Crowding the Conversation

When the Public Engagement program staff at the Hammer invited me to contribute to EXCHANGE, I decided to turn the assignment on its head a bit by creating a platform for a group of people who attended “Engage More Now!” There was a convergence of leading artists, educators, and arts professionals in the audience, and I wanted to hear what they gleaned, what questions they were asking, and what ideas they were still considering. I’ve invited eight of them to share their thoughts here.

Building a context for engaged practices by examining them through multiple lenses — inside (museum-sited engagement), transient (nomadic museum practices), and outside (artist-initiated engagement outside institutional frameworks) — was the foundation for the gathering. Engagement and participatory practices have been historically incubated and supported by smaller, artist-centered organizations (which have been the focus of my work for the past twenty years). These practices have now been fully embraced by museums and educational institutions, yet in the context of the symposium, they remained particularly hard to define. Perhaps the success of the symposium was its failure to define or refine what engagement is. Instead it brought up more questions than answers. We can’t fully answer them, but we can try.

Carolina Caycedo
Artist

My input is based on the last two sessions, the only ones I attended. I felt there was so little representation of local Angeleno Latino artists and collectives who engage with publics outside the museum framework. There was little discussion about what is at stake for the “publics” or “audiences” engaged, except for the intervention of Leonardo Vilchis from Ultra-red about the group’s long-lasting collaboration with Union de Vecinos.

If we are organizing panels about how and why to engage more now, shouldn’t we bring into those panels some of the targeted audiences and hear what they have to say? Specifically, those neighbors from Art + Practice in Leimert Park, where the Hammer has its first Public Engagement Partnership?

We need fewer experts and more neighbors to Engage More Now!

Bree Edwards
Director, Northeastern Center for the Arts, Boston

Curator Candice Hopkins, riffing on the composer Pauline Oliveros, asked the question that I am still thinking about: “How can institutions practice deep listening?”

Luke Fishbeck
Artist, Lucky Dragons

A few unordered questions:

— How can we learn from engagement efforts by institutions at different scales? For example, can lessons from larger institutions like Dia or the Getty be applied to artist-run or alternative spaces, and vice versa? Are there practical ways to share knowledge, data, or infrastructure between institutions of widely different scales?

— For both curators and artists, how is it possible to balance ongoing commitment to a community, a project, or the development of an institution, with professional development or career opportunities that require a change of context? Curators changing workplaces every few years, artists as itinerant consultants engaged in overlapping commitments in widely different contexts. What, if any, are the possibilities for truly ongoing or self-sufficient projects?

— For projects that aim to expand the scope of programming to new sites outside of institutions, what are the limits? How diffuse, how remote can the reach of an institution’s support be? How much can an institution hand over ownership of a project to community partners (or artists) in order to create new contexts?

— What are the criteria for evaluating the success or failure of engagement efforts? How important is evaluation or analysis to understanding community-engaged art?

— I remember both Paul Chan and Sharon Hayes referring to a public as something that is convened or assembled by an artwork. Does this public continue to exist as long as the artwork exists? Is there a hierarchy that emerges through efforts to evaluate or explain the artwork? How can conflicting or ineffable aspects experienced by members of these (temporary) publics be communicated or preserved?

Gregory Sale
Assistant professor of intermedia and public practice, School of Art, Arizona State University

After attending the symposium, my graduate students felt a need to distinguish between practitioners who focus more on the process and the participants themselves and those who work with the matter of social systems and structures while upholding a focus on artistic outcomes. In the first instance, individuals or publics often became both the subjects and the cocreators of the work. In the second, a rarified art object or performance mimics a more traditional relationship between art production and the viewer / end user. They saw this as a first step in defining deeper engagement with participants and stakeholders in social art practice.

Personally I’d appreciate further discussion about artists, institutions, and various publics jointly participating to activate differently the operational models of the museum. Let’s springboard from institutional critique to expand discussion on possible roles.

John Spiak
Director and chief curator, California State University, Fullerton Grand Central Art Center

The title of the symposium may have been a bit misleading. The traditional format of the symposium didn’t provide true opportunity to engage more now, with extremely short breaks between sessions and only one collective lunch gathering scheduled, also with limited attendance. With an audience filled with many leading practitioners in the field of socially engaged practices — artists, educators, museum and nonprofit professionals — I felt there was a missed opportunity for more complete engagement with all who attended and less top-down structure of presenters to audience as passive observers.

I was bothered by the response to a question about Art + Practice during the symposium. The responder stated that [the Hammer Museum] was thinking about holding symposium sessions at Art + Practice, but it was too difficult to make that happen given the location and logistics. I found that response truly disappointing, as that program is engaging more now in positive ways for the Hammer and would have been an ideal venue for part of this symposium, spotlighting directly on-site one of the museum’s incredible collaborative programs. If the Hammer — with its support, solid budgets, and staff size — can’t work out logistics for part of a symposium to take place at an off-site location that is one of its shining stars, it is a bit troubling.

Irene Tsatsos
Director of gallery programs / chief curator, Armory Center for the Arts

This was a stimulating event with so many dynamic thinkers and presenters. It’s noteworthy that the Hammer programmed this, because in such a short period — really within less than ten years — institutions have wholly embraced these varied practices, which had been largely the purview of diverse alternative spaces, to the point of “refinement” (viz. the Hammer’s event invitation). The obvious question is how institutions will start collecting this work, if they haven’t already. Your invitation to “crowd the conversation,” to mess things up, belies an irony that was palpable at the event in terms of its structure and therefore content. Even when energizing, as the Hammer event was, that moment when oppositional (or at least “alternative”) practices become the subject of institutional refinement and critique (to pervert that phrase) is when I find myself eagerly anticipating what’s next.

Lu Zhang
Business manager, The Contemporary, Baltimore

I was most engaged in the conversations that transparently discussed the approach of curators and museums in producing projects — essentially talking shop. The variety of institutions represented working in varied ways (nomadically, temporarily, inside and outside the museum) provided context. Many of the presenting artists and practitioners were very generous with the details of their work. I found these moments of specificity necessary in anchoring the larger amorphous discussion on engaging audiences.

I appreciate the aim of institutions to be more accessible to and considerate of the wider public (or publics). To this end, it would have been useful to discuss to what extent museums support or interrupt the existing long-term work being done by artist-run initiatives and activists, most more nimble and able to respond directly to the expressed needs of the communities they are embedded in than their larger institutional counterparts. While these concerns were mentioned briefly when brought up through audience questions, the symposium may have benefited from a more pointed and focused conversation dedicated to how museums can support existing projects.