'One Place After Another' by Miwon Kwon

I found this a valuable read for its exploratory questioning. It raises questions about the underlying assumptions in the way artists, institutions, groups, society at large operate. A liberating read, it really underlines the fact that we are all small cogs in a very big machine.

Here are some questions which cropped up for me to think about further:

Community

Community 'values' are open to question. However inclusive or tolerant a community aims to be, it is by definition an exclusive organisation - a 'club' or a 'tribe' - with its own rules of membership. There is a conflict between establishing identity (through ground rules) and realising the optimum development/evolution of the group. What part can a community artist play in this? What are the risks that the artist's involvement entrenches perceptions, keeps underprivileged communities 'in their place' by identifying them as such - rather than improving their possibilities? Can an outsider of the community in question operate effectively in that community?

The Power of Money

How much of contemporary artists' involvement with 'the community' is the result of public funding of the arts? Does this funding come with a price - that the funding of the artist must be justified in terms understood and imposed by those investing the money? So that, far from offering the possibility of new or alternative understandings, at one level publicly funded projects are at risk of becoming embroiled in maintaining the status quo?

The Elsewhere and The Other

How much of current practice relating to site, location, community and identity is a reaction to demographic change and the advance in communication technology? In our reaction to this, to what extent do we 'reinvent' the past, imagining the best of how society used to be (in the good old days) and set that up as a mythical (unrealistic) aspiration? How many of our aspirations for the future are based on a romanticising of the past/the elsewhere/the other?

Competing Understandings

What is most liberating about this read is that it advocates taking on board competing definitions and understandings (eg about what is understood by 'site') and seeing them as not mutually exclusive. Rather than using a reductive analytical approach,  Kwon opens up the idea that there are many possibilities.