Looking back at Mapping the Terrain by Suzanne Lacy: The Human Side of the work

Note: This piece is inspired by HK theatre scholar/critic Damian Cheng’s “What is cultural activism?” (written in Chinese 甚麼是「文化行動」?). It is not a response piece, but it is interesting to contrast the different focus we have on the same book.

The rise of artistic engagement in the society, such as those called the New Genre Public Art (NGPA) was bringing a lot of new ideas and energy into the art scene during the 1990s. Mapping the Terrain was one of the earliest works where ideas of various artists came together to talk about the nature of this artistic movement. Suzanne Lacy, author and editor of the book asks how should this new form of work be assessed.

In contrast to fellow writer Damien Cheng who saw that Mapping points towards drawing on cultural and political theories in assessing NGPA, I was heavily drawn to the emphasis on human relationship in the book.

Lacy described this as “relational work” (not the same as Relational Aesthetics),

…relationship is the work… The skills needed for this relational work are communicative in nature, a stretch for the imaginations of artists and critics used to the monologic and studio-based model of art (35)

True, artists and such works deal with political and societal structures, but quoting Kaprow, who inspired numerous socially-engaged artists, Lacy brought the readers’ attention to the personal and spiritual dimension of the work,

The way to get to those issues sometimes is organizational and structural, but often it has to do with compassion, with play, with touching the inner self in every individual who recognizes that the next individual has a similar self. And it is that community, whether literal or metaphorical, that is in fact the real public that we as artists might address (36)

Challenging the ‘collaboration’ among cultural and community workers

Mapping points out that the issues and situations addressed by NGPA often require collaborations among artists, experts and community stakeholders. In his chapter Common Work, Jeff Kelley took these collaborations to task to ask if there is true collaboration.

Kelley was addressing the artist and architecture collaboration of the 1990s, where artists are often hired only to add something ‘nice’ to the project. Yet the situation may be somewhat similar to present HK where artists are invited to cheer up a place with objects, events or participatory activities.

What is Kelley’s idea of collaboration? (i increased the quotation level because i love the quote)

Collaboration is a process of mutual transformation in which the collaborators, and thus their common work, are in some way changed…the creative process itself is transformed in a collaborative relationship (140)

This statement paints a picture of a complicated process, where artists, other experts and local stakeholders come together on a project that matters, offering their unique perspective and specialty. Through negotiation (arguments), everyone’s view is widened by each other and the project culminates into something not that is not just a jigsaw puzzle of various parts, but something that trends the total of its sum.

Collaborations in socially-engaged arts are first and foremost a social relationship that requires social skills stemming from each collaborator’s sense of self. If the socially-engaged arts are to draw on outside expertise, cultural and political theory certainly illuminates where collaborations should go, but one must not forget fields such as psychology and social psychology that inform how collaborations actually work.

Looking at the rest of the chapters, Suzi Gablik, Mary Jane Jacob and other practitioners/writers are all in some way addressing the relational side of the work. Whatever political and cultural climate is prevailing in our society, it is the people who are making everyday choices who come together to make things work in their lives.