ONE PLACE AFTER ANOTHER - Monoskop

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political issues) challenged and expanded.” 28 According to Kester, self-determined
identities of “politically-coherent” communities are derived from an ongoing col-
lective process of internal debate and consensus formation around issues of common
interest to their members. Defined primarily by shared cultural traditions and
a shared sense of struggle against different modes of oppression (racist, sexist,
classist, etc.), these communities are more resistant to appropriation and abuse by
the artist and the art world.
There are several problems with this formulation. First, its identification of
communities in terms of prior “coherence” discounts the ways in which artists can
help engender different types of community. As I tried to show in the previous
chapter, an art project can be an important catalyst for the development of new alliances
and coalitions, however temporary (e.g., Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle and Street-
Level Video, Haha and Flood, and to some degree Mark Dion and the Chicago
Urban Ecology Group). Moreover, quite contrary to Kester’s conclusions, many collaborative
projects reveal the extent to which “coherent” communities are more
susceptible to appropriation by artists and art institutions precisely because of the
singular definition of their collective identities (e.g., Grennan and Sperandio and
the candy-making union; Ericson and Ziegler and the resident group at Ogden
Courts Apartments). In fact, certain types of community groups are now very often
favored for artistic partnerships because of the easy correspondence between
their identity and particular social issues. The practical benefits of such an approach
for some artists as well as most sponsoring institutions (less ambiguity,
more control over the process of collaboration, more predictability and easier projection
of outcome, facility in promotion and instrumentalization) have already led
to the popularization of newly bureaucratized and formulaic versions of communitybased
art: artist + community + social issue = new critical/public art. 29 In such circumstances,
the identity of a community group comes to serve as the thematic
content of the art work, representing this or that social issue in an isolated and reified
way. In the process, the community itself can become reified as well.
Secondly, Kester’s argument implicitly supports the essentialism that undergirds
the frequently voiced belief that only local artists—from the community, from