The Creative Time Summit: Living as Form

The annual Creative Time Summit, a showcase for socially engaged art practices in the US and beyond, aims to invoke the feel and fervour of a genuine movement. If fostering a sense of solidarity is the motive here, then the Summit is an undeniable success, as the atmosphere is far more vibrant and engaged than any other art event I remember. That said, the Summit does pride itself on being more than just an art event, with Creative Time’s chief curator Nato Thompson clarifying, not for the first time, that he didn’t care whether the projects at hand were ‘relational aesthetics, dialogical or social practice’, but preferred to ‘mix them all up’ and see ‘what community the bigger intentionalities produce’. Personally, having recently moved to the US, where the political stakes are more stark, brutal and grotesque than in most places, I fully sympathize. But because I also work in a milieu that widely equates ‘Free Ai Weiwei’ tote bags with political sophistication, I do have questions regarding the innocent accumulation of ethical intentionalities.

The event website, as it happens, addresses ‘artists, curators and thinkers’ specifically. Maybe it’s because Thompson distinguishes between the artists and the curators, and those who do the thinking, that he repeatedly berates the ones who judge the art by art standards, slating them with the same delightful sarcasm he reserves for Donald Rumsfeld. Even the speakers routinely proclaim that they ‘don’t care if it’s art’, or that ‘it’s art because it’s art’, or that it’s ‘art cause they’re artists’. The defensive irritability is palpable, and I couldn’t help but think of Claire Bishop’s critique of the first Summit in 2009, and the wrath it unleashed. Bishop’s writing can be controversial, but the intensity of Creative Time defenders is, shall we say, interesting.

It’s strange to put it this way, but Thompson needs to take responsibility here, for the sheer fact that he’s a frontman who is second to none. The personal magnetism and onstage charisma, the witty, self-deprecating humour and trademark screechy crackle – it’s this captivating persona which carries and structures the event, and Thompson could steer this thing in any direction he likes. From his writings, you can tell there’s more appetite for fundamental aesthetic queries and uncertainties than he lets on at the Summit, which makes his convoluted art-ontological denials a little puzzling. It reminds you of someone who wears outrageous fashion items, then scorns you for asking about the fez.

When, for example, do activist aims even benefit from the visualization economy of the art world? For some causes and struggles, the Midas touch of professional curiosity waters down the potential more violently than any big bad mullah ever could. The choice of publicly framing participation as participation is already political, and to leave such questions to good intentions alone leads you straight to the traditionalist clichés of, say, the Ultra-red collective. Their presentation began with a strong, punchy introduction to a ‘politics of listening’, arguing that the summit privileged ‘resolved political positions over process’ and ‘posited listeners as passive’. Soon, however, the speaker begins to wander about with the mic, asking people ‘Why do you do what you do?’, with the soft burble of a schoolteacher telling you to eat your greens. Silent listeners are ‘passive’, infantilized speakers are ‘active’. You don’t have to be Jacques Rancière to see how Ultra-red exacerbate the very binaries they deride, and reap thunderous applause as they do so.

The more compelling speakers were artists such as Ted Purves, who pondered the potentials of aesthetic criteria for assessing socially engaged art specifically, or for examining the distinctive features of particular projects. Shannon Jackson of Berkeley University, for her part, spoke of ‘medium-specific barometers’ that structure our encounters with ‘un-medium-specific work’, and discussed the resonance of terms like ‘dialogue’ or ‘participation’ in different contexts – including contexts which were not as hybrid as the ideals they uphold, and which succumb to a homogeneity that effects their very ‘habits of criticism’. Then there was artist Kateřina Šedá’s presentation on There’s Nothing There (2003), a project which involved the synchronization of the activities of an entire village. In the Summit context, the work came across as an inspirational example of the artist-as-mobilizer, but also of a practice that is reflexively critical and willfully contradictory, even, or precisely, in its tendency to instrumentalize and tokenize.

There were a number of other highlights – including the collectives Alternate Roots, Common Room, and Women on Waves – but, to be honest, what works best here is the format itself, essentially a brisk succession of eight-minute contributions. This year’s version was even more sparse, stripped of the introductions, the panels and the Q&A. You would think (and many do) that the rapid-fire reduces things to superficial uniformity, when it’s actually the repetition that breeds contrast. The radical equalization in framing leads to the ideological and methodological distinctions shining through all the more, sometimes heightening the differences to the point of caricature, but even these can be instructive.

It also bears mentioning that the Summit’s format is both a transparent and perfectly intelligent way to deal with a bewildering panoply of topics lining the day. I could go on, but suffice to say that the Creative Time Summit is a much-needed structural proposal at a time when curators in New York and beyond could really be engaging more innovatively with the discursive possibilities at hand. And, to be honest, I’m not even sure how many speakers in our field can carry more than eight minutes to begin with, and was often relieved as the speakers were interrupted by the onstage musicians, who were there to forcefully keep track of time. The latter, incidentally, has sparked many an accusation of humiliating the speakers, and reducing musicians to stopwatches, but I personally think the power dynamic is a fascinating and dramatic one, closer to gladiators than egg timers, really. The question of how to interrupt a rant on revolutionary practices, using only a harp – that’s as allegorical as it gets.