‘Teaching’ community/social engagements

“I don’t believe in love/kindness/good will, I am against public book sharing and similar ideas”

A student, let’s call her XYZ, told me when I asked her group what community/social engagement project proposal they had in mind.

The course was on community and socially-engaged arts. I introduced a range of projects and the artistic and social impetus behind them. A major element of the course was for them to scout the area around Hong Kong Cultural Centre, observe the people and the place, execute simple engagements/experiments designed by me, and finally design and execute their own engagement.

Some groups set up drawing booths, some taught tourists Cantonese and some played with the lighting along the promenade. These weren’t ‘community projects’, but gave students a chance to do the research, design and experience a bit of engagement with the people and the place.

So when XYZ gave me that response, I had 2 split seconds to react:

Split second 1: They actually paid attention in class! They recognized my position and were able to consider theirs within the context of this course.

Split second 2: How do I step back from some presumptions I may have hinted, so that they have a more value-free framework to design their own engagements?

The below is the approximate rendering of the conversation:

XYZ: Hong Kongers are cold and selfish, there is no concern for others…so, we don’t agree with what you taught, we don’t think it will work, will we get lower marks because of this?

Me: Nope. I appreciate that you have your views, which is hopefully based on your own observations. You have just explained how you see Hong Kongers. How about designing an engagement to test it? It is still early in the course, I will be introducing more artists and their works, some of which may be more similar to your position.

XYZ: You mean we don’t have to do charity and stuff? Ok let us talk this through again.

(Charity!?! How did they make that association? Maybe because the term ‘community art’ in Hong Kong is often associated with charity and good will and etc.)

XYZ group’s project was to replicate a social experiment where one of them would lie on the ground seemingly unconscious and observe the reactions of passers-by. Not very original, but like everyone else, they had to profile the people there and decide one where to execute this idea. Each member of the team also had to propose a variation of the engagement, test it and explain why.

I got plenty of whinings and questions from the whole class as to why every step needs to be documented. Luckily some groups, including XYZ group, realized during the execution that the required documentations and variations helped them to modify the engagement onsite when something did not go right, or when they did not get any ‘good’ result.

Engagement Day

The weather was great and the Cultural Centre was full of people that day. There was an air of excitement and nervousness surrounding XYZ and her groupmates, after all, they know they were creating a situation that put people to the test.

They ended their engagement sooner than the required time. I pressed them for an explanation. XYZ and her teammate were no longer the cocky students that questioned the assignment before they tried it. They were both excited and a little embarrassed.

They were excited to find out the reaction of different kinds of people, especially those they did not expect to show concern. They were also excited that some people showed interest in their work and chatted with them. But they were also a little embarrassed that some people seemed genuinely worried that a female lay conscious on the ground. I guess they realized they may have taken advantage of people’s kindness.

To each their own? The language and positioning of relational aesthetics

In contrast to this more skeptical group who used a more critical approach beginning with their research, there were groups that simply took what I taught for granted. To these students, I also had to challenge them: Why would people sit down to paint? Why would they even want to talk?

I found that the more neutral language and positioning of relational aesthetics to be suitable for students who are resistant to ideas such as ‘social value’ and ‘kindness’. Yet through the process, some of them have come to realize that these things are not old fashioned or wishful thinking. In contrast, for students who are ready to ‘do good’ and ‘work with the community’, what opens their eyes is how dealing with real people complicates their sometimes naive ideas of ‘social value’ and ‘good will’.

There is no single method to teach community and socially-engaged art, but the range of concepts out there provide teachers with different langauges and approaches for various situations and target students. And it is such students that really push my boundaries of perception and understanding, forcing me to keep on learning.