Table Of ContentArt in Community
DOI: 10.1057/9781137512499.0001
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DOI: 10.1057/9781137512499.0001
Art in Community:
The Provisional Citizen
Rimi Khan
University of Melbourne, Australia
DOI: 10.1057/9781137512499.0001
© Rimi Khan 2015
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First published 2015 by
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doi: 10.1057/9781137512499
Contents
Acknowledgements vi
Introduction: Resituating Art,
Community and Citizenship 1
1 From Consensual to Open-Ended
Communities 14
2 Art as Aesthetics, Culture and Economy 37
3 The Multicultural Artist as Citizen 61
Conclusion 85
Works Cited 94
Index 107
DOI: 10.1057/9781137512499.0001 v
Acknowledgements
This book began life as a PhD thesis in the School of Culture
and Communication at the University of Melbourne.
I would like to gratefully acknowledge the insight and
guidance of my supervisor John Frow, and the generous
assistance offered by Kate MacNeill and Tony Bennett.
Gay Hawkins and Lisanne Gibson examined my thesis,
and I thank them for helping me clarify my arguments.
Conversations with Scott Brook and Danielle Wyatt have
also had an important role in shaping my thinking.
I am particularly thankful to Audrey Yue, whose
encouragement and feedback were central to the develop-
ment of this book. Nikos Papastergiadis, Fiona Haines and
an anonymous reviewer at Palgrave Macmillan have also
offered useful critiques of my book proposal.
My work has benefited from editorial feedback from
reviewers at Local-Global Journal, International Journal of
Cultural Policy and Journal of Sociology in which some of
the ideas in this book first appear.
I would also like to express my gratitude to the staff
and artists at Multicultural Arts Victoria and Footscray
Community Arts Centre, who took part in interviews, and
without whose generosity and goodwill this book would
not have been possible.
Finally, and most of all, I am thankful to Ging, and to
Parvin, Shamim and Tessa Khan.
vi DOI: 10.1057/9781137512499.0002
Introduction: Resituating Art,
Community and Citizenship
Abstract: There has been a diversification and dispersal
of the ways in which art and community intersect. This
chapter introduces the governmental, aesthetic and economic
shifts that have enabled this dispersal, suggesting that
they present new rationales and forms of value for art in
community. These forms of value present the subjects of art
in community – artists, arts participants, cultural workers
and bureaucrats – with multiple and conflicting strategies
of self-making. It is this unstable terrain that gives rise to
the provisional citizen, a figure which reflects new kinds of
relationships between government, art and everyday practices
of the self.
Khan, Rimi. Art in Community: The Provisional Citizen.
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.
doi: 10.1057/9781137512499.0003.
DOI: 10.1057/9781137512499.0003
Art in Community
This book began as a study of ‘community arts’. I was interested in the
contradictions this category gives rise to: bringing art to communi-
ties involves seeking to ‘strengthen’, ‘empower’ or ‘develop’ them, but
the worthiness of these ambitions threatens to undermine them. Too
often, the disruptive or captivating potential of art is tempered by these
good intentions. In countries like Australia and the UK, the history
of community arts is tied up with governmental traditions of welfare,
and dubious historical attempts to cultivate or civilise those in need
of ‘culture’. It is partly because of this historical baggage that claims to
transform communities through art seem paternalistic or naïve, and a
critical account of community arts becomes necessary.
In 1993, Gay Hawkins asked whether ‘community arts [is] a cultural
movement whose moment has passed’ (xxv). Her book, From Nimbin to
Mardi Gras, described the invention and development of the community
arts movement in Australia, and her provocation sought to highlight what
seemed to be the field’s growing irrelevance. She argued that community
arts was at risk of marginalising itself. The field had become dependent
on a nostalgic invocation of ‘community’ that undermined its ability to
meaningfully engage with contemporary cultural worlds. Community
arts was also marked by a ‘lack of aesthetic vitality’ and was unable, and
unwilling, to engage with practices of popular cultural consumption
and production (Hawkins 164). While her analysis was specific to the
Australian context, her reservations about community arts’ aesthetic and
political relevance could easily be applied to other national traditions.
Justin Lewis, a British cultural theorist, presents a similar case for why he
thinks community arts has been unable to fulfil its political promise. He
is concerned by its inability to disrupt prevailing hierarchies of artistic
value and structures of arts patronage – objectives he considers central
to community arts’ political project:
[Community arts] has failed to make art and culture more accessible to most
people. Far from challenging or storming the citadels, it has remained a harm-
less and irrelevant skirmishing on the sidelines. ... Perhaps most importantly,
the community arts movement has let the elitist aesthetics of the dominant
subsidised culture off the hook. Most community artists were opposed to this
cultural elitism, and yet, by forming a separate entity, ‘the community arts’,
they allowed themselves to be appropriated by it. (113)
It is in light of these histories and critiques that, today, the term ‘commu-
nity arts’ is used with some unease. The many variations on the label that
DOI: 10.1057/9781137512499.0003
Introduction
have emerged in the last couple of decades – ‘participatory art’, ‘commu-
nity cultural development’, ‘community-engaged art’, ‘community-based
art’, ‘art and social practice’ – reflect the anxieties that troubled Hawkins
and Lewis, and reveal a desire to distance these ostensibly newer cultural
forms from the traditional ‘community arts’.
At the same time, and despite these reservations, these newer
categories suggest the persistence of art in community. In fact, art and
community now converge in a multitude of new ways. The range of
descriptors above point to a proliferation of the ways that art takes place
in, engages with, seeks to ‘impact’, or takes inspiration from community.
This dispersal of the circumstances under which art and community
intersect is the result of governmental, aesthetic and economic shifts that
frame the field. So, while this book sets out to examine ‘community arts’,
it is really concerned with the range of ways that ‘art’ and ‘community’
are mobilised today, and how these, in turn, shape a figure I describe as
the ‘provisional citizen’.
Governing art in community
In recent decades, the arts have been situated at the centre of a range of
policies and programmes seeking to make communities more creative,
cohesive or productive. Such programmes emerge from a constellation
of governmental agendas – ‘creative industries’, ‘social inclusion’, ‘multi-
culturalism’, ‘sustainability’ and ‘well-being’. These categories extend
welfarist traditions to imbue art and community with new meanings
and uses. Urban regeneration and vitality projects, health and well-being
initiatives, economic strategies, and environmental and sustainability
programmes, all instrumentalise the arts in an ever-widening range of
ways, expanding both the sites in which art is put to use and the kinds of
cultural actors that are involved.
There are many accounts of art in community which seek to respond
to this governmental context (Abdel-Raouf; Adams and Goldbard;
Carey and Sutton; Kay; Keating; Krempl; Matarasso; Pitts; D. Williams
How; Wright et al.). Much of this work relies on a celebratory reading
of arts activity, and, as Belfiore and Bennett suggest, these reports tend
to emerge from an advocacy agenda rather than a critical one (Social 6).
Many of these celebratory texts are also nostalgic in character, informed
by a belief in the loss of community, resulting from a globalised
DOI: 10.1057/9781137512499.0003
