Ramirez Meat Market Makeover. Image Courtesy Public Matters.
For the fourth in my series of interviews with socially-engaged contemporary artists, organizers, writers and thinkers as part of the SOCiAL: Art + People events, I sat down with artists Mike Blockstein and Reanne Estrada, co-founders and collaborators in the artist-run interdisciplinary organization called Public Matters. Public Matters is a multivalent and dynamically shifting arts organization dedicated to affecting powerful change (most recently regarding food injustice in impoverished communities) over long periods of time through youth media empowerment, collective creativity, leadership development, and physical and behavioral change. They are engaged in enormous partnerships with UCLA, USC, and various community organizations as part of a five-year NIH grant to combat cardiovascular health problems in East Los Angeles, and have effectively integrated arts and creativity into combating an enormous public health crisis in a way that very few arts organizations have. I have previously analyzed the organizational structure of Public Matters, but in this interview the artists have a chance to speak more in depth about their partnerships, their teenaged collaborators, and the role of arts in social justice.
Sue Bell Yank: We can start by talking about this particular event, coming up on October 20th at 10am in East LA, the Market Makeover Smackdown!
Reanne Estrada: SMACKDOWN! I like to say SMACKDOWN as if it were in capital letters.
One of the things we learned with our work with Market Makeovers is that the work really begins after the stores are physically transformed because then you have to bring in the process of making sure people come to the stores and buy the fresh produce, the healthier items, so the store owners will keep participating and the solution becomes a sustainable one for the community. So that’s, as you know, a big undertaking because you have to promote the stores, promote the inventory, but you also have to promote behavior change. So people who are used to a cheap processed food diet that’s very convenient, are suddenly fiending for kale, or going crazy for that winter squash. So there’s a gap that we have to overcome. That’s where the “Smackdown” came in, because this fall we’re working with students from the School of Communication, New Media and Technology (CNMT) at Roosevelt High School, so they’re working on the store transformations and the promotion of the project. We thought the “Smackdown” would be a good way to get their competitive juices flowing, and also to bring in fresh blood and new attention to the stores.
I recently had the pleasure of experiencing the Venice Beach Biennial, curated by my colleague Ali Subotnick. Under the aegis of the Hammer Museum’s Made in LA biennial exhibition (closing September 2nd), VBB was a breathtakingly quick, intense, chaotic, and surprisingly subtle exhibition within an exhibition outside of an exhibition on the boardwalk. The intentional fuzziness of the VBB’s structure and curatorial framework was what made it so compelling for me, and I wrote a blog post in three parts for the Made in LA website. Check out all three links below.
Teenaged, bespectacled Magali Bravo confronts the camera straight on as she and her small brother make their way to school through the streets of South Los Angeles. Weaving past the chain link of empty lots, nondescript motels and broad, shadeless expanses, the pair enters three corner markets in search of fresh produce. In crisp white polo shirts and khaki shorts (dress code of choice for LAUSD public schools), Magali and her brother move with a confidence that bespeaks their belonging to the neighborhood - but her face betrays disgust at the processed food choices available. Wrinkling her nose at the camera, the only fresh “produce” she finds are a few sad crates of withered potatoes and bruised bananas on the floor of one liquor store.
“Where do I get my 5?” promotional image, 2007-2009. Courtesy Public Matters, LLC.
Magali’s video, entitled “You Can’t Put a Price on That,” is one of five videos produced through a collaboration between an interdisciplinary artist-run collective and consulting group called Public Matters, the South Los Angeles Healthy Eating Active Communities (HEAC) Initiative, and high school students at The Accelerated School. This youth media project dedicated to exposing the challenges of healthy food access in South L.A. was only one aspect of an integrated action plan that included developing a partnership with the local city council office, creating a “youth ambassador” program at The Accelerated School, bringing together various community organizations, businesses and advocates, and culminating in two Market Makeovers. One of these “makeovers” occurred at Coronada Meat Market, a corner market run by Magali’s godfather, and her video documents members of HEAC as well as her classmates moving displays, repainting, marking clear prices, and generally redecorating the store to highlight fresh produce and healthy food options. [1] Magali was clearly the impetus behind her godfather’s participation, and her energy is palpable, infusing her fellow teens and rendering the peppiness of the thirty-something HEAC project leaders somewhat redundant.
Public Matters, LLC, a self-described “rag-tag group of consultants” [2], is the artist-run initiative behind the production of compelling videos like Magali’s, and the connective tissue linking constituents in many-tendrilled collaborations like the South L.A. Market Makeovers (2007-2009). Their goal, simply stated, is to “work with community members to create media about their neighborhoods…to develop in them a sense of ownership over these places and a belief that they can directly shape their neighborhoods’ future. The media content reflects and benefits the community that has helped create it, advancing a specific community defined agenda or initiative.” [3] Though the precise role of Public Matters shifts over time and within projects, their tendency to involve themselves in social issues of great magnitude (such as tackling South and East L.A. food deserts [4] to provide increased access to healthy food and education about nutrition) necessitates a mode of working that includes multiple partners. For Public Matters, the size and scope of these partnering institutions often matches the enormity of the problems they take on - the group has gone from working with the community organization HEAC to a research center at UCLA (Center for Research in Engineering, Media and Performance, or REMAP), to a major inter-university research institute called the UCLA-USC Center for Population Health and Health Disparities. Along with huge university bureaucracies also come massive funding opportunities, and additional state and federal governmental entities to answer to - for example, the current round of East L.A. market makeovers is funded by a 5-year grant from the National Institutes of Health.>
Los Compadres Market, South Los Angeles, 2007. Courtesy Public Matters, LLC.
Their lack of interest in one-offs and commitment to durational, sustainable projects that bring social benefit places Public Matters in an undefined, hybrid, interdisciplinary realm with many other artist-run initiatives that lack a traditional relationship to object-making and the commercial art market. By their university partners, Public Matters are perceived not as an artist collective, but primarily as on-the-ground liaisons with the most direct contact with schools and community organizations. They introduce a way of engaging stakeholders through participatory media production that differs dramatically from traditional methods of public health messaging. From within their own organization, the boundaries between art, public health, social benefit are fluid, and become labels of convenience for different situations. Creative director Reanne Estrada maintains a separate studio practice, but sees herself engaged in a “continual practice of creative, collaborative problem-solving” in which her solo practice would suffer without Public Matters, and vice versa. Mike Blockstein, principal and founder of Public Matters, very much considers the collective his art practice, and the various other consultants have diverse relationships to what they do as part of Public Matters.[5] In his treatise on art and politics entitled Dark Matter, artist Gregory Sholette sums up this ambivalence towards definition when writing about similarly fluid practices: “I allow those who claim to make ‘art’ define it on their own terms, even if their identification with the practice is provisional, ironic, or tactical, as for example when artist Steve Kurtz (with Critical Art Ensemble) insists ‘I’ll call it whatever I have to in order to communicate with someone.’” [6]
Project 3 (a.k.a. the Market Makeovers crew): Front row (left to right): Brent Langellier, Mike Blockstein, Reanne Estrada, Debra Glik, Alex Ortega, Heather Hammer, Rosa-Elena Garcia, Jeremiah Garza; Back row: Ron Brookmeyer, Nathan Cheng, Mike Prelip. Courtesy Public Matters, LLC.
The UCLA-USC Center for Population Health + Health Disparities Team with Scientific Advisory Board + Community Advisory Board members. Courtesy Public Matters, LLC.
The interdisciplinary, shifting, and hybrid nature of Public Matters by no means implicates a lack of definition in purpose or goal. Rather, their organizational structure is tactical and deliberate, designed to maintain a nimbleness and flexibility supple enough to react effectively to a highly charged and overwhelmingly huge social issue. Perhaps for this reason, Public Matters has chosen to incorporate as an LLC rather than a non-profit - both Blockstein and Estrada worked extensively in the non-profit sector and understand the hierarchical professionalization necessary for such tax-exempt status. They were interested in forging “a new way of doing things as a social enterprise,” becoming essentially a for-profit entity but without any interest in generating profit - rather as a tactical method through which to form useful partnerships yet maintain elasticity in complex public situations. [7] By no means are they alone in this tactical organizing - Gregory Sholette explains that artists today are expert at imitating “a product particular to the post-industrial economy of our time” - the institution - which bespeaks a skill-set “that provides an edge when dealing with the society of risk beyond the longstanding adaptation to structural precariousness.” [8] In the case of Public Matters, this aptitude can be extrapolated beyond the precarity of artists’ positions as cultural producers and applied to the broader situations in which they insert themselves. In response to the “failed states” and “derelict institutions” that perpetuate problems as large as food deserts in the middle of enormous urban centers, artists “take up pieces of a broken world, transforming them into an improved, second-order social reality…” [9]
This oppositional motivation is perhaps too strong in the case of Public Matters, which is an extremely positive, collaborative, and optimistic organization. Yet the specific propensities which run through artist-initiated organizations like this that Sholette identifies, like ” a propensity for flexible work patterns, developing gift-sharing networks, and a capacity for non-linear problem solving” allows artists to uniquely “mimic, exaggerate, or otherwise reshape given reality.” [10] Yet the ability of Public Matters to take on, maintain, and implement innovative projects alongside enormous university partnerships over long periods of time cannot be attributed to a flexible structure alone - in fact, issues of capacity and staffing plague their ambition, and the work can be all-consuming. Rather, the success of the Public Matters model is related to a distinction between artistic and organizational practices that Irit Rogoff discusses in her article “Turning,” quoting a series of essays by philosopher Gerald Raunig. These essays mark a difference between “constituent” practice, in which an organization or collective exists to produce a series of protocols for both the representation and governance of their work (either in opposition to an existing market, or in spite of it). The problem that Rogoff identifies with constituent practice is that it is too easily pre-occupied with the processes through which an assembly is legitimated, and thus sabotages its own innovation and flexibility, opting instead for a regulatory ossification. [11] Rather, Raunig reveals practices like Park Fiction in Hamburg (and I would add Public Matters), as “instituent” practices. These organizations create “instituting events” that bring together a diversity of constituent practices (as in community organizations, schools, governmental entities, universities, individuals), and this plurality counters the closure of the processes at work. As Raunig describes, “The various arrangements of self-organization promote broad participation in instituting, because they newly compose themselves as a constituent power again and again, always tying into new local and global struggles.” [12]
This replicative capacity, the ability to re-invent themselves through a shifting diversity of strategies and networks, is why Public Matters can take on they kinds of projects they do with such limited capacity, and why they can navigate that fine line between “indulging the need to push boundaries and take risks, and being responsible to what we are charged with.” According to Reanne Estrada, this becomes the most integral part of the work, its most interesting and challenging aspect. [13] Public Matters faces a new aspect of this challenge in working with the USC Center for Population Health and Health Disparities on their current round of East Los Angeles market makeovers. The Center is charged with researching and evaluating the work on a large scale with enough rigor and integrity to someday impact policy, and this kind of research agenda and resources are rarely available to an organization like Public Matters (nor similarly scaled artist-run initiatives). The research context poses both an exciting possibility for affecting change and rigorously assessing impact, but also challenges the flexible, non-linear work patterns and instituent events that define Public Matters as an organization. They are learning now to work around concerns about data contamination, defining control and intervention areas, and other such problematics from the research perspective. Yet perhaps it is their very nimbleness and the “license to explore” that they grant to themselves and all of their participants that will allow them to adapt to this new reality as well.
[1] “Where do I get my 5?” Public Matters, LLC, http://www.publicmattersgroup.com/?page_id=721.
[2] Reanne Estrada, interview with author, June 6, 2011.
[3] “What is Public Matters?” Public Matters, LLC, http://www.publicmattersgroup.com/?page_id=2.
[4] Food deserts are manifested by a scarcity of mainstream grocery stores, and where they do exist, they have poor quality produce and high prices. The South Los Angeles food desert is one of the largest in the country, spanning 60 square miles and encompassing 800,000 people. “South Los Angeles,” Public Matters, LLC, http://www.publicmattersgroup.com/?page_id=719.
[5] Reanne Estrada, interview with the author, June 6, 2011.
[6] Gregory Sholette, Dark Matter: Art and Politics in the Age of Enterprise Culture (New York: Pluto Press, 2011), 5.
[7] Reanne Estrada, interview with the author, June 6, 2011.
[8] Sholette, Dark Matter, 152.
[9] Sholette, Dark Matter, 153.
[10] Sholette, Dark Matter, 152-153.
[11] Irit Rogoff, “Turning,” in Curating and the Pedagogical Turn, eds. Paul O’Neill and Mick Wilson (Amsterdam and London: De Appel and Open Editions, 2009), 44.
[12] Rogoff, “Turning,” 45.
[13] Reanne Estrada, interview with author, June 6, 2011.
There has been some excellent discussion in the blogosphere recently over the value of the NEA in light of its budget being cut by $21 million in a House vote. Often the site of controversy, federal funding for the arts has once again risen to the forefront of debate. In some ways, this whole discussion seems laughable, because $21 million in light of the federal budget as a whole is no more than chump change. In fact, the entire budget of the NEA is inconsequential compared to the deficit and debt we are facing as a country, making little to no difference in economic terms. But perhaps what is so galling about the NEA to economic and political analysts is that the value of the arts to this country cannot be easily quantified in terms of societal benefits - and therefore is rarely adequately addressed through the language of the market. Rather, the value placed on art betrays deeply personal preferences.
Tax Subsidies for the Arts
Isaac Butler and Matt Yglesias have picked up on the excellent point that much of federal subsidization of art is largely hidden in tax subsidies in this country, which partner with private funders to provide “decentralized funding of aesthetic endeavors.” Because this is a blanket exception in our tax code, subsidizing charitable donations to many non-arts (and thus more difficult to target) 501(c)(3) non-profit entities that provide blankets to homeless shelters, etc, it is not talked about and thus works equally well for conservatives and liberals as a hidden source of arts funding determined not by the federal government but by wealthy people and their foundations.
As one whose work is funded by this system, whose position and title and every endeavor relies upon a team of people within my institution who write grants and wheedle charitable donations from private and corporate givers and deal with countless memberships, I wanted to add my perspective to this discussion. Our current arts funding system does (at least on the surface) seem to allow for a greater freedom of art practices, and thus a more entrepreneurial and innovative scrappiness on the level of the individual artist or small organization.
The Limits of Scale
However, there is a limit of scale that occurs as arts organizations grow to a municipal or state level within this system. Arts patronage on a scale massive enough to fund these larger initiatives is extremely rare, and begins to meld into a power brokerage that in fact supresses innovative art that could be relevant to a city-wide audience. We begin to see the blockbuster art/entertainment exhibitions and privately funded vanity museums of the extremely wealthy, and one wonders if these subsidies only leads to a vicious cycle of insider-dom. It is again very difficult to measure the societal benefits of power-broker art patronage (who can argue against the famed Getty Center, or the Barnes, or countless other institutions that started in this way?) but one wonders if this country might be missing out on central artistic vision with a view towards the historical, such as that which might stem from a Cultural Ministry.
And even though the small organization or individual artist might seem to benefit from the subsidy system, there is the very real issue of capacity, and the impossibility of most artists to cobble together any kind of living wage. With the advent of non-object-based visual and performative work, most artists I know lose money on their art practices - even those that have extremely successful gallery and museum shows and are considered well-established artists. They simply don’t have the capacity or ability to search out the arts funding they need, and that funding is mostly restricted and cannot be used for real living expenses.The “starving artist” paradigm is an accepted situation - but why must it be? Doesn’t that bespeak an abysmally low value assigned to artistic work compared to the stunning figures quoted by Isaac Butler in terms of art’s economic value to a community? Artists do not reap any benefit from their stimulating “scavenger” work, from their ability to foment urban renewal out of nothingness - developers and businesspeople do. This does not mean that increased government subsidies for artists is the answer…but some return on artistic investment seems worth exploring.
So in a way, the NEA debate is merely the smallest sliver of this messed-up arts funding pie in America. I take issue with Matt Yglesias’s reading of federal arts funding as subsidizing essentially local issues (interestingly enough, he was my editor-in-chief when I was the arts editor of the Harvard Independent, way back when). This hearkens back to my assertion that it is dangerous to view the arts only within the language of markets, rather than a language of values. The localism argument assumes that the arts will be funded at all, and that localities would agree to the quality of life it imparts. In fact, I would posit that in many places, arts wouldn’t be funded at all if federal dollars were never made available. Why build a museum instead of a park? So the question really is, what is the value of arts to this country?
My personal view is that art has enormous value to innovation, and that divergent thinking is more clearly encouraged in art schools than it is in engineering, math, or technology departments. See my previous post on the untapped relevance of university art departments. The Obama Administration is making much of the STEM “Educate to Innovate” initiative to train more students in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math - I cannot understand why it is not STEAM instead. Unless the economic, societal, educational, and innovative value of art is taken more seriously, it will be continually doomed to the sidelines when it could offer real divergency and value to our deepest societal and cultural issues, as well as new ways to “win the future.”
In response to the ongoing economic crisis and the slow erosion of public monies dedicated to higher education in California, research institutes such as the University of California Institute of Research in the Arts (UCIRA) are focusing on the state of education in the arts and humanities, and how critical pedagogy in these departments is affected by impending pressures on these departments to demonstrate their revenue-generating viability. As Grant Kester posed in his keynote address at the recent UCIRA conference, these pressures have manifested in two strands that complicate the autonomy of the university, “on one hand, seeking to integrate it more seamlessly into the circuits of commercial development, to make it more subordinate to the demands of the market, and on the other to expose this creeping integration as a symptom of the erosion of the university’s raison d’etre and the growing pressure to place dwindling public monies in the service of private development.”
This pressure towards integration has, in part, thrown traditional Enlightenment notions of humanistic education [as outlined by Emmanuel Kant and Friedrich Schiller] into crisis, in which Socratic dialogue and argument in the sequestered realm of the University lose legitimacy when proposed as actions that attempt to change the existing social order – insisting instead that ideas refined in the forge of the classroom be utilized only to bolster the existing capitalist system.
Art departments in particular have struggled to reconcile their pedagogical development since modernism with these new pressures and current social contexts – in many cases by withdrawing themselves further into hermetic and insular discourse. As Kester proposes along with theorists and teaching artists such as Ernesto Pujol and Boris Groys, “[The University, especially departments of art and humanities] has evolved a curious symmetry with modern notions of art and the aesthetic as sequestered realms dedicated to the preservation of certain utopian impulses, carried over from our religious past in desacralized form. These include the harmonious reconciliation of the individual and the social, the cultivation of an ostensibly intrinsic ethical impulse, and a projected notion of humanity striving towards perfection or improvement.” Art education in this country, along with modern notions of art and the aesthetic, seek to cultivate new forms of consciousness in the passive receiver, inevitably emphasizing the division between the enlightened expert/artist and the ignorance of the student/viewer.
There is a value in preserving the university (and specifically the Arts and Humanities) as the one place where new ideas can be proposed and discussed for their own sake – [ostensibly] not driven by the forces of the market, capitalism, and neoliberal politics. In a way, art departments must become the “conscience of the art world” – and universities the conscience of our broader social context. Criticality and an educated public opinion is necessary for democracy to function and for social change to occur – according to educational theorist John Dewey, “education is a regulation of the process of coming to share in the social consciousness; and that the adjustment of individual activity on the basis of this social consciousness is the only sure method of social reconstruction.” The tools of critical thought lead us to a more functional democracy. Yet making the connection between the sovereignty of ideas within the university and the application of research fluidly in actual social context remains a deep gulf to bridge when social context (specifically within art departments, but throughout the humanities) is held consistently at arm’s length.
The rejection of professionalism in the arts as related to modernism has left art an open field where both positive and negative liberties can occur – though art schools preserve a surface appearance of openness and self-actualization, it is unclear whether they are actually providing the tools to students to either successfully function commercially or become critical thinkers and active citizen-artists. What situations are we preparing students for? To be teachers? To be commercial artists? To be critical thinkers? Ernesto Pujol claims that “In the United States, we are not graduating artists, we are graduating teachers right and left, and we should finally admit it.” If this is the case, how do we rearticulate theory and practice within art departments, recast art as research and practice as the development of theory, and theory as a critical tool to aid in the formulation of engaged action in the social context? This is not to make art necessarily the site for social change, but not to recognize the important and rapidly dwindling space for “social consciousness” within art departments spells their doom.
Almost despite their pedagogical context, art students are paying more attention to audience, and rejecting the vestiges of modernism. Many are searching for new methods of synthesis (built upon the immediate and universal access to information), more criticality, and the elusive possibility for social relevance. This change is emerging from the passive student/viewers rather than the artist/experts at the helm (though in some cases the teaching cycles turn over so fast that last year’s MFA grads end up teaching this year’s adjunct classes, bolstering Pujol’s claim), as well as increasing numbers of non-accredited artist-run pedagogical spaces that seek to explore new paradigms. This “pedagogical turn,” including projects like the Mountain School for the Arts, SOMA, the Bruce High Quality Foundation University, and the Public School is not new (Allan Sekula’s School is a Factory and the pedagogical activities of Joseph Beuys are excellent precursors), but many have reached quite unexpected entrenchment and longevity. One could even argue that these ground-up shifts have resulted in experimental new programs emerging from within public universities in California and elsewhere that focus specifically on art’s relevance within social contexts (UC Santa Cruz’s Digital Arts/New Media MFA program, CCA’s concentration in Social Practice, Otis’s Public Practice Program to name a few). It remains to be seen whether such programs represent any structural pedagogical change that translates to an increased flow of ideas and action into real social context, but the enduring value of the public university and its art departments demands increased relevance over stagnation.
I took myself on a date Downtown last Saturday to view the interventionist Economy of Gesture show/performance conceptualized by Tijuana-based artist Felipe Zuñiga and curated by Owen Driggs as part of the ongoing “Performing Public Space” initiative. This work included 5 sign spinners (young, energetic, and dynamic young men hired from an advertising company) who spun not ads for clearance sales, but artist-designed slogans and patterns saying things like “we must profile your illegal womb” and “lo que resiste, persiste.”
"Economy of Gesture" by Felipe Zuniga; slogan by Evelyn Serrano; curated by Owen Driggs. 1st & Main. Photo by Sue Bell Yank.
This is certainly not a new idea - artists have begun appropriating this format more frequently in the past few years for precisely the same reasons why advertisers use it. It is a cheap, flashy, dynamic intervention into public space, yet with a human being present to perform and chat with curious publics. Though for me, this performance really was just an excuse to venture to parts of downtown I had not explored on foot before, and the strange, rhythmic acupuncture of the sign spinners served to throw into relief just how fraught and fragmented our downtown really is. Within a couple of blocks, I saw a sign spinner on a lonely freeway bridge, one by the intimidating CalTrans fortress being watched only by a single laughing homeless man, and one in a swirl of at least a thousand people dancing and eating and shopping around El Pueblo. This fractured experience struck me with far more force than the politically-inflected slogans printed on the signs.
"Economy of Gesture" by Felipe Zuniga; slogan by Luis Ituarte; curated by Owen Driggs. Los Angeles & Aliso. Photo by Sue Bell Yank.
“Saturday’s not a great day to do this,” said one shrugging spinner to a curious passerby. “There’s no one around downtown on the weekend. But we’re trying to get the word out anyway.”
It wasn’t quite true that no one was around - there were lots of people downtown actually, but they were sequestered into zones of street life and commerce. Little Tokyo’s Japanese Village, for example, Olvera Street, Broadway, and the bustling little upcoming neighborhood on Spring Street between 3rd and 8th (dubbed the Old Bank District). This last neighborhood looks like a tiny section of uptown Manhattan, with swank little street-level cafes and gorgeous renovated loft buildings in historic Beaux-Arts buildings. The street was closed for a promotional block party: “OBD!” and “DTLA - be a resident!” There were city booths promoting the historic core, booklets with tips on how to stay safe on the streets, and a booth campaigning for the return of LA’s famous 1200-mile narrow-gauge street car system.
Japanese Village, Little Tokyo. Photo by Sue Bell Yank.
This little modest street fair was attempting to nurture a new Los Angeles imaginary - one of walkable communities of young couples, artists, and businesspeople. A place where you know your neighbors, walk your dog in the new parks that will cover street level parking lots, enjoy your rooftop pool and a swinging nightlife, where you are no longer chained to your automobile. A place with a deep and rich history, and a brilliant new future.
According to Norman Klein, downtown Los Angeles is constantly in this cycle of unsustainable boosterism, development, decline, and then frantic revitalization, redevelopment, and re-gentrification - driven essentially by developers and planners. The Tom Gilmore-driven renaissance of Spring & Main is just the latest in this cycle of re-imagining the city. In the first half of the century, Los Angeles was advertised as a garden city, with sunshine and good climate its main attraction. However, as land speculation pushed ever outward due to magnates like Huntington - who owned the expansive trolley system and hocked land further and further away from the center, creating a city of suburbs - cars took the place of climate as a symbol of liberation. The resulting freeway system hacked the neighborhoods of downtown into pieces, and left in its wake swaths of perceived “blight.” New boosters like Gilmore are trying to revive the youthful dynamism of the old neighborhoods, but with a wealthier stratum of society.
There is a science of “neurolinguistics” and “neuroimaging” which is a form of psychotherapy that shifts language and visual perception in the hopes that it will change an individual’s experience (of pain, of fear, of depression). This is the fundamental, yet dangerous power of representation. The way city spaces were represented in the LA imaginary changed how they were experienced, and shifted the way urban planning was thought about. Expansion, decentralization, the automobile, and increased security fit into the “garden city” ideal, whereas tightly packed, thriving communities of non-whites were seen as “blight” to be removed, like tooth decay. Or worse, unwanted “Manhattanization.”
Broadway and 5th. Photo by Sue Bell Yank.
Downtown must still overcome the way the city experience of the average Angeleno is fragmented and shattered. The “old” downtown is being revived, but the new boosters are searching for a history that has been wiped from memory, extracted and guarded like the gaping wound of an old abcessed tooth. Though new neighborhoods try to emerge, they are still fractured from the whole, little splinters trying to find a way to fit together again. They are pieces of thriving street life surrounded by industrialized fortresses. Perhaps with enough time, effort, and urban acupuncture, the mistakes of the past can be mitigated and a flow of pedestrians and street level life once again restored - the promise of the Grand Avenue Civic Park, for example, aims to improve street level circulation to the vital cultural center of downtown - but developments that intend to shift the underlying character of the city have yet to reach wholistic success.
**Ideas in this piece (especially with regards to the history of urban planning and development in Los Angeles) were inspired by the work of Mike Davis and Norman Klein. For more, please see:
Every couple of months at the Hammer, a group of older women from a Brandeis Alumni group come for a tour and lunch in the museum cafe. I had the pleasure of touring this group the last time they came, through the show “Second Nature.” The show, which is coming down very shortly, consists of a fantastic collection of sculpture from the last 10 years (mostly by Los Angeles-based or educated young artists) donated by media exec Dean Valentine to the Hammer’s contemporary collection. The varied pieces within it, though having some relationship to one another in their generational response to object making, are quite diverse, and challenging in terms of an overarching tour.
The Brandeis women, of a clearly different generation than these artists (who included Edgar Arceneaux, Sterling Ruby, Ruby Neri, Stephen G. Rhoades, Martin Kersels, Paul Sietsema, and Nathan Mabry among others), were resistant to art in these forms, and had much to say. One protested the “cerebral” nature of conceptual or post-conceptual art, a refrain I hear frequently as a docent. “These artists need to get out of their heads and into their hearts,” she admonished. Others just shook their heads disapprovingly when I introduced Sterling Ruby’s monumental “Stalamite: Recondite Burning,” an obelisk-like organic coagulation of melted plastic, enormous and stunning in its expressionism.
As their guide, I tried my best to give context for the work they were seeing, to try to lay the groundwork that these artists were not attempting to represent or even necessarily “express themselves” in the vague, cliched sense, but were posing a question or conceptual critique - about the larger framework in which they were making art, about art and object-making in a digital age, about media in general. This leap is still nearly impossible for many art viewers of a certain generation. They are interested (they are there, after all) but they don’t get it, and they become frustrated that they don’t get it.
I think those of us who live and breathe contemporary art forget this, quite often. We like preaching to the converted, and the divide between those who “get it” and those who don’t remains difficult to hurdle. Building access to contemporary art and learning to appreciate good contemporary art takes time. It’s like trying to explain the taste of a good apple versus a bad apple when the person you are talking to has never tasted an apple before…and not only that, is absolutely resistant to apples in general. I was more than thrilled when at the end of the tour, one of the women said, “Well, for art we didn’t like that much, we sure did talk about it a lot.” I felt like hugging her - yes, I wanted to say, yes, that’s the whole point.
Which brings me to the space for museum education - a really fascinating and dynamic space that embodies all sorts of interesting conflicts, like the Brandeis group experience described above. Museum education departments are morphing beyond the docent-training, curriculum-building, K-12 oriented places they once were, where kids fingerpaint after learning about Impressionism. These departments are increasingly the incubators for social practice…for like the artists who are so interested in problem-solving and spatial and social context, museum educators have long had to deal with both art and its public context. Traditional curators are sometimes a bit baffled by social practice, especially as it becomes less and less object-based - a couple of curators have admitted to me that they don’t feel they have the skill set to “judge” good or bad social practices (apples to oranges, again). But museum educators are used to integrating publics with pedagogy and art historical context - they are programmers and teachers and problem-solvers. Obviously not all educators are equipped to really explore these liminal social spaces, preferring to confine themselves to lesson plans and traditional notions of art education - but the space is there. Educators like Eungie Joo of the New Museum and her fantastically interdisciplinary “Museum as Hub” program, or Sarah Schultz of the Walker, are consistently breaking new ground in terms of curatorial and educational collaboration, supporting social practice, pushing the boundaries of arts education, and creating spaces to incubate new pedagogical ideas. It is no surprise that among the three LA art institutions interested in partnering with the Watts House Project, all three are doing so through their education departments.
Clearly I’m a bit of a booster, being a museum educator myself, but I find deep connections forming between these departments and the art practices I am so interested in, and I am excited to see what innovative programs arise from those interstices.
