From site to community- Noga Yechieli

What is the value of the audience understanding the process of art making and not just the result and their take on the result?How has technology effected the format and the approach of community based work?  How do they break the hierarchies of gender, class, race within communities when creating art as a "community"? Who determines the definition of a "community"? If the "community" has exclusive jurisdiction over the management of the spaces, and this repeats itself in every organized community, then where are the "unwanted" elements/organizations/clinics going to be located? How do they keep these projects self sustaining, so that they don't require artists to facilitate the dialogue within the community, and that the community can do it on its own? 

I really resonated with the idea of engaging a community and letting them lead the topics that interest them, that they are dealing with and are passionate about. It is turning art into something more accessible, that doesn't require an artistic education in order to understand. It tackles the privilege of art making. 

It was interesting to read about Mac Donald's view, discussing the "negative" power (in my opinion) that a community can have as well when it uses the collaboration in order to exclude others from their neighborhood and using it to be "territorial". 

I never thought about sculpture being site-specific and the way it can be exclusive to the artist and not the community, and the distance it can create between the two. Therefore I found it really interesting to understand the difference between site-specific and community-specific and their tactics to tackling the former by introducing the latter, in process and in product. 

What I still feel is somewhat missing in the format is the pairing of the artist to the community. By taking an artist with a specific vision that then is adjusted and influenced by a community is not really transformative. It still is coming from the mind of the artist. What I feel is lacking is attaching an artist without a specific vision to a community and allowing the community to invent the inspiration, concept and structure. Having the community be the true artist and the artist just a facilitator. Because in the current format there is still a certain hierarchy, because the artist is coming with a vision of some sort, and sculpture Chicago pairs them with the "appropriate" community that will collaborate well with that vision. I am wondering if it is possible to truly create it all from scratch with the community. 

What I would be curious to know is who gets the credit. Because all these artists are being named in creating these collaborative pieces with communities, but the communities aren't being mentioned. If it was truly a collaborative process do the communities get credit for the result in the end as well, or is it briefly mentioned and the artist gets most of the credit? Even though this is an incredible tool to engage a community and create a dialogue within it, I worry that the community might be exploited as well.