ONE PLACE AFTER ANOTHER - Monoskop

zations are pressured today to think and act as if communities exist as coherent social
entities awaiting outreach. The field continues to covet images of coherence,
unity, and wholeness as the ideal representation of a community. (In a sense, the
shift in focus from public spaces to local cultures has not displaced the ideology of
unity that has prevailed in [public] art over the past three decades.) While such an
outlook contributes to some expansion of art audiences, strengthening the tie between
elite cultural institutions and local constituencies normally disengaged from
their activities, its effects also include the reification and colonization of marginal,
disenfranchised social groups, as well as the concomitant reification and commodification
of local cultures. Furthermore, as some artists have noticed, communitybased
art can function as a kind of “soft” social engineering to defuse, rather than
address, community tensions and to divert, rather than attend to, the legitimate dissatisfaction
that many community groups feel in regard to the uneven distribution of
existing cultural and economic resources. Additionally, according to artist Iñigo
Manglano-Ovalle, there “is a growing and disturbing similarity between initiatives
such as community policing and [community-based] cultural programs,” both motivated
at times by a paranoiac fear of social upheaval. 49 Which is to say, communitybased
art “on the streets,” despite the “real-life” siting, serves a disciplinary
purpose just as do art museums.
As the artistic, political, and ethical pitfalls of community-based art become
more visible and more theorized, the need to imagine alternative possibilities of togetherness
and collective action, indeed of collaboration and community, becomes
more pronounced. Even to begin thinking about these alternatives, however, requires
a major reconceptualization of the “community.” French philosopher Jean-
Luc Nancy has defined some guidelines for such an endeavor: “there is no
communion, there is no common being, but there is being in common”; 50 “the
question should be the community of being and not the being of community.” 51 In
Nancy’s overall project, according to George Van Den Abbeele, “community is
neither a community of subjects, nor a promise of immanence, nor a communion of
individuals in some higher or greater totality. ... It is not, most specifically, the
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THE (UN)SITINGS OF COMMUNITY