It's about Time Creative placemaking and performance analytics

Abstract

The U.S. philanthropic discourse known as “creative placemaking” unites a historically unprecedented number of institutional investors in the instrumentalization of art toward civic, social, economic, and environmental goals. Since coining the term in 2011, the National Endowment for the Arts has supported 256 arts interventions in all fifty states with funds totaling more than $21 million. Not without its critics, “place-based” grant programs hail artists to collaborate on municipally driven, often six-figure budget initiatives that use culture as a backdrop for “comprehensive community cultural development.” Compared to the characteristic shortsightedness of institutional approaches to arts philanthropy in the U.S., many “placemaking” residencies offer significantly expanded periods of cultural engagement between artists, community members, and institutional liaisons. While the discursive emphasis on “place” by institutional investors has incited much debate among policy makers and practitioners, less attention has been paid to the instrumentality of time and embodied interaction within these elongated arts residencies. These exceptional circumstances signal a crucial point of intervention for performance scholarship.

In this essay, I study cooperative time spent over the course of one NEA-funded residency to shift foundational understandings about how artists and project participants challenge the mechanisms of capitalism through practical and direct cooperation with institutional agents. Drawing upon project documentation and interview testimony from a team of lead artists, administrators, and community participants, I highlight three temporal strategies through which the Project Willowbrook team failed to faithfully reproduce institutional norms guarding “creativity” and “place”. By stalling time (reframing the neighborhood's present-day cultural textures and rhythms), spending time (cultivating conversations with residents about Willowbrook's vexed history of foiled planning), and sub-contracting time (rewriting county art contracts twelve times to account for changes), the team's iterative approach suggests the anti-choreographic possibility that collectively embodied solutions to institutional problems cannot be planned in advance.

Notes

1 Landesman served as NEA Chair from 2009 to 2013 and Shigekawa as NEA Deputy/Interim Chair until the 2014 nomination of the current chair – Jane Chu – by President Barack Obama.

2 For a list NEA Our Town funded projects, see Hutter (2014)

3 ArtPlace is a ten-year placemaking’ collaboration among fourteen foundations, eight federal agencies and six financial institutions. (See: references for website)

4 For more on ‘fuzzy’ distinctions, see Gadwa (2013: 3).

5 Arts activist Ruby Lerner challenged these neocolonialist assumptions earlier this year at the NEA's ‘Beyond the Building’ (NEA convening archive), 2015).

6 Lisa Solskolne (2015) co-founder of artist advocacy group Working Artists for a Greater Economy (W.A.G.E.) is one of many anticapitalist critics espousing this view.

7 For more on the ‘creative continuum’ approach and culturally sensitive understandings of ‘creativity’ among low and moderate income populations, see Jackson (2008).

8 This point against placemaking as gentrification is forcefully argued in: Bedoya, Roberto (2013) Placemaking and the politics of belonging and dis-belonging. Grantmakers in the Arts Reader, 24, 20-21.

9 Policy critic Roberto Bedoya has argued this repeatedly in print (2013) and in this 2013 Creative Time Summit presentation. www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvmG4D9ntpI. Accessed 10 May 2015.

10 Just as this essay targets critical cooperation between artists, policymakers, elected officials, funders, commercial developers, non-profit organizers, community members and institutional liaisons, my dissertation (Wilbur, forthcoming) analyses dance ‘making’ as an interdependent exercise fuelled by differentially invested cultural agents and agencies.

11 Dwight Conquergood's (2002) seminal ethnographic work on community cultural performances and Judith Butler's (2007) extended theorization of iterability as a repetitive and constitutive dimension of embodied action – capable of breaking social norms – inform these analytical manoeuvres.

12 Team members include: Woo, photographer Alyse Emdur, translators Jesus Hermosillo and Dolores Dorantes, graphic designer Tiffanie Tran, LACAC administrators Erin Harkey and Letitia Fernandez Ivins, Willowbrook community members Pastor Glass, staff at the Watts Willowbrook Boys and Girls Club, Friends of the Willowbrook and A. C. Bilbrew Libraries, Concerned Citizens of Willowbrook, The Fellowship Baptist Church, neighbours Randie Hughes, Mac and McKenzie from Master K-9, Lafayette, Rachelle, Joheather, Bernardo, Sandy, Harry, the Willowbrook Seniro Center staff and residents, members of Tomorrow's Aeronautical Museum, the Compton Jr Posse and Charles Dickson.

13 Foster's genealogical study of land mapping, instructional manuals and movement treatises from the sixteenth century onward implicates both chorographic and choreographic practices in the construction and evaporation of bodily politics. See Foster (2011: 76).

14 For more on conventional ‘asset mapping’, see Voight (2011).

15 Ivins interview with author, 26 January 2015.