Art and Society: Engagement or Conspiracy?
Posted by: Fats in: Wika at Hirap > Mga Pulong atbpArt and Society: Engagement or Conspiracy?
“Arts of Engagement” is the umbrella theme of a conference (the “International Conference on the Arts in Society 2006″) to take place in Edinburgh, Scotland, around August of this year. Under the theme “Arts of Engagement” are ten sub-themes, covering the widest possible spectrum linking art and society: Arts Agendas, Supporting the Arts, Art in Communities, Constructing Art Worlds, Audiences, Arts Education, Analyzing Art Forms, Meaning and Representation, Festivals, and Art and Human Rights.
Within contemporary art’s postmodern paradigm, “engagement” has become one of several distinguishing terminologies of such a framework posited to challenge mainstream (i.e. Western) value systems. Art works and events created within this framework are also often called “engaged art” or “interventions.” Basically, “engagement” implies the reflecting or challenging of previously and preciously held values and ideas. Thus, to begin an “engagenent”, everything must be seen as having a constructed nature, and anything constructed can be challenged, questioned, engaged. According to the conference prospectus: “On the world stage, global systems of exchange and production are calling old structures into question, and forcing a re-evaluation of art world creations—hybridized, appropriated, traveled.”
I would be curious as to how Arts Confernce may engage the question of creativity and the business of art: As an industry, contemporary art is in the business of regurgitating. These culture, creative and academic industries often work in some recognizable pattern, for example by discrediting or destroying the “old”, the “traditional” or the “indigenous” and re-packaging it as “new” so that it can be sold upon demand. Contemporary art is also in the business of resurrecting - first by killing itself off as mainstream Western art and then reincarnating itself as fringe, alternative, peripheral, radical (which is what postmodern art does). Basically, this — the grind of regurgitating and resurrecting — is the role of contemporary art in society, and it answers the question for a design agenda in the arts as poised by the Arts Conference: “How can artists, thinkers and teachers seize this historical moment to create an agenda for the arts which positions them powerfully in relation to the often competing and intersecting agendas of economy, science and technology?”
But because culture industries are more concerned with establishing agendas, there can only be little room within the mainstream and institutional framework for dialoguing on art’s (in a particular society’s) most fundamental problems. Underlying these problems are seemingly harmless truths and assumptions that have established the power and mono-culture of the international arts matrix. Take, for example, the assumption that international biennales and festivals “take central role on the world stage as gathering points for creative exchange.” In international politics, economics, trade and cultural relations, the primal role of domestic realities are often undermined by the leaders and benefactors of globalism; the world stage is often always promoted as the pinnacle, but is in fact the leveling ground where cultural, economic and social idiosyncrasies are re-shaped and contorted to fit the international trends.
The impact of such an assumption on festivals and international biennales is tremendous on domestic creative practices within very specific societies and cultures, especially those cradled - whether they like it or not - within nationalized economic and cultural networks. It will impact the artist’s capacity to create - the materials, the process, and the language of his or her art. The impact is generally destructive, that is, it hinders creative indigenous (domestic) processes by: [1] introducing standards and criteria of artistic excellence that may be completely alien to the artist’s own culture and development; [2] re-directing much needed limited resources to the building of infrastructures, programs and systems based on national and/or international requirements rather than on self-defined needs of the artistic community; and [3] creating a market that fuels the trend of projecting cultural identity outwards more as a commodity or curiosity rather than invigorating the articulation of this identity inwards through introspection.
“Arts Conference” certainly recognize, as do many international events of a supposed critical position, the realities of oppression and injustice taking place in a myriad of forms in all societies permeated with “present-day contexts of globalisation, and its social, economic and political artefacts of cultural homogenisation, commodification, and militarisation.” But what the international stage really needs to recognize is its own role in the creation and reinforcement of such oppressions and injustices upon which the entire international conference and cultural industries thrive.
On a more positive side, not all international conferences and festivals are detrimental to the creative process, although they are all, to different extents, exploitative. Striking the balance in any exploitative situation is key, and the greater the dynamic tensions, the greater the input towards creative processing. Basically, international conferences and festivals which claim to be open to cultural diversity should prove to be so on the basis of two kinds of organizations crucial to the make-up of culture: these are the social and the economic. At the simplest level, this means that any international undertaking that claims to be open to genuine cultural exchanges, must not discriminate through implementation of registration fees (for profit), rigid requisites of institutional affiliation, and sheer lack of honoraria for all active and invited participants. In my experience, the most enriching international events are a result of and result to enduring relationships among their participants and organizers especially when such relationships are outside institutional or commercial affiliations.
The “Arts Conference” proposes three key areas of exploration: [1] changing and contested sites; [2] artistic media and new genres; and [3] artists and other participants in the arts. In my view, these compartments are assumptions accrued from the power and hierarchy of mainstream art, the very hierarchies supposedly challenged by “arts of engagement.” Although such compartments are useful especially in event management and selection, I am curious as to how practising artists and theoreticians may respond to such a format for thinking and discussing if they ever intend to whenever they participate in such a “global stage.”
My own articulation (of knowledge, language, body) was forged out of personal experience and racial memory, of a very basic (but now easily underestimated) processing between organism and environment within a time-space continuum (tradition, history, and ethnical/genetic aggregations are mre important to me than demotic or congregate associations). It is an articulation that did not arise from the dictates of a museum catalogue, a theoretical text published in an academic journal, a lecture by a famous foreign curator or five years spent in university. Is is instead an articulation made difficult by many years of indoctrination, formal education and the barrage of media. It is an articulation that became possible only when I started to un-learn, and when the basics of life and life force emerged from layers of enforced perceptions of needs and ambitions.
“Arts Conference” and several other international arts events admit to the artist “paying a high personal and professional price” (this implies the creative hindrance of professional bodies) for believing in the creative act although there are also more artists operating solely towards the enlargement of their market value. I would like to see how far the makers of the international arts stage are also willing to do so.
