Artists as Community Whisperers

How can museums be better partners for social practice artists?

Geo Britto, Director of Theater of the Oppressed, conducting an educator workshop for the Mercosul Biennial, Porto Alegre, Brazil, 2011

Let us suppose that you are a curator or a program manager at a medium size art museum. Lots of very exciting art is being made right now; every biennial, every exhibition you see gives you new ideas; your colleagues at other institutions are organizing exhibitions and performances that are really speaking to the cultural moment we are living.  You want to produce exhibitions that also do that, and you have a list of artists that you want to work with, whose work you follow, and who you think would be wonderful to add to the conversation.

At the same time, the institution is undergoing a financial crisis.  The pandemic has really impacted the bottom line. The budget has been cut and there is a hiring freeze after The Great Resignation.  There is great pressure to organize crowd-pleasing, often historical exhibitions with recognizable names and aesthetic pleasing works, not pieces that might prove confrontational or hard to understand. You attend a meeting run by the marketing department where they present a plan for expanding the museum’s audiences: all that is contained in a beautifully designed PowerPoint presenting a plan for attracting a revenue-generating public; those who can become members and potential long-term donors, who are mainly looking for entertainment. There is no discussion about audience diversity there, or the recognition that the catering for high-income audiences basically means that you might be primarily catering to a white audience. The implication is that bringing diversity is the burden of the Education department, which the meantime dutifully continues its outreach and work with “underserved” audiences, but this work is almost completely disassociated with the pressing work by the marketing and the curatorial departments to present high-impact, revenue-generating exhibitions.

Simultaneously, as a response to the country’s most recent reckoning about race, curators have hurriedly pivot to organize exhibitions about Black art and social justice. But it is also clear that the exhibitions, while many of them thoughtful and elegant, ring hollow when it is considered that they are coming from institutions where most of the senior (i.e. decision-making) staff and the trustees are white, and where the economic inequities of the country are perfectly replicated in the hierarchical, bureaucratic and financial structure of the museum.

Last but not least, museums recognize and want to support the work that many contemporary artists do in the public realm, be in the form of activism or social justice. A lot of the art practice today is not just post-studio but also post-museum—which like any other forms of experimental art must also be supported by museums.

What do you, the curator, do then?  How do you address these problems and honor the museum’s educational mission in a way that one is not too constrained by marketing department goals, and where one can respond to the outside criticism that the museum is not simply displaying ideas about social justice but walking the walk? How can a museum become a truly socially engaged institution?

A logical direction you may take is to commission new work to those artists who work in the field of socially engaged art, social justice and/or community work have earned them bona fide credibility in those areas, with sights to present the results at the museum.

Then several issues become clear.  The curatorial staff in your museum has never produced a project that involves a social process— their territory being  the galleries and their specialty the collection; and the education staff, those who possess that expertise is not trusted to lead the process. Further, no one has the time to devote to such a socially involved process, taxed as they all are with meetings, paperwork, and other projects. As a result, the planning process becomes muddled and those who are given the most burdensome tasks are very junior staff members with not enough expertise, understanding of the work and the reasons it is being pursued,  or simply don’t have personal investment in it.

Lastly, the project needs to culminate in some fashion at the museum, thus establishing a pre-ordained product; and it also needs to be visually compelling to compete with the other works in the galleries.

The artist might be expected to recreate the magic of what they do in their habitual local context with the communities located the vicinity of the museum. But the artist can’t develop a relationship of trust in a compressed timeline; the request might feel forced. And there might be suspicion from members of the community, seeing an established artist “parachuting” to produce a project. For all the reasons above and more, the project is likely to fail.

The misplaced expectations on museum-led artist/community projects, and the disappointing result, often translate into skepticism about social practice in general. This skepticism then makes curators retrench and go back to their comfort zone of traditional exhibition-making, with the refrain “this is not for us”. But the question should no longer be whether social practice should be accepted into museums. The question is how museums should have adequate expertise to commission, support and present social practice projects. In other words, they need to catch up.

What I have observed over the years is that the aspect that spooks museum curators the most about social practice is the demand to be personally (physically, and sometimes emotionally) involved in a community for long periods of time, and the possibility of opening decision-making processes to participants—something that is anathema in traditional hierarchical museum structures. As a result, the tendency is to rationalize that social engagement, since it is part of the work, should be the responsibility of the artist but not of the institution. But this is a mistake.

This happened to me a number of years ago when I was invited to develop a project for an arts organization in a working class neighborhood in a large city. I took the project enthusiastically, but soon I realized I was expected to the entirety of the outreach process myself—something that was impossible given that I lived far away and my in-person presence would have to be limited. Nonetheless the arts organization wanted things to happen organically, and saw themselves simply as a stage where they final product would be presented. When I understood their firm hands-off stance,  I gave up on this project.

What happened in that instance was something I would term  “Surrogate Social Responsibility”. Surrogate Social Responsibility is the unspoken or implicit form of working of the museum, largely working in autopilot or with junior staff, generally  leaving the hard work of engagement to the artist. Indirectly, it implies the expectation that an artist’s project might be capable to fix the institutions’ audience problems, even in a symbolic way. Among artist friends, I often referred to this phenomenon as “fix the coat check room scenario” (as referencing an idle space in the museum that no one knows how to use, and thus it is turned over to an artist to “activate”). 

The problem is, of course, that a single artist can’t operate as a miracle worker.  And the failure of these projects is no one’s fault, but mainly that we are still working with 20th century institutional models to serve 21st century art.

An interesting way to analyze solutions to the problem is to study how conceptual and performance art has become integrated in museums. Back in the 1960s and 70s, when these practices were emerging with those descriptors, it would have been unthinkable for an established museum to collect a performance piece, let alone place it at the same level of a painting. Today museums have performance departments, curators with the expertise of curating performance, and there are set protocols and criteria to collect, preserve, and present this kind of work.  While still imperfect (painting still reigns supreme in canonical narratives), much progress has been made in adapting to presenting and incorporating process-based art in museums.

The same will be true of socially engaged art 50 years from now: museums will be adequately adapted to commission and produce socially engaged projects with staff who has the curatorial authority and engagement expertise to partner with an artist to make them happen.

But before we wait for half a century for that to happen, we already know the conditions that should ground these collaborations for them to be both important artworks and meaningful engagements. I can think of at least  four key qualities: adaptability, motivation via involvement, ingenuity, and community groundwork.

Adaptability could be also termed  “tolerance in process”,  because socially engaged projects vary widely depending on the social circumstances, participation responses and other unexpected factors. It is thus crucial for both the artist and their institutional allies to be ready to adapt to those changes and not cling too heavily to a desire for a particular outcome. I always remember a collaborator of Robert Wilson, who mentioned to me how Wilson is so fond of “workshopping” each idea. “Let’s workshop it”, I was told was a common phrase of his. I often think of this because in the ideation phase social practice is closer to architecture and design— as well as devised theater— in how it develops ideas and accepts collective input. Which brings me to the second quality.

Lack of motivation is often evident when the staff working with an artist do not have a stake in the project or much experience with public engagement, thus going through the bureaucratic steps for a project but without caring or understanding why it matters. Interestingly, smaller production teams tend to be more motivated as their team members are likely to have greater involvement in a project from the onset. I saw such dynamic in the small team that Stacy Switzer led at Grand Arts in Kansas City, a small (in staff size) but mighty organization that produced ambitious projects for artists.

William Pope.L, Trinket, 2008, produced by Grand Arts, Kansas City

Motivation via involvement is largely a problem that needs to be understood by senior curators- those who generally do not do the grunt work of putting exhibitions together. In social practice, the way people are included and empowered (and this particularly involves junior staff) is crucial.

Ingenuity is the ability to imagine possibilities even in the absence of resources, and community groundwork is what allows artists to create impactful work. As to ingenuity, I will illustrate it with a personal experience. On another  memorable occasion, I was presented with a city grant for a public art project. We had no sponsoring museum or institution to work with and I was required to develop a public art in Bologna —with my less than perfect Italian and unable to stay for long periods of time. However, I was lucky to have  two curators in charge of administering the grand through a small nonprofit called La Rete, the German curators Julia Draganovic and Claudia Löffelholz. Both perfectly fluent in Italian and able to navigate the incredibly dizzying local bureaucracy with German zeal and determination, Julia and Claudia were crucial collaborators with me in producing Aelia Media, a temporary radio station in Bologna where we involved local artists to produce programming for a month’s period in Bologna. Not having to work with a museum to present this project was liberating, and we were able to structure the budget and production aspects of it in whichever way made more sense for us.

Aelia Media in Piazza Puntoni, Bologna, 2011

What this and similar experiences taught me is that both the commitment and the ingenuity of my collaborators were crucial for making this project work, and that in general large budgets or large organizations are of little use if there is little or no will available to make things happen.

Finally, what do I mean by community groundwork? The example that comes to mind relates to artist Luis Camnitzer.  In 2006, Camnitzer was invited to co-curate the Mercosul Biennial in Brazil by the curator Gabriel Perez-Barreiro in the capacity of pedagogical curator, which would allow him to develop the educational dimension of the biennial. But just as important, Camnitzer also proposed to the biennial foundation to create a permanent education department, which would continue its work between editions (pretty much in the way that a museum’s education department works). This seemingly technical aspect was of huge importance for the future of the biennial, and those of us who worked in subsequent editions ( I was pedagogical curator of the biennial four years after Camnitzer) benefited from the systems that were already in place,  the community relationships that had already been built,  and the good will that existed before even an artist was brought into the picture. This is an example of how institutions can lay the foundation for important work to take place, and it is the equivalent to having a pristine white cube gallery for an artist to intervene.

Note that these are qualities that do not necessarily require large budgets or additional staff: they do require, however, a different mindset and understanding of what it takes to produce these new forms of art. And hopefully we will not have to wait half a century for it to be a normal part of the culture of museums and arts organizations.