I tend to have a lot of apprehension and reservation about community art projects, especially projects that attempt to involve “resource-poor” or inner-city and otherwise marginalized groups. I’m not sure what informs these reservations. I think it’s a combination of my UBC undergrad education, where I spent a whole term in a seminar with Serge Guilbaut studying community and street art projects and interrogating their usefulness, and my conversations with social worker friends in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, who were often plagued by well-meaning but uninformed artists and non-profit organizations that wanted to “heal the neighbourhood” in some way or another through a community art project.
But, at the same time, I want to believe that successful and respectful community art projects, or collaborative and interactive art practices that engage the public in an accessible way, are possible. I still – maybe naively – believe that art can have a social and political function. That it can move people in a very particular way and accomplish or express things that other mediums sometimes cannot.
All of which is to say that I don’t entirely know what to think of Darren O’Donnell and the Mammalian Diving Reflex, and in particular the current “The Duel in The ‘Dale: Parkdale Public School v. Queen West” series of projects happening in Toronto’s Queen West gallery area.
Things that seem positive or potentially interesting about the project:
It’s had some pretty good media play as of late – especially this recent article in The National Post – and a couple of my friends have been helping out with organizing the events and seem really excited by the potential of what’s happening. At least this discussion about the Parkdale neighbourhood and its relationship to the rapid gentrification happening in the Queen West neighbourhood (which the Queen West galleries have inevitably played a role in – intentionally or not) is being initiated by the project.
People often say that Americans don’t like talking about race in order to pretend that it isn’t an issue, but I often think Canadians – and Torontonians especially – don’t like talking about class in order to pretend it doesn’t exist. So I appreciate that O’Donnell’s project is at least broaching the subject of what happens after a neighbourhood is gentrified by the arts and is re-framing the tension between Parkdale residents and what he calls “artsters” into a visible, if slightly over-the-top, series of performances.
Things about the project that unnerve me or rub me the wrong way:
I have some concerns about the motives of involving these kids in what are traditionally adult tasks (preparing a prix fixe menu, performing in a band at The Gladstone, giving a tour of an art gallery). As the National Post reporter accurately pointed out, one of the reasons these projects are bound to be well-attended is that the kids are “cute.” The idea of watching them attempt to enact these adult roles seems to necessarily entail humour, but I sort of wonder at whose expense. Is it funny because watching these kids playfully do what adults see as quite earnest makes us embarrassed by how seriously we adults take ourselves? If I’m feeling super optimistic, I’d like to think that was O’Donnell’s aim.
But the pessimistic part of me thinks that the humour actually lies in something far less self-aware and much more sinister. This part – let’s call it the UBC indoctrinated part – thinks that the humour actually comes from a strange and almost colonial kind of child-adult anthropomorphism. That when adults see these kids trying to play grown up, the humour comes from the fact that we think they’re “cute” in a patronizing way – that their inability to successfully inhabit these roles is funny in the same way that watching a dog awkwardly dressed in a human business suit is funny.**
Clint Burnham, a Vancouver-based critic and writer that’s part of the Kootenay School of Writing, wrote a great article in The Fillip Review a few years ago called “No Art After Pickton” that laid out a lot of his concerns about community art projects in the Downtown Eastside that I often find myself coming back to. In it, he points out:
“It’s funny how people only worry about community art for poor people. Oh right, the civic galleries are community art for the rich. But you never hear anyone saying let’s start a mosaic project in Kerrisdale or Rosedale. No one’s collecting oral histories in Winchester or running a poetry storefront in Shaughnessy.“
And later, he argues what I think I’ve been trying to say in a much more eloquent way when he says “the irony in much community art is that the masses being helped are actually doing stuff that in other contexts is either exploitation or bureaucratic indoctrination (to use extreme language: I mean ideology)“.
The Mammalian Diving Reflex’s description of the two contenders in the project is also sort of off-putting, especially when referring to the Queen West “artsters”: “In the other corner are the artsters –predominantly white, mostly from other provinces, well-educated in the liberal arts, ready and eager to get drunk at gallery openings and always on the lookout for exciting but cheap ethnic dining experiences.” On the one hand, this is sort of scathingly accurate (I fit into most of those categories). On the other hand, aren’t the employees of the MDR also “artsters” by this description? If so, what is their role in this face-off between the Parkdale “community” as represented by the school kids, and the nomadic, parasitic “artsters”?
There’s also something about the whole notion of “social acupuncture” (the name O’Donnell uses for these projects) that worries me – does that mean that, like when we visit a professional acupuncturist, we are leaving ourselves in O’Donnell’s professional hands, trusting that he will make us feel better, even if the process necessarily involves a bit of pain? If so, why is it that we “artsters” want to feel that healing pain so badly? Is it a way of assuaging our guilt about our implication in the changes happening in Parkdale?
This is a rambling, messy post, but it’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately and trying to make sense of in my own brain. Maybe I’m being too hard on O’Donnell and the MDR and community art practices in general. Interactive art practices are always problematic in some way and maybe O’Donnell has no intention to reinvent the wheel and solve all these issues with one project. In either case, I would love to know what other people think and how they feel about all this and to be convinced that there’s something else here that I’m missing.
Addendum: more responses, comments and the occasional kitten-related gif can be found at Lorna Mills and Sally McKay’s blog here.
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** I owe a lot of the ideas in this post, and this part in particular, to Cait McKinney who has been instrumental in making me think this through and wrap my head around it.
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