After reviewing “A Genealogy of Community Engaged Arts,” I was interested to see that Marcel Duchamp was included. However, Duchamp helped bring “conceptual art” into the world, which is technically the foundation for the community-engaged work that is known to us today. Forms such as Dialogical art and New Genre Public art (e.g., Suzanne Lacy’s The Roof is on Fire) would not have existed without the emergence of conceptual art. I was also unaware of the existence of Maintenance art by artist Mierle Ouvre. Her work in the sanitation field and with sanitation workers could be interpreted as activism; however, because of the chronology of this presentation, I understand that her work is art because she deems it this way. Anything can be art. This opened my mind to the limitless artistic possibilities that exist outside of the traditional “art” narrative.
Additionally, I was fascinated with the Tijuana Projection by Krzystof Wodiczko. The project covered very personal details about the lives of eight women. Workshops for this project occurred for a year in preparation. This tells me that this project involves an equitable engagement with a community of people. In contrast to an artist like Santiago Sierra, who for one of his projects, paid drug-addicted sex workers a fix of heroin in exchange for a line to be tattooed on their backs. Consensual engagement with collaborators is paramount to any artists who want to produce community engaged work, or else issues of coercion and inequity can arise. Wodiczko’s work further emphasized to me the importance of maintaining ethics within community engaged art.
This timeline gave an in-depth timeline of community engaged art. However, I am curious to see more examples within each time period. What other artists, especially lesser-known, have done and are doing this kind of work? I am also curious to see how we can apply these ideas to the current state of the world. How do we engage communities and provide artistic outlets for people when so many discrepancies in wealth and technology are present? I hope that myself and my fellow artists can begin answering this question as we move forward in our careers. Thank you for cultivating a thought-provoking, informative, and safe class environment. I have thoroughly enjoyed my time in this class.
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