For an Interactive Art – Ian Rawlinson

In this paper I want to concentrate on a form of public art practice which takes as its point of departure the social interactions involved in its processes and production. I would like to approach this principal concern by way of some initial and very brief observations of the situation here in Barcelona, as compared to that in Britain.

In June 1994 I was awarded an arts in the community travel fellowship which I used to visit Barcelona to study and report on the impact of public and/or community arts in the regeneration of urban areas. At that time in Manchester we were seeking to find ways in which art might be integrated into a program of urban renewal that would involve the collaboration of artists, architects and community members, with the City Council and housing associations in control of the redevelopment.

Whilst Barcelona can boast a great wealth of public art I could find no evidence of any practice which in Britain would be understood as community art, characterized as it is by the participation of community groups in particular projects. In searching out these kinds of interactions I found no individual projects which might serve as a model but rather an entire campaign.

Barcelona Posa’t Guapa (make yourself beautiful) has arguably involved almost everyone resident in the city, and whilst the campaign title suggests something cosmetic, the program has been constituted at a deeper level. It seems to me that the scheme is not just about making the city beautiful, but about rethinking and rejuvenating its entire fabric and cultural life. The emphasis placed on the participation of groups and individual citizens, might enable an outsider to consider Posa’t Guapa, at least in this participatory sense, as a community arts project and certainly it provides a model of collaboration.

The conclusion I drew at that time was that community art in Britain is an impoverished and isolated discipline by comparison to such a broad and integrated model. True, an overall scheme of urban renewal is a different entity from community art. However, if “community” is concerned with group responsibility and commitment and “art” with a dialogue between the form of a thing and its content, then I hope this comparison has not been stretched too far.

By way of reservation, it is a generalization to reduce community art as practiced in Britain, simply to the participation of community members in a given project. Nevertheless it is generally characterized by an emphasis on process and facilitation, providing the means of making but concerning itself only with form and not with content. In a word it is therapeutic. The objects generated by this process, if they enter into public space at all, do so only as a form of cosmetic decoration, entirely unconcerned with the ideologies of making or expression nor those of site and context.

Can Posa’t Guapa be said to have functioned any differently, or for that matter is it comparable at all. In the final analysis, I am not sure.

However, while in the larger scheme of things Posa’t Guapa remains hugely impressive, there are still many individual examples (as glaring as any other in the world) of the numerous kinds of foreign objects (affectionately known as “plop art”) which pass for a monumental, that is “significant” public art.

Clearly monuments signify or commemorate events or people and should be legible to us the public and express in clear terms concerns which are collective. Much of recent public sculpture has the scale and form of the monument but lacks the significant reason to be, even as landmark, that would give recourse to “a clear and brief interpretation”.

It would be fair to say that the monument was ever the measure of public art. In recent years the ideology of the monument has become for some artists the focus of a critique that has given rise to a range of other possibilities.

One project here in Barcelona, which begins to explore these possibilities, is “Urban Configurations” curated for the Cultural Olympiad by Gloria Moure in 1992. “Urban Configurations” is, I think, unique in that an individual curator has been given the freedom to select a group of artists (with broadly compatible views on art) to work in and across a particular district, with a view to creating permanent artworks. The “site-specific” has become the predominant technique for overcoming the shortfalls of an irrelevance summed up in the phrase “the turd in the plaza”.

The works which comprise “Urban Configurations” can be squarely regarded as site-specific and as such are integrated into the urban fabric. In fact, in some cases, the artists have chosen an approach so formally integrated as to be comparatively invisible. However, it would be a mistake to reduce these works to a simple response to the formal dynamics of the site, we might begin by saying that “Urban Configurations” constitutes a critique of the monument. In different ways each artist has begun to address the complex range of contingencies involved in the existence of a work in public space. Avoidance of an overbearingly “interventionist” monumentalism has allowed the emergence of fresh interpretive, critical, poetic and expressive possibilities.

In terms of critical public reception (which in this example I am not in a position to assess/quantify) — that it would be difficult to actively dislike some of these works due to their comparative invisibility can hardly be used as a criteria for assessment. Yet if, as I believe is the case, they examine some of our habitual notions of public sculpture and its functions, is it really so bad that public expectations have been confounded, at least questioned?

However this said, I find myself unable to resolve the complex of educational prejudice which might involve such a positive judgement on my part.

The movement away from the monument might be said to have fostered another possibility for public art pre-figured in Russian Constructivism and Dada and by some of the practices of Conceptual Art and Situationism, taking an impetus from the desire to dissolve the barriers between art and everyday life. The general pull of this historical configuration has resulted in recent years in a number of attempts to research and develop a public art practice which seeks not so much “integration” into a site but rather a form of social “participation”. The site of the artwork is still at issue but is rather more informed by the context of present community.

By this approach other public spaces are opened up where art may be encountered in rather more incidental contexts, and the results, unlike “Urban Configurations”, are most often temporary in nature.

With reference to this I want to consider the work of two teams of artists who I believe successfully challenge what public art is and can be, whilst effectively negotiating the social relations involved in public art practice.

The first of these teams is FAT (Fashion Architecture Taste) a collaborative group of artists and architects based in London who invite the active participation of people from a variety of disciplines in their projects.

Most recently realized was the project “Outpost”, an event staged at multiple sites throughout Edinburgh during the international festival. The Outpost event has since been staged for the Venice Biennale XXX and included contributions from over 1000 participating artists. “The complex relationship struck between the triad of the patron (Gallery, Museum), the artist (Artwork) and the spectator acts as a point of departure for this exhibition” [1]. Some 200 participants (by open submission) each produced 100 business-card-sized artworks together with an equal number of signature cards. The cards were dispensed free of charge from vending boxes located at various sites ranging from festival venues to fast food restaurants. The spectator collects the cards and is invited to purchase the corresponding signature card from a central desk where they were also able to obtain (at the minimal cost of £2.50) a collectors album containing blank pages in which to stick cards and “curate” their own show. Thereby Outpost examines the relation of the site of the artwork to the terms of its consumption. If the gallery site is “displaced” by such a process, so too is the traditional site of the public artwork, Burger King or a doctor”s waiting room being some of the least likely places one might expect to encounter an artwork.

If we take seriously the contention that the spectator actively participates by curating what amount to “fragments of multiples”, we should equally not underestimate or denigrate the value of fun entailed in this engagement. To be sure, the extent to which the individual contributors to this event have worked through these issues varies by degree but then FAT have never acted to censure any contribution. If, as the catalog claims, “the site of art has been one of the least pressing problems for the contemporary artist” [2], the structure of Outpost goes further than this issue alone to address central Modernist notions of authorship and originality and the privileged set of values invested in these concepts and the artwork.

The large number of participants (artists, institutions, proprietors of venues, active curator/spectators) and the wide dissemination of this event across these various contexts, indicate a project conducted on a big scale. Yet the artworks themselves fit into your pocket, “auratic” to some (the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, valued a full collector’s album, which holds up to 50 of the possible 200 cards, at around £500 only two days after the event) disposable ephemera to others. Outpost along with Adsite, another of their projects which developed poster designs for bus shelters, attempt to mark out new possibilities for art practice “beyond the gallery” in the public arena. And again, while it is true there is a dependence on the discourse more commonly associated with “high” art, the familiar and everyday format, here a collector’s album and business card, there a bus shelter design, further strengthens these possibilities.

The second team of artists I want to consider is the collaborative pairing of Simon Grennan based in Manchester and Christopher Sperandio based in New York. Their work specifically involves the active participation of others as an integral part of its realization. This involves bringing into interaction those institutions who commission their services with a diverse range of communities and individuals from Civic, commercial and social life. They have developed a practice which is engaged directly in the network of social relations which can be said to bind people into communities. In this sense the work is a form of social-scientific research aimed at questioning how we constitute community identity and the meanings we invest in it.

However, as has recently been suggested by Hafthor Yngvason, such a “program is a response to social conditions rather than to a scientific goal, and the approach is a public exchange rather than a scientific method. The research is better seen, then, as an acknowledgement of the fact that the complexity of public issues cannot be avoided – not only are there no simple solutions available to public art: there are no simple problems. If loss of community characterizes city life, it is not clear what is to be unified or what will count as community in a pluralist society” [3].

Different projects by Grennan and Sperandio conducted over the last four years in Britain and America have approached these issues in a variety of ways. Their technique involves devising projects which, whilst initial parameters and final conditions of display are controlled and structured by Grennan and Sperandio, at a certain point relinquish creative control to the participants. This strategy is comparable to some of those practices developed throughout Modernism (and specifically since Duchamp) that aimed to subtract the aesthetic of the artist from production by seeking to derive the artwork from a pre-structured system. Rather than the perceived beauty of an image, a success is measured by the extent to which this mechanism functions independently and of itself once set in motion. Grennan and Sperandio make a conscious effort to focus on the ordinary, the commonplace. Participation is employed as a device, allowing the contingency of apparently mundane life to enunciate itself. In “Maintenance” workers at the College of Dupage, Illinois, were given cameras and invited to document their working lives, creating an exhibition which was later shown at the college and at Laurre Genillard Gallery, London.

In “Six Eastbourne Dentists” Grennan and Sperandio invited dental practices in Eastbourne, a small town on the south coast of England, to visit the Towner Art Gallery and Local Museum and select paintings from the permanent collection with the aim of making a portrait photograph in each practice that would use the chosen image as a model. The photographs were exhibited next to the respective paintings at the museum and now hang in the waiting rooms of the dentists who participated as a constant reminder.

Whilst “Six Eastbourne Dentists” was engaged with a specific cross section of the community, the museum, the dental practices and their patients, the project “Everyone in Farnham” took on an entire community. In May 1994 all 12,000 in the Farnham postal district were mailed with an invitation for all to be photographed on the streets of Farnham town center between 5:45 and 6:15 pm on June 4th 1994. Most of the photographs were taken by students on the photography course at the local college.

In these images the traditional distinction between “subject” and “background” is blurred. The people of Farnham who came out onto the streets for that hour participated in the creation of images, the content of which was in effect determined by them. The project raised as many questions as it answered about what might constitute the community of a small market town. That the participants share the same postcode either at work or at home, is one way of designating a group and approaching the issues.

The event itself was not “stage managed” yet involved the negotiation of an intricate web of social relations in its organization, not least of these halting the ordinary flow of people and traffic through the town. In more recent projects they have come to recognize that the modus operandi of their practice may be more accurately described as one of expropriation rather than participation. The artist as thief, who in the context of mutually consenting adults, effectively steals the life histories of willing accomplices. “Life in Prison” [4] details the time stories of three (ex-)convicts. Presented in a comic book format, the focus is very much on the individual and their experience, their own story. This concentration on the individual subject (accomplice) may, paradoxically, reveal more of the issues facing the wider community than any approach Grennan and Sperandio have thus far explored.

Taken as a whole, their methodology involves an essentially questioning approach to art practice both within and outside of those institutions who sponsor it.

Artists generally, whose practice is concerned with the critique of the institutions of power within which they themselves are constituted, are marginal in number. Such a practice need not claim to be in a position to transcend such parameters but perhaps only to bring about small shifts in our habitual patterns of behavior. In the work of Grennan and Sperandio and of FAT, their status as artists, the site, and terms of the consumption and production of artworks, is constantly called into question in a directly public forum. The recognition of their own mutually institutionalized nature may add further force to their arguments.

The role of the artist is in tandem: that of practitioner, facilitator, and at times spectator. In fact, the characteristic social relations involved can be understood in these triadic terms, entailing artists, institutions and communities in reciprocally productive and facilitative interactions. In brief, these roles are continually shifted, turned over and worked through.

Practices such as those described above, traverse the private and public spaces in which we live and interact. They do not result in some ornament to be praised, despised, promoted or destroyed, but then do not seek to avoid one. Rather, they create a space in peoples lives which allows creative possibilities to flow through the interaction of a diverse range of participants. They are part of a growing number of artists who have in recent years recognized that art in public space offers the opportunity for art practice generally to become more socially meaningful.

Granted that most often, claims to social relevance on behalf of these artists may remain questionable, it is also clear that they depend upon the discourses and institutions they may be said to critique. But in arguing the case for an interactive approach, the participatory strategy does begin to explore possibilities outside of those institutions where the divisions between art and everyday life begin to break down and it is here that the artist becomes directly accountable to the public.

In the midst of city wide redevelopment, my home town of Manchester remains relatively devoid of a significant public arts program. Barcelona, however, through the implementation of programs, such as “Posa”t Gruapa” and the “Monumentalization of the Periphery”, has led the way, in terms not just of a commitment to public art but also the acknowledgement of the role it can play in urban regeneration and the development of community identity. “Urban Configurations” in its internationalism responded to the climate in Barcelona during the Olympic Games and has offered further solutions to these problems.

In writing this paper then, my intention has not been to develop a polemic for what I have termed an Interactive Art against a more traditional monumental or specific object based approach (arguably the one adopted by the city of Barcelona). Rather, I have simply wanted to draw attention to a form of practice which in Europe is rarely seen or considered in terms of the discourse of the “sites of public art”. It is tempting to make sweeping and noble claims for an Interactive Art. However, it is almost impossible to legislate for the assumed social responsibility of any form of art practice and it is questionable if drawing up a blueprint for such a thing is even desirable.

In the context of the current debate the problem seems to be that this art cannot take account of city planning. Business cards and chocolate bars cannot physically transform urban space. On the other hand, the form of public art practice which predominates in Europe today, the insignificant monument or the object which pays lip service to site-specificity runs a dangerous risk. That is, it tends to treat urban space as a blank canvas, the city as tabula rasa — a playground for the artist. By definition, no site is a blank page. It is a space already occupied by history and by the culture of communities of people. The value then of the interactive approach I have discussed, with its emphasis on social research and participation, is that it continues to shed light on what might be meant by terms, such as “community”, “identity”, “public art” and the kinds of presuppositions we may be making when we employ these terms. I have been pressed as to which approach I would favor but as I have stated mine is not a polemic. The practices I have identified do different things, one is static the other dynamic and yet crucially share similar cultural histories and provide many possibilities for the overlap and integration of their respective strategies.

In the end the most compelling argument allows room (and crucially funding) for both the site-specific/integrational and the participatory/interactive approaches, entailing both ephemeral and permanent results. Whilst the processes and products of interactive art practice may be addressed from a variety of perspectives (I have in mind particularly the debate surrounding the work of Grennan and Sperandio as photography), it seems cogent to discuss them in terms of the sites and discourses of a public art proper.

Notes

1. Clive Sall and Emma Davis. “Author to Gallery to Audience” in the Outpost Exhibition Catalogue. Edinburgh Festival 1994.

2. Ibid.

3. Hafthor Yngvason. “The New Public Art, As Opposed To What?” discussing “Culture in Action” curated by Mary Jane Jacob for Sculpture Chicago 1993. Grennan and Sperandio participated in this exhibition collaborating with workers and management on the design of a candy bar.

4. “Life in Prison” was produced as an artwork for “Prison Sentences: The Prison as Site/The Prison as Subject”, an exhibition of site-specific artworks at the Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Published by Fantagraphic Books, Seattle 1995.