Summary and outline of chapters
1. Contextual review
1.2. Changes in curatorial practice
1.2.2. Durational approach
Indeed, it is the notion of place as ‘event’ – an evolving and dynamic time-space – that seems to be the key when considering curatorial dilemmas with facilitating the context-specific practices dis- cussed above. The factor of time is a significant aspect of artistic practice, especially so in process driven, participatory, community based, or context-specific work. Recognising the importance of the different timeframes through which projects might develop, curators have adopted durational ways of working to accommodate this need for the time element. Durational approaches have been manifested predominantly in the context of site specific, place-based commissioning where work is developed in a cumulative way over a long period, thereby evolving a relationship with a specific context, community or a group of people, who participate in the creation, or public manifestation, of the work.119
Curator-producers working in this manner operate from an embedded position and are actively in- volved in the artistic process, as well as in negotiating the context as a space for artistic exchange.120 The duration is essential as it is part of the context, and the understanding of site, and public space which is not formed and static, but dynamic and evolving.121 Similarly, the communities are under- stood not as pre-formed but, rather, as dynamic entities; according to Doherty and O’Neil a ‘dura- tional approach to events and projects seems to allow for the formation, dispersal and reformation of temporary active communities’.122
Miwon Kwon in her influential book One Place After Another: Site Specific Art and Locational Identity,
describes, based on her case study of the public art project Culture in Action, four types of commu- nities and different kinds of interactions between the artist(s) and their respective communities.123 The first of such categories proposed by Kwon is the ‘Community of Mythic Unity’, which could be described as a ‘utopian’ notion of community, envisaged as one united by a common denominator
118 Doherty, C. 2007. ‘Curating Wrong Places...Or Where Have All the Peguins Gone?’ In P. O’Neill (ed.) 2007.
Curating Subjects. London: Open Editions. p. 103.
119 Cook. S., Krzemien-Barkley, A. 2014. ‘The Digital Arts In and Out of the Institution – Where to Now?’. In Paul, C. (ed.) A Companion to Digital Art. London: Blackwell Publishers (forthcoming).
120 O’Neill, P., Doherty. C (eds.) 2011. Locating the Producers. Durational Approaches to Public Art. Amsterdam: Antenae Valiz. pp. 3-4.
121 Ibid., pp. 4-7. 122 Ibid., pp. 9-10.
123 Culture in Action was a series of significant public art commissions by Sculpture Chicago, curated by Mary Jane Jacob, which took place between 1991-1993 in Chigaco. It is often considered a groundbreaking experiment that redefined the notion of public art. See Jacob, M.J. at al. 1995. Culture in Action. A Public Art Program of Sculpture Chicago. Seattle: Bay Press.
(such as gender), to which a set of general attributes and characteristics are ascribed. According to Kwon, art projects based on this general unifying notion of community risk irrelevance as all other differences (individual, cultural, ethnic etc.) are ignored, or neutralised, at best.124
Next, Kwon distinguishes communities with already existing clearly defined identities as ‘Sited Com- munities’. According to Kwon, collaborations with these communities often risk being predictable; as the community might either be invited to the project as it ‘fits the bill’ of an already conceptualized work that an artists wishes to realise, or, if the project is centred around the particular community, the focus and the nature of the project may be prescribed by the set of issues central to the com- munity. In this scenario, curator and art institution often act as ‘matchmakers’ between an artist and a community, anticipating an artist’s interest and the kind of project that may result from the col- laboration, sometimes stereotyping the identities of the community and the artist in the process and leading to a superficial collaboration which fits with already established agendas.125
The third type of community, discussed by Kwon, are ‘Invented Communities (temporary)’; ‘newly con- stituted and rendered operational through the coordination of the artwork itself.’126 Such communities are often involved in activities or events, which lead towards, or constitute, the artwork, an important aspect of which is the forming of the community itself. According to Kwon, those communities are usu- ally short lived as they depend, conceptually and financially, on the project and sponsoring institution. The fourth model of community interaction, ‘Invented communities (ongoing)’, is a development of the third model and it refers to a community formed for the purpose of and during the making of the art- work, but which remains operational beyond the duration of the project and its institutional support.127 As an example of this type of community engagement, and the most successful in the Culture in Ac- tion in terms of meeting the declarations of its organisers, according to Kwon, were: a community garden and video production initiative. The community garden, initiated by artistic collective HaHa and Flood, was set up to grow food that was later distributed to AIDS sufferers. The garden was set up in a storefront space, which also become a community centre for AIDS education – with work- shops, lectures and special events organised. The second project, Street Level Video was collaboration between artist Mongalo Ovalle and teenagers from his Latino neighbourhood in Chicago’s West Side, during which the teenagers involved produced videos relating to their lives.128Street Level Video still functions (renamed as Street Level Youth Media); soon after the end of Culture in Action (1993) young people took over the responsibility of running the initiative.129
According to Kwon the community garden and Street Level Video were the most successful as they contributed to the process of community development in their respective contexts. What gave them their sustainability is ‘the artist’s intimate and direct knowledge of their respective neighbourhoods’,130 which grew out of sustained engagement with the context. Kwon sees the duration, and ‘an intense engagement with the people of the site, involving direct communication and interaction over an
124 Kwon, One Place After Another. p. 119. 125 Ibid., p. 126.
126 Ibid., p. 126. 127 Ibid., p. 130. 128 Ibid., pp. 131-132.
129 See Street Level Youth Media, 2013. ‘Home.’ Online. Available at: http://www.street-level.org/. Accessed: June 20, 2013.
extended period of time’ as the key aspect of the ‘ethics’ of socially responsible art.131 Thus, a dura- tional way of working resists the ‘pseudo-ethnographic’ approach to site based commissioning and the ‘curator/artist -nomad’ model of working whereby artist and curator are ‘parachuted’ in to work with communities or sites on a short-term basis.132
According to Doherty and O’Neill, durational projects could be considered as ‘discursive exhibitions’ that evolve over time but instead of prioritising the moment of display, or the event of exhibition, they allow for open-ended, cumulative processes of engagement.133 This creates the possibility of a different understanding of the concept of participation;
‘We could move away from an abstracted idea of participation as event-based, experienced
en masse – towards something ongoing, experienced individually, sometimes discordantly, which is enacted by us as citizens. In this sense, durational commissioning processes that employ co-productive and socially-engaged modes of operation move away from the spec- tacularised mode of social relations, [...] in which shared experience is atomised and con- sumption is undertaken without agency to create a false togetherness.’134
One example of durational way of working in a place-based context, which is a basis of institutional operations, discussed by Doherty and O’Neill, is Grizedale Arts; a commissioning agency and resi- dency programme based in Lawson Park farm house in the Lake District. Originally Grizedale Soci- ety’ Sculpture Project135 invited artists to make sculptural and land art works that responded to the location. Currently Grizedale Arts is a strongly focused curatorial project of on-going programme of events, artists’ residencies and community activities, that encourages artists ‘to work amid the com- plexities of a specific rural location’.136
The Grizedale activities concentrate on the rural context, producing works and situations, which in one way or another involve the local residents. The projects range from site-specific installations, performances, fairs, talks, discussions, country shows and markets amongst others.137 At the centre of Grizedale’s work is the ‘cumulative residential model’, which has gradually generated a large net- work of artists – over two hundred, many international – with whom Grizedale collaborates with on a regular basis. 138 There are six residencies per year for which the artists are chosen through an an- nual open residency call. After the residency period, artists are often invited to return to Grizedale to contribute to the current programme of activities.
The residencies are not production-lead, but rather the process is guided by the focus on commu- nity and the specificity of the local context, with which the artists are encouraged to engage with
131 Ibid., pp. 81-82.
132 O’Neill, P., Doherty, C. 2011. ‘Introduction. Locating the Producers.’ In O’Neill, Doherty, Locating the Pro- ducers. p. 4.
133 Ibid., p. 14. 134 Ibid., p. 9.
135 Grizedale Society’ Sculpture Project was set up in 1977, funded initially by Northern Arts and the Forestry Commission.
136 O’Neill, P. 2011. ‘Creative Egremont. A Public Art Strategy for Egremont Cumbria, UK. Grizedale Arts.’ In O’Neill, Doherty, Locating the Producers. p. 84.
137 See Grizedale Arts, 2013. ‘Projects.’ Online. Available at: http://www.grizedale.org/projects/. Accessed: December 20, 2013.
on a long-term basis.139According to Frogget at al. study of Grizedale, its embeddedness in the con- text, to which it responds with particular attention to the needs of the local communities, is the key principle underpinning the agency’s operations.140 As such, Grizedale is an interesting model of an institution strongly focused on facilitating a meaningful engagement and response to the context – social and locational – in which the durational cumulative model of working is a key strategy for developing an embedded and sustained relationship with the local context and its complexities. While the examples discussed above indicate that durational ways of working are conducive to de- veloping a sustained relationship with social and locational contexts, and therefore can be deployed in order to facilitate socially engaged, context-specific artistic practices, some critics point out that the duration can not be considered a silver bullet to the challenges of artistic engagement with the complexities of social realities. According to Beech, the issue with ‘duration as ideology’ is that it is ‘presented as solution for art’s social contradiction, whereas the only viable solution must be to problematise time for art.’ 141 Beech goes on to point out that duration posited as an ideological solu- tion sets up a binary opposition between ‘duration’ (equated with ‘ethical’) and the ‘short-lived’. He argues that ‘time should not be managed and deployed by artists according to a single ahistorical principle that is meant to be true no matter what the circumstance. Different conjunctures will call for different qualities as well as quantities of time. Pace must be adjusted not fixed according to an ideological imperative’.142