Throughout the text Kwon raises a number of key issues around the ambiguities of community-based art, intervention and interaction as well as overlapping relationships between art, artists, institutions and the general public. Relying heavily on the popular case study of Richard Serra’s Arc (1981-1989), Kwon draws out the historical shifts of Fine Art through public sculpture. More importantly, she denotes the movement of Art as an object oriented practice (a private and specialized interest) toward a new (or at minimum, a now acceptable) socially oriented and mutually beneficial praxis. This shift from the physical to the ephemeral, from material to immaterial, highlights important responsibilities while simultaneously fingering the pulse of dangerous (post-modern) uncertainty.
At first, Kwon (like Hal Foster and Grant Kester) is cautious of this gesture toward the romanticized nomadic wanderings of New Genre public art practices, but eventually she warms up to the idea after reading and citing Deleuze, Guitarri, Bourdieu, Adorno and Derrida. After sorting through messy issues of artists over generalizing, self-serving and disingenuous misidentifying with his or her community, Kwon lands on the crucial underpinnings of contemporary art that are being labored over by way of facilitators, educators, coordinators, curators, administrators and community organizers. Ultimately, Kwon replaces community-based art with collective artistic praxis.
The issue here for Kwon is not in the spelling of the term community-based art, (and does not change anything by renaming it), but she concerns herself with a new understanding of the term by grabbing (however aimlessly) at its roots and re-contextualizing it through brief references of post-modern aesthetic theory. (see list of references above…)
Kwon references Suzanne Lacy’s distinction between the public art movement that developed through the 1970s and 1980s and new genre public art of the last two decades to distinguish the transformation that has taken place between the artist and the community.
“drawing on ideas from vanguard forms” –i.e., installation, performance, conceptual art, mixed-media art—new genre public art “adds a developed sensibility about audience, social strategy, and effectiveness that is unique to visual art as we know it today.” In so doing, it shifts the focus from artist to audience, from object to process, from production to reception, and emphasizes the importance of a direct, apparently unmediated engagement with particular audience groups (ideally through shared authorship in collaborations). According to Lacy, these artists, herself among them, eschew the constricting limitations not only of artistic conventions but of the traditional institutional spaces of their production and reproduction, such as studios, museums, and galleries. They choose instead the “freedom” of working in “real” places, with “real” people, addressing “everyday” issues. In a move one critic has dubbed “postmodern social realism,” new genre public art also insists on a move away from the universalizing tendencies of modernist abstraction, to celebrate instead the particular realities of “ordinary” people and their “everyday” experiences.[1]
By pointing out this transformation, Kwon finally reaches her thesis with no more than sixteen pages left in the text. Her voice comes out in kernels wedged between Kenneth Frampton, David Harvey, Fredric Jameson, Margaret Morse, Michael Sorkin, Edward Soja, M. Christine Boyer, Rosalyn Deutsch, Stan Allen, Kyong Park, Henri Lefebvre, Lucy Lippard, Martin Heidegger, Yi-Tu Fuan, Christian Norberg-Schulz, Marc Augé, James Meyer, David Deitcher, Don DeLillo, Michael Majeski, Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, and Homi K. Bhabha.
I can’t help but wonder which thoughts are hers, if any.
With the help of her laundry list of source materials, Kwon decides to promote the understanding of relationships between persons, places, thoughts and fragments as sustaining rather than opposing forces. Diagrammatically speaking, new genre public art can be understood as an extension of the rhizomatic framework that forms our everyday life, rather than the linear history that has been more notably distinguished by modernism. This is not exactly a new thought; however Kown does place this structure rather uniquely within the context of Fine Art and more precisely within the history of public art practice.
She utilizes in-depth case studies but one can not help but notice that these case studies are nearly a decade old from the time of the book’s publication in 2002. And although Kown does well to treat each example with a fair amount of unbiased care, her voice is drawn thin by consistent use of secondary sources. In result, the entire read feels as though I am reading the extended versions of Kwon’s notes taken via a public art practice survey class, reiterating tensions between artist vision, institutional forces and public reception. Overall, the text lacked foresight by neglecting to draw from so many great contemporary examples, and although it was sincere in its approach, there was nothing contributed in part by Kwon that would have been grasped simply by picking up the laundry list of primary source materials and thumbing through them. Positively, I can say that she did compile them in an order that allowed for a concisely abbreviated lesson on public art practice in the last forty years, but the depth and breadth of her bibliography only points to the derivative quality of
[1] Kwon, Miwon. One Place After Another, Site Specific Art and Locational Identity. MIT Press, 2002.
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