Catalysts

Working in Public (2007-8) was a project that aimed to raise a discourse about the practice of art in the public sphere. It used some of the methods of contemporary public art to reflect on that practice.

The catalyst was an extended visit to Scotland by Suzanne Lacy, a Los Angeles-based feminist and activist artist. Lacy was funded by a Henry Moore Foundation Fellowship at Gray’s School of Art (2005-6) during which she reflected on ten years of working in Oakland, California 1990-2000. Starting in 1990 Lacy had initiated and developed a sequence of discrete but connected projects within a sustained commitment to working with young people of colour to understand and transform their image in the media.

Suzanne Lacy has pioneered approaches to public art over a career of some 40 years drawing together radical feminism and performance art practice. The sharp point of the work enables individuals to ‘analyse the conditions of their own oppression’ as a means of moving forward (Friere, P 2007 The Pedagogy of the Oppressed New York: Contiuum). In this work the artist is a catalyst to a much deeper social, learning (pedagogical) process.

Lacy’s experience, albeit developed predominantly in the USA, offered artists in Scotland the opportunity to work with an outstanding and highly experienced artist in a public dialogue. They were able to contribute their experience to the unfolding discussion and to explore the differences between the contexts as a means of revealing deeper issues and challenges of public art practice in its many forms, roles, aesthetic guises and levels of responsibility.

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A Unique Structure

Out of these aims and opportunities emerged a unique event structure. Working closely with the Scottish Arts Council, the Steering Group evolved a framework intended to enable a core group to participate in the whole programme, whilst others could attend the key lectures and presentations. The framework consisted of four thematic events, ‘seminars’, one in each major city in Scotland. Each event picked up on what we felt was a shared and significant set of tensions in the experience of artists working in the public sphere: aesthetic and ethics; power and representation and quality and imperfection.

We wanted the discourse to be interdisciplinary – across art practice, art research, cultural policy and cultural organisations. We wanted to raise radical questions – Why an artist? What or where is the aesthetic? What particular qualities of leadership might an artist bring to social experience? What are the political and aesthetic implications of publicly funded art?

We aimed to embrace the many disparate views that surround making art in the public sphere and arrive at shared thinking that could also accommodate difference. We also aimed to establish a platform in which practitioners and academics could work together. We wanted to achieve a flexibility that could value very different scales of working. We set out with an ambitious programme of events with key international contributors. These included Grant Kester, associate professor of Art History at the University of California, San Diego and theorist on the aesthetics of collaborative art practice. It included Tom Trevor, Director of the Arnolfini Gallery, Bristol and Simon Sheikh, theorist and critic, key contributor to Documenta 11 in 2007 and lecturer at the University of Malmö in Sweden.

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Whom?

As organisers we sought to draw in a diverse but representative core group of approximately twelve experienced practitioners. These included artists, curators, leaders of arts organisations, community leaders who regularly collaborate with artists. They would work together with each other, Suzanne Lacy and the research team. The core group was selected from an open call which attracted interest not only from Scotland but from across Britain and parts of Europe. Participants had to commit to attending and contributing to the whole programme.

They included Adele Patrick, Lifelong Learning Co-ordinator and Creative Development Manager of the Glasgow Women’s Library; Damian Killeen, Chairperson of Big Things on the Beach; Janey Hunt, artist researcher at Dartington College of Arts, Devon, England; 2005 – 2008; Janice Parker, independent choreographer, Edinburgh; Jean Cameron, creative producer of Glasgow International Festival of Contemporary Art; Kate Foster, ecological artist; Kate Gray, Director of Collective Gallery, Ediburgh; Keith Donnelly, Arts Development Officer Visual Arts South Lanarkshire Council; Kerstin Mey, then Director of Research, Institute Art and Design, University of Ulster and now Director of Research, University of the Creative Arts, Farnham; Monika Vykoukal, then Curator, Peacock Visual Arts and now curator, University of Wolverhampton; Roxana Meechan, Project Management for The Highland Council & Timespan Museum & Art Gallery; Ruth Barker, artist and writer (and now editor of PAR+RS); Sally Thomson, then Arts Coordinator, Royal Aberdeen Children’s Hospital, now Visual Arts Officer, Aberdeenshire Council; Sarah Munro, Artistic and General Manager, Tramway, Glasgow; and Venda Pollock, Lecturer in Art History, Department of Fine Art, Newcastle University.

At each stage we relied on critical feedback from the participants and wider artistic community. The learning was to be a cumulative experience that would expand horizons and generate new energy through cross fertilisation.

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Roles and Values

We ensured that there was space for both formal and informal exchanges of practice, project experience as well as raising questions. This was underpinned by readings, key theoretical texts, drawing on a deep knowledge of art and policy development.

Three out of four seminar events focused Lacy’s experience in relation to a single theme. The fourth seminar flipped the dynamic bringing to the foreground the work of the core group. The core group participants effectively led a public discussion at the Scottish Parliament bringing the issues of contemporary public art practice to the political space.

They demonstrated through a diversity of approaches the important role of art in critically developing the public sphere through participation. Each core group member presented his or her work succinctly in text and image in the form of A0 sized posters. These were displayed somewhat ironically on easels. The Core Group presentations were followed by a panel discussion chaired by the writer, Moira Jeffrey, with contributions from Jay Koh, activist artist; John Caughie, academic in Film Studies; Emily Brady, academic in Environmental Aesthetics; Nicol Stephens, then leader of the Scottish Liberal Democrats and sponsor of the event, as well as Suzanne Lacy herself.

Discussion grounded in practical experience was vital to the programme. Many of the Core Group were seeking ways of thinking about the value of their work that moved beyond conventional forms of evaluation. These seek to identify impact other than in artistic terms – value-for-the investment made, social value, learning value. The Core Group clearly also benefited by being able to juxtapose their work with the work of others. In her analyses Lacy was herself looking for ways of understanding the results of the work, being cautious about inflated claims, being realistic about the limits of the artist’s role. She traced the importance of a transition, of long term thinking, a requirement for impact to unfold by building processes of ‘handing on the baton’, allowing for new organisational forms that could build on success.

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Insights and Analyses

Core participants often voiced what they felt to be an undermining of ‘art’, a lack of confidence or an inability to locate ‘aesthetic power’ if an artwork did not take the form of an object. Areas of the theoretical thinking such as Kester’s notion of dialogic aesthetics pointed to the dangers of historical and institutional constructions of aesthetics. He offered critical insights as means of analysis.

There was a healthy look at the implications of public funding of the arts. In Scotland we appear to be in the enviable position of having quite a well funded infrastructure almost unheard of in the USA and elsewhere. This comes with the very real fear of instrumentalisation and political compromise. Conversely it comes with responsibilities. New questions arise about the status of the ‘voice’ of the individual in the public sphere. How free is it really? It also raises complex questions about the reach of public art. How is public art to be distributed beyond its immediate context of operation? Should it be? Who should distribute and under what construction of ownership or authorship? What is the nature of leadership in an art project? Could an artist destabilise a situation? Could an artist by working in local, grounded situations, destabilise a wider set of assumptions and values?

There was some criticism that the process privileged a single artist and her work, i.e. Suzanne Lacy and the Oakland projects, in some sense re-enacting the hierarchical values of the art world by reifying individuals at the cost of a deeper and broader understanding of a dynamic dependent upon multiple roles. Our intention could not have been further from this.

Perhaps John Dewey captures the thought underpinning Working in Public, “The crucial educational problem is that of procuring the postponement of immediate action upon desire until observation and judgment have intervened”
Dewey, J. (1938/1997). Experience and Education. Macmillan

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Space to Talk, Space to be Heard.

In all, Working in Public provided space to assert the artist and aesthetic priorities; space to play with ideas, to play even at being someone else – a politician, a funder, another kind of artist. There was space to talk and be heard; to be confronted with a different perspective; to tell a story, the resolution of which was still unclear; to try out an idea. There was space to talk to politicians, other artists and other academic disciplines about the issues of art in society. There were opportunities to develop networks that could support the work from that point on and develop skills of language, of critical thinking.

Downloads:

Representation and Power: A Critical Response by Anne Douglas
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Quality and Imperfection: A Critical Response by Anne Douglas
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Aesthetics and Ethics: A Critical Response by Anne Douglas
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Working in Public: Evaluation by Wallace Heim

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