Searching for the Fourth
River: Creative
Tactics for Gathering and Disseminating Stories (and Information)
| 2004
co-authored with Carolyn Lambert
presented at the 2004 Community/Performance Conference, Bryant College,
Smithfield, Rhode Island
The city of Pittsburgh developed where the Monongahela and the Allegheny
Rivers meet and form the Ohio River in southwestern Pennsylvania. Because
of the rivers, Pittsburgh became a significant site for U.S. steel production.
Pittsburgh's steel industry has since declined, but the three rivers
remain an important geographical feature for the region. Numerous local
festivals and place names have adopted this label, including the Three
Rivers Arts Festival, the Three Rivers Regatta, and the former Three
Rivers Stadium. In a city that places great emphasis on its identification
as the three rivers region, stories prevail about an underground fourth
river.
As newcomers to Pittsburgh, we were curious: Did people know about the
underground river, and if so, what could they tell us? We wanted to
collect various versions of this urban legend. Could we draw attention
to the significance of urban myth and provoke discussion amongst strangers?
In the summer of 2003, we developed a performance as an opportunity
for dialogue about Pittsburgh's geography and the city’s collective
identity. This public intervention was constructed around the fictional
premise of two private investigators and the public interest group that
hired them, the Fourth River Lobbying Organization Working Group, aka
FLOW. FLOW maintained a downtown window-front office that served as
the headquarters for their campaign to lobby the city for a re-branding
of Pittsburgh as the Four Rivers region of southwestern Pennsylvania.
As geological private investigators, Cat Furman and Macauley Brooks
conducted man-on-the-street interviews. They attracted attention in
colorful uniforms and life preservers. Among the leads the private investigators
received from Pittsburgh citizens were a sighting of the river in the
basement of a prominent downtown hotel and tips on how to find the underground
water using a dowsing rod. Others told stories of river rats coming
up to threaten summer picnics. Meanwhile, FLOW's downtown window display
detailed the clues and tracked the progress of the investigation.
By soliciting these stories from the citizens of Pittsburgh, Furman
and Brooks became stewards of an urban legend, and also part of that
legend. Most people were receptive when this absurdity was inserted
into the routine of Pittsburgh’s business district. Passers-by
were willing to engage with the geological investigators and conversations
were sparked amongst strangers through the use of spectacle.
This project created multiple insertions into everyday life that were
at different times perceived as real, illusory or somewhere in between.
Searching for the Fourth River blurred the line between fact
and fiction by means of numerous encounters in person, through the storefront
window, and with the media. This project combined performance and the
gathering of oral histories to insert art into everyday life.
We choose to make projects in public for a number of reasons. We believe
that art should be accessible anywhere, anytime (not reserved for museums
and galleries). The joy and/or challenge of unexpected discovery is
reason enough to make work on the street. We are provoked by the nature
of the urban environment: it encourages unpredictable encounters and
fosters multiplicity. By creating a system of reflection on this environment
and an open-ended dialogue, we create something that changes perspective.
This type of art practice has been called "new genre public art",
"community-based art"", or "socially engaged art".
Critical theorist Grant Kester writes, “…this practice involves
a deprivileging of conventional artistic identity (defined by a wholly
autonomous capacity for critical reflection, unproblematized claims
to cultural or social exteriority, and traditional models of agency
and expressivity).” We choose to collaborate in part because it
complicates the notion of creative authorship. Extending our creative
process outside the individual and onto the streets is the starting
point for that process to continue to the audience-participant.
The term "audience-participant" refers to our interest in
strategies that require active participation from the audience in order
to generate the meaning of the piece. In this way the artist attempts
to relinquish control of authorship and to destabilize the relationship
between artist and audience. This method of working is intended to question
the authority of an artist as one who has a privileged ability to represent
or provide an enlightened perspective.
Like anthropologists performing field research away from the academy
or a documentary filmmaker who must leave the film set, artists who
decide to stray from traditional art institutions and an insular studio
practice must be highly conscious of the nature of their work with human
subjects. In the case of the social scientist, journalist, or documentary
filmmaker, people become the subject matter of the work, but they are
usually not involved in the process of creating or assembling the final
written or visual product. In his essay “The Artist as Ethnographer,”
Hal Foster critiques the “collaborative” interaction between
artist and community by saying that the artist is presumed to be the
“institutionally sanctioned authority to engage the locals in
the production of their (self-) representation". Can the roles
of audience member, participant, and artist become conflated in order
to provide a more visible critique of representation? Searching
for the Fourth River used humor and play to destabilize the artist-participant-audience
relationships. Cat and Macauley were specialists, brought in from outside
to conduct research. Their position as investigators was that of a cosmopolitan,
somewhere between tourist and native. Roxana Marcoci writes:
The term “cosmopolitan” refers to dwellers of
the world, and includes the particular experience of exiles, immigrants,
diasporic residents, students, nomads, and other border crossers, whose
sense of belonging, or of “home,” is constructed in the
process of voyaging or relocating to one part of the world while preserving
attachments to another.
Creating these characters as a way to navigate the geological and psychological
terrain of Pittsburgh was perhaps a way of creating a sense of belonging
in our new hometown. We voluntarily embedded ourselves in the local culture.
In the act of false pursuit we also transformed and became a part of the
local mythology and created a way for ourselves to access its history.
As Edward Said argues in his essay, "Reflections on Exile",
the matter of choice in one's identity is a determiner of experience.
Our choice to come here as students inevitably places us both as privileged
tourists of culture, and relegates us to the status of outsiders. In this
project we chose to be playful with that position, taking on the character
of two other completely unique visitors, who knew even less than Pittsburgh
than we did. They had no commitments at the new site, just a job to do.
Like Cat and Macauley, we acted as investigators. We became fascinated
by the mystery of this underground river, and the variety of stories people
told us about it increased our appetite for this mystery.
Some participants adopted our sense of play and came up with fictions
and stories of their own. We felt our project was the most successful
in these interactions. Our goal in future projects is to refine the ways
in which participants have agency and to develop methods in which participants
will be more aware of and responsible for shifts in the power dynamics
of their relationship with us, the artists.
Although urban myth is impossible to separate from the location of people
from which it springs, our aim was not to represent any community through
myth, nor do we feel that the people we spoke with throughout our investigation
would identify themselves as being “in community” with one
another. It was the very nature of the stories being disparate and sometimes
contradictory that was so compelling. We were delighted that these newly
gathered stories compelled further dissemination. The urge to investigate
this urban myth determined that our project was more process-based than
product-based. There was no culminating display for this piece. The project
was not intended to be experienced as a whole, as retold now, but intended
to be engaged with by many people in brief encounters. Any of the tellers
of the fourth river story had opportunity to shift the focus of our story,
to embellish it with fiction, to bring it to a new audience. And yet,
bringing the project to an academic conference, we are forced to usurp
that control in order to share a complete picture of the project with
you.
In Searching for the Fourth River we became one of the conduits through
which the myth of the fourth river was passed. The fourth river became
a complex character in Pittsburgh's social history. Inevitably, like
the fountain or the sightings underground, we know that our investigation
will be evidence of this unseen body of water.