The Role of Dialogue in Socially Engaged Art

“context providers” rather than “content providers,”

“How do we form collective or communal identities without scapegoating those who are excluded from them? Is it possible to develop a cross-cultural dialogue without sacrificing the unique identities of individual speakers?”

• This is real!  What the STITCH Community Mural project tried to nurture was a space for a cross cultural & cross generational dialogue.  That left some people off to the side (white folx) because there were points where the dialogue was NOT about them, but people were not willing to listen.  They had to FIND, INSERT themselves into the dialogue.  Don’t think this a reflection on the process that we chose, but more on a reflection on peoples unfinished work.

• Austrian arts collective Wochenklausur, boat colloquies

“scrutiny, they were able to communicate with each other outside the rhetorical demands of their official status.”

• The Roof is on Fire, Youth-led conversations about things affecting them (media, police harrassment, school, etc) at top of parking structure.  Helped by Suzanne Lacy

“These dialogues led in turn to other collaborations and other conversations, including a six week long series of discussions between high school students and members of the Oakland Police Department (OPD) that resulted in the creation of a videotape used by the OPD as part of its community policing training program.”

• It’s not about what is created at the end, but the very process that it takes for social change to happen.  Anyone can organize through the political system, change policy, but how much of that actually affects, moves, touches the community? 
• infinite conversations, circle, ancestral, ceremonial (mural project)

“In these projects conversation becomes an integral part of the work itself. It is re-framed as an active, generative process that can help us speak and imagine beyond the limits of fixed identities and official discourse.” Can I get a YESSSS?!

• New genre public art, mapping the terrain, lacy
• relational aesthetic
• conversational art
• dialogue-based art
• Public sphere, Habermas, “Participants in a public sphere must adhere to certain rules necessary to insulate this discursive space from the coercion and inequality that constrain human communication in normal daily life”
• “This egalitarian interaction cultivates a sense of “solidarity” among discursive co-participants, who are, as a result, “intimately linked in an inter-subjectively shared form of life”.
• SOLIDARITY……
• Breaking down of the view of the artist, from being seeing as bourgeois, to “one defined in terms of openness, of listening, and a willingness to accept dependence and intersubjective vulnerability.”
• community members themselves being the ones to share their collective knowledge on ______ situation, action, etc.  KNOWLEDGES. Whose knowledge is accepted & repeated & reaffirmed by the system?
• dialogical aesthetic <—->traditional aesthetic, universality
• based on consensual knowledge <—> based on god, objective, western
• subjectivity is formed through discourse
• procedural form of knowledge 1) concerned with recognizing social imbedness and context (rather than holding them accountable to some ideal or generalized standard) and 2) re-definition of discursive interaction in terms of empathetic identification. connecting through empathy (isn’t this problematic also? idealistic? question)
• Empathy (p 9-10 reread)
• Lacys  The Roof is on Fire also took place for 2 months!