Clearwater Festival

Today I'm taking inspiration from a different venue: from live performances instead of sitting alone and reading. Don't get me wrong, reading the theory and the experience of others is important and it leads to better understanding and greater appreciation of community art, but participating in live community events can trump almost any amount of late night reading.

This weekend, for instance, I went to the Clearwater Festival in Croton, NY. The festival displayed a different type of community art than what I have been focusing one. Although it is the main direction in which I am going, visual art is far from the only community form. Music, theater, dance, writing, and any other number of other, less generic, art forms are just as important and Clearwater, with a heavy emphasis on music, managed to use many of these forms.

Now I've been going to folk festivals my entire life, although I grew up in the hills of the Falcon Ridge Folk Festival myself, and I always heard the music and enjoyed the community atmosphere, but not until recently did I really think about the connection between the two. However, if there was ever an embodiment of an innately community art experience it's at a music festival.

As I listened to the musicians over the past two days, I realized that they, of course, already knew this. Billy Bragg, a wonderful British musician whose set I randomly stumbled into, spoke about how in the 60's singer-songwriters thought they were going to change the world. In reality, he said, it's not the performer but their audience who make the change. By performing, the musician brings a group of like-minded people together and sets the stage for them.

Janis Ian followed and switched the discussion from music as politics to music as art. Music, she said, is the one art form that cannot be destroyed. In a purely literal sense, this is quite true. Sound cannot be burned like books and paintings and can never be completely silenced. Janis Ian continued that as long there is one person willing to sing a "we shall overcome" then the tradition of music would live on.

Both of these musicians, who have already dedicated much of their lives to music, showed me what a community artist really does; we bring people together to open their eyes. The community artist him- or herself may not change the world, but they change the people within the world and depend on them to continue the changing chain. Billy Bragg’s songs may not actually bring down the debt or create peace, but he will inspire the people who hear him to do so.

Although unlike the music that Janis Ian was talking about visual art can be destroyed, the reason that the art was created cannot be. There are and always will be artists out there inspiring and creating in the face of destruction and a community ready to come together and listen to or view their work. Sitting amongst a hillside full of people who had contributed to Pete Seeger’s dream of cleaning up the Hudson river and were putting up with the heat, bugs, and crowd just to hear the music that meant something to them reminded me just how powerful a community drawn together by art can be.

Step One: Wikipedia

Although perhaps not the greatest end in and of itself, I find Wikipedia a perfect means. Where better to start looking for something than on a massive, free, internet data-base? Especially if you consider that what I am researching is about community involvement, and Wikipedia is based on community involvement.

Yet I found the Wikipedia article on community art sadly, if not unexpectedly, lacking. In fact, it was headed by the claim that the "article needs attention from an expert on the subject." (Who knows, maybe after working on this for a while I could be that expert). But for now, it seems that both me and Wikipedia are stumped by this emerging field.

The article starts by saying that "community art could be loosely defined as a way of creating art in which professional artists collaborate more or less intensively with people who don't normally actively engage in the arts." A sound proposal and yet still, as the article itself says, only a loose definition. What way of creating art? What is a professional artist? What about groups of professional artists working together?

The article goes on to say that "community arts... refers to artistic activity based in a community." This too seems helpful until you realize that what the article just did was use the term in its own definition, an extremely tempting road to take I can assure you.

ex.

Random Bystander: "What is community art?"

Community artist: "Well, it's art that takes places in a community."

The real problem is that actually is the definition. Community Art is art that takes place in a community. But what really needs to be done is a breakdown of what type of art, how it takes place, and in what community. Now we face the fact that there are many answers to each of those questions, that Community Art is as varied as any other field of study. Just like the difference between a botanist and a molecular biologist, the difference between a muralist and a video artist is huge.

The Wiki article deals with this by discussing different types of community art, categorized by the headings of community art and public art, online community art, and community theater. However, the most useful information that I gleaned from this article was a list of key artists and a list of references. Already I have begun to look into Judith F. Baca, Josef Beuys, Harrel Fletcher, Adrian Piper, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Helen Crummy, and Ruth Howards as well as into the list of community art books that mostly seem to stem from New Village Press.

But those I leave to further inquiries in further posts. As I said, Wikipedia is a wonderful place to start. Already I have more to research than I will be able to manage, but that's the problem with researching: you always find more than you have time to see. Thankfully, that is also the fun of it.

What is Community Art?

My answer, and the reason I created this blog, is: I don't know.

Ignorance is terrifying. However it is especially so when it's about a field that you have decided to dedicate your life to. When people ask me what I plan to do, as everyone is bound to ask at some point, I say that I want to be a community artist. Some people roll their eyes, dismissing me as just another hot-headed "I-wanna-change-the-world" type youngster. This is frustrating. Some people frown and ask me what I mean and I find that I don't have an answer. This is infuriating.

It's infuriating because I don't yet have the skills to explain to people that my lack of an answer isn't because of lack of thought or consideration. I have seen art change lives and communities, I have worked with artists and been one of the artists myself who facilitates that change. If I had a Powerpoint presentation prepared from my experiences, emotions, research, and gut-reactions that was stored mentally and could play on demand, I believe not only that everyone would understand what I want to but cannot say but they would agree with it.

This is, of course, preposterous dreaming. A powerpoint presentation prepared by some combination of my mental excesses would probably be more concerning than instructional. But if that option is out of the question, how do I explain what I know in my heart, brain, and gut is right for me to do?

The problems is, it seems that every person I talk to has a different definition of community art, if they have one at all. Murals, art centers, government agencies, public art projects, interactive community projects, all of them and none of them manages to encompass the idea of community art, or at least, what I feel is the idea of community art. Because that's all I have right now, a feeling.

In the fall, I am attending Lesley University where, if all goes well, I'll get my Masters of Education in Community Art. To tell you the truth, I don't really know what that means. How can I if I don't even know what community art is? But what I hope is that through my time at Lesley, and my outside inquiries, I will learn how to intelligently and succinctly verbalize the meaning of community art: what it is, why I chose it, and what I plan to do with it.

This blog is intended to be a documentation of my attempts at definition. It will be, if you will, an Explorative Definition of Community Art.