Jocelyn Dimaya
19 April 2016
Evelyn Serrano
Arts and Community Engagement
This essay will analyze and reflect on Grant Kester's "Aesthetic Evangelism", a look at New Public Art. Aesthetic Evangelism addressed many of the potential issues associated with community involved work. It had me recalling many of the issues I faced in my own community involved art practices. While there will be discussion of some of the challenges that inevitably come with New Public Art, or community based art " it seems clear that most of these projects do provide positive benefits for their various constituencies and that any single project will undoubtedly have both successful and less successful components."(Kester)
One of the first points Kester makes is in regards to the representational politics and the relationship between the community involved and the artist. While doing community based art work, acknowledging the position you hold in relation to the community is just as important as making sure the members of the community are involved in a significant portion of the decisionmaking. Kester explained it well when he said, "This is an "exchange," in which the artist, by surrendering some degree of their creative autonomy in negotiations with a given group over the production of a project is understood to have gained in return some authority to speak from the group's position or on their behalf." It is a collaboration and it can be easy for these types of projects to start being referred to as work by "so and so renowned artist and people of such and such community." It can be a dangerous zone if artists are being put on a pedestal above the community when the work could not in fact have been accomplished without the work of community members. There is a line that distinguishes between collaboration with a community and exploitation of a community.
Aside from the final exhibition of the art, in this work there is a substantial emphasis on the process. When this type of work is conceived, it is typically inspired by an artist discovering a social issue that needs to be attended to. Kester compares artists to social workers saying, "I would contend that the function of the community artist can, in at least some respects, be productively compared with that of the reformer or social worker. Both the community artist and the social worker possess a set of skills (bureaucratic, diagnostic, aesthetic/expressive, and so forth) and have access to public and private funding (through grants writing, official status, and institutional sponsorship) with the goal of bringing about some transformation in the condition of individuals who are presumed to be in need," While I agree with this comparison, I find it very tricky to find the proper vocabulary to articulate thoughts about this artist-community relationship without putting forth any implications of superiority or inferiority. If a "community" is defined as "individuals in need", it is hard to not associate that with the idea that the artist is intervening in order to "save" said community. I do not think that there is any "saving" that necessarily has to be done. And in many cases, artists who go into this type of work need the communities more than the communities need the artist. In fact, the communities do not need the artist at all. If there was no interaction, the community would continue on and the artist would not be doing any work. Kester puts it this way, "Community art is typically centered around an exchange between an "artist" (who is understood to be "empowered," creatively, intellectually, symbolically, expressively, financially, institutionally, or otherwise), and a given subject who is defined a priori as "in need of" empowerment, access to creative/expressive skills, etc. Thus, the "community" in "community art" often, although clearly not always, refers to individuals marked as culturally, economically, or socially different either from the artist him or her self, or from the audience for the particular project."
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