Notes
- Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics (Dijon: Les Presses du Réel, 1998).
- Educator-activist-curator Janna Graham offered a workshop on this topic on May 16, 2011 at the Royal Holloway University of London Department of Geography. However, the focus of this workshop was upon collaborative artistic practices rather than collaborative practices within institutions. The cross-over between these two types of practices does provide insight on all work that takes interest in public engagement and social change. Recording of the event is available online at: http://backdoorbroadcasting.net/2011/05/janna-graham-collaborative-art-practices-spaces-communities.
- The understanding of the concept of community brings forth many problematic and complex questions concerning essentialism and homogeneity. See: Gerald Suttles, The Social Construction of Community (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972) and Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991).
- What I define as museum-centered art education work are programs that are primarily interested in communicating exhibition goals and look inwardly to the institution and art history. The role of this work is to sustain the importance of the institution as a teacher and expert. Examples of such programs include artist and curatorial talks, exhibition guided tours, and art-based workshops related to exhibitions.
- Among her numerous publications, in Museums and Education: Purpose, Education, Performance (New York: Routledge, 2007) and The Educational Role of the Museum (New York: Routledge, 1999), scholar Eilean Hopper-Greenhill expands on the shift in museum education work, public engagement, and community development over the last centuries. “Museums as Contact Zones,” in Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997) is a seminal work by Clifford that has greatly impacted and influenced the museum field. In this text, he breaks the preconception that museums are a place where culture goes to die by placing at the forefront of their role the importance and value of cultural exchange, reciprocity, and contest. Lois H. Silverman's, The Social Work of Museums (New York: Routledge, 2010) explores the application of social work techniques within relationship-centered museum experiences and advocates for the larger social role of museums. Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics (New York: Routledge, 2011) is Jackson's interdisciplinary analysis of social practice within both performance art and visual art. Nina Simon's, The Participatory Museum (Santa Cruz: Museum 2.0, 2010) describes how participation works and what methods can be used in order to create successful and meaningful experiences for visitors within institutions. She argues for participation and collaboration with the community as a meaningful role for public cultural institutions to serve. Lacy develops the idea of “new genre” public art in Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art (Seattle: Bay Press, 1995). Also see: Nicolas Bourriaud, Lésthétique Relationnelle (Dijon: Les Presses du Réel, 1998), Homi K. Bhabha, “Conversational Art”, Conversations at the Castle: Changing Audiences and Contemporary Art, ed. Mary Jane Jacobs and Michael Brenson (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998), 38–47, and Tom Finkelpearl, “Five Dialogues on Dialogue-Based Public Art Projects,” in Dialogues in Public Art (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000), 270–275. Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004) introduces Grant Kester's new term “dialogic art” and provides examples of effective community-based art projects, theoretical discussions about communication and community, and aesthetics. In his view, the best dialogical art has left little trace in critical literature almost as a result of the fact that the distance between the artist and audience was negligible—this is the goal, but it also indicates how marginalized this kind of practice remains within the art world and critical discourse. Also see: Miwon Kwon, One Place After Another: Site Specific Art and Locational Identity (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002) and Claire Bishop, “The Social Turn: Collaboration and its Discontent,” ArtForum International 44, no. 6 (2006): 178–183.
- Rishma Dunlop, “Who Will Be the Throat of These Hours… If Not I, If Not You?,” Educational Insights 7, no. 2 (2002): 1–12.
- See Jacques Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991).
- Although I argue that this is not unique to art institutions but rather a concern for all types of institutions, the focus of this article will center on art institutions as based upon my expertise and personal experiences within the field of contemporary art galleries and museums. As a museum professional, I recognize my active participation and integration within institutional practices and therefore appropriate the voice and struggles of the institution as my own and bring forth reflection using an imaginary “we”.
- In her article “New Institutionalism and the Exhibition as Situation” (2006), Claire Doherty defines New Institutionalism as the “emergence of the museum as a proactive laboratory of social evolution within a context of the decline of the welfare state.” New Institutionalism emerged as a new model for museum management and exhibition curating at a moment of increased corporatization for the art institution wherein the public are increasingly referred to as consumers and the institution's activities are driven toward income producing targets and aligned with the interests of commercial entertainment industries. In Protections Reader (Graz: Kunsthaus Graz, 2006). Also see: Nina Montman's edited compilation Art and its Institutions: Current Conflicts, Critique and Collaborations (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2006).
- It is important to note that although I create a dichotomy between such types of practices with collaborations interested in long-term relationship-building and civic engagement, the desire to build new publics is fundamental to the mission of museums and galleries as well as how they survive within our capitalist funding system. My interest in differentiating types of collaborative practices here is specifically tied to unraveling terminology and structures that blur the boundaries between such types of initiatives. Most literature on collaborative practices within art institutions is presented with the main interest and goal of expanding the institution's public and learning to engage the public in new and innovative ways. This goal can never be entirely removed from any work or effort of a public institution. How one chooses to go about doing this is the most important component and reflects the values of the institution.
- Lehan Ramsay, Collaboration: Moving Up to the Future (Melbourne: Monash University Melbourne/Art Harbor & Future University Hakodate, 2006), 1.
- Maria Lind, “Complications; On Collaboration, Agency and Contemporary Art,” Public 39 (Spring 2009): 56.
- Pablo Helguera's, Education for Socially Engaged Art: A Materials and Techniques Handbook (New York: Jorge Pinto Books, 2011) offers a practical guide to collaborations between artists and communities and identifies different ways communities have invested or collaborated on projects. His proposition of temporalities over systems for collaborations is important in moving away from formula-based work.
- Lyz Crane, “Building Worlds Together: The Many Functions and Forms of Arts and Community Development,” Animating Democracy (2011), http://animatingdemocracy.org/sites/default/files/LCrane%20Trend%20Paper.pdf.
- William Cleveland, “Arts-based Community Development: Mapping the Terrain,” Animating Democracy (2011), http://animatingdemocracy.org/resource/arts-based-community-development-mapping-terrain.
- Lucy Lippard, The Lure of the Local: Sense of Place in a Multicultural Society (New York: New Press, 1997), 157.
- Ramsay, Collaboration: Moving, 2.
- Bernadette Lynch in Whose Cake is it Anyway? A Collaborative Investigation into Engagement and Participation in 12 Museums in the UK (London: Paul Hamlyn Foundation, 2011), 11 defines consensual power as the act of convincing partners that their interests are the same as those of the institution. This is accomplished through the public recognition that institutions typically prioritize collaborations with like-minding and non-challenging partners, which therefore forces collaborators to concede to the institution's goals in order to continue to be considered for future collaborations.
- Anthony Huberman, “Take Care”, in Circular Facts, ed. Mai Abu ElDahab, Binna Choi and Emily Pethick (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2011), 17.
- See Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox (London and New York: Verso, 2000).
- Lind, “Complications; On Collaboration,” 57.
- Ramsay, Collaboration: Moving, 2.
- See The Centre of Possible Studies Blog, http://centreforpossiblestudies.wordpress.com/about/.
- See Serpentine Gallery website, http://www.serpentinegallery.org/2010/08/hiwa_k.html.
- See Open Field Project Blog, http://www.walkerart.org/openfield/.
- See AGO Youth Council on the Art Gallery of Ontario website, http://www.ago.net/youthcouncil.
- Huberman, “Take Care,” 14.
- Cleveland, “Arts-based Community Development,” 1.
- Irit Rogoff, “Looking Away: Participants in Visual Culture,” in Collaborative Arts: Conversations on Collaborative Arts Practice (2005), http://collabarts.org/?p=6.