How do we call on the public to understand what we do?
The verb ‘call,’ used in this question urges me to pull out the ‘sentence prism.’ When I hold the prism just right I can see it split into three more:
1. How do we call on the public to participate in or engage with this work?
2. How do we help folks (students, community members, citizens) understand this work?
3. How do we teach students of this work to both make it well and understand it richly?
After a brief foray into the strange juxtaposition of the words call and understand I’d like to hijack the original question and juxtapose it with those three.
The word “call,” suggests a value on the part of the questioner that I see commonly expressed among folks in this diverse community of practitioners: a desire to offer greater agency to this work’s intended audience. That is, so that audience persons become participants or even collaborators. I have that value. I like that idea. I prefer work that can happen outside of a gallery or museum, that is conceived of and created by a group of people and that can take as its primary goal or ‘criteria for success’ some creative revision, nudge or agitation on a worldly injustice as opposed to, say, art historical/canonical significance or aesthetic intrigue. I love all of it, but I tend to prefer the former.
Sitting next to “call” the term “understand” feels strange. As a teacher, I am skeptical that we can call on someone to understand anything. Of course, understanding is not the same as participating in something. It’s relatively easy to call on someone to participate in something. It’s more difficult to usher in the qualities that will make it matter to someone(s). The weirdness of those two words (call, understand) in one sentence, reflect or even perform, one of the debates around this work and its dissemination that I think is long from resolved. Which I also think is quite fine. Patience. Keep tweaking. Keep working.
I would say this: If we want to engage with a public, if we want to call on folks to engage with us so as to foster creative participation or perhaps social change and it is our idea (as opposed to a collective one) then we have serious responsibility to that public; to determine if it actually matters to them (which involves helping them understand) and to include them meaningfully. How to do that: determining what specific strategies are used in any given project depends on the project circumstances and is based on the experience and judgment of that person/persons. The choices will likely determine the resulting perceived value of that project/experience to a lot of different parties. (But, just as I’m not so afraid of making a crappy sculpture to find my way to a less crappy sculpture, I’m not so afraid of making a crappy socially engaged art project. The stakes are higher in some ways, I’ll give you that, but perhaps this is all quite forgivable?) I couldn’t offer any single response to this question for the same reason that I wouldn’t suggest there is only one way to disseminate a painting or help a public access it or help folks to understand it. It depends…
About the contributor: Sara Black has worked broadly as an artist, artist-teacher, arts organizer and curator. In 2005 Sara was a founder of the artist group Material Exchange active in Chicago until 2010, in which she worked closely with artists John Preus and David Wolf. Since 2011 Sara has been working collaboratively with a number of artists and arts organizers, namely Jillian Soto, Lia Rousset, Amber Ginsburg, Karsten Lund and Raewyn Martyn. Her artworks use carpentry, wood-working, and repair as a time-based method, inherited wood or other haunted objects as a material, and imagine building as a physical means of articulating lived relationships in a constant state of renegotiation.
Sara Black received her MFA from the University of Chicago in 2006 and in 2011 relocated to Yellow Springs, Ohio to lead the revitalization of the visual art program at the newly re-opened Antioch College as an Assistant Professor of Visual Art. In the fall of 2014 Sara will transition back to Chicago as Assistant Professor of Sculpture at SAIC. She has given talks and presented workshops at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Harvard University, SAIC, DePaul University, Columbia College, and more. Her work has been exhibited nationally in a variety of spaces including Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art, The Smart Museum of Art, Gallery 400, Hyde Park Art Center, ThreewallsSOLO; Portland’s Museum of Contemporary Craft; New York’s Park Avenue Armory, and Eyebeam; Boston’s Tuft University Gallery; Minneapolis’ Soap Factory, and more. sarablack.org