View of the Art for change exhibition at SPACE (2006)
Last Saturday we attended the opening of the first part of the “expanded exhibition” Local | Visitant in Calaf, which is part of the Idensitat project. Our paranoid idea that hordes of socially sensitized artists, fleeing their ivory towers, are taking to the streets and using the “
The text is especially sharp because it focuses on the “retrospective” exhibition that the SPACE studios dedicated to Loraine Leeson under the title Art for Change. Loraine Leeson is perhaps one of the most reputable figures in what some have called community based art, social art or even political art (which is the term Peter Suchin uses to describe her work). Suchin points out how the way in which issues relating to the authorship and dissemination of Leeson’s and her collaborators’ work have been managed reaffirms the established hierarchies of experts and non-experts, artists and non-artists, “representers” and represented, and perpetuates the figure of the artist as “agent of bourgeois legitimization.” It seems to us that this is a lesser evil derived from the process of museification of said work; perhaps it would only be pertinent to judge the effectiveness of those interventions in the moment and social context in which they occurred.
However, the matter is aggravated when, as Carmen Morsh (research consultant of the artistic mediation program of the
past Documenta) “the potential of art as a means for education and social inclusion has become the most important criteria [sic] for public funding of a project … What was in the ‘90s still unique [i.e. Leeson’s position as an avant-garde teacher] … now belongs more and more to the daily business of English art institutions, which today, can gain artists with an international reputation as collaborators for their educational projects“. In this way, Suchin points out, artists/educators like Leeson no longer represent an opposition to the channels of education and official culture, but operate in line with established models of introduction to high culture. To finish off the play, Suchin ends his article with this devastating quote from Demetra Kotouza extracted from her article
Lies and mendicity
: “Encouraging schoolchildren to make ‘art’ about their experience of disenfranchisement and exclusion is, intentionally or not, nothing less than the neutralising of dissent in advance of its potential manifestation”.