Shamans and Activists: contradictions in "community art" (excerpt)  |  2004

During the 60s and 70s, disenfranchised groups attempted to empower themselves by making their stories known and educating people about the specifics of their cause under the general ambition of "consciousness raising". The strategy was to make a social issue highly visible, so that it could not possibly be denied by the hegemonic structure that was perpetuating human rights violations in American society. Sometimes those involved in political struggles were also creative people: artists, musicians, dancers, writers. Naturally, some felt compelled to address their concerns through creative works.

As the Civil Rights movement in the U.S. empowered large groups of people to be more open and vocal about the need for change, artists like Suzanne Lacy and Mierle Laderman Ukeles initiated projects that required engagement from audiences outside of a gallery or museum context. The intention was to solicit involvement from non-artists as a way to directly address social issues. Participants were asked to reflect on their own experiences, and/or to surrender those experiences as catalysts for creative works. This practice has often been called "community-based" art. Although I have grave concerns about the broad definition of community in this context, for ease of understanding I will use this term below to refer to a certain type of process-oriented public art that aims for socio-political engagement.

The desire for relevancy compelled artists to turn away from exhibiting at arts institutions. Although they dismissed the bureaucratic structure of museums and galleries, early community-based artists ironically embraced the cult-of-personality perpetuated by the same institutions they chose to reject. Many artists working outside of arts institutions cite Joseph Beuys as an inspiration and father figure for community-based practice. Although this recognition is certainly well-founded, these artists hesitate to acknowledge the possibility that Beuys may have been a flawed model for the ideals of an activist art tradition. His pursuit of the artist-shaman persona creates a strong contrast to his assertion that "everyone is an artist". Beuys states:

...when I appear as a kind of shamanistic figure, or allude to it, I do it to stress my belief in other priorities, and the need to come up with a completely different plan for working with substances. For instance: in places like universities, where everyone speaks so rationally, it is necessary for a kind of enchanter to appear. (John F. Moffitt, Occultism in Avant-Garde Art: The Case of Joseph Beuys UMI Research Press, Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1988, 108-109)

Beuys' creation of shamanic performances adhered to an avant-garde modernist tradition of the artist as a catalyst for mental or spiritual enlightenment, someone who could have the ability to startle the viewer into a deeper understanding of her own existence. Artists working with social issues followed his example and continued to perpetuate the high cultural status of fine arts despite their seemingly contradictory interests in addressing social issues. In a 1978 interview in High Performance magazine, Suzanne Lacy states:

With this last piece [In Mourning and In Rage] we had a meeting with all the women's organizations in town that deal with violence, and we said we wanted to do this piece, and we wanted to support them, and we wanted them to support us. Immediately, one of the women from one of the centers jumped up and said we think the way you can support us is that you can help us do a self-defense lecture-demonstration and then you can serve on the hot line and we need help doing that. And we said NO, we're artists, and we have skills in this area and we're going to talk with you about it. There was a struggle because they didn't understand what we were trying to do as artists; they don't trust art. Realistically enough, what's art ever done for them? What's art done for political organizations in the past ten years? So there was a struggle to educate them to what we can do, and about the power of this imagery and what it can do. (Suzanne Lacy interviewed by Richard Newton in 1978, republished in The Citizen Artist: 20 Years of Art in the Public Arena Linda Frye Burnham and Steven Durland, eds. Critical Press, Gardiner, New York, 1998)

In their early works, Lacy, Ukeles, and others like Judy Chicago seemed to cling stubbornly to their identity as "artists" and sometimes chose to distribute their work through traditional arts institutions. The challenges they faced as outspoken feminists in an era of little visibility for women artists was no doubt also a factor in these decisions. I respect the triumphs they made in re-defining artistic practices. However, 30 years later these women have themselves become canonized, and it is crucial to understand their contributions contextually and without romanticization.

Early community-based practitioners used their title as artists as a way to legitimize their presence at a site or in a group where they could lay little claim to authority. Their expertise as artists was used as a substitute for their lack of experience in dealing with the issue or cultural crisis that their work aimed to address. This is not to say that projects like In Mourning and In Rage or The Dinner Party did not contribute to the discourse of feminism or that they were failures. But they struggled in their attempts to supplement or enhance the project of existing activist movements.

The cult of personality works within arts institutions, but it does not work when artists want to collaborate with the public or with non-arts institutions. Art addressing the social issues of a "community" is possible, but it often fails because it satisfies the charitable desires of the artist more than it satisfies the practical needs of the community. Art can be anything and it belongs anywhere. But that does not mean we are doomed to community-based art practices that do not acknowledge the failures of the bureaucracies within which they choose to work.