Community Service

Recent models for community-based art that incorporate social relations as an element of the art work itself need to be considered against a broader historical background: the rolling back of Western welfare systems, the collapse of state-organized social infrastructure in Eastern Europe and the chronic lack of institutional networks in various regions of the Southern hemisphere. The specific notion of ‘community’ brought to bear in a given art project is, hence, inseparably linked to the views on action and co-existence prevailing within the respective societal context.

From the early 1990s on, community-based art – more evidently so than in earlier incarnations of collective approaches – have focused on marginalized groups encouraged to act and communicate via a co-operative process, with the aim of empowering the socially disadvantaged. Also known in the US as ‘new genre public art’ (a term coined by Suzanne Lacy) or ‘connective aesthetics’ (Suzi Gablik), the various approaches taken all reveal an interest in art works that have practical value and which make a political impact. Rather than merely taking place in the public sphere or being placed there, this is art that is public by its very nature. Some examples were featured in the ‘Culture in Action’ show curated by Mary Jane Jacob in Chicago in 1992–3, the first extensive and pioneering exhibition of participatory art projects in public spaces that focused mainly on work with local communities. A case in point is the hydroponical project Flood (1993), by HaHa Group, who, besides setting up a discussion forum on AIDS-education, worked with HIV-positive people on planting herbs that could potentially be used to help treat the virus. But bringing together a community defined in essentialist terms (in this case, only those who have the virus) reiterates and confirms the marginalization of that community rather than breaking it down. Why should people who are HIV-positive have any particular interest in horticulture, and why should they believe that herbs can help to cure their illness?

Christian Kravagna rightly notes that many projects defined as new genre public art ‘lack a political analysis’ and operate instead with a ‘pastoral mix of care and education’ that displays ‘pseudo-religious traits’.1 And Miwon Kwon has pointed to the negative effects of US arts funding, which increasingly has turned directly to social projects, funding social work rather than art.2 Instead of attempting to take on the neglected social duties of the state, then, the challenge for art is to create a temporary model situation of community – one that can be experimental, provisional, informal and maybe prototypical, even Utopian.

In an article about the bringing together of communities in recent contemporary art projects Carlos Basualdo and Reinaldo Laddaga pose a key question concerning respect for and encouragement of difference in the public realm: ‘How can diverse local intentions be brought together on behalf of unified actions that acknowledge their diversity as well as their shared values?’3 Their answer to this question lies in the concept of ‘experimental communities’, which puts the emphasis on both the temporary and the model-like character of these endeavours. Here, bringing together individuals with different knowledge and experience in a collaborative process is the essential factor that distinguishes these projects from the art forms discussed above, where a community is rigidly defined by one specific feature (such as being HIV-positive).

Projects with hybrid, experimental communities are found, for example, in the work of Jeanne van Heeswijk; the Turkish artists’ collective Oda Projesi (‘Room Project’), and the Park Fiction project in Hamburg (from 1994, ongoing), in which the inhabitants of the St Pauli district of the city are involved not as members of a particular social habitat but as co-creators of a ‘desire-based production’ for long-term use – in this case a park to be used by the neighbourhood. From 1997 to 2005 Oda Projesi ran a space, where local communities could meet and exchange ideas in Istanbul’s Galata district, collaborating with other artists to organize events including workshops, concerts and birthday parties for children. In the Face Your World project (Amsterdam and Columbus, Ohio, 2002) Van Heeswijk equipped a bus – whose route linked three municipal ‘Children of the Future’ centres, among other locations – with computers running interactive software that allowed children to manipulate, redesign or reinvent their immediate surroundings. These collective production situations take on a public character by encouraging the democratic shaping of public space.

While these projects frequently place less emphasis on representation in an exhibition context, where they often comprise little more than some matter-of-fact documentation or interviews with participants, another currently prevalent form of participatory art aims directly at the production of a video. This is often shot without an audience and is then shown in a conventional way. Examples of this include works by artists Johanna Billing, Annika Eriksson, Phil Collins and Jeremy Deller, who all have a significant interest in music as a catalyst of shared experience.

Billing’s Magical World (2005) shows a children’s orchestra in Zagreb rehearsing the hippie song ‘Magical World’, by Rotary Connection. The camera alternates between panning over the dilapidated socialist-era buildings outside and focusing on the concentration on the faces of the children as they make music with rapt attention. This juxtaposition can meaningfully be seen as a statement of hope, in which the crumbling idea of a socialist community makes way for private, informal communities. Billing’s child musicians, Phil Collins’ teenagers dancing to the point of exhaustion in Ramallah (They Shoot Horses, 2004) and Annika Eriksson’s fusion session of rappers and a Brazilian repente band (The Session, 2005), where musical styles and their political undertones merge, all form informal communities with shared passions, tastes, talents – subjective, self-selected and positively connoted traits, then, that bind people together in an emotionally charged situation.

In another current tendency communities are brought together in a joint action that is concentrated on the physical, and in which the individual experiences the vulnerability and manipulability of his/her body – more or less reduced to life in its most elemental form. The subject may be the finer details of individual human expression within a crowd, as in Victor Alimpiev’s Sweet Nightingale (2005), which features a large group of people in a kind of orchestra pit being silently instructed, to the accompaniment of a Gustav Mahler symphony, to execute various minimal, almost sculptural, movements. The work articulates the delicate relationship between the largely powerless individual and society. Israeli artist Yael Bartana shows a communal performance of rituals: her Wild Seeds (2005) features a group of teenagers whose shouts of a ‘Jew does not deport another Jew’, ‘we have a plan to conquer this land’ or ‘you’re in the middle, you’re safe’ turn their playful joshing into a parable on the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories. Both Alimpiev and Bartana, in other words, present the human body as a political body.

This more active understanding of a ‘political body’ is countered by Artur Zmijewski, whose projects are designed as experimental situations in which the participants are subjected to a specific scenario. Naked men and women play tag in a cellar and in a former gas chamber (Game of Tag, 1999), a 92-year-old Auschwitz inmate has his camp ID number re-tattooed on his arm (80064, 2004) or a group of unemployed Polish men repeat the Stanford prison experiment of 1971 (Repetition, 2005).4 In these scenarios (much more aggressively than in Bartana’s or Alimpiev’s pieces) humanity is stripped down to the point of physical and mental humiliation, evoking Giorgio Agamben’s notion of ‘homo sacer’, an outlaw devoid of all rights and reduced to ‘naked life’ in a symbolic or actual area (camps, prisons) purposefully exempt from human rights laws – the central condition for persecutors’ readiness to inflict physical and psychological violence. As a result Zmijewski’s excessive moral provocations are as dubious as Santiago Sierra’s experiments with socially marginalized groups. The questionability of works in which social evils are not discussed but demonstrated, using living subjects treated as objects, is further heightened when most of the participants take part only because of their own deprivation, solely for the (small) fee being offered. Their own motivations and experiences play no role whatsoever; the participants merely perform, either actively or passively, in order to give an art audience the crassest possible sense of its own moral dilemmas by means of a form of shock treatment and the breaking of taboos. But in genuine participatory art, as distinct from art that deals with objects, it is the participants themselves who constitute the basic constant factor. Despite the differences in the treatment of those involved, the vaguely defined community in the projects of Alimpiev, Bartana and Zmijewski is ultimately united by the defencelessness of the human individual at the mercy of a power structure set up to control, discipline, or destroy them.

In situations where there is a lack of access to institutional infrastructure a further kind of community project arises, one that is marked by its institution-forming character. One such group is Sarai in Delhi, which gained international recognition after participating in the last Documenta.5 Sarai consists of over 30 theorists, artists, programmers and activists who work primarily with new media because they, as the group has stated, ‘play a decisive role in the current transformation of urban spaces, and because they exert an influence on key contemporary issues such as culture, the economy, intellectual property, work, democracy, political control, information management, surveillance, freedom of opinion and censorship’. They regularly organize local and international conferences and film screenings on these issues, and their research and publications draw on the broad network they have established through mailing lists, blogs and meetings. In addition, their Cybermohalla project (initiated in 2001; mohalla means ‘neighbourhood’ in Hindustani) is aimed at young people in deprived parts of Delhi. Cybermohalla Media Labs are free of charge, and holds regular workshops, lectures and other events.

While Sarai focus above all on propagating the innovative use of new media, the Ruangrupa artists’ collective in Jakarta aims to support the development of the local art scene by carrying out research and documentation, inviting curators and artists for exhibitions, offering a residency, publishing the six-monthly magazine Karbon and organizing the twice-yearly ‘OK’ video festival. Although non-profit organisations, Sarai and Ruangrupa are organized along institutional lines (Ruangrupa is funded by the Dutch foundations Hivos, RAIN and Doen Stichting, while Sarai was affiliated from the outset to the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies in Delhi). What most clearly distinguishes them from official institutions is the way they have developed out of a growing local grouping, and the resulting self-determined working models, which do not depend on visitor numbers or the opinions of sponsors, politicians or the press.

The virtue of these communities as compared with earlier models, which often assumed fixed identities for those involved (as patients, migrants etc.), lies in an openness of process that is based on the temporarily shared interest of the participants or simply their physical being in the world. This more recent notion of community in art also represents a critique both of the consensus politics of shared values in 1980s’ communitarianism, as still reflected in early ‘community-based art’, and of Marxist ideas of the community united in class struggle. Instead, it can be linked most appropriately to Jean-Luc Nancy’s idea of an ‘inoperative community’, a relational social organization that is not formed on the grounds of belonging but founded equally on singularity, otherness and shared experience. Only on the basis of such an approach is it possible to begin thinking in a new way about anything like the creation of democratic public spaces.

Nina Möntmann is a curator and writer based in Hamburg. She is the editor of Art and its Institutions, Black Dog Publishing, 2006.

Translated by Nicholas Grindell

1 Christian Kravagna, ‘Modelle partizipatorischer Praxis’, Die Kunst des Öffentlichen, ed. Marius Babias, Achim Könnecke, Amsterdam/Dresden (Verlag der Kunst ), 1998, pp. 34–5
2 Miwon Kwon, Im Interesse der Öffentlichkeit, Springer II/4, December 1996–February 1997, p. 31
3 Carlos Basualdo and Reinaldo Laddaga, ‘Rules of Engagement’, Artforum, vol. XLIII, no. 7, March 2004, p. 169
4 The psychological Stanford Experiment was intended to explore human behaviour under conditions of imprisonment. The participating students, divided into guards and inmates, had to sign a statement confirming they would accept to abandon human rights during their participation. The experiment escalated into a scenario of sadistic violence and had to be cancelled after six days.
5 Sarai (Hindi, Urdu, Punjabi, Bengali, Turkish): an enclosed space in a city, or beside a highway, where travellers and caravans find shelter, sustenance and companionship; a tavern, a public house; a meeting place; a destination and a point of departure; a place to rest in the middle of a journey.