Oregon Humanities Fall/Winter 2008

Cover of Oregon Humanities Fall/Winter 2008
Kathleen Holt
EDITOR
Raina Hassan
COMMUNICATIONS ASSISTANT
Jennifer Viviano
GRAPHIC DESIGN
Leigh van der Werff
COPY EDITOR
Editorial Advisory Board
Tom Booth
Brian Doyle
Debra Gwartney
Julia Heydon
Marianne Keddington-Lang
Guy Maynard
Win McCormack
Camela Raymond
Kate Sage
Rich Wandschneider
Curt Yehnert

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Relating through Art

What happens when art is more than just a spectator sport?

By Eric Gold

Between October 2007 and June 2008, photographer Julie Keefe sent 150 middle school students from ten communities across Oregon to meet their neighbors. Equipped with video and still cameras, the young people got to know the others in their communities by taking pictures and asking questions. The photographs were printed as banners that were then hung in public places, accompanied by handwritten quotes from each person interviewed.

The Hello Neighbor project, funded by the arts nonprofit organization Caldera, was in part a reaction to changes in Keefe's own north Portland neighborhood, which has undergone dramatic demographic and socioeconomic shifts since she moved there in 1991. Upon hearing that one longtime resident welcomed some of the changes but lamented the fact that neighbors didn't say hello to one another anymore, Keefe was driven to give neighbors a chance to get to know each other, and she hopes to make it into a curriculum that can be used elsewhere. "People need to be educated," she says. "An education in civility, if you want to put it that way. It's not that difficult to get to know your neighbor."

Hello Neighbor is an example of an artistic tradition called "social practice," which refers to works of art in which the artist, audience, and their interactions with one another are the medium. While a painter uses pigment and canvas, and a sculptor wood or metal, the social practice artist often creates a scenario in which the audience is invited to participate. Although the results may be documented with photography, video, or otherwise, the artwork is really the interactions that emerge from the audience's engagement with the artist and the situation. Last year, Portland State University launched a new social practice track in its Master of Fine Arts program. Harrell Fletcher, who leads the program, says that what sets the new track apart from more traditional studio art is that his students work out in the world rather than in a studio. They also typically show their work in the world--on the street, in a bakery, on the Web--rather than in a gallery, and they tend to collaborate with non-artists on the projects.

Not all social practice artists are concerned with the kind of social ethics that inspired and motivated Keefe. Lawrence Rinder, director of the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive and former dean of the California College of the Arts, says that two types of social practice art have, in the last few years, moved closer together. In one type, the artist is primarily concerned with formal or aesthetic problems, as an artist working in paint or clay might be. In this type of art, "social good may be an outcome, but it isn't the primary one." But one of the explicit goals of the other type, of which Keefe's Hello Neighbor is an example, is to facilitate a democratic vision of civil society. Rinder says this vision "embodies what I think are the best of American values."

Ideally, social practice art aims to open up people's daily lives to new experiences. In many instances, these projects use the social convention of civility as a starting point, from which more genuine and innovative ways of relating to others become possible. Sam Gould, a Portland-based artist who has created social practice art projects with various collaborators under the moniker Red76 since 2000, says his work is "an act of expansion. How can we expand our everyday lives and live more positively--more progressively--and think of our everyday existence as something that can be built upon, rather than it being built upon us?" These works, he adds, have the potential for participants to create "a fissure within their normative existence, letting them open up and think of things in new ways."

***

Alicia Eggert, an artist now studying at Alfred University in New York, remembers being invited by her friend and sometimes artistic collaborator Gary Wiseman to a tea party called "Travel and Mystery with Emphasis on the Mustache." "All we knew was that we had to dress mysteriously and meet at a bus stop," she says. "You see other people walking up and they're wearing a mustache or they have a scarf wrapped around their head, and you think, 'Oh, this person's doing the same thing.' Everyone who's already on the bus is kind of expecting it to be a boring bus time, almost like a non-time." The original plan, Wiseman says, was to have the tea party in a field near the runways at Portland International Airport, but when borrowed transportation fell through, the group took TriMet to the Jubitz truck stop parking lot, set up some tables, and drank tea.

Between March 2006 and January 2008, Wiseman hosted thirty such tea parties, a series of events that he calls the Tea Project. "Tea Project was really all about holding these events in spaces that they would not ever happen in," he says, "liminal spaces, places that are overlooked or underused." Wiseman's guests gathered in empty lots, on top of Mount Tabor in southeast Portland, and, one night at midnight, halfway across the Burnside Bridge. He invented whimsical themes such as "Badminton, Birthday, and Birds," or "Emerald City," designed to create opportunities for unusual experiences and interactions among participants. He thought of the events as rituals, which he hoped would transform his guests. "The first thing that ritual does," Wiseman says, "is it acts as a social glue--it brings disparate elements of a society or a culture together in agreement on something, even if they don't agree on other things."

Projects like Wiseman's tea parties, in their departure from the usual, demonstrate a broad range of unexpected, possible social circumstances. By orchestrating an aestheticized tea party with an unfamiliar theme and a distinct color palette, Wiseman sought to transform a forgotten patch of grass or asphalt in the middle of the city into a metaphorical place where possibilities, including those for social interaction, are freed from stale convention and commercial interests. A ritual like this, he says, "is designed to take you out of the world, into this timeless framework. But then, you can't stay there. You have to leave again. But the idea is you go in there and there's some sort of learning, or renewal, or refreshing. And you go back into the world with that." These projects remind us that another place, a place of different possibility and potential, exists along with the space that we routinely occupy, and that we can create this other place wherever we are. We can break the habits of isolation to connect with strangers around us, and we can break the habits of mechanical politeness to engage with one another in a more profound way.

***

The work of four Portland social practice artists who call themselves the M.O.S.T. also addresses issues of place and social convention. The quartet likes to appropriate bureaucratic structures and themes and incorporate them into their work. At an event organized by Wiseman and Eggert called Step into My Office, the M.O.S.T. collective created an agency called Your Fan for a Day, which asked participants to fill out forms. The responses were then used to determine what type of fan support an applicant might need, from a high five to a Bundt cake to a full-time cheerleader.

Katy Asher, who founded the M.O.S.T. in 2003 with Khris Soden, Jennifer Rhoads, and Rudy Speerschneider, explains that the group discovered a shape resembling an unknown continent, which had been painted on the floor of a friend's kitchen by a departed roommate, the backdrop for a picture that was never executed. They realized that the "map," as they came to call it, could become a symbol for the creative state of mind one sometimes experiences when prompted to see one's surroundings in a different way. They named the place "Mostlandia."

"One of the major differences between Mostlandia and the world you know," Asher says, "is that Mostlandia doesn't have any land. Mostlandia is a place that's built on a sort of presence of mind, noticing the thing that you hadn't noticed before, or realizing that there can be a layer of understanding about a place that you might have but someone else might not know about, but that you could share." In other words, Mostlandia is a metaphorical place that manifests itself in a certain state of mind.

"We were so excited to discover a map of this place on our friend's floor," Asher remembers. "We decided to have a party, and we celebrated by inviting everyone who was at the party to become citizens of Mostlandia. We told people to come as whoever they would want to be in Mostlandia. People showed up dressed as raccoons and farmers, engineers, invasive species, flower princesses, homeland security. ... We've ended up with a whole sort of community of people who are Mostlandic." Stephanie Snyder, a Mostlandian citizen and the curator of Reed College's Cooley Gallery, says that "what [the M.O.S.T.] do makes everything that already exists discernable in a different way." They remind us, she says, that our reality is what we invent.

Mostlandic forms, like those produced by Your Fan for a Day, begin in familiar fashion, with name and address, but then the questions trail off into the absurd. The application for Mostlandian citizenship asks for an applicant's skill ratings in deja vu and telekinesis, on a scale of 1 to 10; bow hunting is one of the skills listed, but Asher explains that it really refers to "a five-legged race." Experiencing Mostlandia leads us to question all the relations we have with others in the course of our everyday lives. Beginning with a familiar situation, such as filling out a bureaucratic form, the artists in the M.O.S.T. lead participants into a kind of alternate reality that, in its absurdity or apparent arbitrariness, reminds us that all bureaucracies involve a degree of the absurd and the arbitrary.

***

While Mostlandia involves a metaphorical transportation, Portland artist MK Guth, who serves as chair of the MFA program in visual studies at the Pacific Northwest College of Art, literally transported members of the public who participated in her Red Shoe Delivery Service project, first conducted in New York City in 2003. Driving a van with collaborators Molly Dilworth and Cris Moss, Guth offered pedestrians in six cities a ride to wherever they wanted to go, provided they would trade their shoes for any of a multitude of red-sequined footwear the artists supplied. Participants were asked to click their heels and say, after Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, "There's no place like ..." finishing with wherever they wanted to go. The artists would then ferry the passengers across town, videotaping the journey and participating in whatever interaction followed. "You're setting up a set of situations that the public completes, and it's only as interesting as they want it to be," Guth says.

In her project for the 2008 Whitney Biennial exhibition, Guth created an imposing sculpture of braided synthetic hair intertwined with ribbons on which hundreds of people had written their response to the question "What is worth protecting?" After accumulating ribbons during a cross-country tour, Guth settled into the library of New York City's Park Avenue Armory, which was being used to house part of the show. She had the furniture and lighting of the somewhat Gothic space changed to make it more inviting. "It's constructed so that it feels comfortable and casual," she says. "There are cushy chairs, and you can sit and chat with people, and all of a sudden, you lose sense of the fact that you're participating in something, and it becomes a little more about a temporary community. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. You're constructing a situation where the possibility of these things can occur."

Visitors to the Biennial were invited to add their own ribbons, and the sculpture eventually draped all over the room. "I knew that it had to be interactive for a certain amount of time for it to actually physically take over a space," Guth says. "So when this interaction part is done, and you move through that piece, it's still an experience, because you're maneuvering through this braid. And you can bump into it and pull a ribbon and read it if you so choose, but it offers a very physical experience in its own right."

The incongruity of attending a tea party in an empty city lot, or of filling out strange and amusing bureaucratic forms, or of being asked to help braid a multitude of ribbons filled with strangers' thoughts, can provide an opportunity for those experiencing the project to think about their lives and the social structures they inhabit in a new way. Like greeting a neighbor you don't know yet, it involves some risk and uncertainty. "When you're destabilized like that," Wiseman says, "it opens you up, brings you into the moment, and you have an opportunity to see things differently. You can either appropriate that into your life, or you can reject it. But you have that choice."

Sam Gould seeks a similar degree of uncertainty in his work with Red76. "I think a lot of the work is a kind of push-pull between familiarity and the unknown--the uncomfortable," he says. "And how do you toggle back and forth, where you get people comfortable enough for them to feel safely uncomfortable, to be able to discuss the issues that you're trying to raise?" Social practice artists often begin with the familiar, and then alter it just enough to encourage creative thinking and spontaneity on the part of the audience/participants, without making things so strange as to be intimidating.

Wiseman also values the potential for a project to take an unexpected turn once the public starts to participate. "I see every event as a collaboration with whoever is there," he says. He sets the scene, and then "when the participants start arriving I just let go of the wheel, and whatever happens, happens. Which is far more interesting than anything I could write or plan." Sharing authorship of the event allows for a transformation in the participants. They leave behind the passivity that Wiseman sees in many of our commercially driven social opportunities, and become invested in what is happening right there before them.

"You can't freak if things aren't going the way you planned them," Asher says. "People show up to our events and they do weird stuff. They get that they can do anything, and then they do it." She notes that the M.O.S.T. recently announced that it has passed away, and its members have moved on to focus on other projects. However, she adds, "Mostlandia's not going anywhere. It doesn't need us. We just sort of happened to discover its existence in a way that we could share with other people."

Social practice projects, by inviting members of the public to participate and to see their physical and social surroundings in a new way, encourage participants to question not just the scenario of the project, but all surroundings, including the environments we inhabit and the relationships we have. A poster-size photograph of a neighborhood resident, hung from the side of a condo project under construction, asks us to think about all the people we encounter, or avoid encountering, as we negotiate that neighborhood. A tea party in an empty lot demands that we reexamine all the familiar social rituals in which we participate. An unexpected offer of transportation offers a moment to reconsider a whole array of social exchanges. And an application for citizenship in an intangible country makes us recognize the arbitrary nature of many of the memberships we hold.

Like any relationship, these projects are only as good as the spirit in which they are offered by the artists and received by the public. At its best, though, the work offers an opportunity to move beyond mechanical politeness in our everyday relations with others and to open up to the risky process of genuine engagement.

As an artist doing social practice work, Guth says, "Your autonomy kind of goes out the door a little bit because people do what they want to do." When the audience is invited to become a kind of spontaneous collaborator in the creation or development of the artwork, the artist sacrifices a degree of control over his or her project in exchange for the potential revelation that can result. "It's interesting to work in a relationship where both the viewer and the maker are active simultaneously," Guth says. "Because in that place, anything can happen."

Eric Gold is a freelance writer based in Portland. He is pursuing a master's degree in nonfiction writing at Portland State University, and his work has appeared in Portland Monthly, Portland Spaces, and the Portland Tribune, among other publications.

© 2008 Oregon Council for the Humanities