Portland State University Social Practice Journal

ISSUE 1, JANUARY 2012

Introduction

1. Writing Yourself into Government Policies by Katy Asher

2. Dear Claire Bishop by Ariana Jacob

3. The Art of the Regift by Helen Reed

4. This is About Realizing Dreams by Katherine Ball & Alec Neal

5. The Sound We Make Together (Melbourne) a conversation with Harrell Fletcher

6. Epistemological Inclinations in Participatory Art by Dillon de Give

On August 28, 2011 the “Social Practice” entry on Wikipedia was tagged for deletion. The Wikipedia community suggested that the term provided nothing more than “a vague method of describing a number of practices that are covered elsewhere”[1] as the primary rationale for the removal. It is true enough that the term Social Practice has been applied to an incredible diversity of artworks that traverse multiple disciplines, from community farming projects to activist organizing initiatives, and from antagonistic public interventions to alternative education models. The common threads that are often cited as linking these practices include: engaging with or collaborating with a public, working across a variety of disciplines, and instigating works that have relevance to both an art and a variety of non-art audiences.

While these criteria may appear hazy, the value of the term comes into focus when we think about art and social practice in the context of art education. In fact, the term “Social Practice” (in relation to art) emerged in an educational context. The California College of the Arts (CCA) was the first institution to launch a Social Practice program in 2005.[2] This program formed as a way to develop an arts curriculum around collaborative practices and work in the public realm, without the weight of association with terms such as “community practice,” or “relational practice.” The term was adopted from Marxist and social theory, and took on slightly different connotations in the context of art education.[3]

Shortly after the development of the CCA program, Harrell Fletcher began the Art and Social Practice at Portland State University. And a similar graduate program under the leadership of Suzanne Lacy, with the title Public Practices, arose at the Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles. All of these programs strived to offer an alternative model of art education that privileged qualities such as community collaboration, cross-disciplinary research & decentralized practices of artistic engagement.

The designation of Social Practice within the art academy attempts to create a space to frame out an alternative discourse around art production & reception. We hope that this journal will function as an extension of this space, as a site of dialogue for issues and themes pertinent to the students and faculty of the Art & Social Practice program at PSU. As Rick Lowe noted in his concluding remarks at the Open Engagement Conference closing panel of 2011, when socially engaged art is written about solely within the bounds of artistic discipline, it loses a great measure of it’s value, which is located in the transgression of these boundaries. Through the frame of Art & Social Practice, a work may never enter a gallery or receive acclaim from international art publications, but may instead find an enthusiastic audience of obscure sports enthusiasts or environmental activists. 

For the purposes of this journal we concieve of art and social practice as a just loose enough framing device to shift our evaluative focus towards the cross-disciplinary intersections and encounters of art works, drawing out it’s value across multiple fields of knowledge.

The PSPJ Editorial Committee consists of Katy Asher, Crystal Baxley, Ariana Jacob & Helen Reed.

[1] Wikipedia contributers, "Social Practice," Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_practice (Accessed August 29, 2011).

[2] Lydia Matthews, email to author, November 20, 2011.

[3] Ted Purves, telephone call to author, November 26, 2011.

GOVERNMENT POLICIES

A Conversation with Mark Elliot about Participatory City Planning
by Katy Asher

In 2008, I had the opportunity to speak in Mark Elliot’s art class “Collaboration Commons” at the Victorian College of the Arts in Melbourne, Australia, about my work with the art group, The M.O.S.T. Since that time, I’ve kept an eye on Mark’s work as he began to meld his PhD research on collaboration and the internet with the realities of city planning with Future Melbourne, a participatory 10-year planning process for the city of Melbourne, Australia. Below, Mark fills me in on what he has been doing over the past couple of years, discusses the more subtle implications of collaborative city planning, and describes how the ability to participate doesn’t always equal an opportunity to be heard.

Katy Asher (KA): I’m working with some other artists in town who are interested in starting up a bi-monthly or quarterly publication based on themes of interest to us. The first theme is collaboration. I studied your work during my MFA program and thought it was really interesting, so I wanted to include something that had to do with you in this issue. When I first met you, you were just finishing your dissertation, Stigmergic Collaboration: A Theoretical Framework for Mass Collaboration. I wanted to ask how you got to the place where you decided you were going to develop a dissertation on collaboration itself.

Mark Elliot (ME): Sure. The project started with an interest in what I call “composing collaboration,” in other words, treating collaboration as a medium, whereas it’s typically treated as a method or a means to an end. How can the process of collaboration, the consideration of people’s involvement and the tools that often support collaboration be pulled together to ensure a good outcome, and often, a very specific outcome? I found a lot of gaps in knowledge. Specifically, I couldn’t find a general theory of collaboration. It just didn’t exist. That spurred me to build my own conception of it via reviewing existing literature around collaboration. What I found was a little bit of information in art, a little bit in education, a little bit in science, a little bit here and there. They were all fairly limited in their scope of consideration and thus their application because they were all so focused on their subject matter. I began asking what, in the context of this existing literature and my experience, does collaboration really mean and how can I build some sort of theoretical framework that would be useful in implementing it in the future?

KA: Something I noticed and was surprised about when I read through some of your research were multiple references to research about drone software and/or people trying to make flying armies, information that was super militaristic.

ME: Yeah.

KA: That was a surprise to me, because often times you have collaboration coming across in this more touchy-feely, humanistic fashion. It shouldn’t have been so surprising, maybe.

ME: Right, especially if you consider that the military complex of most nations is typically the most funded, has the most well developed R&D programs and is fundamentally about coordinating and organizing people, even if it is in their destruction. (Laughter)

KA: Since the time of publishing your dissertation, you’ve started Collabforge. How did you get started with your first project, Future Melbourne?

ME: I got a phone call from the manager of strategic planning for the city. He said, “I’m in charge of the city’s ten year planning process. As part of my duties, I need to ensure it’s collaborative and builds upon the best tools and knowledge we have available today. I’m trying to find a collaboration expert. I can’t find any body except for you, and you’re in town – would you like to have lunch?” That’s really where it started. To his great credit, he was really inspired by Wikipedia and wanted to do something like that, or draw up on that.

We developed a project with the City that had four main stages. The first was mapping their existing planning process, then reengineering that process from the perspective of my research on how to make it more collaborative, and identify what tools to use. The next stage was an internal collaboration phase where we brought together the city planners and all of their internal stakeholders around an internal drafting phase. The third phase was opening up that same approach to the public and the final phase was an evaluation of the entire project. I started a company so that the corporate veil protected my personal interests and that evolved into Collabforge.

KA: I have been looking at some of Collabforge’s clients, and am interested in trying to link them to various projects taking place in Portland. For example, in Portland we have something called Civicapps.org. People can use it to geo-tag potholes and send pictures of them to the city for repair, or find bus maps, food carts or bike parking across the city. Do any of Collabforge’s projects work this way?

ME: I think that would fall under our general area of expertise. That whole area is increasingly being called Gov 2.0 – the Web 2.0 thing being applied to government. Most of our clients are government, and when they come to us, they might be thinking, “Yes, we need a website,” or, “We need an App. We need something.”

There’s a bit of a tension in there in that typically our clients are thinking with a “tools” focus, which could be an app or a website, or what have you, whereas we’re thinking about the underlying principles. Whenever we’re figuring out how to go into a project, we have a standard approach of thinking: people, then process, and then tools. We acknowledge that tools are very important. They’re our big levers in society, typically, but no tool really gets properly implemented or implemented at all unless there’s an underlying process in which we engage in articulating that tool. Often the tool and the process tend to blur in our minds when we use it. We don’t realize that they’re actually separate. If people don’t value those processes or don’t understand them or don’t see how they fit into their lives, they’re never going adopt them and the tool isn’t going to be used.

KA: So, what did Future Melbourne look like to a citizen who wanted to participate? Did it look like Wikipedia?

ME: If you go to http://www.futuremelbourne.com.au, the site looks like it did during the first phases. The main sections of the site are People, Creative, Prosperous, Knowledge, Ecocity, and Connected. If you’re a registered member, you can click on any of those pages. An important aspect to keep in mind with the City of Melbourne project is that there weren’t any public engagement opportunities taken away from the standard 10-year planning process – the wiki website process was just added to it.

KA: So there were also typical town hall meetings…

ME: Definitely. The reason for Melbourne’s focus on the online component was that the major demographic of the city was Gen-X or even a young Gen-Y bracket. They had research showing that the group of people that who lived and worked in the city were much less likely to turn up to town hall meetings and were more interested in engaging via online channels. That was a big impetus for it, but they didn’t want to expose themselves to criticism for excluding people, so they didn’t take anything away. They also trained key people for teaching citizens how to use the site, set aside dedicated work stations at the public libraries, engaged community groups to come in for working sessions where they learned how to use the site and engage the subject matter, and had facilitators who could go straight into the site and enter the feedback. There was a bit of a mix.

KA: I was talking with a friend earlier today about your work. We talked about community conversations around the future of an abandoned high school in his neighborhood. He noted that received paper flyers for town hall meetings and also had access to a blog and email surveys. He remarked that the town hall meetings were mostly attended by people of an older demographic who owed homes. On the other hand, the blog and email surveys were widely used by younger folks who were renters and wanted different outcomes. He thought that using the Internet was a great way to get more information and community engagement.

ME: That makes me think of something else. One of the underlying outcomes of from Future Melbourne is that the input that we received through the wiki as opposed to town hall style input or email submissions was that the wiki input was prioritized much much more anything else. There’s probably a fairly simple reason for that.  If you imagine editing an article in Wikipedia, the article changes, but you don’t really see who changed it. You don’t even necessarily see the change unless you are the town planners who were checking the revisions. So, suddenly you are really focusing on the materials’ merit, not who contributed it or why they contributed it.

There are even more subtle impacts. For example, let’s say some material got changed, and is sitting there for a while, then somebody reads through that material and it gets moved to somewhere later on the page - or even gets deleted. Even if it gets deleted, it impacts the flow of the content.

One of the biggest prevailing attitudes for planners out there is that public consultation is just a pain in the ass. It’s a box they need to tic and then they move on. The traditional approach of submission is almost designed so that it can be ignored. (Mimicking a planner) “Ah yes, I’ve received that and accounted for receiving your submission and it’s in my spreadsheet. I’ve ticked the box that said I have considered it.” That doesn’t mean it’s ever going to be integrated. It probably isn’t going to be integrated.

KA: And that’s something you noticed as it was coming about?

ME: The opportunity is really for something more akin to participatory democracy as opposed to representative democracy. You can participate in the stuff that governance is really made of: policies, strategies, plans, written stuff that people have to be held accountable against.

Have you come across the work we’re doing with Southern California Association of Governments, SCAG? Here’s a link: http://scag.ca.gov/. It’s the redevelopment of Southern California’s transportation plan, starting with bicycles and pedestrian lanes.  We developed a site and a process for how to engage the community. I think it will be launched in the next couple of months. Their hope is that this will go well on the bike and pedestrian front, and then they’ll continue the approach throughout the entire transportation plan.

KA: That’s totally exciting!

ME: In my mind the value proposition is so high for this type of community consultation because it’s not just about, (laughs), what they call in the business ‘voluntary compliance,’ which is that if people are involved in the planning process and feel like they have a stake in it, shared ownership, they won’t be enforced or coerced to comply. It also means that it’s much less costly to implement.

There’s also what we demonstrated with Future Melbourne, which is that you just get better outcomes. Subject matter experts from all over the world contribute who have motives in promoting their own interests and identity, adding lots of value. The town planners never conceived that they would ever even have wanted that value or could have ever afforded that value – they’re getting it all for free.

For example, on Future Melbourne, if you go to the search page, and search “Helsinki,” you’ll come across “bicycle lanes in Helsinki.” Somebody, we don’t know who this person even is, said, “Oh, you want to address bicycle lanes in Melbourne? Here is a submission about how they did it in Helsinki.” It’s extraordinary! Nobody asked for that. Nobody even would have realized that a report on how Helsinki did it would have been valuable to Melbourne, let alone could have afforded to commission that report. So, it has an amazing value and it’s in context. So when you read through the bicycle section, there’s a link that takes you to the submission.

Sooner or later, this approach has got to become more widely adopted but how long will it take?

KA: Right. Just a few seconds ago, I was wondering if you get examples of the opposite of this? Do you run across people spamming or trolling the site who want to remain anonymous and keep returning for their own agenda?

ME: Not yet. There are two main dynamics at play, the nature of engagement and the maturity required for this type of engagement. The nature of engagement has to do with who will even find out about one of these kinds of planning projects to begin with. Once they do, they have to be motivated to read through a site like Future Melbourne, find the best point of entry, the ideas that they want to express in relation to the existing ideas and then engage the technology. That filters out a lot of people. The only people participating were, by and large, the people who had a lot of motivation to do so.

In terms of maturity, as this approach becomes more widespread, I expect to see something akin to swarm lobbying taking place, or lobbying transforming to capture the opportunities presented. People with lobbying-oriented interests as opposed to, say, community welfare interests haven’t yet grasped the power of being able to go and edit the plan. Once they realize that if they just did that consistently and effectively from lots of different perspectives and getting lots of different people involved, the system will need to develop immunity against that. This hasn’t arisen yet.

KA: Speaking of filters, it seems to me that the format of commenting on blogs is less complex in terms of filtering people out and encouraging them to figure out where to put their viewpoints in context.

ME: Sure, and the blog format, an online forum or discussion forum, would, from my framework, fall under cooperation instead of a collaboration process. The traditional consultation process also falls into a cooperative process. They’re aligned, which means that people can only submit disparate, individualized, fragmented little bits and pieces that aren’t actually integrated with anything other than the conversation. All of those conversations can be ignored in some respect. The only significant change is the “open” factor, in that those comments have come out of the black box of sending an email or sending a letter, or, even a town hall can be a black box, ultimately. That is a significant change, but at the end of the day…

KA: …Who’s going to do anything with that, really?

ME: Yeah, exactly.

KA: I have one last question. If everything you are working on came to fruition better than you can imagine it, how would you see this work changing the architecture of our city structures, our governments? How do you see this changing the structure of public participation in our society?

ME: One of the main things that this work does is make ideas and information more accessible. It connects ideas, information, people and opportunities to one another in a much more agile and dense fashion. As humanity evolves, we have more and more ideas and information to make sense of in our heads. We also have many more people and opportunities to engage with than 100 or 250 years ago. What does that mean? I hope that it means increasing our overall intelligence, really. To make it a bit more concrete, what I would expect to happen if, say, city planning was increasingly drawing upon this approach, is that, suddenly you’d have this ecosystem of ideas that would be common across a variety of planning sites. Someone promoting his or her nifty carpool idea in New Zealand could contribute to Future Melbourne. You’d have transnational swarms contributing to the city plans all over the world where they’ve never done that before.

I’d extend that by way of asking how people and communities share information and collaborate together. I think we’re seeing a really extraordinary thing with recommendation systems, for example “you’ve purchased A, B and C, so you might be interested in purchasing D.” Imagine that you had 50 planning wikis across the US with some common standards the plans could fall into. Your city plan could recommend things to you! Or, if you were contributing to Future Melbourne, you might get an email saying, “This particular city is doing planning around carpooling. Maybe you’d be interested in contributing there.” From a city planner perspective, the message would be, “We can see that you are redeveloping bike lanes in your city. Here are the articles that have already been drafted in other city plans around bike lanes that you might be interested in drawing upon.” This is simple stuff, but a logical conclusion that means increased awareness, intelligence and capacity. 

BY ARIANA JACOB

*Originally published May 2010

Since attending the panel discussion you participated in at apexart for the Incidental Person[1], I have wanted to write you. Actually, I have probably wanted to contact you since discussing your article “Antagonism & Relational Aesthetics”[2] with my peers in the Art & Social Practice MFA concentration at Portland State University.

During my time in this MFA program your writing has often been a guide for how to articulate the uncomfortable gloss of idealism radiating from much of the work that can be classified as social practice art. Your arguments have been useful for helping to think through some of the problems that this kind of work produces, including work claiming to be open for everyone but then denying it’s real exclusivities. I have also really appreciated your critique that judging an artwork’s merit based on whether it has “good ethics” reduces art’s ability to make important, accurate statements about society and sanctions a lot of bad art.

I end up having many questions which I refer to you in my mind and I have wondered what it would be like to just ask you them, so that is what I am doing here with this letter. While I am approaching these questions from a different angle than I imagine you would take, I hope there will be some areas where my considerations relate to yours.

I admit I am more interested in art’s ability to make articulate statements than in its purely aesthetic qualities, and more interested in art that is about life than art that is about art. I also have some hope in art’s ability to be a testing ground for new social structures. These sensibilities put me very close to you might call the ethical/micro-utopic camp. But this makes your writing even more important to me to help discern where to draw the lines of critique and where to question my own tendencies.

One of my perseverating questions has to do with how to conceptualize art as both an academic discipline and also something beyond academia. Along with that question comes another: where does art education play in to this expanded “academic” field?

I came into graduate school with a desire to improve my work and to learn about other people who make art that deals with similar social and relational ideas and practices. I had no allegiance to the academic discipline of art and little relationship to the history of art. As I near the end of my degree I continue to want to make work that exists outside a purely art arena and to make work that addresses it’s content not to art history but to contemporary society and “everyday life”. I now also realize that as a person with an MFA I am accountable to the academic discipline of art. While I may not be fully upholding that responsibility, I acknowledge that many of the serious conversations about ideas that matter to me are taking place within the sanctioned art discourses, and if I want to take part in any of these conversations I may need to become more accountable to the history of art.

On the Community Art Network[3] blog you claimed that all art should be held to PHD standards. To me that implies that art should be an exclusive conversation where you have to be educated into its realm to have a valid opinion or to have a means to share your opinion. I am not pro ignorance, but I am against the professionalization of all fields which reflect on the experience of living. I think that art deserves to be more than a specialized professional arena.

In that same interview you said of these works that are branching beyond the domain of art, “ If these claims of transdiciplinarity are to be taken seriously then these projects need to function within other discourses too.”

This assumes that when art pushes out beyond the art world it will necessarily operate in other established discourses related to other academic disciplines. But what if this kind of work is reaching for a territory that does not yet have an established discourse, that doesn’t belong in any academic category? Can there be a non-academic discourse around this work that still has intellectual substance? Can there be an arena for cultural reflection and analysis that uses language and mediums that are accessible to people who are not specifically educated into any discipline? Is that desire of mine based on fictional ideals of accessibility?

In mid-March Mark Dion came to Portland to teach a week long workshop about museums to our program. At one point during his visit he gave me a gracious but firm talking to about my responsibility to know the history of Art as my own history.  It was appropriate to have this call for accountability to academic traditions coming from Mark Dion, whose artistic persona is so classically scholarly. I believe he has found a way to successfully meet your criteria for transdisciplinarity, but this works for him because his interests lie within the history of academic discourses, both of art and of natural sciences. 

There are other subjects and skills that do not have academic equivalents but are worth seriously thinking about, like my own particular interest in conversation, manners and social dynamics. Of course there are academic ways of thinking about these topics but they only barely apply to what actually interests me about them. I want forums to think carefully about subjects as we experience them in our daily lives. And I think using language and mediums that stay true to those everyday experiences can make for demanding, insightful and accurate reflection.

We know this drive to apply art outside of the art world and its academic discipline runs strong within contemporary art, both at present and historically. The panel discussion at the Incidental Person exhibition re-examined some examples of this ongoing history as it was embodied by APG[4] and with EAT[5]. But it also brought out evidence of how art can stop functioning well when it gets too close to everyday life. This failure was evident in your bold, accurate statement that APG produced “bad art”, and in Stephen Wright’s unconvincing but curious example of the artist who had entirely assumed the role of housepainter.  The underside of this ideal was also present in Wright’s snarky idea that all the MFA graduates who disappear back into the non-art work force are at the forefront of applying art to real life contexts. My goal is not to make work that blends seamlessly into the non-art world because, as these examples show, this offers no friction on which to catch reflective thought.

That panel discussion helped me continue questioning the implication of my desire to make art that exists and can be thoughtfully discussed in an everyday arena. My questions however are certainly not resolved. I am still working on how to answer these questions and more:

Where is there a place to discuss social practice art outside of the art academy? Is it possible for there to be work that is not directly accountable to any established academic knowledge body but still has an intellectual strength? How can I make work and have discussions about art that take place in language that is not an art professional dialect?

I acknowledge that much of this conversation is several years old for you, and that you may very well have moved on by now to other discussions, whereas I am currently trying to orient myself in relation to it. If you have the time, I would be very interested to know how my framing of these questions appears to you, and to hear what questions you currently consider pertinent in relation contemporary art practice and discourse reaching outside of academia and art institutions.

Thank you for writing clear, insightful critiques of this “social turn[6]” in art. I consider you to be a useful guide in my thinking about this kind of work.

Sincerely,

Ariana Jacob

[1] Anthony Hudek.“The Incidental Person.” apexart.org

http://www.apexart.org/exhibitions/hudek.htm

[2] Claire Bishop. “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics”, October Magazine, MIT, Fall 2004, No. 110, Pages 51-79

[3] Jennifer Roche. “Socially Engaged Art, Critics and Discontents: An Interview with Claire Bishop.” Community Arts Network Reading Room.

[4] Artist Placement Group, active in England from 1966-1989

[5] Experiments in Art and Technology, active in the USA from 1967-early 1970’s

KATHERINE BALL & ALEC NEAL INTERVIEW JOHN HENRIKSON

The question of art is no longer aesthetics, but survival of the planet. 

                                                                                                                        - Platform London

3,094 miles, 91 days, 13 states, 21 communities, 4 bicyclists, and 45 solutions to the climate crisis. In August 2010, Alec Neal and I began the Solutions Revolution---a cross country bicycle trip filming a documentary about local communities’ solutions to the climate crisis.

The bike trip was inspired by Lab of Insurrectionary Imagination member John Jordan’s ruminations on art, activism, and social practice, “I didn’t want to make art ABOUT issues, but IN them, WITH them, imbedded IN the issues themselves...to abandon the work in the art-world and actually work with the social movements as material.This was similar to Beuys and his ideas of social sculpture---to actually see the movements as material.” Alec and I made a pact to travel to the 2010 United Nations Climate Conference in Cancun, Mexico with as low carbon transportation as possible. Our plan was to bike from Portland, Oregon to Washington D.C., take a train down to Florida, and a boat across the Gulf of Mexico.

Along the way, we interviewed citizens developing systemic solutions to climate change. We spoke with developers, school teachers, city commissioners, farmers, foresters, musicians, mycologists, students, scientists, senators, homeowners, and nomads. The interviews will be released in a documentary in summer 2011.

In Oakville, Washington we interviewed forester John Henrikson of Wild Thyme Farm. Since deforestation produces 20% of all carbon emissions caused by humans, we were interested in the Wild Thyme’s efforts to maximize carbon sequestration and bring industry and environmentalism together through the practice of wild forestry.

Katherine Ball (KB) & Alec Neal (AN): What is your philosophy on forest management? 

John Henrikson (JH): We’ve modified natural selection forestry—where you only take what the forest has selected out—into what we call wild forestry: maintaining the forest in as wild a state as possible. In doing this, we assist the forest to evolve to its highest state of biodiversity, maturity, integrity and complexity. In the process we find that we can harvest incredible quantities and quality of wood.

Washington-based climatologist Dr. Philip Moses has a quote that epitomizes what we are doing here, “Instead of single variable maximization, we are going for multiple outcome optimization.” What we’re finding here is that the convergence of high carbon sequestration, high biodiversity, high timber quality, high timber quantity, all can be done at the same time. It’s clear that you can go for 100-200 years in this ecosystem maximizing all of those elements and still extract timber because the forest is growing and kicking out trees that it doesn’t need to get to old growth. We’re evolving from a forest that’s 20,000 board feet an acre when clearcut it to 50,000 or even 100,000 when selectively harvested.

KB & AN: How did you develop this philosophy? 

JH: When we first acquired the land, none of us had any experience managing landscapes, we did not come from a natural resource, farming, or timber background—we were suburban kids. Around year seven we realized that our inattention to the landscape was having consequences. The ice storm of 1996 hit and 30 acres of our forest was destroyed, in some cases up to 100% by alder trees going down. When we first bought the farm, we had an opportunity to intervene in our forest: the locals came to introduce themselves said, “You should clearcut that 17 year old alder forest and replant doug fir right away. The alder is a junk tree and doug fir is what you want.” Of course we weren’t planning on cutting anything. It turns out in retrospect they were about 80% right—we should have taken 80% of the alder out immediately. What would have happened was we would have paid off the mortgage in two years instead of twenty. But the big benefit would have been by 1996 when the ice storm came, had we taken out all of those young alders and we would have had almost no damage from the ice storm. The reason we know this is that the older alders that are spaced far apart are still there today. It was the young alders that were too tight together and had poor root structures that went down catastrophically. So not only did we lose out money earlier in the game, we also lost out on high quality, big money trees today, and we still have heavily damaged parts of the forest that should have alder trees two feet in diameter.

KB & AN: How has your personal relationship to the land changed over time? 

JH: Before, I was always a spectator, spending my time outside hiking around fascinated with wilderness. When I became a landowner, I moved into a working relationship with the land. The working relationship is a day to day affair, it is the kind of thing that keeps you up at night when the storms are howling. You start to have a personal relationship with the plants and animals that you are involved with and it takes over your life.

KB & AN: How much is your forest worth?

JH: We’ve had it assessed for carbon sequestration markets. The forest was calculated to have 2,000 board feet an acre which would be 2 million board feet over the entire acreage. At the lumberyard that would be worth $1 million dollars.

KB & AN: What keeps you going? Why don’t you just cut them all down and take the money?

JH: Well, why do you do anything? It would be great to have the money, but I don’t want to sacrifice the forest. I’m kind of a scientist at heart. The reason I’m doing this is to figure this out. To learn and be able to share that learning. I have an intuition that there is that sweet spot between high carbon, high timber, and high biodiversity. I don’t want to talk about sustainability—I want to talk about outrageous, vigorous growth beyond your wildest dreams. This is about realizing dreams.

CARBON SEQUESTRATION

KB & AN: How do trees sequester carbon?

JH: CO2 is a nutrient to the trees just as oxygen is to us. The trees convert carbon dioxide into carbonaceous wood fiber. The CO2 stays sequestered as carbon wood fiber as long as that tree is alive. It slowly degrades once the tree dies. If you use it for wood products you get a little extension on its life.

KB & AN: How does industrial forestry compare to wild forestry when it comes to carbon sequestration?

JH: The industrial forest is what I would call carbon neutral. Over time, the amount of lumber grown and lumber extracted achieves a steady state: they grow, they harvest, they grow, they harvest. Looking at the big picture you don’t get anywhere there, but it’s better than development. What we do here is more proactively carbon negative. By managing a persistently mature forest, we are exploring how to accelerate the process of carbon sequestration and minimize the release of carbon through rot and decay. e design our management plan to go to longer rotation forestry. For this first 100 years our forest’s maturity is actually increasing and storing more carbon than it is releasing. We are also experimenting with soil retention, soil building, soil carrying capacity, hydration, and fertilization.

KB & AN: How does deforestation contribute to climate change?

JH: Massive deforestation globally will change the way storms form and the way moisture relates to the landscape. Greece, Turkey and Israel all used to have vast forests like the Pacific Northwest. Three to four thousand years ago, the people of that region cut down all the trees and subsequently desertified their landscape. In order for that region to support a large forest like we have here, they must have had a lot more moisture on the landscape. Now, nobody associates that part of the Mediterranean with a lot of moisture—deforestation changed their ecosystem.

THEORY AND PRACTICE

KB & AN: Can you talk about the importance of being a sustainable forester rather than just advocating for sustainable forestry?

JH: My goal is to not just do the right thing but to document it to see what makes sense and what doesn’t—cause it won’t fly if it doesn’t make economic sense. I could care less about the money and I have no interest in being in the lumber business, but I have no story to tell if I can’t make wild forestry work economically. I’m just another opinion, just another flapping gums, talking head. I bring foresters and environmentalists to Wild Thyme what I say to them, “Help me out here. I’m happy to hear where I can improve. If you want to be critical just because I’m being active, show me your forest and tell me what I’m doing wrong.” But the criticism has to come with some weight to it—get your skin in the game, you make the investment, take your life savings and turn it into the forest, and forget about your retirement fund, cause I don’t have one anymore and I’m not young anymore, but this important to me. That’s the kind of sacrifice you’ve got to make, it is not sending in a $50 donation.

KB & AN: How are you are trying to bring industry and environmentalism together?

JH: I try to be a-political. I work with environmental groups and industry people. It is not that I am trying to be an industry flack. It’s that I need to maintain a relationship with them in order to bring them along. Instead of trying to figure out “Why are these ‘evil’ people doing this?” I’m trying to figure out “Why are they doing this? What is causing this? Why would you be abusive to nature?” To understand what is driving industry without putting your subjective layer of “evilness” on them is the beginning of being able to change their model.

Overtime as we prove the model that you get more timber over the long run, there will be people—investors specifically—that decide to do forestry on a different scale, to make an investment, to go beyond the narrow economic limitation and take the risk and do the right thing. But is very hard. You need people like yourself, or me, or anybody to put their money on the table. You can buy land and do what I do—you can do exactly the opposite of industrial forestry. Anybody is available to do that, but it is high risk and lot of work—you can lose it all since it is a physical product.

KB & AN: Are there other opportunities for solutions to climate change at Wild Thyme Farm?

JH: In every step of producing food and fiber there is a chance to reduce your carbon footprint. I’ve got my little lumber operation here, but it would be more efficient for me to do it at ten times my scale. I would like to produce one million board feet of wood a year and buy from all of my neighbors in the valley so they can do this kind of selective forestry and give them much better money than selling it to the mill, but then you need a couple million dollar facility, it’s not huge, it’s not like a big lumber yard, it might be as big as a dairy farm and that means you are not trucking the logs 50 miles away, you are trucking them two miles away.

FOREST INTERVENTION

KB & AN: What is a healthy forest?

JH: A healthy forest has it all. It’s got big trees and little trees, clearings and brushy areas, lots of animals and birds, water—everything.

KB & AN: Do forests need human intervention to be healthy?

JH: Yes and no. Forests don’t need any human intervention, but mosts of our forests have already had a lot of human intervention. To shift from massive intervention to zero intervention is not a good thing generally. You will see this typically in the Inter Mountain West where forests will go through a convulsive state from clearcut to plantation to regeneration making it all the same forest, all the same age. Then a wildfire or insects go through and it starts over. The same thing happens–it’s feverish—it’s trying to reestablish its balance. We set it out of balance and it is our responsibility to put it back into balance. It doesn’t take a lot, but it does require timely intervention and involvement. In one sense the forest doesn’t need us, but since we’ve already been so heavily involved we are responsible to set it straight.

KB & AN: Can you talk about the history of industrial farming?

JH: For farmers, ranchers, and loggers, the margins are so thin. The only time loggers were making money was in the old days when they were cutting old growth. They were harvesting an investment that was built over hundreds or thousands of years that they didn’t create. They basically liquidated an endowment fund. That’s why you had timber barons and big timber industries in the past. They don’t make any money anymore and are trying to get out of the business whenever possible. They want to sell their land for development because that’s the only way they can get their investment back.

Katherine Ball is in Copenhagen, Denmark cataloging the city’s sustainability initiatives and studying at the School of Walls and Space. She is contemplating biking through Africa for the next UN Climate Conference.

Alec Neal is in Minneapolis, Minnesota collaborating with Heartland Circle.

www.solutionsrevolution.org

www.wildthymefarm.com

Citations

John Jordan, “Optimism Now or Nothing,” in Let’s Remake the World III, edited by YNKB (Copenhagen, Denmark: YNKB, 2009), 60. 

(MELBOURNE): A CONVERSATION

Harrell Fletcher. Death mask, Grainger Museum storage, 2010, colour inkjet print.

Following a preview of The Sound We Make Together exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia on 3 September 2010, some of the participants gathered with Harrell Fletcher and Alex Baker to discuss their thoughts on their involvement. The following is a transcript of that conversation.

Names of organisations and their acronyms:

NGV  National Gallery of Victoria 

APA  Arts Project Australia 

CERES  Centre for Education and Research in Environmental Strategies

CRA  Crooked Rib Art 

FCAC  Footscray Community Arts Centre 

GM  Grainger Museum 

Alex Baker, NGV: From what you have experienced of the project The Sound We Make Together (Melbourne), what are your overall impressions?

Sue Roff, APA: I had no idea what to expect until we walked in the exhibition space just today. I’ve probably been less hands-on in terms of my organisation for various reasons, but it’s a really great overview of so many different parts of the Melbourne community. Some I was familiar with and some I wasn’t.

Harrell Fletcher: Something that I’m really glad about, working with the NGV, is that admission is free so people can come and go as much as they want, which isn’t the case in most equivalent galleries elsewhere in which you almost always pay admission, and so people usually only go once. I really like that people can experience this exhibition over a period of time, having a chance to look at different parts on different visits, especially in the case of the video of the weekend of presentations – it’s four hours long.

Marg Vandeleur, CERES: I wouldn’t classify this as a community art project – it’s some kind of hybrid form of engagement between community and artist. It intersected in some ways very narrowly, and also fairly unrepresentatively, with what CERES is, and I think that’s got to do with the length of time of the project ... but on the other hand what it brings together are organisations’ perceptions of themselves and how they want to be seen to the world, to some extent; plus, someone who is a complete outsider to us and their take on it, and juxtaposing those two things. So, I suppose it’s some kind of hybrid form of community artist engagement, which I haven’t encountered before and it will be interesting to see what comes of it.

Harrell Fletcher: Anybody else have thoughts on that?

Reeham Hakem, CRA: I’ve been involved in pretty much each component and stage of the project from the start. One component involved us choosing an artwork or an object we thought would represent ourselves or our group. And I just felt, through each component, we were the ones who were curating the exhibit, and I found that really profound because we all have different points of view and different issues that we feel need to be pointed out, whether through a sculpture or reading material. That was a really good way of engaging people who are not necessarily in the arts culture, rather than it being the same, static requirements of what an artist is and what it takes to be an artist. And we could all be involved in that sense, having community members curating the exhibit.

Harrell Fletcher: I think that’s a really good point and, in the case of Crooked Rib Art, you ended up making a piece of art as well. But if we had required that of everyone, some people would feel really uncomfortable making art, so we didn’t want to put them in that position; instead, we found a role that we felt everyone would be comfortable in, which was to choose a piece of art from the NGV’s collection. That was a way to allow people to participate in something that they wouldn’t normally get to do.

Jennifer Barry, FCAC: At some point in the process, because each stage of the process did feel like it had its own shape and its own sort of experience, I think it was after you came to visit [laughs] or maybe it was before or maybe we were anticipating the visit – we can’t remember – but it was a very anthropological feeling, like a Margaret Mead kind of moment where we were going, ‘the man is looking at us through the kind of grilled gates of whatever it is, through the lens of visual art or whatever’, and it felt kind of weird and it felt a little voyeuristic and we felt a little like we were kind of quaint objects in and of ourselves, but that was only that one part of the process. The other part of the process like the selection of the NGV artwork and how you want to be represented, and I agree with what Marg said is that it felt more empowering in some aspects or stages of the project and, in other stages of the project, it was like a waiting game of how you felt you were going to be represented. So it was interesting …

Michael Brennan, FCAC: And if I could add to that … an unforseen aspect of the whole project was that it made us look at what we thought the project meant as well, and what we thought that you, Harrell, were after as an outcome. And it made us question what community is and the way you were approaching community, whether it was a concept of community or an engagement of community or a combination of both. We didn’t really arrive at an answer, but it was a question.

Jeff Sparrow: When Alex first contacted me my initial reaction was a certain scepticism about my own involvement. I’d never thought of myself as an artist or having any relationship to fine arts, and I must say that, at various points on the way through, I remember asking Alex, ‘How is this going to work? What am I doing? [laughter] What role am I playing? But by about the second stage, I gave up worrying and just enjoyed the process, and I thought poking around in the back of the NGV was kind of awesome. It was a really good experience in and of itself. Likewise with the weekend on which we all presented talks … Everyone spoke really well and said interesting things and they were groups that I would normally not have had any contact with. It was good for me to have that experience of letting go of any control and saying: these people know what they’re doing … something will come of this. 

Harrell Fletcher: I really appreciate that people were willing to participate because a lot of trust had to go into believing we were going to, in the end, represent people in ways they would feel comfortable with and that it would be a positive experience for them. A few people have commented that there were all of these different aspects, and so some of them put people in the role of curator; some of them in the role of subject and being of observed and, I actually talk about this in the wall texts on the photographs I took when I was in Melbourne, that we were also asking you all to come to the institution and get a look into the back room so you could have another view of the NGV, different than what you would normally have, and then that was reversed when I got to go and look in your back rooms. So you all were able to have different angles and experiences within the project. Hopefully the audience for the exhibition will also be able to perceive these different perspectives to try and understand you as individuals and groups based on what is on view in the exhibition.

Sim Luttin, APA: I was in communication with Alex from the beginning of the project as well, but what I found was such a wonderful process for it, and I echo what everyone else has said as well, is that you felt part of something big and you felt part of a community even when you didn’t know necessarily the other parts of who that community was. I knew some of the organisations and individuals, and others I didn’t, but it was very nice to go on a journey where you didn’t have a predefined outcome of what that was, so what it allowed the project to do was evolve in these other ways that involved a lot of people from our organisation and a lot of people from other organisations who may not normally get involved in a process such as this, and again who may not be artists. For Arts Project artists to be involved in a project where they got to make a selection from the NGV’s collection, got to go back behind the scenes of the NGV and then welcome Alex and Harrell back into the behind-the-scenes at Arts Project, I think was a really unique way of involvement.

Paul Hodges, APA: I just had fun being able to go into the storage rooms and it was a real experience from 10 o’clock to 2.30 or 3.00 o’clock looking through many famous paintings and actually being able to choose a painting from the huge collection. It was a real privilege, and I think the piece we chose was actually quite funky and different from the other ones we saw – more like Pop Art – and it seemed like an appropriate selection.

Marg Vandeleur, CERES: What I was trying to say before is that I don’t think we really had either the resources or the time to really engage with and involve our many communities in the decisions we made. But that would have been a completely different project if we were to really get that kind of connection with all the communities CERES represents.

Michael Brennan, FCAC: That’s an indication of the fact that it’s just impossible to be truly representative of anything or anyone as a group. I think we at Footscray Community Arts Centre are quite aware of that as well because we deal with a number of diverse and different communities and you can’t be everything to everyone. I just think that this project shows how much of an important role subjectivity plays in everyday interaction.

Marg Vandeleur, CERES: It’s interesting, because I think the choices from CERES’s point of view were absolutely apt and I’ve got no quibble. It’s fantastic and the other thing that’s interesting is the way the images that were chosen by the organisations and the images that Harrell came up with or selected somewhat echo each other, even though there was no known relationship before you entered into that process. This would be a different sort of project entirely, but I would have loved to have displayed the painting we’ve chosen at CERES. I know there would have been security issues, but we could have built a project with schoolkids taking photos ...

Monica Syrette, GM: We’ve had quite a different experience because we’re not a community arts organisation, we’re a museum that’s within a university and it’s primarily an autobiographical museum of quite an unusual person. So it’s interesting to hear your perspective about how to engage with your, for want of a better word, stakeholders – the people who use CERES and that you wish to communicate with. When Alex first contacted us I was really excited because I knew Harrell’s work and I felt there were real parallels with Grainger and what Harrell is interested in. Grainger wanted to make music democratic and explore music as a universal language. I find it interesting to hear how everyone here had different perspectives and expectations about the project. I was also at NGV storage on the day that Jeff Sparrow was there making his selection, and after we had been looking around he said to me, ‘I don’t know why I’m here, I don’t know what’s going on’. He was really confused [laughter], I sort of just jumped in.

Jennifer Barry, FCAC: We did enjoy the high art/low art divide, not that there is one, but we enjoyed playing with the NGV because we don’t usually get to do that, so you know, that’s kind of fun …

Marg Vandeleur, CERES: It was a thrill for our people too. It was the highlight.

Alex Baker, NGV: Both Marg and Jennifer raised really interesting questions, which was something I was going to ask you about. What is the role of a large public institution like the NGV – an encyclopedic art museum – in fostering an exhibition like this? What happens when a project such as this occurs in a large institution such as the NGV? What’s been really interesting for me as a curator is working within my institutional structures to realise a project like this. It’s been a challenge, but it’s also been rewarding because we have tremendous resources here that other institutions do not necessarily have. For instance, a vast collection that we could use in interesting ways as a conceptual backbone for the Fletcher project involving you all. In another case, the photographs that Harrell took here in Melbourne were printed and framed onsite at the NGV. Could that happen at a smaller art institution? And maybe the show would have taken a different direction if it was indeed at a different kind of institution, at a community arts organisation like Footscray. Does anybody have anything to say about this?

Harrell Fletcher. Reference library and Julian Martin at work, Arts Project Australia, Footscray Community Arts Centre, 2010.

Jennifer Barry, FCAC: I reckon definitely the different resources available. As soon as I walked in the space this afternoon, the level of resources that the NGV can bring to even the display of an exhibition itself is profound compared to what we can do at Footscray. In terms of the content, in terms of the concept and the process, it would very much, I think, fit in with what Footscray Community Arts Centre does; it’s all about people and communities and self-identity or how you would like to be represented and the discussions around representation, so we would love to do this kind of project, so if the NGV maybe just gave us the money and then we could do the next one.

Sumaya Asvat, CRA: I think that’s the point; it’s really powerful to have an exhibition like this in an institution like this, not just for the artists but for the viewers. I’ll take my artist’s hat off and put my educator’s hat on, so when kids or youth come here, they can see art in a different way. It becomes really real; it’s tangible. It’s not something – ‘Oh high art is this and these sort of artists do this’, but it’s something that everyone can be a part of, and so they come in and they say, ‘Oh I never thought of them as artists but hey, they’re working with this group’, and for them I think it’s also, and for me as well, it’s really refreshing to come to an institution like this and see an exhibition that’s not egocentric, that’s not about one person or one group; it’s about everyone working together, so I think that’s a power in this whole thing.

Marg Vandeleur, CERES: This is going to sound weird Harrell, but your aesthetic actually makes more sense in this context too, right. If I look at the three pictures you chose to represent CERES, I first thought to myself, ‘Oh my god, they’re so ugly, you know, why is he selecting to take a photo of a little sign of a little worm when there’s so many beautiful things on site?’, but in the context of high art, your images and your aesthetic and the juxtaposing of them makes sense. They confront our notions of what’s beautiful and what’s ugly. I mean, that’s what you’ve done with our images. You’ve given us three images that on first glance you think, ‘My god they’re so – well, I thought – they’re so ugly!’

Harrell Fletcher: But actually in CERES’s case they were all things that you use to represent yourselves with, because these are displays that you use ...

Marg Vandeleur, CERES: Of course, but we’ve got millions of idiosyncratic little things representing us. The whole site is a kind of kaleidoscope of that …

Jennifer Barry, FCAC: There’s a kind of approval stamp that comes with an exhibition like this being at the NGV, but I hate that as well. I hate the fact that it’s got to be in a ‘cultural institution’ in order to be seen as art in some way.

Michael Brennan, FCAC: To try and extend what you’re saying, if the exhibition that we’ve just seen upstairs was presented in one of our own organisations, it could run the risk of being swallowed up by the other activity that happens around it. And while the clean white box of the art institution is often criticised as a very controlled, very institutionalised exhibition space, to my mind it does have the benefit of eliminating distractions so that the subtleties can come to the surface and so you do see those more nuanced ways that the organisations work and the details of the individual organisations have a chance to surface in that kind of isolated space.

Sim Luttin, APA: I was going to say something similar. We’re obviously an arts organisation so that sort of clean, crisp space of white walls is more familiar perhaps to us than it is to CERES and other organisations, but walking into the space there was a sense of familiarity somehow about it, that again it did allow the space for these little moments to come to the surface. The moments that Harrell actually captured of us are really familiar things in our environment, and while they’re perhaps not the most obvious that we might use to promote ourselves, it really does reveal something about the inner workings of the organisation and the artists and what we’re about. Seeing the small pieces that Harrell picked up on; those idiosyncrasies are quite beautiful moments, I think, in our studio.

Jennifer Barry, FCAC: Alex, did the NGV learn anything from us?

Alex Baker, NGV: We did. During the weekend of presentations there were NGV colleagues in the audience up and down the hierarchy and across different departments and they commented to me about how meaningful an event this was. I’m an outsider to Melbourne and I learned so much about what’s happening in this city as a result of this project. Given that I am a contemporary art curator, I often do only contemporary art–related things: art openings, gallery visits, studio visits. I don’t necessarily get to go to places like CERES as part of my job, so in many ways by working with Harrell I got to see and experience things that I hadn’t seen and experienced before. And by extension, we are exposing both the NGV and its audience to a range of activities that would normally not be engaged with by this institution.

Monica Syrette, GM: I do think it’s great to have the project at the NGV because it is very challenging for people to see exhibitions like this that involve the high art versus low art debate. I think that in Australia as well, when it comes to art, people are still very threatened by this debate. This will generate a lot of conversation and that’s really great, but it’s fantastic that the NGV trusted you as a curator and Harrell as the artist to do this type of project.

Marg Vandeleur, CERES: They also trusted those community organisations that participated to deliver on their end and I think if there’s any feedback for the NGV, it’s just how valuable and exciting it was for us community organisations to connect with the NGV in that way.

Reeham Hakem, CRA: It works both ways. The NGV gave us a role in creating this exhibit, with our take on what we think should be shown and exhibited, so I think the NGV was great for that initiative. But I also think it worked the other way because now, people coming to the NGV have another reference for when someone mentions ‘community art’. Community art is sometimes seen as an excuse for amateur art, for example, and the NGV is a good venue to explore these assumptions. So it worked both ways and I’m really interested to see what’s going to happen later on and what sort of questions and discussions are going to come up.

Jennifer Barry, FCAC: Alex, are you going to capture what the audience, how the visitors might respond to the exhibition?

Alex Baker, NGV: It’s a good question. I have not really thought that through and it is an ongoing problem in all art museums – gauging visitor responses in constructive ways, providing feedback loops, so to speak.

Harrell Fletcher: I think there will be plenty of opportunity for lots of different things to happen. And something that’s happened just during the time that I’ve been here is that we’ve been able to arrange for a few extra things like bringing in The Hacketts to perform as part of the opening tonight, which is just something that came about because we actually went over to Footscray Community Arts Centre and met and heard the band rehearsing in a studio. If you are compelled or interested, either try to work with the NGV or put on your own event and have a conversation in which people talk about this project and their various thoughts and feelings on it.

I think one thing that’s good to keep in mind, it’s been brought up a little bit, is that this exhibition is just one project, it can’t do everything. Sometimes I think when an unorthodox project happens, suddenly everyone wants it to be everything to everyone. Most other exhibitions are following the orthodoxy. They’re just straight studio art and nobody has any expectation of these exhibitions doing anything other than being what they are. But if projects of this nature were more common, if projects like what we have done here were even just 10% of what museums were showing, then you could start to get a diversity of different levels of engagement and topics. I hope that when people encounter projects such as this one they will have their views expanded about what an artist can do, what a curator can do, the possibility of site-specific engaged projects, etcetera.

Jennifer Barry, FCAC: I think what you do has an anthropological kind of element to it.

Harrell Fletcher: But it also turns a lot of those conventions on their head. An anthropologist usually takes their findings back with them to their university and may not share it with the people they studied. By presenting my projects in the places and with the people who actually live there – they get to participate and engage in various ways that wouldn’t normally happen in anthropology – in those ways for me I am addressing the potentially negative, problematic aspects of anthropology or ethnography. I think there’s a lot of value in anthropology, but there are ways it could be modified that would make it less problematic and I guess that’s what I’m attempting to do. But I have no background as an ethnographer or anthropologist. I’m just an artist.

Michael Brennan, FCAC: Because if you were an anthropologist I suppose you’d try and draw conclusions from your findings, so is that something which is part of your process?

Harrell Fletcher: No it’s definitely not, other than in a very subjective way. For me, what makes me who I am, is that I’m someone who is growing and learning and having hopefully a greater understanding and empathy through these project encounters. I’m having real-world experiences rather than just going off my idea of Australia or my idea of young Muslim women or whatever it happens to be; instead, I now have real experiences that change the way I think, drastically. When I’m able to sit back and realise whatever my assumptions were and then compare them to what I’ve learned, and how I understand these things now, I feel really fortunate in having been able to have first-hand experiences in so many different places and with so many different people.

in Participatory Art

Dillon de Give

“I am interested in science and in philosophy only because I want to learn something about the riddle of the world in which we live, and the riddle of man’s knowledge of that world. And I believe that only a revival of interest in these riddles can save the sciences and philosophy from narrow specialization and from an obscurantist faith in the expert’s special skill, and his personal knowledge and authority…”

-Karl Popper

from The Logic of Scientific Discovery

 This essay concerns itself with participatory art– the type of participatory art that publicly invites people into a process of creative output, and then expresses the value of their contribution in its final manifestation. I want to trace a certain attitude through the artistic process. To be specific, it is the preoccupation or fascination with the questions of how we learn things about the world, what it means to know, and how to characterize or transmit knowledge that will be seen as intimately linked to the idea of working with other people. This qualitative attribute could be termed an “epistemological imperative”, or a tendency to emphasize ways of knowing over ways of seeing.

The process of learning is a process of collapsing distance. It is an experience by which subject endeavors to meet object. Building knowledge through a process of inquiry is traditionally the job of the scientist (or certain lucky elementary school students). What happens then when artists begin to act like scientists and elementary school students by enacting a process of inquiry? In this framework many old questions are given new life. What could it mean to know the land? What about my next-door neighbor who doesn’t speak English? The path of the waste I produce, and the food I eat? Many subjects so close to home that they are haven’t been considered art at all until they are seen as a doorway to a new way of knowing. An artist examining these processes begins to shape the experience by which subject meets object as an expression, and functions under the epistemological imperative.

 This kind of art-working has a relation to the kind of everyday performance that happens in the science lab: observation, flexibility, the necessity of communication, and even extension of experimental results towards future use. It also retains some of the social ideals of “citizen” scientist of the 19^th century: the social web of knowledge production is diffuse, and it doesn’t require an expensive infrastructure. It theoretically accepts input from anyone willing to put in the time.

 To extend the comparison between the ways the scientist and the artist seek to produce knowledge, or “ways of knowing”, I want to invoke a set of ideas developed by the Austrian philosopher Karl Popper, a self-described “critical rationalist”. Popper, who began publishing his work in the 1930s, observed that many of the classic problems of epistemology had to do with the growth of knowledge, and decided that the best way to study the growth of knowledge for him was to examine the history of science.

His contemporaries, the Logical Positivists had believed that science proceeded through a process of induction. Popper denied this, taking Hume’s centuries-old problem of induction at face value (this had stated that no matter how many observations one makes, it is logically impossible to create a natural law, i.e. even after a lifetime of seeing white beluga whales it is still impossible to say that the next beluga whale you see will be not be black). Instead of using induction, Popper said, the scientist begins by simply making an assertion, a claim. This space for the creative intuition in the scientific process Popper described as an “irrational element” at work in the moment in which a scientist dreams up such an assertion. This central place of the scientific assertion is what I would like to compare to the central conceit behind an artistic project.

His qualifying factor for an assertion, “falsifiability”, is what I am going to attempt to apply to the artistic project. But more on that term first– of specific concern for Popper was the ability to determine the scientific status of an assertion. While the Positivists had called for verifiability through inductive processes, Popper called only for a quality of falsifiability. He emphasized that piling up lots of evidence does not make a statement something more and more correct, instead we should look for particular instances in which the theory might fail and test it rigorously to see if it survives. In order to be considered scientific then, a theory must be at least capable of being proved wrong. The more audacious it is, the more it flirts with this kind of epistemic danger, the better it is. For Popper, Einstein’s theory of relativity was a good assertion because it seemed quite unlikely. It didn’t have a lot of empirical evidence when it was formulated, yet it could be theoretically tested (and was years later when technology caught up, passing the best tests we could perform). Passing a test does not guarantee truth for eternity. But the potential to fail– falsifiability– is prerequisite to considering an assertion scientific.  Adopting this concept of knowledge in an artistic process would mean that we are never absolutely certain about the accuracy of our beliefs. We work only with a best guess, and if possible, improve on it. It is the provisional nature of assertion here that allows for a continuous process of critical investigation. 

There is something about such a way of operating that is attractive for an artist. In order to know something about reality, all that is needed is to pose an interesting question and thoroughly examine it in a specific situation. The artist would conjecture by “projecting” an idea into an experience of inquiry. This means establishing guidelines under which to work, and under which to deduce situations to test the central assertion. In this sense, the form of the assertion is the form of the project. It is the way by which the artist proposes to know a subject through a central conceptual proposition. This way of reading and art project can be mapped onto many works that share a desire to know through experience. For example artist Paul Chan proposed to know the devastation of post Katrina New Orleans by staging the play Waiting for Godot in the decimated public space there. His project Waiting for Godot in New Orleans had other components, but these hinged around this central assertion.

By being predicated in social form, the project-as-assertion has epistemic advantages. As in a scientific community, it has a framework for immediate intersubjective verification. Results may be witnessed and discussed collectively (or even reperformed). Second, it also has an ability to accept contributions towards its method of experimentation from multiple intelligences and immediately affect small forms of change– to use its discoveries.

Inviting other people to help put the assertion “to the test” establishes a kind of truth relation to the world in which it was based. Nevertheless, there are twin dangers that seem to threaten the constructive potential of an assertion made public: either that it will be seen as rhetorical and accepted/rejected without contest, or that it will be interpreted as purely descriptive, significant only in contributing to the aesthetic structure of dialogue itself and not given proper examination. In other words, either an assertion is voiced and not tested, or the process of assertion making itself becomes a celebration.

The first case “voiced and not tested” may occur when a pre-existing view is too strongly attached to the subject, and the project is presented to those who have a well-established opinion. This is preaching to the choir. If I go to a farmer’s market and begin soliciting mail to convince industrialized farmers to change their ways, I might help gather momentum that could be used for various purposes (legislation, etc) but the action could lack the kind of artistic depth that it might have if it actually seemed to run the risk of “failing”. In other words, it would not be falsifiable as a project-assertion in this specific context.

The second problem identified using the project-as-assertion comparison– “the assertion celebration”– occurs when discussion is prized as an end in itself. Here, a central assertion hasn’t been made so much as universal value has been placed on everyone’s ability to make assertions in general. This can be seen in certain “conversation stations” and artistic debate clubs that intend to foster dialogue, but are not explicit about the ends of this desire. This isn’t necessarily a problematic sentiment, but it doesn’t make for art that is falsifiable and accountable to the conditions of the world. It is a problem of framing. If discussion is not contextualized within a concrete context, (i.e. if the project does not account for the fact that dialogue can lead to action) then it begins to feel impotent.

Projects operating under an epistemological imperative are likely to be interested in knowing their own social structure, as it will influence the way its central assertion is enacted. Close to a project’s ability to embrace form is an awareness of emerging social roles associated with it.

In his book The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life sociologist Erving Goffman (published in the same year as Popper’s Logic of Scientific Discovery) provides a way to analyze social roles in a dramaturgical framework, equating social action with theatrical performance. He relates the public perception of an individual to the individual’s acceptance of the artifice of enacting identity.

“When an individual has no belief in his own act and no ultimate concern with the beliefs of his audience, we may call him cynical, reserving the term ‘sincere’ for individuals who believe in the impression fostered by their own performance.” (Goffman, 18)

Sincerity here is the result of embracing the constructed nature of a role by recognizing that it necessitates social functionality. It is also an intuitive ability to believe. There is a kind of assertion going on here as well. An individual’s self-presenting actions are guided by an assumption about what their “true nature” is (for practical purposes). I would forward that the epistemologically inclined project is not exempt from creating these roles and the hierarchy that results, but that it does endeavor to create a space for the sincere performance of those roles by giving each a definable relationship to its central assertion. If, as I said earlier, the social form is distinctly advantageous to an art concerned with ways of knowing, then the enactment of distinctly purposeful roles within it reflects a kind of belief in itself, or earnestness.

Goffman identifies social interactions in “real life” as generally taking place between two complementary “teams” of performers (a team may be as small as one person). I would view participatory art as a relation of up to four purposeful teams, and one non-present team. They are: artist/collective, collaborator, participant, audience, and non-audience.

It should be acknowledged that many projects make allowances for role changing. A person may move from audience member to participant in a social performance, or perhaps graduate from participant to collaborator on a long-term pedagogical project. Effort is extended (formally and informally) to govern the structure of potential interchangeability, coordination, and movement between assumed roles. This is one reason why the artist has an increasing similarity to an organizer, director or curator. Management of this sort has to do with the maintenance of an assertion. This means monitoring the “lab” environment to ensure the assertion is both “voiced and tested” the project does not become an “assertion celebration”. Even as the form changes, the meaning of the proposal must remain discernible. To make each role’s function explicit is to encourage the sincere performance of all roles and keep tabs on the meaning.

Seeing a project as a conglomeration of social roles functioning around a central assertion means recognizing it as statement-like. The contributions of each role fit together like the parts of a sentence. An artist must come to terms with the almost-separateness of their assertion from themselves. A public assertion exists in whoever’s mind encounters it. It has a relationship to the term “realistic” because it must take place in the world. In this way it derives value from its understandability, as opposed to its singularity.

According to Popper’s epistemological model we can never “prove” anything, but we are at liberty to generate strong assertions for a ways of knowing, and these assertions may function in the world until they are falsified. The artistic project as assertion is a temporary structure, an inquiry or set of tests on a central conceptual core. Its falsification relates to its durationality. Falsification may be posed simply as an end point to a way of knowing. If the project was a way of knowing a problem, then its falsification can be found in establishing a solution. Likewise, if an artist’s preconceived way of knowing a subject was inadequate in some way, falsification can be the confirmation that further examination of a wholly different character is necessary. The ability to put a period at the end of the sentence would be to either accept transcendence into non-art, or falsification of the initial assertion. Art is not government, science or philosophy. In many ways it can be created and function as pure expressive conjecture– even as it strives to make permanent contributions to the concepts of form and meaning. On these terms an artist is enabled to maintain their determination to start and finish projects that are primarily concerned with conditions of the world as we know it.

Goffman, Erving. 1959. The Presentation of the Self In Everyday Life. New York: Anchor Books.

Popper, Karl Raimund. 1959. The Logic of Scientific Discovery. London: New York: Routledge.