Question – Artists speak

The Research Question

In 2015, within my role as a post-doctoral fellow with Simon Fraser University’s Art for Social Change Research Project funded by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, I conducted a series of interviews with a number of senior artists in British Columbia who either defined themselves or were defined by others as having socially engaged art practices. As an artist who shared a long history of practice in this field, I wanted to know if there was anything from these artists’ past experiences they could offer future practitioners? Defining the practice as meaning to take the experience one has gained, experience from the doing of it, in order to actualize a condition or event that did not exist before.

There is currently a great deal of interest in this form of art practice within institutions and academies. The institutional gaze has brought with it tensions and questions that are not easily resolved. Who is best qualified to do this work? How are the processes and techniques and the ‘way’ many of these forms have evolved into being used to serve agendas that are counter to the original impulses behind the work? Currently the term community engagement is even viewed with suspicion by many, as the arts-based practices born out of critical and activist sentiments are being instrumentalized and co-opted by institutions and organizations to further serve neo-liberal and progressive agendas.

In counter point to this argument, the art practices defined within the field and those being explored within the Art for Social Change Research Project are being seen as interactive, multidisciplinary opportunities for practice and pedagogy. These practices have the capacity to open up new spaces to encounter relationships and new ways to create ethical responses to emergent global concerns. In response to the growing interest in this work, in 2013 the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) provided funding to support the Art for Social Change Research Project. These conversations with artists is a part of a five-year national research initiative on art for social change and is the first study of its kind in Canada.

We initiated this inquiry motivated by thinking about what might best serve those seeking to become the next iteration of practitioners? Dr. Lynn Fels, Co-investigator with the Art for Social Change Research Project, and myself arrived at the question through Hannah Arendt’s theorizing as it relates to the education of the young. When we reflect on the past it is often in order to ascertain what the future needs to know or come to understand. Initially when I first started these interviews I had an interest in asking other artists: what might characterize this art practice and what might define it?

I had already come to some understanding through my own work: that having and creating opportunities to be creative is, in and of itself, a necessary and urgent need most of us share. And the doing of it together renews our common world and our shared sense of it. When art is facilitated and practiced with others in an environment dedicated to hospitality and conviviality it creates an experience of community and enhanced states of shared worldliness. Artmaking can create networks that reach far beyond the making of something together. But in order for this to take place it requires the making of something new.

Arendt (1954) discouraged us to imagine that a new world is being built through the education of the young. She reminds us that it is a pre-existing world into which the young or the future is being introduced (p. 193). She also asserts that education is the point at which we decide whether we love the world enough to assume responsibility for it, and by the same token save it from ruin which, except for renewal, except for the coming of the new and young, would be inevitable… and whether we love our children enough to prepare them in advance for the task of renewing the common world (p. 196).

Through considering the educational perspective of Hannah Arendt, the question we asked all of the artist practitioners in this collection of interviews was:

As an artist who works in the field of art for social change, what, in their experience, needs to be preserved or held as a responsibility as it is re-imagined into the future?

Through this question I sought to understand whether there are a unique set of practices, critical, or creative undertakings that characterize these artists’ work? Whether their practice as they understood it could be defined entirely through social engagement, community engagement, or activist impulses? And/or is the making of art what needs fore fronting? I asked some of them whether they saw a relationship between creative and artistic practice and social change? Or, as a number of artists in this series maintain, the work is not motivated by art for social change but rather through the ‘taking’ of the experience of the doing of it. Art becomes social change.

I would like to gratefully acknowledge the generosity of all the artists who agreed to be interviewed, media artist Flick Harrison, Dr Lynn Fels and Nicole Armos with Simon Fraser University’s Art for Social Change Research Project. This research project was supported by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada with Simon Fraser University’s Art for Social Change Research Project.

—Patti Fraser

References:
Arendt, H. (1954). Between past and future. Eight exercises in political thought. Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penquin Books Ltd.

Who asks the questions?

The Indigenous scholar and poet, Dian Million, frames an introduction of oneself as a set of relations and an introduction is an acknowledgement of, who walks with us. Who walks with us is an introduction to the people who have influenced us, guided us, troubled us, nurtured us. Introducing ourselves to others is simultaneously an introduction to those with whom we have shared a common history, land, or family. This set of introductions doesn’t just refer to people but also to places; it includes the waters we live by and consume, the land we walk upon, and the air we breathe. Who we walk with isn’t an abstraction but something deeply personal.

So let me introduce myself to you in relation to the collection of artists featured in this website.

Unbeknownst to myself when I initiated this collection of interviews I was in part uncovering a path of my own practice as a ‘socially’ engaged artist over the course of thirty years. As it turned out I had in some way either worked with, created documentaries on, influenced, or had some relationship through my work as a community engaged theatre and media artist with most of the artists featured in this website.

Thirty years ago, socially engaged art practices, as represented within this series of conversations, were not recognized with any legitimacy within cultural or educational institutions. There was little or no designated arts funding for community engaged arts within the public or private sectors. And for the most part the work produced out of these encounters was viewed with little interest within these same institutions.

Many of the early experiments in this field were activist based and viewed as that. Influenced by the pedagogies emerging out of social liberation movements in Latin America, through the feminist movement, and through the reclaiming of folk craft or vernacular art.¹

What was shared through performance, art making, dance, and music was an attempt to re-frame narratives, represent lives and communities excluded from mainstream artistic cultures and audiences. There was an active seeking on the part of the communities and the artists to create new meanings, new forms of expression, new relationships and new narratives through making and creating. And a call for those who came to be witnesses to these events.²

What we experienced was that the people involved in these many of these projects appeared happier and more resilient after completing the hard work of creative practice.³ The groups of people with whom I worked with and with whom we formed ‘community’⁴ even in its most temporal sense appeared to benefit from this work. Some of the benefits gained from these encounters were, my opinion, not because it was easy and not necessarily because it provided recreational opportunities and social encounters. But because of the creative demands asked of us.

Drama educator, Gavin Bolton, speaks of the “here and now,” “spontaneous,” and “existential” moments, which may be found in dramatic play, which he states, have two components: the descriptive and the existential (Bolton, 1992, 10, 17). According to Bolton, when participants “submit” to the fictitious or imaginary world they are creating, the dramatic play is “here and now”; where, suggests performative inquiry scholar Fels (1998), participants straddle the not yet real and real world(s) of lived experience; and, in the interstices, a possible world becomes momentarily realized.

Primarily, the creating of something from nothing—whether it is an event or an object created along side or in collaboration with others in order to draw meaning in the here and now—is the hidden hand of power within this creative practice. Remembering, just as Million invited us to frame an introduction within the frame of a network of relations, we could chose to introduce ourselves within the social, political, economic conditions of our lives, as well. Who we walk with and where we walk matters. The history of, socially engaged art was in part an innovation and a response to crisis. In my particular experience, it was a call to respond to the AIDS crises as it was being experienced in British Columbia particularly in Vancouver in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s

Hannah Arendt (1954) writes about crises as an opportunity that obliterates prejudices and lays bare “the essence of the matter” (174). She also asserts that the disappearance of prejudices means ‘that we have lost the answers on which we ordinarily rely. A crisis becomes a disaster only when we respond to it with preformed judgments that with prejudices. (174)

Many artists in this collection of interviews do not believe their work emerges through pre-determined frames. In this sense, the making of art strikes at the core of pre-formed prejudices. The process of creative practice can only evolve through an inquiry that has no preformed answers and is not seeking any. Creative practice forces us to forfeit preformed and prejudiced narratives. Creative practice asks that we seek out something new and make something of it. Creative practice requires an open-ended inquiry. If we enter into this kind of inquiry with an already formed outcome or pre-ordained sets of understandings all we can do is create replication and duplication, neither of which can offer the potentiality of producing new meaning in the here and now.

My practice and those of many others interviewed here sought encounters and opportunities to work alongside communities and groups of people who were seeking some form of expression in order to, in the most naïve sense, put right that which is wrong. For many of the projects it is difficult to know whether the work we did together has made any lasting difference. There was little follow up research or institutional support to find out what happened in those early years. As the years passed, a more nuanced understanding of the effects of this work has emerged, and with this understanding the need to create opportunities for sustainability. Yet in the opinion of many, the heart of this work still defies definition and is still evolving outside of institutional settings and frames.

When asked to reflect upon the past in order to talk to the future my journey has been a journey of beautiful failures, questionable success, of exhausting encounters, of contentiousness and unresolvedness. In the early years I found myself more often than not in atmospheres of urgency, marginalization, and crises. This work was being seen and being played out in the arena of activism. Through the generosity of others, we sought to open windows into the darkest nights and into places inhabited sometimes by the lightest of souls.

Varela (1987) writes, of bringing forth a new possible world through our actions. “What we do,” Varela says, “is what we know, and ours is but one of many possible worlds. It is not a mirroring of the world, but the laying down of a world.”⁵ (62) Creative practices in the company of others, seeking to understand, to resolve, to renew, to re-imagine what now is can open a new world into what is possible. And what is possible in our lives helps us to address the gap that dwells between what was and what could be. With that in mind, I invite you to consider with me the responses of this remarkable collection of artists as I ask them what needs to be preserved as it is re-imagined in the future?

—Patti Fraser

¹. Vernacular designates a value on that which was homemade, or homebred, and derived from the commons↩

². See Renea Morriseau interview on this website↩

³. Cohen, 2006) The Creativity and Aging Study; The Impact of Professionally Conducted Cultural Programs on Older Adults↩

⁴. Illich forwards the practice of hospitality as ‘recovering threshold, table, patience and listening, these activities generate seedbeds of virtue and friendship and radiate out for the possible rebirth of community. Ivan Illich with Jerry Browne, We the People, KPFA, March 22, 1996↩

⁵. Varela, F. (1987). Laying down a path in walking. In W.I. Thompson (ed.), GAIA: a way of knowing — political implications of the new biology (pp. 48-64). Hudson, NY: Lindisfarne.↩

Words from the Listener…

by Nicole Armos

The gifts of socially-engaged art emerge not only from the culminating artistic product, but particularly from the process of creating together. Similarly, this compilation of vivid audio and video interviews with socially-engaged artists invites us into a process of learning through listening that embodies the relational, creative, and activist tenets of the work itself.

These interviews form a sort of ‘living textbook’ that does not present a static, objective, or singular understanding of this diverse practice, but rather allows ideas to emerge from the lived experience of the artists working in various contexts. In this textbook, theory is formed from praxis as expressed through story, centering story as a mode of learning through reflection. Like socially-engaged art itself, no interview is quite like the other, each tracing its own constellation of ideas unique to the teller and their relationship to Patti Fraser. And, as we listen, we may find new meanings emerge each time we revisit them at different points in our life.

Learning through listening is embodied. Listening calls us to slow down, and grounds our senses in the present moment of the speakers’ embodied way of being and expressing themselves. Unlike written texts or prepared lectures, these interviews allow us to appreciate the gems of the “thinking-as-speaking process” (Tilley & Powick, 2004) of conversational language, rife with the subtle and implicit understandings embedded in our colloquialisms and non-verbal sounds and gestures. We learn from the way breath shapes pauses; and the way intonation, tone, and rhythm color thoughts. And in return, we can come to recognize our learning through our embodied reactions: the words that make us laugh, or cry, say “mmm,” or gasp; the tug on our sleeves as we listen. These voices and rhythms echo in our minds long after we hear them.

In a sense, these interviews constitute a critical pedagogy and enactment of social justice. In one interview, media educator Corin Browne describes the danger of the work of “an entire generation […] of mostly women, who are now mostly middle-aged, who have worked for basically no money [being] rendered invisible because it’s not public, it’s not permanent, it’s not collected in academic institutions. Community engaged artists don’t show in galleries, they don’t write papers, people don’t make documentaries about them. They do these incredible projects that live on forever in communities and are never memorialized in any kind of official institutional capacity.” This living textbook joins an effort to fill the gaps, honoring and voicing the important legacy of work made by artists working outside the commercial art industry, including many female and First Nations artists.

In presenting these reflective conversations with artists, the interviews capture the relational nature of the work, and the experiential and mentoring nature of teaching and learning in this field. We learn from these artists while hearing about the artists that influenced them, and listening to Patti and the interviewees learn from each other in dialogic exchange. Further, as a compilation of artist interviews online, not bound within the covers of a book, the project seems to invite more perspectives…perhaps listeners will begin to reflect on their work, start conversations with mentoring artists in their lives, begin to collect the stories of senior artists in this field.
We invite you to listen…

References
Tilley, S. A., & Powick, K. D. (2004). Distanced data: Transcribing other people’s research tapes. Canadian Journal of Education, 27(2), 291-310.