ONE PLACE AFTER ANOTHER - Monoskop

30 Kester, “Aesthetic Evangelists,” 6.
31 This was precisely the premise of Group Material’s contribution to the 1996 “Points of Entry”
exhibition at the Three Rivers Arts Festival in Pittsburgh. They used the exhibition guide as
the site of intervention, incorporating divergent and contradictory comments from residents
(gathered through extensive interviews), local businessmen, city officials, academics, urban
theorists, and cultural critics into the official language of the publicity material. The project
intended a disarticulation of the notion of community as put upon the artists by the organizers
of the exhibition. See “Points of Entry,” program guide (Pittsburgh: Three Rivers Arts Festival,
1996).
32 Kester writes, “This [politically-coherent community] formation almost always takes place
against the grain of the dominant culture, which survives by individualizing social relationships
in which the distribution of power is based on differences of class, race, gender, and
sexuality. ...The politically-coherent community can come into existence almost anywhere
there are individuals who have struggled to identify their common interests (and common
enemies) over and against a social system that is dedicated to denying the existence of systematic
forms of oppression.” Kester, “Aesthetic Evangelists,” 6.
33 See my comments in chapter 4 on Heather Mac Donald’s article “The New Community
Activism: Social Justice Comes Full Circle,” City Journal (Autumn 1993): 44–55. Adopting a
victim discourse, those with cultural, financial, and political capital frequently characterize
their positions of privilege as marginal now, especially in relation to the supposed authoritarian
intervention of the (liberal) state overrun by politically correct dogmatism (it is argued that
one can be unfairly marginalized because of privilege). A similar logic structures neoconser-
vative arguments for “new citizenship” and “new civil society.” See, for example, William A.
Schambra, “By the People: The Old Values of the New Citizenship,” Policy Review (Summer
1994): 32–39.
34 Kester, “Aesthetic Evangelists,” 5–6. He suggests such an approach specifically as an alterna-
tive to the tendency toward the fetishization of authenticity, on the one hand, and a kind of
poststructuralist “denuding,” on the other, “which views the artist’s transgressions of (what are
seen as wholly arbitrary) social and cultural identities as inherently liberatory.” According to
Kester, these are two typical reactions in the art world to the fact that the exchange between a
community group and an artist is never entirely organic.
35 Fleming, letter to the editor, 3.
36 Chantal Mouffe, “Citizenship and Political Identity,” October 61 (Summer 1992): 28.
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NOTES TO PAGES 142–148