Underneath the Nine-Hour-Long Conference, the Beach!

If you had told me last Saturday morning that the marathon talks event I was about to attend, devoted to public/social/ relational/dialogic/participatory/community/or-whatever-it’s-called-this-week art, would feature trumpet serenades and folksy banjo licks, I probably would have smiled weakly, muttered something along the lines of ‘if only…’ then continued wishing I was still tucked up in bed. But the Creative Time Summit at the New York Public Library, subtitled ‘Revolutions in Public Practice’, did indeed feature a trumpet and a banjo; and not only that, but a flute, guitar and double bass to boot.

We know what these kinds of conferences can be like; speakers overrun their allotted time, minutes rack up as hassled technicians grapple with crashed PowerPoint shows, and audience members hijack the Q&A to drivel on endlessly about themselves. The musicians were Creative Time Summit curator Nato Thompson’s ingenious and mischievous method of keeping the conference on schedule. And with presentations from 40 – that’s right, 40 – artists, collectives, historians and thinkers to cram into this day-long event, someone certainly needed to keep an eye on the clock.

The Summit followed an award ceremony the night before, at which the inaugural $25,000 Leonore Annenberg Prize for Art and Social Change was bestowed upon The Yes Men, a group of high profile ‘culture jammers’, whose work can be seen in a new documentary film entitled The Yes Men Fix the World. Expanding on this idea of ‘art and social change’, the conference was divided into nine sessions, with each given a weighty title, collectively describing a range of different perspectives on ‘public practice’; ‘Activating Public Memory’, ‘Crisscrossing Geo-Political Boundaries’, ‘Community Organizing’, ‘Trespassers, Squatters and Interventionists’, ‘Social Organizing as an Aesthetic Act’, ‘Making Oppression Visible’, ‘Sustainability in the Face of Global Meltdown’, ‘Ambiguity is My Political Weapon’ and ‘Alternative Economies’. Two keynote addresses, one in the morning by artist Sharon Hayes, and one immediately after lunch, given by historian Morris Dickstein, accompanied these sessions. Each participant – with the exception of Hayes and Dickstein – was given seven minutes to speak. As the clock reached six minutes, a musician would sound a soft note or chord signaling that the speaker was into their final 60 seconds. When time was up the musician would start playing, and the microphone would be gently faded out, forcing the speaker to stop. The instruments changed with each session; ‘Crisscrossing Geo-Political Boundaries’, for instance, was assigned a plaintive-sounding trumpet, whereas a double bass was thought more suitable for ‘Making Oppression Visible’.

It was a fun system that helped keep the day’s presentations rolling smoothly and with a welcome degree of levity. I say ‘presentations’ rather than ‘discussions’ because there was no discussion; audience questions were shifted to a conversation room upstairs from the main summit, where the speakers could be collared after each session. Although this had the welcome effect of cutting out of the main programme any potential bores unable to differentiate between asking questions and delivering their entire curriculum vitae, for a summit meeting focusing on community-minded art practices, the emphasis on monologue rather than dialogue seemed a little odd. I could understand it as a means of squeezing all 40 speakers into a single day, but as a fellow critic sat next to me observed, ‘why have 40 speakers in the first place?’

The day began promisingly with an upbeat introduction by Thompson and Paul Holdengröber of the New York Public Library’s LIVE programme, and a ‘morning prayer’ delivered by the anti-consumerist activist (and New York mayoral candidate) Reverend Billy, who exhorted the audience to ‘exalt in embarrassment’. This was followed by a very personal keynote speech from Hayes, who described how she came to be involved in art through her experiences in New York’s queer activist performance scene during the AIDS crisis of the early 1990s. One of the few speakers who described their motivations for making work, rather than the work itself, Hayes made the interesting distinction between getting involved in ‘art’ and getting involved with people who just happened to be making art, music, theatre, or dance. By the end of the day, the question of ‘art’ as a distinct, specialist area of cultural activity, and ‘art’ as just a useful label for an un-circumscribed form of activity, was one that I wished had been directly addressed by more speakers.

Punctuated by mellifluous melodies, the summit hurtled along at lightning speed, a rapid-fire range of memorable moments, both bad and good. Such as, I hear you ask? Well, here goes … We heard Igor Grubic speaking about his politically and legally controversial 1998 ‘Black Peristil’ project in Split; Thomas Hirschhorn describing his ‘Bijlmer Spinoza Festival’ in Amsterdam; motor-mouthed architect Teddy Cruz giving the most information-packed seven minutes I’ve ever heard, on the topic of ad-hoc architecture on the US/Mexican border; and Francesca Insulza of the group Multiplicity, talking about three research projects her group has conducted into various aspects of the cargo and leisure shipping industries. Estonian artist Kristina Norman spoke about her project to restore the Bronze Soldier Monument to its original place in the city of Tallinn (a project which, given how divisive the original statue is amongst Estonian and immigrant Russian communities, seemed more akin to pouring oil on an already raging fire); curators What, How and For Whom gave a brief overview and budgetary breakdown of their recent Istanbul Biennial; artist Gregory Sholette sketched out a few historical examples of US artist-activist groups such as Art Workers Coalition, Group Material, and his own RE-PO History collective; and Edgar Arceneaux described how he turned his Hammer Museum residency into a project regenerating the houses and street opposite the Watts Towers in Los Angeles.

You want more? The afternoon sessions included Minerva Cuevas and Tanya Bruguera giving unsentimental tours through their respective works; curator Maria Lind on self-organization and the role of the institution; Lars Bang Larsen’s concise survey of work by Spanish artist Lara Almarcegui; Okwui Enwezor on artist Alfredo Jaar’s recent work reinterpreting Kevin Carter’s harrowing photograph of a starving child watched over by a vulture; and Yael Bartana on a recent project she had made in Warsaw, based on old Zionist propaganda films. We listened to Jaar himself give a blunt, emotive address about the how the Western media ignored the genocide in Rwanda in the 1990s (that Newsweek was the only Western media organization he mentioned, seemed ironically US-centric to me. Why not Le Monde? Or The Guardian? Or Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung?). We heard Peter Fend talk about seaweed-based bio-fuel (though how Marcel Duchamp and Joseph Beuys also ended up in his speech was lost on me), and Eve S. Mosher ask us to think of our favourite word for 30 seconds then share it with our neighbour (this was supposed to generate a memorable moment of togetherness, though as her talk came late in the day, the only word I could think of was ‘hungry’). We sat through Liam Gillick deliver a typically dense presentation on car factories and teamwork, then heard Temporary Services give their contrastingly clear statement about mutual support amongst artist communities, and finally Julieta Aranda explain the ‘Time/Bank’ project she is developing with Anton Vidokle, an alternative currency system in which the units of exchange are time and services, rather than money. All this, and much, much more.

It’s to Creative Time’s credit that they provided a platform for such a great number of projects, but there was relatively little diversity of opinion, and at points the summit lapsed into self-congratulation. There was much talk of alternative structures and organizations, but it was from within the established structure of a conference convened by an art organization and attended, in the main, by people connected to the art world. Where were the voices of dissent? Who is to say all artists engaged in this kind of work have good intentions? (Many of these presumably politically left-aligned community projects use strategies that could equally be appropriated by the right.) How well could these projects exist in the world without the imprimatur of ‘art’, unframed as cultural production? Isn’t most art, to some degree, a public practice? Is a picture or sculpture sometimes not a more valuable contribution to a community than an artist-run window cleaning service or fleeting intervention in the urban fabric?

Many of the speakers used the occasion to give brief resumes of their recent work. However, given the nature of a good deal of the projects presented – running community vegetable gardens, for instance, working in run-down neighbourhoods, or examining forms of urban planning – after the third or fourth hour, this ultra-compressed parade of mini-artist talks started to blend into one another. Don’t get me wrong – I respect the sincerity and integrity of many of the summit speakers, but there was scant reflection on the intrinsic problems or issues surrounding participatory, community-based art.

A curious uniformity of language characterized the day; a certain species of hand-me-down sociology terms, management-speak and press release vocabulary that seemed strangely lifeless given the spirit of so many of these projects -– alternative economies, self-organization, freedom of speech. This was made most obvious at the start of the afternoon session. Dickstein, an historian of the Depression era, gave an entertaining and informative keynote talk on art produced in the wake the financial crash of the late 1920s. His talk focused on James Agee and Walker Evans’ Now Let Us Praise Famous Men (1941), and John Steinbeck’s journey from being ‘a writer who didn’t have a political bone in his body’ to the archetypal chronicler of the migrant working family. Dickstein argued that Fred Astaire and Busby Berkeley were also justifiably as representative of the art of the 1930s as any Agee, Evans or Steinbeck, observing how ‘political art tends towards the puritanical’, and stressing the importance of idiosyncrasy and pleasure. He was followed by Beka Economopoulos, of Brooklyn-based organization Not An Alternative, whose language could not have been in starker contrast to Dickstein’s exhortations to idiosyncrasy. Her talk was peppered with dry management phraseology and quasi-academic buzzwords such as ‘deployment’, ‘documentation and analysis’, ‘practice’, ‘contextualizing frame’, ‘staging an intervention’, ‘integrating art, activism and theory in order to affect popular understandings’. Gold Diggers of 1933 this was not.

During the ninth hour of the summit – when blood sugar levels were running low and, if we’re being honest, most people’s thoughts were turning to where the nearest bar was – Vik Muniz spoke about donating the sales proceeds of a work he’d made, in collaboration with the residents of Brazil’s largest rubbish tip, back to the tip dwellers. He showed an emotive clip from a forthcoming documentary about the project, in which he and one of his collaborators attend the auction of one of the works, happily embracing each other as the work goes under the hammer for a huge five-figure sum. Muniz was followed by Harrell Fletcher, who described a project in which he traced a $1500 rug that had come into his possession back to its source in India, where he donated the price of the rug to textile workers in the factory in which it was made. All very generous, but why did his journey need to be framed as ‘art’? Who funded it and why? Why does anyone need to know that he’d undertaken this task? Is it not better to just quietly get on with goodwill rather than shout about it? There was something in both Muniz’ and Fletcher’s talks – an over-demonstrativeness, perhaps – which made me feel uneasy.

A question that begged to be asked was precisely to do with the issue of art; what is it about the ‘art’ element to a project that might make it socially unique and useful, rather than a community garden or youth outreach scheme like any other? What, for instance, makes the Baltimore Development Cooperative’s project to turn an area of wasteland in their city into an urban vegetable allotment any different to hundreds of similar, non art-related projects across the United States and Europe? Because it is run by artists? Are artists that special? Are they to be afforded more socio-political latitude or leverage as citizens than, say, gardeners or social workers?  Is the label ‘art’ just an excuse for tapping into a broader range of funding streams? An impressive answer to that question came from artist Laurie Jo Reynolds, who spoke frankly in her talk about how she has used the label ‘art’ where it seemed most useful in order to support her admirably successful campaign to instigate reform of conditions for prisoners at the Tamms Super Maximum Security Prison, Illinois. Here was an artist taking serious political responsibility rather than just associating herself with it.

I left the summit with mixed feelings, although on reflection they were probably to productive ends. Despite the lack of any friction, somehow the effect of spending an entire day listening to an impressive cast of individuals speak about their work helped distil certain questions, hopes and doubts I have about this particular field of activity. The trouble is, out here in the real world, we can’t call upon a small ensemble of musicians to gently drown out the verbose, the abrasive and the bothersome.

Images by Sam Horine, courtesy Creative Time