Conversation Pieces the Role of Dialogue in Sociallyengaged Art

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Elli on Kester's Chat Pieces

Community & Communication in Modernistic Fine art
Grant H. Kester

Grant H. Kester is Associate Professor of Fine art History at the University of California, San Diego, and the editor of Art, Activism, and Oppositionality: Essays from "Afterimage" (1998).

Introduction
Kester begins past discussing a series of artists that accept adopted an arroyo, which is performative and process-based.  They provide context rather than content.  The offset group of arts, WochenKlausur seeks an intervention in drug policy through conversations on a boat with central political, journalistic and activist communities.  They were able to come across a consensus through the cosmos of a boarding house where drug-addicted sex workers could seek refuge.  Kester's assay of this work's relevant legacy of modernist art is found "in the ways in which aesthetic experience can challenge conventional perceptions and systems of knowledge."(#3)  Next is a performance art projection, The Roof Is on Fire, by Suzanne Lacy.  This brought together over 2 hundred high school students in conversations on height of a parking garage in Oakland, California where they held a series of improvisational dialogues on the problems facing young people of color in California.  With more than a one thousand Oakland residents and local media present, the youths were able to have control of their image.  These dialogues led to other community collaborations. Finally, Kester discusses the ROUTES project, which was organized effectually exchanges with bus drivers, writers, photographers, filmmakers, and other artists in 2001 resulting in a range of works.  At the heart of the project was a process of listening to and documenting the drivers' feel in relation to sectarian violence.  All of these projects share a concern with the artistic facilitation of dialogue and exchange.  Conversation becomes an integral part of the piece of work itself. Kester uses the term dialogical to depict these and related works which have an interactive graphic symbol.  Kester seeks to distinguish these projects from political or social activism by presenting them every bit works of art.

The Eyes of the Vulgar
This chapter asserts an art historical context for the rest of the book through a reading of the way in which value has been assigned to the intelligibility of the work of art.  Offset, two works are compared to evidence the differences betwixt a dialogical approach and the advanced discourse starting in the early on twentieth century.  The first project is Rachel Whiteread's House (1993).  House was based on the avant-garde recipe of shock, disruption, and ambiguity where consensus is considered insubstantial. It was provocative yet indeterminate, opaque notwithstanding open to differing conditions.  Viewers who didn't proceeds insight to the work were written about as a lost cause.  Furthermore, House was conceptualized without any direct interaction with the site's residents.  The 2d work, West Meets East (1992) past Loraine Leeson of The Art of Change, culminated in a billboard not far from Whiteread's sculpture.  Leeson worked with Peter Dunn for nearly 20 years every bit The Art of Modify developing collaborative projects with various groups in London.  In West Meets East, dialogues with young women from the Bow School focus on their common experiences in living between two cultures.  Leeson considers herself a facilitator of shared visions.  The two works discussed here represent two approaches to creating art.  With House, the object came showtime.  With West Meets Eastward, like nigh of the piece of work in the book, the starting indicate was a dialogue with the customs.  The artistic identity of The Art of Change is based in role on their capacity to listen and to maximize the collective creative potential of the group they piece of work with.  Dissimilar the situation with House, there is no theoretical framework in place to clarify a work like Due west Meets East.

Aesthetics and Common Sense
The motive behind the avant-garde rhetoric of shock and disruption is complex.  It seeks to make the viewer more than receptive to the natural world, other beings, and other forms of experience; to shock them out of an existing perspective in order to witness the sensitive perceptions of the artist.  Aesthetic feel prepares us for entry into an idealized community of speakers.  However, this utopian vision is threatened by advertizing and mass media.  This relationship betwixt fine art, advertising, and propaganda is a key point of tension in mod art theory.  While fine art's function is about always presented in opposition to a malevolent other that threatens to destroy or compromise it, art'southward promises must exist deferred as information technology struggles to survive the mass civilisation overflowing.  Equally a consequence, a significant characteristic of the modernist tradition is a meditation on the ruins of soapbox.

The Cold White Peaks of Art
Protecting the purified trunk of the aesthetic from advertising and mass culture requires the creation of increasingly formidable barriers.  The fine art of semantic resistance becomes an cease in itself and a defining betoken of the avant-garde.  This development commencement appears in debates by Roger Fry and Clive Bell.  While Bell is critical of artists whose work relies on shared symbols and representation, Fry states that the "truly creative artist" is "noxious and unassimilable" to "social man".  Fry and Bong tend to naturalize the elitism of art.  There are many contradictions in their writings.  There is the assumption that agreement art is universal, merely at the same fourth dimension an assertion that the masses volition never be able to relish a truthful aesthetic experience. Also, they admit that the ability to experience pregnant form depends on having leisure time to principal the complex codes of innovative movements, while denying that hard art is discursively coded.  Finally, while halfheartedly appealing to a revolution that might one 24-hour interval universalize aesthetic enlightenment, they readily succumb to the resignation that the elitism of high art is inevitable. However, their work does contain many of the cardinal elements of an avant-garde discourse that takes class later in the twentieth century.

Repin'southward Peasant
For Clement Greenberg, fine art differs from kitsch in its ability to frustrate simplistic translation.  The artwork asserts its difference from, and resistance to, mass culture by refusing to communicate with the viewer.  The only refuge for the artist disenchanted with socialism and disgusted by capitalism was to withdraw into a resistant subjectivity and reject comprehensibility entirely.  A group of New York School artists fabricated a argument criticizing a critic's writings most their piece of work as being "program notes" for the "elementary minded".  According to the artists their images contained an "intrinsic" meaning that resisted translation.

The Elegiac Image
According to Mark Rothko, the simply advisable response to a world filled with vulgar eyes is silence and withdrawal.  This is a withdrawal from significant itself.  Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit upshot an of import transition in avant-garde discourse by linking the critique of representational art (Bell & Greenberg) to a broader set of philosophical assumptions regarding the constitution of man subjectivity.  So Rothko'due south refusal to produce readable/understandable paintings opposes not merely kitsch or representational painting, just the very coherence of the viewer as a speaking and reasoning subject. Rothko takes a position of superiority over the viewer.  The artist is a privileged discipline who will teach the "ungifted bulk" how to grasp the illusory nature of the real.

Politics of Semantic Labor
Greenberg asserts that the work of art must emphasize the "opacity of its medium".  This opacity operates in two ways.  Showtime, one cannot await "through" the medium of the painting to something that it represents in the world.  The second use of the term suggests the viewer's desire to penetrate below the surface to a hidden significance.  Greenberg'southward notion that the experience of fine art is concrete raises the question of how fine art tin directly bear on the viewer (actual) without becoming "easy".  Still, Greenberg recognized that difficult fine art chop-chop becomes part if the tradition confronting which new work must rebel.  Also, the opposition between circuitous art and simple mass culture was difficult to sustain in a globe where ad began to utilise the mainstays of avant-garde art practice.  Thus the cadre avant-garde principles were freed from theory and put to other uses.

The Prostitute and the Palace Guard
Michael Fried is perhaps the all-time- known gimmicky critic to elaborate on the critique associated with Greenberg.  In Fried's writing, rather than an attack on kitsch, there is a threat posed by the profusion of new art movements in the 1960'southward – particularly minimalism.  Fried responds by differentiating authentic art from inauthentic fine art.  He uses the concept if theatricality to describe artists whose works reference contextual factors.  Theatrical work agrees to conform to the viewers' expectations.  Thus the artful meaning is not immanent in the concrete object, but is created in its situation in space and fourth dimension.  Works of authentic artists are indifferent to the viewer's presence and preconceptions.  These works take a presentness that is experienced as a kind of instantaneousness.  There is no dialogue between the authentic work and other art forms or the viewer.  The authentic work of fine art is tested by a preanalytic chance response that corresponds with established norms of artistic excellence.  Thus there are no contingent forces of history, civilisation, or politics in regards to the definition of quality.  The authentic work teaches us to respect the unique and dissonant nature of things.  This openness to the world runs throughout advanced soapbox in Bell and Fry's rejection of representation, Greenberg's assail on kitsch, and Fried's criticism of theatrical art.  Nevertheless, it is assumed that this openness comes at the expense of an indifference to, or set on on the viewer.

Elapsing, Performativity, and Critique
The twentieth-century formalist avant-garde approach associated with the criticism of Bell, Fry, Greenberg, and Fried relegates transdisciplinary deviation to the category "not art".  Here, Kester explores the historical background of dialogical art, using the conditions of duration and visuality to differentiate it from the normative model of avant-garde art.

Duration and Opticality
Thomas Crow seeks to challenge the modernist insistence that fine art is defined primarily by an optical effect.  He focuses on works that emerge in the 1970's and 80's that claiming modernism's "fetish of visuality".  These works are associated with the rise of conceptualism characterized by the "withdrawal of visuality".  Here the viewer is called on to consummate the work of art in a process of collaborative interaction.  This movement toward direct interaction shifts the locus of aesthetic significant to a social and discursive realm.  Fried (according to Stephen Melville) presents the artful feel in a way that brings the viewer and object into a "harmonious communion" (57) without the mediation of spoken communication or language.  Art should overwhelm united states of america with its natural authorization, not talk us into credence.  What is of import to Kester'south analysis of Fried is his insistence that the authentic work resists interpretation and that our awareness of discursive conventions spells the cease of actuality.  Rather than fine art compelling conviction or casting doubt, Kester suggests a tertiary possibility.  The work of art can enact community through a procedure of physical and dialogical interaction.  He argues that dialogical fine art practices are more than supplements to authentic works; they possess their ain positive aesthetic content.

Duration and Critique in the Work of The Artists Placement Group and Helen and Newton Harrison
The Artists Placement Group (APG) was formed in the early 1970's and sought to place artists in advisory positions in regime, industry and the media in the Britain.  The APG experienced a moderate caste of success.  Co-founder John Latham asserts that the artist tin, by the forces of her alternative time sense, overcome bureaucratic inertia, and self-interested major corporations.  APG's vision of disquisitional insight, derived from the aesthetic and embodied through consultation and collaboration across disciplinary boundaries, represents an of import quantum in Kester's attempt to define a durational and dialogical art practice.  This disquisitional time sense is evident in the work of Helen and Newton Harrison.  Their projects, which respond to the ecological status of specific regions, are premised on a process of dialogical interactions in which the artists interview ecology activists, scientists, policy makers and others.  The Harrison's working method encompasses "conversational migrate", wherein unanticipated new images and knowledge are generated past open-ended dialogue.  The Harrisons envision more comprehensible solutions than individual specialists by reframing the meaning and potential of a given site.  Their plans have generated considerable support from both governmental and nongovernmental organizations.  Cardinal to their piece of work is the spatial imagination necessary to envision the interactions of vast ecosystems as well as an imagination that allows them to envision long-term impacts on a given ecosystem.  They are able to present their work in a mode that allows viewers to see problems differently.  John Latham (APG) cites ii limitations on specialized forms of cognition or expertise.  The first is the limitation of specialization itself.  The second is the limitation of a short-term fourth dimension sense in the context of a capitalist organization of production.  Kester approaches the problem of defining dialogical practices from ii points of view.  The first defines art through its role as an open space in gimmicky civilization where interactions tin can have identify that wouldn't be accustomed elsewhere.  His second arroyo to assay involves identifying works' salient characteristics and linking them to aspects of artful feel abandoned or redirected during the mod menses.  This includes a critical time sense, a course of spatial rather than temporal imagination, and a concern with achieving these durational and spatial insights through dialogical and collaborative encounters.

The Problem of Other Minds: Adrian Piper's Catalytic Converters
Adrian Piper is an artist and philosopher who is concerned with the limitations and the possibilities of dialogue across boundaries of difference.  Piper'southward creative and philosophical inquiry is important to Kester'due south assay of dialogical art because it provides a description of the process by which nosotros become more open up and receptive subjects, besides as the mechanisms that can hinder that process.  What brings Piper into proximity with Kester'south other dialogical practitioners is her involvement in the viewer's response as the material of her work.  She describes the kind of person who could most successfully participate in dialogical exchange equally someone who is open and vulnerable to the shaping influences of new ideas and subjectivities rather than defensive and critically reflexive.  She compares this "Kantian subject to the "Humean" subject who has a self-interested want which is time to come oriented.  This subject area is a "slave to passions" seeking fulfillment of desires.  While the Humean field of study is individualistic, the Kantian is social and ethical.  Kester states that one of Piper's most important contributions to contemporary philosophy is her attempt to link Kant'due south ethics to his account of epistemology.  She argues that Kant's model of epistemology leads us to care for others with respect and to recognize their "complex specificity as homo subjects" (74).  However, Piper makes the assumption that nosotros naturally seek an authentic, honest account of others and that we cannot tolerate differences in our mental prototype of the globe and the world itself.  However, Piper argues that our cerebral concepts that nosotros use to understand the world are not stock-still, therefore, nosotros "welcome anomaly as a means of extending our agreement our understanding" (76).  She contends that rather than using this otherness to reinforce our fixed identity, nosotros can remember of ourselves differently.  Piper's work seeks to encourage such transformations.  Dialogical art requires empathetic identification and a formation of solidarity based on shared identification. Empathy is key to expanding our sense of humanity, but Piper suggests that in that location must be a balance betwixt "self -absorption" and "vicarious possession" in compassionate identification.  Furthermore, Kester feels that a dialogical aesthetic requires that we must conceive of others as co-participants in the transformation of cocky and society.  Piper, however, approaches the viewer as though she is a teacher rather than a co-participant.  She says that she is confronting the "sinner with show of the sin" (79).  This somewhat dogmatic stance from a position of moral loftier ground has elicited criticism. Withal, Piper asserts that she wants to challenge what she refers to as "Easy Listening Art".  In doing so she has provided an of import resource for artists working dialogically to cantankerous boundaries of racial, cultural, or class departure.

Dialogical Aesthetics
Orthopedics and Aesthetics
The poets, photographers, and filmmakers of the postal service revolutionary period found an important stardom between mass media and pop culture or revolutionary art made by or for the working course.  Mass media promotes ruling grade ideals in the form of entertainment and journalism.  Thus mass media is condemned because it suppresses working-class consciousness of the operations of social ability. Avant-garde artists of the 1920's employed mass media techniques in a style that promoted the feel of "stupor" to counteract the faux reality conveyed by these ascendant cultural forms.  This is an try to create a heightened presence of mind in social club to overcome the effects of modernistic life.  This relates to Greenberg and Fried's definition of the artful as an immediate shock or epiphany that is made sense of in terms of an existing discursive system.  The artists creating dialogical projects, on the other hand, conceive of the human relationship betwixt viewer and work as one that is a motility outside of self, extended over time, through the use of dialogue.  Therefore, Kester sees it necessary to explore the resistance of discourse more thoroughly through the work of Jean-Francois Lyotard.

Lyotard and the Sublime
For Lyotard the shock of the sublime is in and of itself valuable.  Thus the task of advanced fine art is to represent the unpresentable.  This work is the site where that which is beyond soapbox (the differend) takes refuge.  According to Lyotard, the artist "wins" when the viewer is deprived if every bit much if the framework of shared soapbox as possible. Kester has identified two general modes within the trend of mod art and theory towards antidiscursivity.  The first is indifference and the second is engagement and theatricality (wherein the viewer is a flawed subject area).  This leads to two assumptions.  The belief that the viewer'southward orientation to the earth is defective, and that the artist tin can recognize and fix this defect.  This framework set up past the avant-garde tradition does not suit dialogical fine art practices considering it promotes a reductive model of discursive interaction, it defines the aesthetic experience equally immediate, and it is based on the interaction betwixt viewer and object.

Dialogical Practices
Here, Kester offers an alternative approach; to locate open-ended possibility not in constantly irresolute objects, but in the process of communication that the artwork initiates.  This requires two shifts; a more nuanced account of communicative experience, and agreement the work of art as a process of advice rather than an object.

Stephen Willats and the Audition equally Rationale
Willats is concerned with identifying and facilitating modes of resistance and critical consciousness among the residents if public housing.  In doing then he shifts the focus of art from the object based to the experience of his co-participants in their daily lives.  Willats argues for an aesthetic exchange wherein the artist's presuppositions are peradventure challenged through a dialogical encounter.  Aesthetic distance is achieved through the collaborative production, which develops an interrogative statement developed with a group of participants leading to a framework fir critical reflection.  In this blazon of dialogical practice, what emerges is a new set of insights.

WochenKlauser and Concrete Intervention
WochenKlauser describes a specific trouble and so brings together resources to facilitate its resolution through "concrete interventions". (98)  Their projects are divided between collaborative and advocacy-based works. Both types of work involve an intensive process of discussion to decide the appropriate form of intervention.  In response to those who equate their practice with social work, their founder, Wolfgang Zinggl states, "interventions are nonetheless based on ideas from the discourse of art."  This includes the chapters to remember creatively and critically across boundaries, and the facilitation of unique forms of discourse.

Jay Koh and the Art of Listening
It is necessary to shift from a concept of art based on self-expression to i based on the ideals of communication to empathize Jay Koh'southward work. The human action of establishing networks of Asian artists, writers and activists across national boundaries constitutes a kind of aesthetics of listening.  The philosopher Gemma Corradi Fiumara argues that Western philosophy and art must, rather than concentrate on assertive saying, begin to acknowledge the office of listening as a creative practice.  Koh agrees.

Aesthetics and Alterity
Kant asserts that in aesthetic feel our "cerebral powers are in gratuitous play".  As well, there'southward a commonness of cognition, with knowledge produced at the site of the viewer and the object.  As viewers nosotros achieve universality by ridding ourselves of self-interest.  Kant's account of the aesthetic offers that the private has the potential to view the world equally an opportunity for experimentation and self-transformation.

Habermas and Soapbox Ethics
German theorist Jurgen Habermas differentiates discursive forms of communication from hierarchical forms.  His concept of an identity is ane formed through social and discursive interaction, which suggests two differences between a dialogical and a conventional model of aesthetic experience.  The first concerns claims of universality while the second concerns the specific relationship betwixt identity and discursive experience.  Habermas defines the public sphere as a space of contending interests wherein the clash of argumentation results in a winning position that compels the assent of others.  The authors of Women's Means of Knowing (1986) have a different approach.  Their procedural grade of noesis is defined by two elements.  The first is to recognize the social context from which others speak, judge, and human activity.  The second constitutes a continued noesis grounded in our capacity to place with other people.

Empathetic Insight in Lacy and Manglano-Ovalle
Empathetic Insight can be produced along a series of axes.  The outset is in the relationship betwixt artists and collaborators.  The second is between the collaborators themselves.  The final is produced betwixt the collaborators and other communities of viewers.  These three functions rarely exist in isolation.  This can be seen in the piece of work of Suzanne Lacy and T.E.A.M. and in the work of Manglano-Ovalle.  Both artists' work has an afterlife, which is an important feature of dialogical projects.

Conclusion: Levinas, Bakhtin, and Performative Identity
Lavinas describes intersubjective ethics in terms of the "face to face" come across.  Bakhtin describes a subjectivity that is formed through dialogical interaction , ultimately expanding the authoring subject. Levina's concern with "concrete" others differentiates  him from Bakhtin, for whom the other all the same functions as a vehicle for cocky-realization.  However, Levina's analysis of encounters leads to the power of the ego, while Bakhtin holds promise that this trend tin exist undone.

A Critical Framework for Dialogical Practice
In this chapter Kester applies his theory to gimmicky community art practices that are based on dialogical art practices.  There is an assessment of new genre public fine art that has the tendency to exist responsive to local contexts and cultures rather than focusing on the object.  As such artist Dawn Dedeux is presented within the context of the historical and ideological context of community fine art.  Dedeux worked with prisoners in New Orleans to create a big-scale multi-media installation.  Her relationship with Wayne and Paul Hardy gives an instance of her ability of aesthetic transcendence.  The Hardy brothers are a pair of notorious drug dealers and gangsters who were willing to piece of work closely with Dedeux to create videos and wall sized prints.  The videos showed other prisoners that their "heroes" were ready to give up the lives that had given them their notoriety.  Thus her human relationship and piece of work with the Hardys gained her much respect with other inmates. Ultimately her work with these tragic heroes gives great insight into problems of race, class, and poverty.  Pierre Bourdieu suggests two stages in the process of such political representation.  The showtime involves balloter procedures wherein a community appoints an individual to speak its commonage will.  The second phase occurs as the consul exhibits the community in the form of protests, demonstrations, and other political performances.  The spokesperson is legitimized through their demonstration of those who have delegated him.  Ultimately, active listening and intersubjective vulnerability play a central role in projects created in collaboration with communities.

Community and Communicability
Jean-Luc Nancy, in his book the Inoperative Community, attempts to put together a concept of community.  For Nancy, our identities are e'er in negotiation through our encounters with others.  Negation of others is impossible. However, Nancy's procedure of "being–outside-self" conflicts with dialogical exercise in several ways.  Still his piece of work has influenced contempo discussions of community-based art.  Art Historian Miwon Kwon criticizes Kester'south concept of a "politically coherent community" as being reductive and essentializing.  Kwon argues that politically coherent communities are more, rather than less, vulnerable to appropriation because they utilize collective identities.  Kester shares a concern with Kwon of the compromises involved in the "bureaucratization"  of community-based projects.  However, Kester shows that unanticipated forms of noesis can be produced through dialogical encounters with politically coherent communities.  This is shown through examples of work by artists such as Cristen Crujido who works with Mexican farm laborers.  Some of the artists Kester discusses illustrate the limits of his concern with dialogical aesthetics.  They advise "dialogical determinism " which is the belief that all social conflicts can be resolved through the power of free and open up substitution. This is problematic because it overlooks the differences in power relations that precondition participation in discourse.  Besides, dialogical determinism overlooks the extent to which political change takes place via discursive forms.

Kester'south book is bold in its desire to challenge the formidable set norms of art criticism in order to admit a new class of art. Kester shows that he is well studied in the theories of the avant-garde earlier he begins to dismantle some of its core assertions.  He makes a strong statement for the placement of dialogical projects amid discussions of contemporary fine art.  Every bit an culling to tired formal assay of objects, Kester makes a call to invigorate the community through artistic, compassionate means. In his favor, he does not attempt to promote dialogical art equally flawless in this procedure.  He recognizes problems that can arise while still forging new basis for a new form of art.  He does this in a manner that is accessible and informative.

Submitted by Eli Pollard

References/ Recommended Reading

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No references for this department.

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