Art in Community

The Provisional Citizen

Rimi Khan

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137512499
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Trade & Tariffs
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The arts are situated at the centre of policies and programs seeking to make communities more creative, cohesive or productive. This book highlights the governmental, aesthetic and economic contexts which shape art in community, offering a constructive account of the ties between government, culture and the citizen.

1

From Consensual to Open-Ended Communities

Abstract: This chapter examines the meanings of community that shape community art. While a seemingly natural category, community is in fact mobilised by governmental programs which enlist citizens into wider strategies of power. By examining how community has been defined by communitarian thinking and in political discourses of social cohesion, it is argued that community art carries an uncertain normative power: citizens are positioned within programs of governmental responsibilisation but also encouraged to express themselves through art. The history of Footscray Community Arts Centre highlights the practical problems with defining community. While historical definitions of community have tended to rely on consensual and homogenising visions of community, community arts’ organisations have a role in enabling more provisional and open-ended forms of belonging.

Khan, Rimi. Art in Community: The Provisional Citizen. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. DOI: 10.1057/9781137512499.0004.

The 40th anniversary celebrations of Footscray Community Arts Centre took place at its grounds on the banks of the Maribyrnong River, in the western suburbs of Melbourne, Australia. From here, one can look out towards the skyscrapers of the city’s Central Business District and the shipping yards of Port Melbourne – a vista that reflects the different cultural trajectories that surround the area, of industry, migration, mobility and, now, gentrification. The celebrations were a community event in the most ordinary sense. Families basked on the grass or queued up at food trucks, as live music played in the background. The art being presented here – the performances in the outdoor amphitheatre, video screenings in the basement theatre and visual art exhibited in the Centre’s numerous galleries – seemed secondary to most people’s experience of the day, and to the more general sense of conviviality and communality they participated in. The question I am interested in is the kind of community an occasion like this produces. How is this community constituted by the imagination of the Centre’s arts workers, by the agendas of their government funders, by the area’s history and its place within a broader arts economy? What are the ways of thinking about community that make such an event possible – specifically, how do these visions of community encourage particular ways of relating to each other, to the place people are in and to the art that surrounds them?

I begin to answer these questions by examining how the idea of community is put to use in practices of community art. I suggest that community is a powerful concept, because it can be used to produce particular kinds of citizens. And these citizens are characterised by an ambiguous sort of freedom – both to produce and participate in art that ‘expresses themselves’, but to do so by aligning themselves with governmental and institutional agendas. These kinds of contradictions are encouraged by traditional notions of community that emphasise the responsibility and dutifulness of citizens. I want to consider these ways of thinking about and using community, and then examine how Footscray Community Arts Centre’s history has been shaped by these discourses. The Centre’s community has always been a diverse, dispersed and unstable one. Throughout its history, this instability has led to some uncertainty about the Centre’s artistic agendas, and how best to define and reflect its community through the art it produces. But these moments of uncertainty also reveal glimpses of other, more flexible, formations of community that are not geographically bounded, marked by ethnicity, or characterised by particular ways of making or experiencing art. The bonds produced by these forms of community might only be provisional ones, but they can present us with the ideals of togetherness that offer productive ways of negotiating difference and diversity.

The uncertain power of community

Recent decades have witnessed a renewed set of uses for the arts, which rely on arguments about its significance to government, to the economy, to individuals and to community. The idea of community in particular has had a powerful role in animating discussion about the value of art and culture. But the power of community is an uncertain one, and the idea is fraught with a number of contradictions. Community is both nostalgic and utopian; it is a description of social reality as well as a prescription for social ailments. It is seen to exist outside the state, but is also mobilised by governments for a range of political ends. While there is much to say about the meanings and histories of community, I am interested in how these meanings shape our understandings of art, and carry with them particular political and ethical possibilities.

The term community is used in both everyday and political rhetoric to describe the relationships that give rise to structures of attachment and collective belonging. The word refers to a range of groups and sites, such as geographical communities, communities of interest and identity-based communities. In some instances of community, spatial proximity is important (‘the local community’), and in others, it is not (‘the Muslim community’, ‘the gaming community’, etc.). My concern here is not to define community, but to indicate how it is situated with respect to a number of other ideas – government, selfhood, responsibility and freedom – and the kinds of artistic and ethical relations this makes possible.

Gay Hawkins provides a useful history of the term as it has informed community arts in Australia. She suggests that the community arts movement emerged out of a broader resurgence of the idea of community in the 1960s and 1970s, and was linked to other social and political changes taking place at the time. Community became a descriptor for a host of ‘marginal’ groups – including women, the working class, migrants and indigenous communities – enabling a diverse set of constituencies and practices to be categorised under the rubric ‘community arts’. Hawkins’ book traces the connections between the emerging left political movements during this period and the establishment of a federally funded community arts programme¹ – both of which used community to signal a ‘generalised concept of disadvantage’ (32).

The political project of community arts, as it emerged in the 1960s in countries like Australia, the UK and the US, was to democratise the arts. Community was aligned with the ‘people’, and community arts democratising agenda relied on this notion of community as an authentic and localised site of oppositional power. As the early history of Footscray Community Arts Centre demonstrates, community was an important political space for the unmediated expression of identity and marginality. Situated in what was regarded as an economically deprived and culturally marginal part of Melbourne’s western suburbs, the Centre defined its role as providing opportunities for creative expression to the area’s large working class population, to women and to new migrant groups, in terms that did not have to speak to the cultural ‘elite’. Many of FCAC’s projects in its 40-year history have also been aimed at constructing a collective identity for Melbourne’s West and creating a sense of local pride. The term community is mobilised in these programmes as an organic space of direct attachments and emotional investments. It is an apparently unregulated site of belonging and identity formation, outside the reach of government. The rhetorical power of community, then, lies in its positioning as an ethical space outside the state. The idea of community functions as a critique of the state, at the same time as it effaces the power relations implied by the state.

These understandings of community are part of a longer tradition of communitarian thinking, where community is characterised as an antidote to the forces of global modernity. Emanating primarily from the works of writers such as Amitai Etzioni, communitarianism perceives contemporary life to be characterised by a loss of tradition and intimacy. Community is then idealised, as cultural theorist John Frow has suggested, as something closer to ‘the pre-industrial village rather than the abstract and highly mediated cultural spaces’ of contemporary life (59). In this rather nostalgic discourse, community forms a locus of resistance to the uncertain effects of globalisation and the perceived corrupting influence of modernity. Community art becomes part of a broader project to rectify the negative effects of mass culture and reconstruct authentic, interpersonal bonds.

The influence of this communitarian narrative about society’s decline is particularly evident in the academic and policy literature on social capital. Since the 1990s, the concept of social capital has been widely used as an explanatory framework for describing contemporary life.² This has included its use to describe the supposed impacts of arts participation, where involvement in art programmes is said to help strengthen communities with weak social ties (Hampshire and Matthijsse; Lee; D. Williams How). The term’s popularity can be largely attributed to the influence of Robert Putnam’s 1995 work, Bowling Alone, a study which documents decreasing rates of civic participation, associational membership, charity, volunteering, and informal social networks and neighbourliness in post-war United States. Putnam argues that these changes signal a fall in social capital, or ‘networks of civic engagement’, which ‘foster sturdy norms of generalised reciprocity and encourage the emergence of social trust’ (‘Bowling’ 67). The perceived decline in social capital is attended by a pervasive sense of social malaise and pessimism about the future.³ Community, then, is in crisis. But, in a somewhat circular way, it is also posited as the remedy to this social decline. Community is seen to form the foundation for civic life: it becomes a critical site for encouraging loyalty, solidarity and commitment through volunteering, charitable activity and group membership.

Importantly, Putnam’s emphasis is on traditional forms of civic organisation, and he does not regard contemporary types of group membership, such as those found within environmental organisations, feminist groups or forms of electronically mediated communality, as sufficient sites of social capital. These involve less committed, more dispersed and unreliable relationships that do little to contribute to meaningful communal bonds. He goes on to suggest that such bonds are only formed through particular kinds of cultural practices, for example, bowling and home ownership, rather than television viewing and online shopping (‘Bowling’ 73). Moral order is taught and enforced through these rituals, and participation in these activities becomes a barometer of social cohesion.

Despite the rather nostalgic basis for Putnam’s arguments, the idea of social capital is used today by international agencies such as the World Bank, by development organisations, statistical agencies, in urban and cultural planning strategies, and by municipal governments and state cultural policies, all concerned with finding ways to increase social bonds (ABS Measuring; Biddle et al; Edwards). Much has been written, for example, about how Britain’s New Labour government in the late 1990s capitalised on the ‘mysterious power’ of community (Kelleher 178). The Blair government’s emphasis on the problem of ‘social exclusion’ relied on the narratives of community I have been describing, where certain forms of participation in public life were privileged over others, and seen to address problems of poverty and inequality. In this way, material and structural problems were given moral explanations, and social exclusion was blamed on those who did not participate sufficiently in civic and economic life (Levitas).⁴ These social exclusion policies presume a community of shared values, glossing over differences and divisions within populations in order to maintain social cohesion (Clarke and Newman 57; Rose ‘Community’ 9; Delanty 89; Jupp 10). ‘Community-building’ is encouraged as a strategy for fixing social inequality, but only by obliging people to take responsibility for their circumstances. This obligation on citizens to include themselves in social life in specific ways does not acknowledge the range of other kinds of social and cultural activity people might already be involved in – such as social media activism or street art – and the forms of community that might arise from them.

These kinds of directives demonstrate the usefulness of community to government. In the introduction, I suggested that both ‘community’ and ‘culture’ can be regarded as indirect strategies of government, particularly if we take Foucault’s view that governmental power is constituted by a vast assemblage of instruments and techniques for the management of populations. These instruments are diverse, and they encompass many institutions that are traditionally understood to exist outside the direct machinations of the state, such as the media, religion, art programmes, and health and fitness regimes. This range of instruments reveals the dispersal and pluralisation of government, in ways that complicate traditional understandings of what is ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ the state. Because these strategies of government take place outside of formal structures of power and the direct injunctions of policy, they have been described by some as ‘governing at a distance’ (Bratich, Packer and McCarthy 8). The practices and relations enabled by community become part of regimes of self-government. So, the idea of community – as an ethical tool apparently outside the state – enables it to become the ‘surface’ by which government acts on the social (‘Acting’ 18).

In the second half of the twentieth century, community has become the object and tool of an array of governmental programmes. Community has become a crucial instrument in strategies of contemporary neoliberal government, because it is a space of common sense understandings about interpersonal norms and relations of sociability. These communal bonds are continually worked on by policymakers, educators, activists, and ‘manipulators of symbols, narratives and identifications’ (Rose Powers 177). Policies of social capital and social exclusion construct community as the apparently natural basis for identity and belonging. Communities are encouraged to be self-managing collectivities, and in this way also become powerful sites of indirect government. This ‘responsibilisation of community’, as Rose describes it, envisages community as a space of spontaneous, emotional affiliations, at the same time that it is the focus of various programmes and narratives of governmental expertise (‘Community’ 6). It is this set of contradictions that means that the citizens produced by communities are defined by relations of provisionality.

The provisional politics of the citizen

The figure of the citizen is a crucial component of this self-governing community. In contemporary Western democracies, citizens are asked to be active participants of government: by voting, signing petitions, filling out surveys, commenting on news websites and social media updates, we are encouraged to shape our political worlds. These practices are part of what Rose describes as ‘a new game of power: the community-civility game’, which involves a ‘double of autonomisation and responsibilisation’ (Rose ‘Community’ 5, 6). This movement between freedom and responsibility, between existing outside the state and as integral to governmental processes, is reflected in the contemporary ideas of community I have been describing. These ideas of community also imply a contradictory kind of selfhood – while we are apparently free to decide whether and how we participate in these practices of citizenship, our actions are also intrinsic to the techniques of government themselves.

Significantly, the citizen becomes a player in government through culture. It is via culture that shared systems of meaning become possible and communities are produced. Take, for example, contemporary discourses of national citizenship: here, the community to which one asserts their belonging is the national community. In recent years, governments in places like Australia and Western Europe have increasingly required their populations to prove this national belonging by way of formal instruments such as citizenship tests. These normative instruments seek to construct communities along consensual lines, in accordance with supposedly shared values. So, the communal belonging of national citizenship takes place through culture, and is demonstrated by a prescriptive set of articulations of this belonging.

Hawkins describes how the Australian community art movement emerged partly in order to challenge the prevailing terms of national belonging (14). By giving cultural expression to marginal and local communities, community art contested dominant visions of the nation as a singular and homogenous community. But this points to a number of contradictions that surround the relationship between community, art and official strategies of nationhood. On the one hand, practices of art in community have historically sought to create a space of solidarity and expression for those excluded by official discourses of nationhood. At the same time, however, many of these art projects formed part of governmental strategies for the ‘responsibilisation’ of community. And, participation in community art is often said to be transformative and morally educative in ways that might contribute to the governmental agendas of social cohesion and social capital. Accounts of the value of community art that use the language of social capital and well-being situate such art squarely within governmental discourses for encouraging the self-management of communities. In this way, community art can disrupt official projects of national citizenship, at the same time that it functions as a ‘technology of citizenship’ and self-government (Cruikshank).

So, art is at the centre of the dual possibilities of community and citizenship. Art is a tool for self-expression, for contesting narrow constructions of national identity or other normative frameworks, but it can also be used to encourage a particular communal order. T...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction: Resituating Art, Community and Citizenship
• 1  From Consensual to Open-Ended Communities
• 2  Art as Aesthetics, Culture and Economy
• 3  The Multicultural Artist as Citizen
• Conclusion
• Works Cited
• Index