art/vision/voice - Maryland Institute College of Art

6 art / vision / voice
learning is not truncated or neglected in the service of production.
Ideally, resources permit an ongoing and deepening collaboration.
v Although outside observers almost always err in evaluating ccd
projects by the standards usually applied to conventional art works,
the evaluation standards that are appropriate to ccd practice are
those that focus on participants’ awareness and learning. Participants’
cultural knowledge should become deeper and broader through the
exploration of their own identities and growing mastery of the arts
media involved. They should feel satisfied with what they have been
able to express and communicate through the project, and the project
should meet participants’ own self-declared aims. Most important,
participants should demonstrate heightened confidence and a more
favorable disposition toward taking part in community cultural life
and social action in future: the ccd experience should have the effect
of stimulating further involvement.
Purity of form and intention is a shining object of desire. But in
practice, community cultural development work in the United States has
almost never been able to attain this state of full and pure expression.
The chief reason is that adequate resources have not been available to
underwrite ccd work. Supporting long-term collaborations between
artists and communities is an intrinsically public enterprise, which is
why such work in other parts of the world has been funded largely by
the public sector, or by large quasi-public development agencies.
Domestically, ccd has been hard to sustain in a nation where cultural
policy stresses privatization and where the nonprofit arts funding
apparatus has been slashed so many times it threatens to succumb
to the death of a thousand cuts.
Rather than being seen as its own field, with its own standards, needs,
and resources, in the United States, community cultural development
work has, until recently, mostly been regarded by gatekeepers and funders
as an amateur or inferior expression of conventional art-making.
Community dance projects are very sweet, this thinking goes, and so nice
for the participants, but they aren’t really art, are they? There’s a place
for participatory theater projects, the conventional wisdom says, and it’s
under S for “social work.” The result has been that most community
cultural development practitioners have been forced either to compete
for scarce arts funding with mainstream artists who are far better and
more appropriately positioned to support their claims with blue-ribbon
reviews and the like; or to nip and tuck, spin, and translate their work
into other funding categories, where they compete with non-arts social
programs for education or community development funds.