Rules of engagement: from toilets in Caracas to new media in new Delhi, Carlos Basualdo and Reinaldo Laddaga survey five recent art projects dedicated to social change through the creation of experimental communities

ArtForum, March, 2004 by Carlos Basualdo, Reinaldo Laddaga

In all these projects, as anthropologist Arjun Appadurai has written, "internal criticism and debate, horizontal exchange and learning, and vertical collaborations and partnerships with more powerful persons and organizations together form a mutually sustaining cycle of processes." The concern is to facilitate the creation of exchange networks between groups of people in order to produce new representational forms and community identities. In turn, these circuits come to intervene in traditional art spaces, thereby effecting a "globalization from below." These projects thus constitute various points in a kind of universe in the making, one characterized by the vast movement and interaction between far-flung social networks. Yet in the process of forming, the organizations find themselves inexorably facing a fundamental problem: modes of organization. Art institutions offer some help in this regard, often promoting and ensuring the long-term success of particular projects and providing a network of relatively connected environments by which experimental communities can reach one another. Nevertheless, artists today demonstrate an ambivalent relationship to these institutions, which are implicitly hindered in their social efficacy by their tendency to exhibit objects more or less in isolation for more or less solitary individuals over relatively brief periods of time. How to overcome these limitations? How can very diverse local intentions be brought together on behalf of unified actions that acknowledge their diversity as well as their shared values? How are positions in a broad conversation distributed and enumerated? Is it possible for the arts to intervene effectively in the shaping of contemporary society? Suddenly, such problems have become central for artists engaging collaboratively with communities. Their work raises precisely these questions while at the same time attempting to answer them.

Carlos Basualdo is a New York-based critic and curator.

Reinaldo Laddaga is assistant professor in the Department of Romance Languages at the University of Pennsylvania.