The
Arts Research Center at UC Berkeley is sponsoring the symposium
"ART/CITY" on March 16, 2012. Participants have been invited to respond
to the prompt “in relation to the arts and civic life, the question I am
wrestling with right now is…” in advance of the event. This posting is by Shannon Jackson, Director of ARC.
Reading the blogposts of ART/CITY's incredible
interlocutors, I am struck both by the investment in broadly resonant
macro-issues about the conjoined future of the arts and cities and by
participants' willingness to share highly local stories of the puzzles that
they are encountering at their own institutions. Whether we are talking
about Dallas or Philadelphia, UC-Berkeley or UC-Riverside, about a museum or
about a community center, these posts reflect the thinking of a broad coalition
of citizens, people whose conversation will be important because of the different sectors
that they occupy. We seem to share many similar values, but our approach
and response to questions of cultural sustainability will differ depending upon
whether we are museum directors or city planners, visual artists or theatre
artists, in small organizations or large ones, whether we are Conceptual
artists, community organizers, social workers, teachers, parents, and more.
While I am tempted to move into the abstract issues that
drive research in the urban arts field, I will say that the question that is
truly preoccupying me most right now is how the Arts Research Center can enable
public deliberation about the issues that we hold dear. At ARC, we are working
to support independent and fresh thinking about the arts in many areas--across
a range of art forms, in relation to numerous disciplines, and in conversations
that are both highly local and intensely international. At the same time,
we seek to share our work and our process with interested communities and with
those who want to think with us about the most pressing and intriguing
questions at work in contemporary culture.
The question then of how to continue to do this inevitably
invites other questions: 1) In a world where public engagement is an
articulated value for nearly every art institution, what is the value of a
Center that represents many art forms (music, public art, film, architecture,
visual art, dance, theatre, etc) in curating such deliberation? 2) How do
we navigate the Heisenberg principle when it comes to certain research
questions and experiments in creative art-making? For instance, if the relation
between city, the university, and the arts is a research question for us, how
do we both serve the UC-Berkeley's art organizations AND cultivate
independent-minded research in the arts and sustainable relationships with the
many arts, community, and educational organizations serving the Bay Area?
3) At a time when public resources have drastically diminished — not only
for civic arts programs but also for the University system that tries to
support ARC —what kinds of philanthropic and foundation models might help to
sustain ARC's role as an arena of public, cross-arts deliberation and to restore
ARC opportunities for artist residents to engage in interdisciplinary,
cross-sector experimentation at the university, with our students, and with our
Bay Area colleagues? How can ARC's own efforts to expand and sustain itself be
imagined in a way that expands and sustains the programs and initiatives of
other institutions, in the Bay Area and beyond?
My hope is that ART/CITY is itself an answer to such
questions…and a gathering that helps us imagine new answers as well.
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