Journal of Arts & Communities - Volume 5, Issue 2-3, 2013

This Critical Introduction to our Special Edition on ‘The Turn to Community in the Arts’ surveys the diverse ways in which ‘the turn’ is manifesting across art forms. Multiple forces are contributing to the shift in art-making. These include artists’ attempts to bridge relationships between aesthetic and activist practices; a dissolution in the boundaries between cultural, social, political and economic domains; and the increasing instrumentalization of the arts by government. Crucially, the authors map out the various mobilizations of community within distinct disciplines and traditions of arts practice, and consider how the ‘turn’ is understood within discourses of art criticism, contemporary art theory and community art. The disjunctures between and within these domains precipitate the critical questions and problems driving the subsequent articles of the Special Edition.

This article builds on Mulligan and Smith’s notion of The Turn to Community in the Arts. Recognizing the lack of official histories for these forms of relational, social and collaborative practices, the article offers an expanded cartography for this collaborative art practice through three interrelated terrains: as identity politics; as governmental intervention; and finally, as contemporary art. This new mapping has implications not only for how the field is theorized, but also how its value is understood artistically.

Community-based arts have had a clear influence on public arts and culture policies in countries such as Australia, United Kingdom and the United States and yet the word ‘community’ tends to be used in such policy discourses in shallow and ambiguous ways. This article notes that the very idea of community has divided western scholars for over a century, with recurring suggestions that industrialization, urbanization and/or globalization have made it largely irrelevant. However, some have noted that the search for community is both ancient and enduring and that the idea of community has perennial symbolic importance. Against predictions that attachment to community would fade away it has been noted that the desire for belonging to community has gathered force in a world of increasing global flows. New communication technologies enable most people in the world to belong to a greater array of real and virtual communities. While virtual communities will often have specific membership criteria, problems emerge when particular people or groups of people feel excluded from participation in local or place-based communities because such exclusions can have devastating consequences in a world of great flux and uncertainty. Gerard Delanty has explained that communities only come into existence in the contemporary world to the extent that they are ‘wilfully constructed’. This article argues that community-based arts have a significant role to play in the creation and projection of communities. It argues that we should engage with the complexities embedded in the word community rather than turn to alternative terminology, such as ‘social capital’. However, the word community needs to be used thoughtfully and carefully rather then loosely and divisively.

‘The West Welcomes Refugees’ is a government initiated public art project featuring the stories of eleven different migrants and refugees who have settled in Footscray, an old industrial neighbourhood in Melbourne’s inner West. For the cultural researcher, this project invokes multiple terms of reference for situating and interpreting the work. As ‘community art’ it can be framed variously as art instrumentalized for governmental agendas, an organic expression of ‘community’, a social critique of the nation and a poetic reflection on place. This article engages with the unwieldy and contradictory nature of this project by conceiving of it as a complex location of culture, a term borrowed from Homi Bhabha. Bhabha brings a performative understanding to the relationship between community, culture and place. This framing opens up the social and postcolonial politics of ‘The West Welcomes Refugees’ in ways not possible within the theoretical terms currently dominating community arts discourses.

Visual artist Amy Spiers has been making participatory and socially engaged art since 2006. Her article explores her own evolving understanding of community and social engagement through a critical reflection of a number of her artworks over the last few years. She describes how theorists Rosalyn Deutsche, Miwon Kwon and Claire Bishop, have looked to theories of radical and plural democracy, particularly Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau’s concept of antagonism, to reveal the political shortcomings of much socially engaged art. She finishes the article by explaining how these theoretical underpinnings have impacted her art practice and advocates for a more destabilizing approach to socially engaged and participatory art practices.

This study explores theory and practice in architecture and participation through an ethnographic exposition of an architectural design and community development process for Hub Melbourne, a new coworking space in Melbourne. As well as contributing a practical example of a participatory process in architecture, the analysis aims to situate learnings from the architectural practice here studio in a long history of participation in architecture. Claire Bishop’s ‘The social turn: Collaboration and its discontents’ (2006) is used as a starting point from which to argue for autonomous evaluations in social practice that value the production of ethical and political engagement as creative content. This content is intricately connected to the project’s aesthetics. Borrowing from the pluralist political theory of Chantal Mouffe, the article suggests that participation is difficult in architecture, yet presents opportunities if conflict between stakeholders is valued in an agonistic way.

This article outlines the conceptual constructs that compel the author to create sonic projects for and with people of varying abilities. The author is a hybrid artist-researcher, and the article is voiced in a way that brings creative thought and academic language together. The article is divided into two parts. Part 1 discusses the author’s constructs of the ‘sonopoetic’ and ‘meta-listening’. Part 2 shows how these constructs have led to the author’s contemplation of the sono ecosystem through a large-scale sonic work titled The NIS (2009/2013) featuring the Amplified Elephants and the BOLT Ensemble.

Jennifer Lyons-Reid and Carl Kuddell are the documentary-makers, artists, activists and educators behind Change Media, an Australian organization dedicated to building the cultural capacity of Indigenous and other excluded communities, using digital media. Through their extensive experience of working within an artistic terrain marked by inequalities between communities, the arts industry and government, they highlight some of the ethical quandaries behind the affirming rhetoric of community development and the privileged status of art.