Critical Introduction: The Turn to the Community in the Arts

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JAAC 5 (2+3) pp. 81–91 Intellect Limited 2013

Journal of Arts & Communities Volume 5 Numbers 2 & 3

© 2013 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/jaac.5.2-3.81_1

Keywords

community artscontemporary artart criticismsocial relationshipspolitical valueaesthetic value

danielle wyatt and lachlan MacdowallUniversity of Melbourne

Martin MulliganRMIT University

critical introduction:

the turn to community

in the arts

abstract

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 disso-lution 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 disci-plines 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.

JAAC_5.2&3_Mulligan_81-91.indd 81 8/13/14 1:07:03 PM

Danielle Wyatt | Lachlan MacDowall | Martin Mulligan

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Since late in the twentieth century, the relationship between art-making and community-making has been transformed by a surge of new or renewed inter-est in the idea of community across all art forms. This interest is distinct from the previously separate and often marginalized tradition of community arts. Where once the term ‘community arts’ referred to a specialized and marginal form of practice, the specificity of this practice has been blurred by a ground-swell of art-making by, with, and in the context of community, across a range of art forms drawing from various disciplinary and professional domains from new media and performance, to design and public art. This broad ‘turn to community’ (Mulligan and Smith 2010) in the arts is being theorized and historicized by discourses largely detached from the community arts tradition. At the same time, the field of community arts is itself in a state of transition from its radical activist past, to increasing professionalization and institution-alization within government and the academy. Testament to the multiple and contradictory images and desires attached to the term, this interest in commu-nity takes many forms and operates under myriad names: social practice, community art, applied performance, networked culture, participatory art, new genre public art, relational aesthetics, dialogic aesthetics and so on. While not interchangeable, these terms designate a proliferation in contemporary forms of arts practice exploring social relationships, particularly, in the variety of ways it is possible to conceptualize, produce and present art. Across these fields, the typology of community also differs: models are drawn from Indigenous tradi-tions, rural idylls, socialist utopias or the philosophy of temporary autonomous zones. Nevertheless, underlying all these formations is a shift in focus towards an intensification of, and intervention in, human relationships, social connec-tion and belonging, made possible through artistic or creative activity.

The table below maps the key areas in which the turn to community is evident:

Field Forms of community practice

Contemporary art Social practiceRelational aestheticsParticipatory art Careful artUseful art

New media W eb 2.0/User-generated content/hive activities

New media artsNetwork culturesDistributed aesthetics

Public art Place-makingNew genre public art

Architecture and urban design

Participatory designUrban and neighbourhood renewal

Performance Applied theatreTheatre for developmentVerbatim theatreAnimateuring and improvisationCommunity rituals


Critical introduction

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Art historian Grant Kester sees this work as being driven by both political and aesthetic impulses. While diverse in form and content, artists situating their practice within the social world share:

… a common desire to establish new relationships between artistic prac-tice and other fields of knowledge production, from urbanism to envi-ronmentalism, from experimental education to participatory design. In many cases it has been inspired by, or affiliated with, new movements for social and economic justice around the globe. Throughout this field of practice we see a persistent engagement with sites of resistance and activism, and a desire to move beyond existing definitions of both art and the political.

(2013: 1)

It is possible to identify other more socio-economic forces driving the turn to community in the arts. These include a broad trend towards the ‘instru-mentalization of the arts’ for non-artistic, usually social outcomes (McCarthy et al. 2005); a shift in the terrain of governance in a post-welfare state from the ‘disciplinary’ governing of society to a more collaborative and consen-sual governing through community (Rose 1996, 1999); and the dissolution of boundaries between social, economic and cultural spheres, or the post-cultural condition. Additionally, Hal Foster identifies the desires of cultural institu-tions to foster the perception of public relevance as yet another factor driv-ing the interest in forms of social practice (1996: 306). Connected in complex ways to these external forces are various internal drives towards community for artists. These include practitioners seeking avenues to push existing insti-tutional boundaries and definitions of practice; a rejection of object-based practice in favour of process-driven work; and artists’ concern about the rele-vance of their existing practice in the face of massive geopolitical upheaval and ecological crises.

But in attempting to theorize ‘the turn’, a number of qualifications need to be made. The first is situating it within an international context in which the relationship between art and community is highly varied between regions, countries and cultures, and has assumed a multitude of different historical trajectories. The shifts taking place in the relationship between art and community we document in this Special Edition are very much a western phenomenon, influenced by Western European cultural traditions and taking place predominantly in the United Kingdom, the United States, Australia and Canada. The turn to community could, from the perspective of many Asian, African, Latin American or Indigenous contexts, be under-stood as a turn back to community, a re-integration of art in the West with the social worlds and practices from which it became detached in the eight-eenth century since the European Enlightenment (O’Connor 2011). This (re)turn reflects a particular kind of ontological insecurity in western soci-eties. Since the burgeoning of modernity, community has represented a counter-discourse to what Gerard Delanty has called the ‘instrumental, co-opting bonds of the state, the nation and its institutions’ (2003: 9). More recently, it has signalled a reaction to an increasing sense of uncertainty, atomization and risk in a global capitalist world.

Second, understanding the significance of the turn requires establishing a critical distance from the dominant discourses through which it is prima-rily historicized and theorized. Overwhelmingly, the shift in the relationship



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1. See Claire Bishop from the United Kingdom, Grant Kester, Ted Purves, Nato Thompson and Miwon Kwon, all from the United States, and all with a background in or orientation around visual arts, or visual art history.

between art and community is being theorized from the perspective of Anglo-American critical arts discourses trying to contextualize and critically evaluate the work of high-profile, professional artists and collectives from the United States, the United Kingdom or Western Europe. A significant proportion of this work is from the disciplinary perspective of visual art,1 a field with a very different history of social engagement to other art forms – particularly, performance and theatre. Concentrated around elite, professional artists, this critical discourse understands ‘the turn’ as a unidirectional movement from the arts to community. It is less attuned to the diverse histories of communi-ties themselves impelling certain art movements from the grass roots. Labour and feminist movements, migrants, queer and Indigenous communities: all have used art to advance political agendas, to foster recognition and cultural inclusion, or to maintain cultural heritage. Visual art perspectives have a disproportionate authority in structuring the terms of the debate around the turn to community, a disproportion reflected, to some degree, in the recur-ring reference to visual art critic and historian Claire Bishop by a number of contributors to this edition.

The articles in this collection present facets of the turn to community as it is manifesting in Australia. As a multicultural, anglophone country with an Indigenous cultural heritage and located ‘South of the West’ (Gibson 1992), Australia sits in an ambivalent relationship to the dominant Anglo-American critical discourse around the turn as it has been predominantly theorized and understood. Australian researchers have been slow to appreciate the lega-cies of Indigenous and migrant traditions, and the long histories of south-ern cultural exchange that have influenced Australian culture and distinguish it from Europe or North America. In addition, debates around the shifting orientation of arts practice in Australia have not drawn sufficiently upon Australia’s distinct tradition of community arts and CCD practice which has a long history of advocating for communities, particularly, from within the apparatus of the state. As Martin Mulligan argues (in this issue), this history of practice may offer ‘a new way of engaging with the state’ – for artists and communities – but is often dismissed by art theorists and critics as coopted, compromised art (Bishop 2006).

In beginning to map the turn to community, and in order to draw out the differences and disjunctures within this broader formation, we might pose some simple questions: how is the notion of community conceived within various fields of art practice, and what factors, internal and external, are driv-ing a new or renewed interest in community? What methods are involved in engaging with community and how is the relationship between ‘the arts’ and community negotiated and framed? What are the ends or ‘outcomes’ to which community is contributing? How much scope do communities them-selves have in shaping the end products to which they contribute? Such ques-tions form the bedrock of a more philosophical enquiry into the political and aesthetic value(s) of this work, and indeed, the very terms through which ‘value’ is institutionally understood, apportioned and critiqued. In his socio-logical history of community, Martin Mulligan (in this issue) elucidates how the appeal of community resides in its ambiguity. Community suggests at once the immediate social bonds between people through placed and embod-ied encounters, a form of belonging, and a moral purpose directing behav-iours, attitudes and ways of relating. As Nikolas Rose (1999) has identified, in the post-welfare state era of advanced liberalism, community has also been instrumentalized as a technique of governance, a way of managing marginal



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populations through the language of social inclusion. How do artists, from their various disciplinary contexts and backgrounds, negotiate the contradic-tory meanings and associations community invokes? What are the politics of the mainstreaming of community in the arts, and what are the costs – both for arts practitioners and for communities themselves?

Hal Foster draws out the radical antecedents of the turn to commu-nity in Walter Benjamin’s anti-fascist essay, ‘The artist as producer’. In this essay, Benjamin calls for artists of the left to intervene in the ‘means of artis-tic production’ and ‘transform the “apparatus” of bourgeois capitalism’ (Foster 1996). But in our present, in the context of the expansion of the logic of neo-liberal capitalism to all domains of social life, and the concomitant uncertainty that political truth might be found outside the dominance of the market and the state, the politics of social transformation through art seems less certain. Moreover, in the conscription of community into the service of governance and other institutional agendas, can the arts’ turn to community lead to ‘an evasion of institutional critique as often as an elaboration of it’ (Foster 1996: 306)?

It is already clear that an important feature of the turn to community in the arts is the continued disconnect between the fields listed above and existing traditions of community arts and community cultural development practice (CACD or CCD practice). In one instance of this disconnect, critic Claire Bishop (2012) positions the recent interest in participatory practices in contemporary art in relation to a revival of 1960s art practices – from Fluxus to the Situationists, and a range of contemporary philosophical writings, from Jean-Luc Nancy’s The Inoperative Community (1991) to Nicholas Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics (2002). For Bishop, the founding texts of participation also include Walter Benjamin’s essay on Brecht and the Paris ‘Dada-season’ of 1921, in which André Breton coined the term ‘artificial hells’ to describe Dada events that moved out of the cabaret halls onto the streets. It is no surprise that a number of the contributions to this special issue wrestle (productively) with Claire Bishop’s work (Spiers, Beyerle, Badham). She has been one of the early and most prominent art historians to trace the history of participatory practice and to bring a critical language to bear upon its political and aesthetic ambitions. However, Bishop’s lineage of participatory practice, while valua-ble for situating many contemporary arts practices within a longer history of social engagement, is limiting in the sense that a history of this broad, varied and fragmented ‘turn to community’ is told through the critical lens of the modernist avant garde – and as stated above, from the disciplinary vantage of art history. Within this paradigm, and for Bishop in particular, the renun-ciation of authorship, the privileging of the ‘artist’s intentionality’ over the ‘work’s artistic identity’, the emphasis upon an ethics of practice over the ‘disruptive specificity of a given practice’ (2012: 23) constitute shifts that are deeply problematic for legitimating this work as ‘art’.

The artists and researchers engaging with Bishop’s work in their contribu-tions here reveal the authority that contemporary arts critical discourse exert over other, less theorized, less historicized modes of practice. To some degree, the insights of critics like Bishop get indigenized and appropriated as they are applied to the very localized, art and place-making projects featured here. But perhaps the narrow range of theoretical references deployed by these contrib-utors also says something about the failings of arts pedagogy in Australia: that it needs to seek out consciously and nurture the many histories, traditions and practices drawn from this place and its Asian-Pacific surrounds; that it needs to carefully situate and localize the Anglo-American critical hegemony that



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tends to be applied as though universal and place-less. Drawing from this observation, in this issue we ask: what is at stake in the fact that the emerging history of social practice in contemporary art is being written without refer-ence to a longer history of community-based arts, or to perspectives grounded outside of the western anglosphere, or from a wider field of artform tradi-tions? The stakes include the extent of the open nature of art participation, the recognition of alternate traditions, aesthetics and values, the role of the artist (including the frequent privileging of the artist’s ethical position), and the role of institutional interests in shaping social practice and its expression. Also at stake is the very shape and content of the arts themselves. On the one hand, art critic Robert Nelson argues that the trend towards social practice can move artists away from the core business of art: ‘as artists abandon the techniques and disciplines of a medium and see their role as social facilitators and theo-rists, they have less and less chance to make a contribution to visual language’ (2011, emphasis added). On the other hand, for Grant Kester (2013), it is the critic and art historian who has failed to adapt to the radical shifts in the loca-tion, purpose and conduct of arts practice. For Kester, it is the altered domain of practice that demands that critics and historians ‘redefine or transform our understanding of aesthetic experience’ and ‘challenge preconceived notions of the object of art’ (2013: 1).

This Journal of Arts & Communities Special Edition examines the way the relationship between art-making and community-making has been trans-formed by renewed interest in the idea of community across all art forms. Invited articles have been developed from presentations for the Community Turn in the Arts, a one-day symposium conducted by the Centre for Cultural Partnerships, University of Melbourne, held on 12 June 2012. The sympo-sium was organized to gather a range of disciplinary perspectives on the turn to community and for thinking critically about its implications. Perspectives featured here include cultural research and cultural studies (Badham, MacDowall, Wyatt), sociology (Mulligan), contemporary art (Spiers), archi-tecture (Beyerle), music and composition (Hullick) and digital media produc-tion (Kuddell and Lyons-Reid). Rather than presenting a celebratory survey of contemporary art in the context of community, this array of perspectives is intended to expand the space for interrogating the significance of community for artists, for critical arts discourses, and for the social and cultural politics of art. But more than this, this collection of articles is intended to bring to light some of the submerged differences and divisions (as well as overlap and affinities) between different practitioners and disciplines.

The articles are divided into two main sections: Part One from the theoreti-cally based perspective of researchers (Badham, Mulligan and Wyatt) and Part Two from the creative or arts-based research of artists reflecting upon their work (Spiers, Beyerle, Hullick, and Kuddell and Lyons-Reid). Marnie Badham delves into the mechanics of the ‘turn’ itself, drawing out and distinguishing the multiple traditions of practice through which ‘community’ has become a generative artistic site. Organizing these traditions into three main terrains – identity politics, governance and contemporary art – her article provides a valuable ‘expanded cartography’ for situating the following articles in this edition, and for mapping community-based arts practice across art forms in general. In contrast to Badham’s horizontal mapping of ‘community’, Mulligan maps community along the vertical axis of history. His article, ‘Thinking of community as an aspirational and contestable idea’ explores the ambivalence of community through a historical analysis of sociological approaches to the



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concept – from the classical work of Durkheim, to contemporary sociolo-gists like Delanty, Bauman and Rose. His article demonstrates the surprising persistence of the power of community for more than a century in the face of large-scale social and technological transformations. Urbanization, globaliza-tion and expanded technologies of communication have not only intensified its appeal, but have also multiplied the formations of and meanings attached to community. Like Badham’s work, Mulligan’s article provides a cartography for identifying and distinguishing between visions of community mobilized by subsequent contributors.

Wyatt’s article, ‘The West Welcomes Refugees’, shifts the scale of interro-gating community to a specific and located site: a government initiated public art project in an old industrial neighbourhood in Melbourne’s inner west. Through a close reading of this case study, she considers the consequences of the turn to community for thinking critically about community arts from the vantage of cultural studies. In particular, she applies Homi Bhabha’s theo-rization of the nation as a ‘location of culture’ to thinking about community arts and its politics of place. This approach is an example of the generative possibilities of bringing new theoretical viewpoints to the critical analysis of community arts, particularly theoretical perspectives outside of the standard orbit of community arts practitioners, policy discourses and art history.

Part Two of the edition begins with Amy Spiers (‘Too comfortable’) and Ammon Beyerle (‘Agonistic participation’) reflecting upon their work making socially engaged art and participatory architecture, respectively. Both authors open up vital insights into the generative dialectic between creative practice and theoretical research, both drawing a kind of agonistic energy from theo-rists like Rosalyn Deutsche, Claire Bishop and Chantal Mouffe. Their articles present a lively to-ing and fro-ing between theoretical concepts, their own practice and the questioning and reflecting that goes on between this. It is clear through their reflections that theory informs their practice as much as creative practice informs their response to theory. While there is considerable overlap in their approaches, Spiers and Beyerle are impacted by their theoreti-cal research in very different ways. For Spiers, theories of radical and plural democracy illuminate some of the failings of socially engaged art. For Beyerle, a theoretical history of participation in architecture seems to illuminate some-thing about the inherent participatory nature of architecture itself – as a proc-ess of community-making in the context of divergent interests and visions.

The final two papers by James Hullick and Jennifer Lyons-Reid and Carl Kuddell from Change Media read more like manifestos than reflections on practice. In a compelling fusion of poetic and academic language, Hullick’s ‘I am that we are a Meta-Listener’ draws upon an eclectic range of theories and his compositional work with the Amplified Elephants, a sound art ensemble for people with intellectual disabilities. What is striking about his article is Hullick’s seamless melding of humanist understandings of art – the ‘enlight-enment’ of humanity through serving the ‘sonopoetic’ – with the therapeutic and psycho-social needs of community. Using the idea of sonic ecosystems, Hullick pluralizes the field of arts production as a space where multiply abled practitioners and diverse forms of listening and creating can thrive.

Finally, Carl Kuddell and Jennifer Lyons-Reid of Change Media draw upon a number of projects with Indigenous and disadvantaged youth in order to question some of the stereotypes, myths and unrealistic expectations of CACD practice. In their many years of cultural community building through digital media and education programmes, they have worked across a complex



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terrain of government institutions, ‘excluded’ communities, local organizations and the arts industry. Their article, ‘Turn CACD on’, underlines the ethical tensions generated by a practice that sees itself as a vehicle for social change, while disavowing its investment in structures of power that maintain the status quo. While at times ambivalent about the value of much CACD prac-tice, Lyons-Reid and Kuddell are clear about the capacity for CACD to inno-vate, to transform social relationships and the structures through which they are constituted. Ethical practice, they argue, is embedded in thinking through, and being honest about, the asymmetries in power structuring the relation-ship between arts practitioners and participants. Their article highlights the many perils invoked in the ‘turn to community’ in the arts, as well as pointing to this work’s potential to renew both arts practice and social relationships

The recent expansion of art-making in the context of community may mean teasing apart the historical relationship between art and the state, particularly in highly governmentalized liberal democracies like Australia and the United Kingdom. If emerging forms of community-engaged art could learn from the highly developed politics of community development or the often subtle methods of CCD practitioners, the broad turn to community in the arts can also transform our understanding of existing CCD practice. For this tradition, working with community has long implied a kind of consen-sus of practice. Owen Kelly, narrating the history of community arts in the United Kingdom forty years ago, describes how the field fell into the ‘wait-ing arms of the state’ (1984: 14) because it failed to clearly articulate a set of values and goals. Beginning from a small number of practitioners who shared a commitment to left-wing activist politics forged in the late 1960s, the move-ment was defined more through what it was against than what it ‘actually did’ (Kelly 1984: 13, original emphasis). For Kelly, an assumed consensus between practitioners meant that they never had to articulate their political ideals and the nature of the social change to which they hoped to contribute. Assumed consensus rendered the politics, values, methods and ethics of this work implicit, rather than explicit and available for critical discussion. More than this, the unstated nature of this consensus has meant that the politics of consensus (as opposed to dissensus and division) has itself remained unex-plored, because the consensus has been invisible.

Kelly’s critique is directed at community arts as a field that consolidated within government through policies and discourses directed at defining and resourcing the sector (1984: 1). In Australia, Gay Hawkins’ (1993) history of community arts documents a similar governmentalization. Community arts, as it is commonly understood in Australia, is ‘a creation of government policy, an official invention’ (1993: xviii) circumscribing a vague and ‘heterogeneous field of cultural activity’ (1993: xviii) largely defined through its relationship to elite, mainstream or consumer culture:

‘Community’ was posed in opposition to the power and alienation of the state, the mass media or whatever. In this configuration the explicit purpose of subsidy was to establish communities, to organize and address various marginal groups not as audiences, not as consumers, but as self-determining ‘communities’.

(Hawkins 1993: 162)

In Hawkins analysis, the instrumentality of community arts is concealed in this positioning because its deep association with oppositional and authentic



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forms of engagement obscures its complicity, first, with the welfare state, and then with neo-liberal forms of governance and social reform. It is in this context that the community arts movement failed to adequately challenge or question the values and aspirations that it held as self-evident. The broad turn to community in the arts makes clear that the very terms and justifications through which a community arts movement, and eventually a CCD sector emerged in Australia have shifted. CCD practice and the history of practi-tioner-led work is coming under challenge by the increasing institutionaliza-tion and bureaucratization of ‘community’ within a number of different sectors: government, academia, cultural institutions and the market. In the profes-sionalization and institutionalization of this work, different visions, priori-ties, methods and political motivations are rupturing the consensus that has dominated community arts discourses. The contemporary practice of commu-nity-based arts needs to revise some of its basic distinctions and justifications. Some of these include the opposition between ‘high’ art and ‘community’ art, between ‘democratizing culture’ and ‘cultural democracy’, the assump-tion that communities ‘need a voice’ or ‘need art’ and the idea that culture is an effective space for identity formation. These ideas, once axiomatic for community-based arts, are all under challenge.

The idea that working with community implies an unstated and shared set of social, aesthetic and political values was challenged, in a subtle way, during the course of the symposium upon which the articles of this edition was based. At the end of the day, when all of the formal presentations were over and those in the audience were asking questions of the various present-ers, a series of fault lines began to open up in the room. In these informal discussions, very different investments in community became apparent. For some, working with community does not necessarily mean a commitment to community. For others, ‘community’ is one idea or site amongst many possi-bly generative spaces for art; community gives shape to a certain practice (whether theorizing or art-making), but is not necessarily the raison d’être of this practice. In other instances, the ‘turn to community’ is a pragmatic choice for practitioners to sustain themselves as artists; it is a way of earning a living in a particularly competitive field, or a way of subsidizing (and nourish-ing) other art with other aesthetic and ethical ambitions. In these instances, turning to community is, increasingly, detached from the activist politics with which it is so strongly associated.

A subtle sense of disquiet was palpable as these different views came to light.

Within the context of an assumed consensus, the unspoken expectation is that we should all inhabit a shared politics, a shared ethics, a shared commit-ment and a shared language that can be understood by everyone. The pres-ence of feeling in the room communicated more than the careful wording of the presentations themselves. Perhaps this feeling emerged because there has not been a space to discuss or dissect our various positionings? What are the consequences of an expanded ‘turn to community’ in the arts? How are tradi-tional community arts practitioners responding to the more institutionalized practices encroaching on terrain they see as ‘theirs’? Who has the authority to represent and define the boundaries of ‘community’ in the arts? This special edition opens up a rare opportunity for practitioners themselves (both research-ers and artists) to reflect upon and question the terms of their own practice. Crucially, in the differences between contributors’ methods, philosophy and motivation in working with community, readers can begin to demarcate



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boundaries and categories within this expanded and amorphous cultural field. The collection of articles here lack perspectives from government – local coun-cil arts workers, policy-makers, politicians – and from cultural institutions – curators, museum directors and arts managers. Including these perspectives in future collections would both expand and refine the terms through which we critically engage with art in the context of community, adding yet more layers to its complexity and implications.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the editors of the Journal of Arts and Community, Greg Giesekam and Stephanie Knight, for their guidance, advice and patience in the preparation of this Special Edition. We would also like to acknowledge that this research was supported under the Australian Research Council’s Linkage Projects funding scheme (LP 100200277).

RefeRences

Bourriaud, Nicholas (2002), Relational Aesthetics (trans. Simon Pleasance and Fronza Woods), France: Les presses du réel.

Bishop, Claire (2006), ‘The social turn: Collaboration and its discontents’, Artforum International, 44: 6, pp. 178–83.

—— (2012), Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship, London and New York: Verso.

Delanty, Gerard (2003), Community, London: Routledge.Foster, Hal (1996), ‘The artist as ethnographer?’, in The Return of the Real,

Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 302–09.Gibson, Ross (1992), South of the West: Postcolonialism and the Narrative

Construction of Australia, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Hawkins, Gay (1993), From Nimbin to Mardi Gras: Constructing Community

Arts, St Leonards: Allen & Unwin. Kelly, Owen (1984), Community, Art and the State: Storming the Citadels,

London and New York: Comedia Publishing Group. Kester, Grant (2013), ‘The device laid bare: On some limitations in current art

criticism’, e-flux journal, 50: 12, December, pp. 1–11. McCarthy, K. F., Ondaatje, E. H., Zakaras, L. and Brooks, A. (2005), Gifts of

the Muse: Reframing the Debate About the Benefits of the Arts, Santa Monica, CA: Rand Corporation.

Mulligan, Martin and Smith, Pia (2010), Art, Governance and the Turn to Community: Putting Art at the Heart of Local Government, Melbourne: RMIT University.

Nancy, Jean-Luc (1991), The Inoperative Community (trans. Peter Connor, eds Lisa Garbus, Michael Holland and Simona Sawhny), Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Nelson, Robert (2011), ‘Reflecting on art’s paradoxes’, The Age, 28 December, p. 13.

O’Connor, Justin (2011), Arts and Creative Industries: A Historical Overview: And an Australian Conversation, Sydney: Australia Council for the Arts.

Rose, Nikolas (1996), ‘Death of the social? – re-figuring the territory of gover-nment’, Economy and Society, 25: 3, pp. 327–56.

—— (1999), Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.



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SuggeSted citation

Wyatt, D., MacDowall, L. and Mulligan, M. (2013), ‘Critical introduction: The Turn to Community in the Arts’, Journal of Arts & Communities 5: 2+3, pp. 81–91, doi: 10.1386/jaac.5.2-3.81_1

contributor detailS

Dr Danielle Wyatt is a Research Associate working at the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne. Her recently completed Ph.D. examined community art projects in the suburban ‘badlands’ of Melbourne and Sydney. Her current research interests include discourses around multiculturalism, the postcolonial politics of place, and the aesthetics of community and collaborative art.

Contact: School of Culture and Communication, The University of Melbourne, Parkville, Victoria 3010, Australia.E-mail: [email protected]

Dr Lachlan MacDowall is Head of the Centre for Cultural Partnerships in the Faculty of the VCA and MCM, University of Melbourne. His areas of research include the history and aesthetics of graffiti, the creative city and community-based art-making. He has published widely on graffiti, street art and urban creativity. He is also the Principal Researcher on a three-year ARC-funded project examining the effective evaluation of community-based arts projects, in partnership with the Australia Council for the Arts and Associate Professor Martin Mulligan, RMIT University.

Contact: Centre for Cultural Partnerships, The University of Melbourne, 234 St Kilda Road, Southbank, Victoria, 3006, Australia.E-mail: [email protected]

Associate Professor Martin Mulligan is a sociologist working at the Globalism Research Centre, RMIT University since 2004. He has completed a range of projects focusing on the sustainability of local communities in the context of globalization in Australia and Sri Lanka. Projects in Australia have been conducted in partnership with VicHealth, Regional Arts Victoria and the Australia Council for the Arts and they have focused on issues related to well-being and local governance. He was also a chief investigator on a major study for AusAID on lessons to be learnt from the post-tsunami recovery effort in Sri Lanka and India and that research resulted in the publication of a book by Routledge, India, 2012. In conducting research on the challenges facing local communities from Australia to Sri Lanka and India, he has developed new ways of thinking about the sociology of community in the contemporary world. In 2011 he has developed a new research interest in cultural adaptation to climate change at the level of local communities.

Contact: School of Global, Urban and Social Studies, RMIT University, GPO Box 2476, Melbourne, Victoria 3001, Australia.E-mail: [email protected]

Danielle Wyatt, Lachlan MacDowall and Martin Mulligan have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the authors of this work in the format that was submitted to Intellect Ltd.


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Critical Introduction: The Turn to the Community in the Arts

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