Meg Rotzel reflects on the formal successes of the April 13th dinner and the Berwick's responsibility for inclusion in conversations around public art.
The Berwick’s first dinner party in the “Meet Me at the Table” series focused on the individual artist, and was generously hosted in Jill Slosburg-Ackerman’s studio in Somerville. We gathered a group of artists and arts administrators in order to begin the series from the artists’ perspective. This was a comfortable and natural place for the Berwick to begin, as our programs and founding members are artist focused. However, one of the aims of this series is to learn and grow from our current position, and build towards meaningful collaborations and connections with wider existing communities in our local area. The dinner provided a stable starting place to venture out into more complex ideas of the intersections of public works and my interest in social artistic practice and its formalization within the art world.
Our multi-talented artists, Hannah Burr and Sarah McKeon, made a work of art that focused questions I have about the junction of artwork and meaningful conversation. Sarah and Hannah designed a menu and ongoing game that took the formal progression of a dinner and made conversation between diners and the rhythm of a multi-course dinner sculpturally visible. I’m interested in artworks based in exchange that invite awareness of individual acts within communities that acknowledge and build upon social structures in a meaningful way. For this bit of writing on “Meet me at the Table”, I’d like to parse out the formal aspects of this project in order to understand the Berwick’s, and my engagement in socially motivated artworks “…that takes as its theoretical horizon the sphere of human interactions and its social context…” (thank you Nicolas Bouurriad).
The dinner was composed of 6 courses of passed platters requiring each diner to serve her neighbor. Each guest marked the courses, in turn, by clinking a glass, opening an envelope announcing the next course, and passing around a bowl that contained varied individual instructions. Each chair at the table was outfitted with what looked like saddlebags, simply and elegantly sewn from canvas. Within these double pocketed bags were piles of unfinished wooden blocks, some gently sanded, others brilliantly colored. I received instructions throughout the dinner that read “place a block every time you smile”, “do not make eye contact” and “place several blocks when you agree with someone”. One guest received an instruction that read “place 13 blocks when the table comes to a consensus”, which was a momentous and clearly marked event! By the time we were into the second course the table started resembling a little city with towers of blocks that marked moments and gestures within conversation.
The artwork, pared with the discussion topic of public artwork, unfolded together. We learned the game of placing blocks while we got to know our fellow diners. The discovery of the game, our cohorts and the food brought the table together in convivial conversation about the objects and landscapes that we were all building together. This lead to my understanding of the blocks as symbolic of each of our actions, verbal and non-verbal, within conversation and collective building of ideas. The table was evidence of our individual activities and their relationships to each other.
I sat next to Matthew Hincman and Laurel Demarco, each of us had own ways of responding to our individual instructions. Laurel built concisely around her plate, and at times avoided placing blocks, I started to enthusiastically build up and out into my neighbor’s space, while Matthew did the same, but first began with picking up his plate and building a platform underneath it. Eventually we became comfortable with the necessity to build into each other’s spaces and developed a kind of playful set of etiquette, which allowed for the use of shared personal space.
Through the flow of courses, activity, and shared neighborly building the dinner conversation proceeded, as many formal dinner party conversations proceed, beginning with individual conversations that grow to engage the whole table. Sarah and Hannah’s engineering of a standard set of known formal dining etiquette, multiple courses, a considered pause between courses to regroup, and the introduction of new elements (food, conversation piece), we moved comfortably through the evening. Topics of the artist’s place in public art were discussed ranging from convoluted bureaucratic processes, misunderstanding of artist intelligence, frustration with funding, the multiple rewards of making things in public places, the need for education in the field, and anecdotes of making and encountering public artworks locally and in other places.
I felt that there were meaningful moments within the dinner, especially where Ellen Driscoll acknowledged the difficulty of frequently being the only woman (and artist) around a boardroom table during the process of making public work. Matthew Nash brought up the topic of art criticism and public artwork’s outsider status within the discussion of other forms of artwork. Jill Slosburg-Ackerman questioned the meaning of public works, and if they could contain transformative moments. Laurel Demarco, a graduating art student, was inspired by the conversation as a whole, not knowing that the field was a possibility for a young artist. The final course of the dinner included a discussion of the artwork, which provided Hannah and Sarah feedback about their project, a mini crit that drew the evening to what seemed an appropriate close.
All of these conversational moments were important, however, as an organizer of this event, the conversation represented an acknowledgement of artist centered issues, but did not bring my thinking about the public sphere and it’s intricacies any further. I believe this is because we were located within the artist studio and within the artist community, a place where I feel comfortable and knowledgeable, which was our initial intention. Regardless of my comfort, I was unhappy that I came away without moving into new territory or getting into the meat of public works. This is where the project of defining goals, deeper intentions, and fears of complexity and risk of the public sphere must begin. The Berwick’s project of supporting work that builds a foundation of equal footing of collaboration must reach outside of its known world.
I’d like to return to the form of Hannah and Sarah’s dinner party. As described, and as pictures of the evening’s events show, the dinner party proceeded in a well choreographed and, actually, well known way. This was not apparent at the onset, as the rules of the game, and its manifestation unfolded in stages as the evening progressed. However, with hindsight, I enjoyed the artwork because already knew its form and rhythm, and how to engage because of its familiar form. What does this imply then, this comfort and rhythm that is culturally embedded within me as a (western) diner? What do I take away from this experience, now knowing that the entwining of a culturally known forms of dining and games directly provide a conduit for engagement with my neighbor in conversation and friendly making? And to move into shadier territory, what does this culturally known entwinement imply when I ultimately left with the galvanizing feeling of coming together, but not one of progress towards my goals of, well, positive impact on my social sphere.
To be clear, the artists are not responsible for the ultimate questioning of the dinner party. I’ll begin by questioning the form that has become popularized by the art world terms of relational aesthetics and dialogical artworks. I believe that these practices, which are now acknowledged by the art market, and taught in art schools, may seem to “take[s] as its theoretical horizon the sphere of human interaction[s] and its social context”, but after taking a “theoretical horizon of social context”, it does not actually impact that context unless it’s willing to take risks outside of its own social context. Unsuccessful artworks reiterate their own framework and make us aware of context. But, I don’t believe they actually do anything with its’ privileged and coded context in relationship to anything, except possibly other art objects.
THIS is why I’m fascinated by public artwork and its’, at times, doleful complexities. It’s given the challenge of actually doing something, or at least that’s what I’ve put upon the term “public art”. The form of public artwork sits at the intersection of many desires and expectations, “... expected to address urgent developments in a diverse range of social issues and relationships. Artists are given the task of taking on these complex, problematic and ultimately socially meaningful intersections in order to lead up into engagement via a civic sanctioned process of collaboration in order to express the “community’s” ultimate desire of dealing with these problems. We all know that this is a tall order for an artist, regardless of how many committees diligently work towards these hopeful goals.
So now that I’ve teased out this morsel, it’s important that I, and the Berwick, declare a closer reading of our intentions within our Public Art Incubator program as well as our goals for this series of dinner parties. The Berwick intends to take on the incubation of temporary public artworks that deal with social public space. By defining the temporality and the subject of our shared social sphere we become much more focused on our goals for the dinner parties as a whole. We are (I am) uncomfortable outside our (my) formal practice of art. We must build and depend on a well-honed practice of collaboration; one that starts as its foundation in rethinking authorship at the onset and requires intersections of common goals with another body of socially minded people. We must learn from community organizers and healthy community groups. We must seek out places where both groups have moments in common and build upon them, always with the time consuming process of building together, not side-by-side.
With this important fact stated and known, I return briefly to the issue of form. It is the artist’s gift and the Berwick’s ultimate goal, to produce artworks that are formally satisfying and engaging. To make a full step outside of the terms of the art world and into the reality of people, our artwork needs to look and feel like it’s ours to play with and learn from. In this way, we can look again at Hannah and Sarah’s dinner party artwork and acknowledge its strength in precisely instigating play and exchange on a group level. What was missing was the Berwick’s responsibility, the inclusion of people other than our own. And with this, we proceed to our next dinner parties, charged with the responsibility of true and meaningful collaboration.
- Meg Rotzel, April 2007