of challenges to it, is to deny a fundamental part of what it is to be human, and what it is to exist socially: to be constantly placed in a position of uncertainty. To truly engage is to embrace the uncertainty of your own position in the face of another’s – be it unfamiliar, critical, informed, confrontational, dismissive or curious. Opposition, dialectics, contradiction are fundamental elements of both internal and social human life.

Disorder, or at least its potential, lies at the heart of every social encounter. Embracing disorder in town planning means allowing plans which anticipate physical and social needs to be open to challenges from those who are affected by these plans and to the unforeseen turns of real lived experience. Encountering difference in the spaces between what is planned leads to a richer life.

Embracing disorder in a socially engaged art project holds similar rewards. It may require that a project’s measures of success are drastically changed. It may question the value of the project at all. It would certainly call for honesty about the challenges to a project; misunderstandings, lack of interest, lack of participation, feelings of discomfort and inadequacy. It may require that those involved question their own motivations. But it might eventually lead us to think about strategies for creativity which really are valued by people in a particular geographic area, to recognise those that already exist there successfully operating at a grassroots level on their own terms. By embracing disorder, a socially engaged art project may really start to explore what creativity is and what art is. To truly engage with anyone means being open to the idea that they might just be able to teach you something. Embracing disorder, however hard it might be, isn’t half as frightening as trying to pretend you’re in control.

Notes:

[1] Richard Sennett, The Uses of Disorder: Personal Identity and City Life (Norton, New York, 1970)

[2] For further details http://services.parliament.uk/bills/2007-08/planning.html

[3] Artists and Places: engaging creative minds in regeneration (CABE, April 2008), p 4 http://www.cabe.org.uk/default.aspx?contentitemid=2467

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