Olivia Michael - An Ethics of Engagement - Week 5 Assignment

After reading Anthony Downey’s, An Ethics of Engagement, I was challenged to reflect upon a number of crucial concepts necessary for community-engaged art. First, Downey emphasized that there are “degrees of collaboration” (Downey 594). Collaborations can consist of simple, pedestrian acts or be driven by an emotional or physical experience. When engaging with a living, breathing, and feeling community, artists must consider how much they are asking of their collaborators, because oftentimes the subjects that artists ask their collaborators to work with can be traumatic or “have modalities of conflict at their heart” (Downey 595). This leads me into my second insight, about the way in which community-engaged artists recruit their collaborators. Downey discusses the necessity for consent, because in community-engaged art, certain power structures can be created among the artists and participants, which can lead to circumstances where those participating “are frequently cajoled (or, indeed, goaded) into collaborating in projects” (Downey 595). Downey refers to examples that create suspicion of this cajoling: “Of course, in extreme instances, such as Zmijewski re-tattooing a holocaust survivor’s tattoo or Sierra paying Iraqi workers in London to be sprayed with polyurethane, there is the argument that such acts expose precisely the relations of power to be had in modern society…” (Downey 595). Third, this reading made me reconsider how community collaborators are compensated and credited with their own stories and experiences. Olaf Breuning’s photo, Twenty Dollar Bill, makes me question how those boys from Ghana were compensated for the part they played in Breuning’s piece. In regards to Renzo Martens’s, Episode III, Downey asks “We may also ask who actually benefits from Martens’s film, a question that raises precisely the meta-critical issues that the film is attempting to explore if not exploit” (Downey 601). I drew a parallel in my mind to the film, Paris is Burning, and how ball culture and stories from members of the LGBTQ+ community were told in a critically and monetarily successful documentary. However, the director, who was a tourist to the ball culture community, received all the money and attention, rather than the individuals who were the main focus of the film. Collaboration is at the heart of community-engaged art, and if the collaborators are not given the same amount of credit and respect as the artist, then some form of exploitation has occurred. 

If I were to ask Downey any three questions, I would ask:

1. Is exploitation of any person, group, or culture acceptable if it is being utilized in order to incite positive change? In other words, are artistic intentions more important than outcomes?
2. Were the boys pictured in Olaf Breuning’s Twenty Dollar Bill financially compensated for the part that they played in his work? In other words, how should we go about compensating collaborators during and after projects?
3. What are some steps to establishing safe, consensual, and enthusiastic collaboration among a community of collaborators and artists?

This work has helped me to understand the importance of process when approaching community-engaged art. If a project is too end goal-oriented, then the consensuality of the collaboration can often be put at risk. I will make it a priority to approach this work with a greater amount of love, patience, and courtesy for my fellow collaborators. The community is what defines community engaged art; therefore, if the community being represented is not at the forefront, the artist must re-evaluate their motives. I think that Teya Sepinuck exemplifies very ethical engagement with communities in her work. She allows her collaborators to not only share their stories, but to represent their own stories for themselves, as themselves. This is ethical in the sense that the artist’s interpretation of a story will not color the true nature of their collaborator’s stories because they are telling it for themselves. Another example of good ethics is in Sepinuck’s Home Tales project, where she cast a homeless man named Michael to tell his stories (Sepinuck 27). After trying to offer him a great deal of charity both during and after the project, she came to the realization that she was being presumptuous (Sepinuck 30-31). It was through this that she has also learned how to step back and avoid imposing her own lifestyle ideals on the people that she works with. I admire the ethics of Sepinuck’s work very much and hope to apply her ethics to my own community-engaged art-making process.

Works Cited

Downey, Anthony(2009)'An Ethics of Engagement: Collaborative Art Practices and the Return of the Ethnographer', Third Text,23:5,593 — 603 

“1-3.” Theatre of Witness: Finding the Medicine in Stories of Suffering, Transformation and Peace, by Teya Sepinuck, Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2013, pp. 13–31.