For those of us engaged in community-based art practice (via scholarship and/or via practice), what does the occupy movement have to offer our understanding of the term “community?” Miranda Joseph’s theorizing of community has asked us to think carefully about our tendency to hold up “community” as always and only a liberatory category. Other scholars have joined Joseph in questioning the use of “community” as an organizing concept for certain modes of socially engaged theater, performance, and art practice. For example, art historian Miwon Kwon cautions against the essentializing tendencies of community-based art, in which “community” is reduced to “commonality,” in turn closing down political and aesthetic potential (One Place After Another, 2004). At the same time, scholars and artists continue to locate the political potential of theater and performance in its ability to bring people together in temporary community. Jill Dolan’s Utopia in Performance (2005) argues that “live performance provides a place where people come together, embodied and passionate, to share experiences of meaning making and imagination that can describe or capture fleeting intimations of a better world” (2). How can the occupy movement help think through this tension? It seems that there is something about the nature of the movement that provides some helpful ways of thinking through a mode of being in community with others that holds on to that very contradiction. That is, the interdependency that the movement stages might help think through ways in which artists might, as Grant Kester puts it, “define [themselves] through solidarity with others while at the same time recognizing the contingent nature of this identification” (Conversation Pieces, 2004, 163).
Friday, February 3, 2012
Occupy as Form: Catherine Ming T'ien Duffly
The Arts Research Center at UC Berkeley is sponsoring the working session "Occupy as Form" on February 10, 2012. Participants have been invited to post some brief thoughts on the topic in advance of the event. This guest posting is by Catherine Ming T'ien Duffly, lecturer in Theater, Dance & Performance Studies at UC Berkeley.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Thank you Catherine, for bringing up this important contradiction. The Miwon Kwon quote really resonates with me. I hope that we will have the opportunity to discuss its ramifications for the movement, and for us as artists as well. I think one of the best parts about this movement is that the participants seem to always be thinking about how to be more inclusive, how to improve the structure. I think it takes humbling one's self in order to do this, and humble experimentation is so rare, as experimentation also seems to require a kind of boldness. I feel very fortunate to take part. Thank you.
ReplyDeletethis is less a comment and more an appreciation – thanks for bringing into this conversation these questions and thoughts about community –
ReplyDeleteyour post inspired me re-read an article by Kester called “Dialogical Aesthetics” and I found this section where Kester quotes Jeffrey Nealon’s “Alterity Politics: Ethics and Performative Subjectivity” -- “…our capacity for ethical (and one might say aesthetic) judgment derives not from the heady vantage point of some transcendent subjectivity but from a given ‘dialogical situation in all its concrete historicity and individuality.’ …according to Nealon, “…ethics is constitutively linked to corporeality, the direct experience of ‘lived’ time and place, and our affective and meaningful relationships with concrete others.”
Your post and these words make me think about how artistic practices and the occupy movement share ways of bringing people together as community in varied manifestations - thank you