Culture in Action: A Public Art Program of Sculpture Chicago. - book reviews

Art in America, June, 1995 by Eleanor Heartney

The self-righteousness of this point of view seems to make those who endorse it oblivious to the contradictions and complexities of their positions. Jacob criticizes the museum as a vehicle for power and profit, but overlooks the implications of her own dependence on institutional funding for her highly ambitious public programs. Guillermo Gomez-Pena refers to the art world as a dysfunctional family and Judy Baca decries the cult of the individual, but both ignore the less-than-progressive forces that may be unleashed when communal will is allowed to overwhelm the individual voice. (There is a strange and unexamined parallel between this championing of the community and the ideas currently espoused by conservative populists, with their emphasis on community standards and their advocacy of politics on the local level.) Only Phillips seems willing to grant validity to the individual, noting that vital public life involves the acceptance of individual difference rather than its suppression.

Equally troubling is the appearance in some of these essays of a strain of nostalgia for pre-urban or rural models of communal society. Baca and Lippard both invoke the earth-centered practices of native peoples, while Estella Conwill Majozo conjures up the African view of intrinsic connectedness. But are such models really relevant to the modern urban culture in which most of this art is situated?

Culture in Action offers an opportunity to put the theories articulated in Mapping the Terrain to the test. The two theoretical essays in the book pick up many of the same issues. Michael Brenson admirably denounces modernism-bashing, struggling instead to find a basis for "community based art" (as it is referred to here) in the modernist tradition. In the process he makes some questionable assumptions--e.g., that modernism is about healing the shocks of modern life, that paintings are emblems of power--but his efforts to link community-based art to the work of modernist figures like the Russian Constructivists, Joseph Beuys and Gordon Matta-Clark give it a context which is sorely missing from the other book.

Jacob's essay recapitulates public art's move away from the restraints of institutional dependence. She maintains that art's defection from the museum and its return to its communal origins spells a new era of freedom for artists and their audience. Yet the descriptions of the projects which follow, and which make up the bulk of this book, undermine this argument. The Culture in Action program consisted of eight projects created by artists or artist groups commissioned to create community-based works. While no museum was involved in this undertaking, it is hard to see how a program with an obviously very generous budget supplied by the NEA and the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund could be characterized as institution-free.

Predictably, the projects described in this report vary in effectiveness. The two most successful ones have also proved to have a continuing life: Inigo Manglano-Ovalle's video workshop for West Town area gang members, which culminated in a day-long block party and which seems to have been a genuine community celebration, and HaHa's hydroponic garden, which generated a network of AIDS volunteers and involved artists who lived in the community in which they worked.