Bowerbird Communications

CONTACT

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EMAIL: Jennifer@BowerbirdCommunications.com

TWITTER: @BowerbirdComm

LINKEDIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/bowerbird

I live and work in Chicago, IL.

About.com Chicago Between 2007 and 2009, I produced and...

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About.com Chicago

Between 2007 and 2009, I produced and wrote for a website owned by About.com, a New York Times Company. Within two years, I tripled site traffic, wrote more than 300 blog posts and extensive feature articles, and I launched the use of social media to extend the site’s reach. I also became proficient at using About.com’s proprietary content management system.

I’m on LinkedIn and happy to connect there, too. You can...

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I’m on LinkedIn and happy to connect there, too. You can read more about me in the third person and find my complete work history.

“Jennifer Roche was the Executive Editor in charge of this book and she has taken up this...

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“Jennifer Roche was the Executive Editor in charge of this book and she has taken up this task with aplomb, shepherding the project through the various stages in a professional, fair, and enthusiastic way. It was clear from our early interactions with Jennifer… that McGraw-Hill/Irwin ‘got it’ in terms of their thinking about the Internet and its impact on the educational curricula of business schools.”

—From the Acknowledgments of “Internet Business Models and Strategies,” by Allan Afuah (U. of Michigan) and Christopher L. Tucci (NYU). 2001.

Between 1989 and 2000, I worked in higher education publishing, serving as an Executive Editor for the McGraw-Hill Companies and for Mosby Medical Publishers (now Elsevier). In these roles, I led the successful acquisition and development of book and media projects with annual net revenues of more than $10 million. I also acquired numerous titles, served as primary author liaison, negotiated contracts with authors and suppliers, and managed my budgets effectively.

As a result of my efforts, I was named a finalist for Editor of the Year at McGraw-Hill/Irwin in 1999. At Mosby, I was named to the Chairman’s Honor Council for outstanding editorial performance from 1995 to 1997.

Prior to Mosby, I worked in the production and editorial departments at the University of Chicago Press. I began my career with the book sales team at John Wiley & Sons.

ABOUT Jennifer Roche

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I am a writer, editor, and communications strategist. I specialize in creating content and communication strategies to reach curious and educated audiences.

In 2004, I launched Bowerbird Communications, a freelance writing and communications firm. Between 2007 and 2009, I produced and wrote for About.com, a New York Times company. I ran their website on Chicago. Within two years, I tripled site traffic, wrote more than 300 blog posts, hundreds of feature articles, and I launched the use of social media to help promote the site.

From 2010 to 2012, I also served as the first Communications Director for the Consortium on Financial Systems and Poverty, where I headed communications strategy and media outreach for a team of development economists. CFSP is based at the University of Chicago, led by Professor Robert M. Townsend of MIT, and funded through a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

My interview with ArtForum critic, Claire Bishop, was republished in an anthology titled, “Artistic Bedfellows: Histories, Theories and Conversations in Collaborative Art Practice.” It was edited by Holly Crawford and published by University Press of America. A blog I wrote for several years, The Place Where We Live, was named to Gaper’s Block’s “Top 10 Bloggers We Wish We Knew (But Don’t)” in 2005.

I also assist universities, businesses and non-profit clients with communications strategy, including creating content, editorial and writing projects, social media and blogger strategy, web development and project management. I have written numerous cover articles, features, and other original content for online and print consumer, business-to-business, and trade publications. My subject areas have been primarily the arts and sciences.

Prior to my freelance career, I worked in higher education publishing, serving as an Executive Editor for the McGraw-Hill Companies and for Mosby Medical Publishers (now Elsevier). In these roles, I led the acquisition and development of book and media projects with annual net revenues of more than $10 million. I also acquired titles, managed author relations, negotiated contracts, and maintained budgets. As are result of my efforts, I was consistently named to the Chairman’s Honor Council for editorial performance.

I earned a Masters in Liberal Arts from the University of Chicago and a B.S. in finance from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. I live on the north side of Chicago with my husband, our two children, and a dog named Boomer.

CURRENT I am a writer, editor, and communications...

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CURRENT

I am a writer, editor, and communications strategist.

From 2010 to 2012, I also worked as the first Communications Director for the Consortium on Financial Systems and Poverty. CFSP is based at the University of Chicago, led by Professor Robert M. Townsend of MIT, and funded through a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. I headed communications strategy for this team of development economists who study the role of financial services and financial systems in alleviating poverty.

I initiated and led a strategy to disseminate our research to a wider audience, often by helping to distill it into lay terms for policymakers and media. I produced and managed the website, wrote press releases and news articles about our work, developed print and media communication materials, and launched a series of publications by the Consortium.

Learn more: http://www.linkedin.com/in/bowerbird

Follow me on Twitter: @BowerbirdComm

Web Developer of CFSP website: Pivot Design

I served as the project manager and a producer for this animated...

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I served as the project manager and a producer for this animated video that explains why we believe the work of the Consortium on Financial Systems and Poverty is important.

During the production, many challenges arose, including how to depict the characters in a way that felt respectful and truthful but avoided stereotypes.

Production House: Epipheo Studios

PRESS RELEASES

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MIT Economist Townsend to speak at World Bank-IMF spring meeting on financial Inclusion For Consortium on Financial Systems and Poverty, 2012.

Economists identify that one size does not fit all for microfinance programs For the Consortium on Financial Systems and Poverty, 2011.

Rich country, poor country: economists identify financial sector as key driver for growth For the Consortium on Financial Systems and Poverty, 2011.

What is e-money’s future? Economists identify implications for financial systems where mobile banking is on the rise For the Consortium of Financial Systems and Poverty, 2011.

How do we know if financial innovations help or hurt in fight against poverty? For the Consortium on Financial Systems and Poverty, 2011.

Economists reveal factors that help poor lift themselves out of poverty For the Consortium on Financial Systems and Poverty, 2010.

Economists may bring into focus the financial lives of billions For the Consortium on Financial Systems and Poverty, 2010.

ART, ARCHITECTURE, URBAN PLANNING

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10 great things to see in the Modern Wing of the Art Institute of Chicago Introduction to the opening of the Modern Wing for About.com Chicago, 2009.

Socially engaged art, critics and discontents: an interview with ArtForum’s Claire Bishop Originally for Community Arts Network, then republished in “Artistic Bedfellows: History, Theories, and Conversations in Collaborative Art Practices,” edited by Holly Crawford and published by University Press of America, 2008.

National Veterans Art Museum Introduction to National Veterans’ Museum for About.com Chicago, 2008. (Formerly, National Vietnam Veterans Art Museum.)

Rem Koolhaas’ McCormick Tribune Campus Center at IIT Background and visiting guide to unique building for Galinsky.com, 2006.

Greening the infrastructure: two new national initiatives may green the way for better practices in infrastructure Feature article on future developments in sustainable infrastructure for Civil Engineering and Revitalization magazines, 2006.

Military makeover: how military bases are being revitalized after closure Feature article about environmental, financial, and planning considerations in the wake of base closures for Structural Engineering & Design, and Revitalization magazines, 2006.

Beyond disability: The Fe Fe stories Feature article highlighting the work of young videographers and the non-profit organization Beyondmedia for Community Arts Network, 2004.

INTERVIEWS

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What will it take to improve financial access to formal savings? Q & A with Chris Woodruff (University of Warwick) for the Consortium on Financial Systems and Poverty, 2012.

The ladies of the Chicago Roller Derby, how they roll Photo essay and Q & A project with photographer Mary Rafferty. In progress. 2012.

How do poor farmers manage the risks they face? Q & A with Chris Udry (Yale University) for the Consortium on Financial Systems and Poverty, 2011.

Assunção delves into the overlooked implications of bank branches & location choice Q & A with Juliano Assunção (PUC-Rio) for the Consortium on Financial Systems and Poverty, 2011.

Buera examines microfinance effects on individuals and countries: Q & A with Paco Buera (UCLA) for the Consortium on Financial Systems and Poverty, 2011.

Nukes and kids don’t mix: Q & A with Dr. Helen Caldicott For Chicago Parent magazine, 2004.

"Writing is related to character. If your values are sound, your writing will be sound. It all begins..."

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“Writing is related to character. If your values are sound, your writing will be sound. It all begins with intention. Figure out what you want to do and how you want to do it, and work your way with humanity and integrity to the completed article. Then you’ll have something to sell.”

- William Zinsser

Jennifer Roche Cape Cod, MA

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Jennifer Roche

Cape Cod, MA

The Bowerbird Communications logo was created in late 2006 by...

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The Bowerbird Communications logo was created in late 2006 by Emily Lonigro of LimeRed Studio.

Male bowerbirds, in an effort to attract mates, construct elaborate and often magnificent structures out of natural and found objects.

Many of my writing projects and interests have percolated around these themes: art, architecture, environment, gender, sustainability, science, urban planning, and community. Bowerbirds seemed like a fitting way to express important aspects of my work. So, I named my company after the bird and hired Emily to create the logo.

At the time, Twitter had just been launched. They originally used a stylized version of the word “Twitter” for their logo. Then, in 2010, they rolled out their bird. Something must have been buzzing in the zeitgeist during that time that made so many of us want to put a bird on it.

National Geographic Magazine photo gallery of bowerbird displays
Follow me on Twitter: @BowerbirdComm

Small town America re-designs itself into prosperity

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This article was commissioned by Art in the Public Interest for their web resource “Community Arts Network.” CAN promoted information exchange, research and critical dialogue within the field of community-based arts. They defined community-based art as “art made as a voice and a force within a specific community of place, spirit or tradition.”

By Jennifer Roche

Last year in the small town of Valley, Alabama on the banks of the Chattahoochee River, Mayor Arnold Leak found himself sitting next to his attorney in the conference room of the local Holiday Inn Express holding an auction paddle. On the block was the abandoned, 500,000-square-foot Langdale Mill that had been built originally in 1866.

Leak admits he and the city council were reticent about stepping forward to bid on the mill, “Good Lord, who wants to go $300,000 into debt?” Plus, more than a few of his colleagues outside Valley questioned why a town of 9,200 people with little more than sales tax and licensing fees to generate revenue would risk purchasing an enormous, obsolete mill.Symbolic of the region’s vanishing textile trade, the building’s owner had gone bankrupt and was forced to sell it off. The mill was boarded up and an eyesore. Now, representatives from firms intent on demolishing the mill and selling it for scrap waited in the conference room, poised to bid against the mayor.

But eight years earlier, Valley had embarked on a town planning and design process initiated by a little known program called Your Town. When he arrived at the auction, Leak was acting on a widely supported, sweeping plan for the city’s future that included transforming Langdale Mill into a riverfront economic hub and cultural center.

“Had we not gone through the Your Town process, we wouldn’t have ever known how important that mill was to us,” said Leak. “We would have said, ‘Oh, it’s an old mill. Go ahead tear it down.’ The scrappers would have chopped our future off right there. … It was clear we had to have it.”

Leak won the mill at auction for $300,000 – the city council and his constituents celebrated. His bankers considered it a steal.

Your Town: Citizens’ Institute on Rural Design

Launched in the early 1990s by the National Endowment for the Arts in cooperation with the National Trust for Historic Preservation, Your Town: Citizens’ Institute on Rural Design quietly promotes better design and planning as a means to small-town economic development and viability.

Every year Your Town workshops teach rural community leaders how to assess their town’s physical assets and make the best of them.“The more mobile we become and the more easily we can move,” observes NEA Director of Design Jeff Speck, “the more it is that quality of life will determine whether towns succeed or fail.”

Cheryl Morgan, director of the Center for Architecture and Urban Studies at Auburn University, helped establish Your Town Alabama and serves as a workshop facilitator. “Everyone who comes through this program is proud of their community, but they don’t always understand what that means physically,” says Morgan.

Your Town teaches them how to tap into their city’s unique architectural, environmental and historical features. For example, when Valley City Clerk Martha Cato first attended a Your Town workshop, she and her colleagues wanted to replace their disappearing textile industries with “smoke-stack” ones.

“They had 14 miles of the Chattahoochee River running through their town,” recalls Morgan, “but no place to make a physical connection to it that they could really leverage.”

“We had never done anything with it all,” says Cato.

But after Cato attended the initial workshop, she came home “really charged up.” She said, “We’re a community who does things, but I believe Your Town gave us a direction. … I knew what we needed to do.”

Cato brought Cheryl Morgan in for subsequent planning meetings, and the city worked on its long-range plan. During the process, in addition to realizing they were underutilizing their proximity to the river, they recognized another problem. Valley had been incorporated about 20 years earlier from four historic mill villages. As a result, they had no obvious center to build on. When they considered where they could put a downtown, the Langdale Mill jumped out at them.

“It’s a combination of knowing what you’d like to have ideally and recognizing opportunities that fit like pieces of a puzzle to get there,” said Leak.

Richard Hawks, co-founder of Your Town and chair of Landscape Architecture at SUNY-Syracuse, says that Your Town workshops frequently begin with a viewing of old and recent photos of a town and a discussion of what has changed. “We ask them, ‘How do you feel about the change? Do you care? Do you like it?’”Since beginning their planning process, Valley’s progress has been swift. They rented out the Langdale Mill for two years while final plans, including a possible hotel/convention center, are put into place. They built a recreational complex, completed a seven-mile extension of the Rails-to-Trails project, and began publishing an annual report to their citizens. From 1998 to 2003, revenues from sales and use taxes rose by more than ten percent. Earlier this month, Mayor Leak is seeking approval from the city council to buy a second mill.

More often than not, Hawks says, it’s the incremental changes — a fast food restaurant here, a relocated post office there — that erode a town’s character and its ability to thrive.

“I don’t know of any place where incremental decision-making by Wal-Marts and departments of transportation adds up to anything people want to live in,” he says. “If (small towns) have a plan and their vision is based in reason, a remarkable amount of success can come of it. … It’s communities who don’t know who they are and what they want to be that get victimized.”

Yet, once small towns like Valley understand the importance of good design, they still face unique challenges in developing and implementing their plans. Often their towns have modest financial resources and few paid staff members. If the town does have a vision, it’s subject to disruption because elected officials frequently turn over.

Your Town gives participants tools and solutions to combat these problems. City leaders get to brainstorm about representative problems faced by towns in their region, frequently alongside local and national experts. They’re shown how to evaluate developers’ plans, so they’ll be better prepared to respond to them. They’re taught about funding programs and how to build their work force capacity by fostering networks of volunteers.

Unique Designs for Unique Cultures

Of course, not all town officials who participate in Your Town end up buying a mill. “Like with all planning efforts, the outcome of Your Town is rarely immediate,” says the NEA’s Speck. “What we’re positively influencing is often subtle and profound.”

Dan Wildcat, director of Haskell Environmental Research Studies at Haskell Indian Nations University, facilitated a Your Town on the Reservation workshop that was attended by members of seven Midwest tribes. “I thought Your Town on the Rez was particularly valuable,” he said, “because one of the things native people are beginning to do is take very seriously the design insight of our ancestors.” He added that the workshop, which included a keynote speech by acclaimed architect and native person Johnpaul Jones, helped reinforce that tribes can and should draw on their culture when planning and designing their reservations.

Most Your Town participants and facilitators who were interviewed for this article cited this kind of positive, ripple effect. Connie Krahn, director of Rio Reyes Trust in California, says that Your Town helped her young organization raise its profile among key stakeholders, which she feels will increase the Trust’s effectiveness in safeguarding the Kings River. Doug Self of Driggs, Idaho, applied for a Your Town workshop to help his community respond to its rapid growth. Although the workshop resulted in a four-block plan for Driggs’ downtown, he says the “motivation and inspiration” it provided were even more important.

If there’s a drawback to Your Town, it seems to be its limited scope. Richard Hawks says he’d like to see a national program with “more horsepower and greater capacity for delivery.” Although the NEA steadily funds the program at $120,000 annually, it results in just a handful of workshops a year.

Hawks believes one solution for growing Your Town might be more state-sponsored programs like Alabama’s. Your Town Alabama was started when Paul Kennedy, a county employee, attended a national workshop and convinced his supervisor it could help struggling towns in their state. Present at Kennedy’s very first workshop was Valley’s Martha Cato.

“If I had to put an assessment on (the Your Town process),” said Mayor Leak. “I would say it’s one of the most important things we’ve done in our city’s history. And, I’m not just flowering that up for you.”

Jennifer Roche is a writer. She lives in Chicago.

Original CAN/API publication: July 2005

Beyond disability - The Fe Fe stories

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by Jennifer Roche

When was the last time you saw a positive (or even negative) image in the media of a teenage girl with disabilities? It wouldn’t surprise the Empowered Fe Fes to hear that you can’t remember. So, rather than wait for a reflection of themselves to show up in the media, the Fe Fes, a diverse group of 12 young female Chicagoans with disabilities, created their own video instead.

“The Empowered Fe Fes is a group of young women with disabilities who have to go through life learning how to deal with disabilities, so the Fe Fes are like a support group,”explained 19-year-old Fe Fe Chaka Stovall before the October premiere of “Beyond Disability: The Fe Fe Stories.”

“This movie is just a reflection of how we live our everyday life.”

The documentary shares the young women’s journeys as they come to terms with their lives and explore the power of wielding a camera. It opens with a collage of their voices:

A lot of people wonder what we’re about.
You got that right, girl!
Well, I mean, we’re females.
We’re definitely females, but that’s obvious.
But, we’re disabled females, and that gets people kind of …
Some people are ignorant.
That’s true.
But, we’re like this new, this whole
New generation.
Yeah, we’re like disabled, female and proud —
Yeah, disabled, female and proud.
Yeah!
Yeah!

The Fe Fes appear on camera and behind, taking on all the roles of video making. Through footage from their meetings, “person-in-the-street” interviews and individual testimonies, they explore the obstacles they face and the accomplishments they achieve. They also reveal their growing awareness of the possibilities their lives hold.

“Remember my story of trying to get involved in that TV production class?” Nico Echols, now 20, asks her fellow Fe Fes during one meeting. Echols, who has a seizure disorder, cerebral palsy and is visually impaired, wanted to take a video class at her high school to pursue her interest in journalism. After weeks of stalling her registration, the school finally told her that she couldn’t be in the class because the teachers weren’t willing to adapt the equipment for her.

“My first thought was, ‘Now wait a minute!’” recalls Echols. “I may be legally blind and I may not be able to do stuff with the video equipment, but at least I could do the audio equipment.”

17-year-old Krystal Martinez, who became disabled and in a wheelchair suddenly two years ago, reflects on how her life changed. “My outside life got messed up by my condition. My boyfriend and I broke up after a long relationship. My friends didn’t come over and call me like they used to. And, when I went outside everyone would stare at me like I was weird or something.”

She later adds, “My disability didn’t change who I was. It did change the way I feel and look at life.”

“My name is Terrah,” announces smiling Terrah Payne. “I’m too crazy. I came to this world a very happy girl as you can see. I came with a disability called cerebral palsy. For short, it’s called C.P. My disability doesn’t put me down. I want to know more. I want to do more. This disability cannot put me down!”

Susan Nussbaum, Transition Project Coordinator at Chicago’s Access Living and a disability-rights activist, organized the Empowered Fe Fes about six years ago. Nussbaum, who is 50, had been an antiwar activist and participated in the women’s movement before she became disabled suddenly at the age of 21. Forced to consider life anew, Nussbaum gradually found her way to the nascent disability-rights movement and her work at Access Living.

She found that after she became connected with the first generation of disability-rights activists she wanted to help foster the next one. “It became clear to me over a period of time as I started getting older that I didn’t want any young women going through what I had gone through,” recalls Nussbaum.

“There was this opportunity at Access Living to work with young people at the same time there was this movement in the broader progressive women’s movement to pass on the lessons to young women without disabilities,” she continued. “So, I sort of jumped on that bandwagon. We got some funding. I organized a couple girls and we started meeting. They invited their friends. We went to high schools. We would get a girl here, a girl there.”

One of the early members suggested “Empowered Fe Fes” as a play on the word females and the name stuck. Soon, a core group of stalwarts formed. When Nussbaum received funding earlier this year from the Department of Labor to provide job skills to teenagers with disabilities, she knew immediately that she wanted to work with the nonprofit organization Beyondmedia. For almost a decade, Beyondmedia has been active in the Chicago area with a mission of collaborating with underserved women and girls to increase their visibility through video training workshops and media-equipment access.

“They had a good rep, and I thought it would just be so cool for the girls to do something that had to do with technology,” Nussbaum said. Beyondmedia Executive Director and founder Salome Chasnoff said she welcomed the opportunity to work with the Fe Fes and saw it as a natural fit for her organization. She made a commitment to adapt the workshop for the Fe Fes regardless of their disabilities. To get a sense of the Fe Fes’ needs, Beyondmedia held an exploratory session with the equipment. “[It] was so much fun,” recalled Chasnoff. “They had never done anything like this, so it was like a celebration.”

In the end, Beyondmedia needed to make only a few accommodations for the Fe Fes such as getting special attachments to fasten the video cameras to the girls’ wheelchairs and printing training materials in extra-large fonts. They also produced the final video with accessible features like captioning and verbal cues throughout.

“I think it’s urgent we get funded somehow to continue working with Beyondmedia,” said Nussbaum. “Because I have never seen anything like the growth I have seen in the past few months. It’s totally surpassed my wildest expectations. I think their sense of pride and identity comes from an awareness that is not forced upon them, but that’s all around them [during this process], and that’s that life with a disability is going to be okay. It is as valid an experience as any kind of journey that one undertakes in life.”

Alysha Kostelny, 19, supported Nussbaum’s observation, “I feel much more confident than when I started with Beyondmedia. I am smart. I can do stuff. I can help people more than I think I can.” Chaka Stovall added, “Holding a camera made me feel like I was in control. It was like, I can handle this. This is cool.”

Many of the Fe Fes have since headed off to college, but they created a new group called the Divas in Charge. They hope to remain active with one another, and if possible, with video making. At the very least, they seem intent on carrying their sense of empowerment with them. “If anybody says a visually impaired person can’t do a video,” says a beaming Echols at the end of “Fe Fe Stories,” “I just showed them the proof.”

Jennifer Roche is a writer. She lives in Chicago.

Visit the Web for more about the Beyondmedia Education: http://www.beyondmedia.org/

Original CAN/API publication: December 2004

Music crosses over at the House of Blues

Tue, 15 May 2012 11:35:00 -0500

(This article was commissioned by Art in the Public Interest for their web resource Community Arts Network, which promoted information exchange, research and critical dialogue within the field of community-based arts.)

by Jennifer Roche

It’s half an hour before lunchtime at Chicago’s House of Blues, and Rosa Harris, microphone in hand and voice fully loaded, paces back and forth across the darkened stage. On break from her job as a legal secretary, she’s singing the blues and sharing its history with an audience of junior-high students and preschool parents.

The seventh and eighth graders from a suburban parochial school wear big gym shoes and baggy pants. They lean way back in their wooden folding chairs – cool and disinterested-like – but every one of them watches Harris while the parents wave their arms in the air and smile delightedly at the lesson.

It’s a tall musical order to convey the history and nuances of the blues in under an hour-and-a-half, but this is Blues SchoolHouse, a core program of the nonprofit International House of Blues Foundation (IHOBF). They’ve been meeting the challenge since 1993.

IHOBF Executive Director Susan K. Jauron says that the notion of creating a “schoolhouse” was part of the House of Blues (HOB) entertainment corporation’s plan from day one “Before the first HOB opened in Cambridge, (Founder) Isaac Tigretts was talking about the foundation and about using the House of Blues as a classroom where young communities could come and learn about the history of this country through folk art and music. That was absolutely his vision.”

The foundation emerged soon after the first HOB opened, with a vision statement that echoed Tigretts’ dream: promote cultural understanding and creative expression through music and art. By 2003, Blues SchoolHouse and IHOBF had hosted more than 40,000 students and teachers, and it was operating out of six HOB venues: Las Vegas, New Orleans, Los Angeles, Anaheim, Orlando and Chicago.

—-

Rosa Harris and the Dreams Come True band roll through West African rhythms, a bit of Bob Marley’s “Jammin’” and excerpts from Celia Cruz’s work. Cruz, Harris explains, sings in a call-and-response pattern, which is a traditional element of the blues. Another band member takes the microphone and commands the crowd,

HOB’s fog machine shrouds the audience, laser lights ping off the walls, and one of the visiting parents steps on stage to belt out an Aretha Franklin hit.

“When I say ‘house of,’ you say ‘blues.’ When I say ‘house of,’ you say ‘blues.’”

“House of!” he shouts.

“Blues!” yells the audience.

“House of!”

“Blues!”

Many of the kids lean forward in their seats while Dreams Come True whirls through field hollers, the importance of W.C. Handy (the first black man to write and publish blues music), Ma Rainey, Thomas Dorsey, Little Richard and James Brown. By the time they get to Jimi Hendrix, HOB’s fog machine has shrouded the audience, laser lights ping off the walls, and one of the visiting parents has stepped on stage to belt out an Aretha Franklin hit. By the concert’s end, the audience has journeyed from Middle Passage to Patti LaBelle, and many more of them have climbed on stage to sing their favorite songs, show off their rap talents, and enjoy the spirit and life of American music.

—-

Today’s SchoolHouse is as much about the musical experience as it is about visiting the House of Blues. The venue’s interior vibrates with a charming, roadhouselike mayhem of color, pattern and folk motifs painted by artists Brent Spears and Holly Mandot. Discarded, decorated shoes “walk” toe-to-toe across the walls and ceilings, and hand-painted signs by British artist Tim Jourdan help maintain order. One reads, “While entering and exiting our house, please be quiet, be cool, and have some respect for our neighbors. Help Ever. Hurt Never.”

This unique environment flowed from Tigretts’ desire to create an authentic-feeling atmosphere for HOB’s concerts and for the extensive folk-art collection he fostered. Numbering more than 5,000 pieces nationwide (and growing), the folk collection is among the largest displayed publicly in the U.S. It plays an important part of the SchoolHouse experience. Before every SchoolHouse concert, students and teachers receive a guided tour of the collection.

Jauron explains, “Much of it, if not the entire collection, was created by African Americans from the southern United States. It reflects the culture similar to the culture that blues grew out of.” Chicago displays more than 700 works and represents what HOB curator Scott Smith calls “the cream of the crop” of the corporate collection.

During their preconcert tour, some of the junior-high students look at Mary Proctor’s piece called “Sticks and Stones.” It’s a depiction of a black, nondescript figure reaching toward the sky. The figure’s coat and hat are made literally of sticks and stones. The words “Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me. (That’s a lie)” are painted flatly and simply along the figure’s side.

The guide, IHOBF employee Erin Teegarden, tells the students that Proctor was a missionary who lost her family in a fire, and then, in the sorrow and aftermath of the tragedy, received an inspiration to paint. Teegarden prompts the students to discover the materials Proctor used and to notice the discarded door upon which she painted the figure.

The students stop again before the intensely present art of Roy Ferdinand. In one of his pieces, viewers look down the barrel of a presumably loaded gun. The would-be assailant stands on a street corner. He wears a Malcolm X hat and a peace sign on a chain around his neck. Teegarden encourages the students to name some of the contradictions and emotions in the work. She also points out that Ferdinand used ordinary art supplies – ball-point pens, colored pencils, crayons and markers – that could easily be found in a drug store. In this way, she spurs the students to think about their own creative possibilities as well as those intended by Ferdinand.

“Sometimes it’s really moving to be here,” Teegarden says later. “With some of the artists, the children can relate to their messages and it teaches them about things they’re dealing with in their own lives.”

Chicago’s IHOBF Program Director Francine L. Pope concurs that the impact of Blues SchoolHouse extends far beyond the didactic portion of the tour and concert. Pope frequently receives letters from parents and teachers thanking her for the moments of meaning, large and small, that their kids derived from their experience. Sometimes, Pope says, the composition of the audience might introduce new realizations for the students. For example, once students from Barrington (a wealthy, predominantly white suburb) shared the audience with African-American students from a poorer city school while another time students from one city school shared the audience with cognitively challenged kids from another.

“We work very successfully with lots of different groups,” says Pope. “It’s a nice mixture. Music crosses over everything. You don’t need to already be educated about it. Kids come here and they shine. You start seeing the power of music and art.”

IHOBF created a thorough classroom guide and a learning center on their website to accompany the SchoolHouse. The guide and site reinforce the educational goals of the programs and offer background material, lecture points, artist and musician profiles, glossaries and learning activities such as art projects. It’s intended to be a highly flexible resource for instructors to incorporate the SchoolHouse experience into their classrooms. In addition, each IHOBF location offers myriad other options for students and teachers, including Martin Luther King Day celebrations and events, art and music workshops, a visiting-artists program and an off-site version of the SchoolHouse, which reached an additional 12,000 students in 2003.

Shortly after Pope settled into her role as Chicago’s Program Director in 1998, Washburn, a local guitar manufacturer, contacted her. They were looking for a way to give back to the community, and they wanted to find an organization to work with. Pope and her program coordinator (and musician) Sandra Antongiorgi put together a pilot program for teaching students guitar in Chicago’s public schools. Washburn provided guitars, and IHOBF provided instructor contacts and support to the school. The pilot was so successful that within two years IHOBF and Washburn had taken the program national. By 2003, more than 600 students had participated, and the “Make an Impression” program became another of IHOBF’s core offerings.

—-

Paul Revere School, a Make an Impression participant on Chicago’s South Side, just let out for the afternoon and kids are percolating through the halls. Upstairs, in the century-old wing, five students, ages ten through 12, take their seats in a corner of an enormous classroom. They’re warming up on their guitars with Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Their instructor, Larry Blasingaine, a slight, bespectacled man wears a leather cap and speaks softly. “I don’t have kids,” he says. “These are my children.”

They tune their guitars together and then flip through their Mel Bay songbooks (another IHOBF partner) looking for the ones they know and setting out to play them. Carl Knight, age 12, demonstrates his jazzed up version of “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star,” after which Anthony Richmond, age 11, shares his skill at playing “Frolic,” the song also known as “Dueling Banjos” from the movie “Deliverance.” The class then divides in two and plays the “dueling” parts with Brittany Owens, age 11, and Jamerrio Pondexter, age 10, joining in. When ten-year old Mariah Driver asks to play her version of the song, Blasingaine says, “She transposed the rhythms on her own. She asked if she could do 1/8th notes. I was amazed. They’re able to come up with their own ideas.”

Downstairs and across the hall Tyree Grant, Pavillie Simpson, Cleola Thomas, Jerry Thomas, Tyree Watson and Zhyon Wilson sit in a circle around their teacher, percussionist Isabelino Landor, while the remains of winter sunlight filter through the classroom’s giant windows. The children play a Puerto Rican rhythm called a bomba sica on four conga drums, a cowbell and a maraca. Landor, whom Pope located through Chicago’s Puerto Rican Segundo Ruiz Belvis Culture Center, encourages his students gently, “You’re falling off rhythm. Let’s remember tempo. Every musician has to learn to follow the beat.” The children comply and prepare for their next rhythm, a tumbao, which they tell their visitor, originated in Cuba. They’ve been part of a Make an Impression pilot program in percussion for fewer than six weeks.

—-

Not surprisingly, Blues SchoolHouse and Make an Impression are enormously popular programs. IHOBF provides the Schoolhouse and accompanying resources to schools for free. The schools need only sign up, provided IHOBF has space for them. “One of our challenges,” reports Pope, “is that Blues SchoolHouse is booked for months. It’s hard to say ‘no’ to schools. They’ll come one year and want to return, but we don’t always have room for that.” Jauron concurs, “We have incredible demand for our programs. (It) outstrips our ability to provide them.”

For the Make an Impression program, IHOBF provides organizational oversight, site visits, instructor resources and instruments (frequently, but not always, through corporate partners). Students also get to play together on stage at the House of Blues each spring, something they look forward to all year. In return, schools must complete an application process that requires them to show how, where and when they intend to use the program within their curriculum, and they must demonstrate how they will pay for the instructors.

For example, Paul Revere benefits from the generosity of their former student and Lands’ End founder Gary Comer. He supports the Make an Impression program through his Comer Science and Educational Foundation. As a result, students at Revere receive guitar and percussion lessons two days a week in their after-school program, and a second group of students receives lessons the other two days of the week. This number and frequency of classes far exceeds what other schools in Chicago are able to provide for their students, if they’re able to afford the programs at all. Pope and Jauron both say they’d like to do more for the schools with lesser means. “I guess our biggest challenge is getting more resources,” says Pope. “We’ve got the programming.”

To be sure, IHOBF’s close alliance with HOB affords it many advantages that some nonprofits can only dream of. They lend the foundation its concert space, allow extensive access to its art collection, and provide key overhead plums like office space, e-mail and tech support. HOB also sells patrons Blues Foundation Room membership packages and donates a portion of the proceeds toward the foundation’s overhead.

Yet, just about everything that happens for IHOBF beyond opening their doors relies on fundraising. IHOBF must, like all nonprofits, find a way to finance its programs. Pope concedes that their connection with HOB becomes a double-edged sword when it comes to seeking grants. “Some funders think, ‘You’re part of a big corporate entity, you should have plenty of money.’ But, we’re like any other struggling arts group.” In 2002, IHOBF spent more than $1.5 million providing their programs (including Blues Ambassador scholarships for college students), but their contributions and donations fell short of covering that.

Routine fundraising challenges aside, IHOBF continues to explore extending its impact and reach in the communities its serves. Jauron says about this longer view, “One of the things we’re looking to do is to build stronger relationships with schools and educators. To that end, we’re developing partnership models where we work with teachers in a workshop setting, provide them with support materials to prepare their community for SchoolHouse, and perhaps providing them with visiting artists to go on-site and interact with the community.”

For example, Pope is currently shepherding an on-site pilot program at Tilton Elementary School on Chicago’s West Side. She wants to find a way to integrate more fully the blues history and art projects into the school’s curriculum. “We have learned so much in a short period of time,” Pope says. “You have to do the pilots, they really inform your work. Every school is different.”

Like Pope in Chicago, each local IHOBF site can develop programs with the thought of offering them nationwide eventually. In this way, IHOBF shares resources and ideas across locations, but also allows room for local autonomy, capitalizing on unique resources, and fostering personal initiative.

After reflecting on IHOBF’s progress and community involvement, Jauron concluded:

The most compelling part of this organization and the real story is about what happens in the program setting. The vision of the organization is to have programming experiences that make kids have a greater understanding of American culture, a greater appreciation for diverse experiences, and to really inspire young people to find their own creative voices. That’s the real story and the real opportunity. And, in a sense, that’s the real challenge.

Visit the Web to learn more about the House of Blues (www.hob.com) and the International House of Blues Foundation. (www.ihobf.org).

Jennifer Roche is a writer. She lives in Chicago.

Original CAN/API publication: May 2004

Going the other way with Scrap Mettle SOUL

Tue, 15 May 2012 11:35:00 -0500

by Jennifer Roche

Scrap Mettle SOUL, the distinguished community theatre founded by Richard Owen Geer on Chicago’s north side, celebrated its tenth season in May 2004 with a world premiere called “The Other Way: Stories of Uptown.” For a decade, SMS has been examining its community by choosing themes, collecting stories from the neighborhood, and presenting them using an intergenerational, multiracial, mixed-income cast of residents. This year, perhaps prompted by the 2000 census that confirmed Uptown is one of the most diverse communities in the nation, SMS explored the lives of its immigrants.

“The Other Way” swept nimbly through the global stories of Uptown’s citizens with a poignant script by Jules Corriere, a memorable musical score by June Shellene, and simple, effective staging by creative director Geer and director Stephanie G. Wieland. The result left me marveling at Uptown in the same way that one of its characters did. “The beautiful thing about this neighborhood,” she said, “—it’s like all these people can’t be from the same place, but we are, aren’t we?

“The Other Way” opened with the entire cast of almost 50 adults and children emerging onstage to sing “Homeland.” It’s a beautiful piece about the natural longing for one’s mother country, and the simple lyrics conveyed the loss that many immigrants endure:

When shall I see my home again?
When shall I see my beautiful land?
I will never forget my home.

My father is there,
My mother is there,
My brother is there,
My sister is there.

Their journey began, collectively and individually, as the travelers departed from Uptown for Chicago’s O’Hare airport. They boarded the #36 Broadway bus, a fitting symbol of Uptown’s diversity because it runs through the Uptown and connects it to downtown. It was a delight to see SMS celebrate this melting pot of a bus line with a big showy tune that mixed a little of New York’s Broadway in as well. “It’s a wild ride to the other side,” went Shellene’s lyrics, “deep in the valley of the Broadway Bus!”

The cast arrived at O’Hare to board the same plane, but each with differing reasons to depart — a business presentation, a daughter’s wedding, a visit to one’s mother. They headed through security and began sharing their stories.

We met a third-generation European American imagining the challenge of her great-grandmother’s migration, a Thai refugee who waited five years in a camp for sponsorship to come here, and a Japanese American who was interred by the U.S. government and witnessed a fellow American shot for looking Japanese. A Vietnamese immigrant marveled at her new Uptown neighborhood. We watched as orphaned Sudanese boys crossed the unforgiving desert on foot during their harrowing route to America. A mother from Uptown told how she met her destiny by flying to Kazakhstan to pick up her adoptive son, Bo-bo. And this was just the first act.

In the second we met narrators from Sarajevo, Haiti, Mexico, Palestine and more. Recorded from oral histories of Uptown (and neighboring Edgewater’s) immigrants, and adapted by Corriere, the narratives seemed to have been tempered appropriately. They were unique in voice but not so distinctly that they failed to fit together. They also touched a range of sentiments that went far beyond those most commonly associated with immigration such as hope and hardship.

Corriere’s choice of an airport setting and Geer and Wieland’s staging came together effectively. As characters stepped forward to tell their stories, they went through the security motions that unite us all, for better or worse, in post 9/11 America. They sat on chairs and took their shoes on and off. They held their arms out while being searched. They put luggage through an x-ray machine. A voice-over frequently interrupted with “security alerts” reminding the passengers not to take packages from strangers. These announcements intensified until late in the second act when the voice shouted, “Trust no one!”

The airport setting raised questions about the intentions of the travelers’ new government against the backdrop of the conditions they left behind. We were reminded of our government’s ambivalence toward immigrants and the current national mood. We came to recognize O’Hare, and by extension all airports, as modern-day Ellis Islands.

Geer and Wieland also made strong use of the company’s minimal props to draw the most out of their staging in SMS’ new (and somewhat raw) space. During the piece about the Japanese Americans, an “authority” stood on a chair and held an industrial light above the storyteller, which easily evoked the intimidation she reported feeling. Slammed folding chairs became gunshots. In one light-hearted sketch about the wonders of air travel, the children zoomed on and off stage mimicking motor noises and their arms outstretched like wings.

—-

After years of renting, SMS found this permanent home a few blocks away from their old location. The space used to belong to Columbia College’s dance program, but now SMS shares it with a youth organization called Alternatives. “This place is a new life for us,” said Geer, “We feel like we’re growing something here.” The room has an unfinished feeling, with bleachers and folding chairs for seating and graffiti artwork from the youth program propped up against the walls. Yet, SMS had little problem transforming it into workable performance space.

Act Two opened with the story of a Mexican woman sharing her appreciation for Uptown’s melting pot, but it also highlighted the possibilities inherent in community casting. Our storyteller said that in Mexico, it’s all Mexicans. But in Uptown, “It’s like I’m next door to the whole world!” Although the script suggested an older speaker, both nights that I saw the performance the monologue was performed deftly by 12-year-old Sarah Lloyd.

Geer and Wieland double- or triple-casted most of the other roles, as is SMS’ tradition. “Everyone who comes is guaranteed a role,” said Wieland about their community participants. “It’s very inclusive.” At best, the casting allowed a revelation like Lloyd’s or resulted in two performers enhancing a single role, as in “Invisible,” about the challenges of being a 25-year-old black man. The first time I saw it, the actor’s portrayal was quiet and understated while the second actor played the role somewhat defiantly. The two yielded a richer understanding that neither performance, as credible as they were, could have achieved alone.

Unfortunately, the casting was not always so reliable. Some performers displayed a convincing affinity with their parts that had me wondering whether they were professional actors, while others rushed disconnectedly through the same lines. The unevenness seemed to emphasize the providential nature of SMS’ policy of inclusiveness. It sometimes requires a leap of faith and good will from the audience, but it also promises the rich payoff of witnessing one community member giving life to another’ s story.

The natural and most fitting end to the play, I thought, came with “Rita’s Story,” about a pianist who emigrated from the Dominican Republic to study music at Juilliard. Prior to her story, the second act had been building in intensity as the musical numbers disappeared, the airport announcements grew harsher, and the emotional toll of the stories mounted. Rita spoke directly and evenly. She said that under Trujillo’s (or El Jefe’s) dictatorship, no one was allowed to talk about the government. “Torture was nothing,” she reported, “and surprised no one.” Rita rejoiced at the freedom she discovered in America and concluded,

Some people still walk around voiceless. Not me. Hey, George Bush! Have a seat. Have I got a list for you. Hey, Dick Cheney! Don’t you want your daughter to get married? Hey, El Jefe! Up yours!

It’s great to be an American.

Her addressing the president directly, after leaving a country where it was impossible to do so, emphasized the collective promise (and challenge) of our current political life in a way that the play had only hinted at until then. It struck the right notes about the nature of the payoff for immigrants’ perseverance, and it implicitly called attention to the voice SMS gave the immigrants. For these reasons, it felt like an appropriate emotional and conceptual end.

Corriere closed the show instead with one more narrative entitled “Ashes” about a miner who moves to Uptown from Kentucky. The story, although solidly performed and full of themes of perseverance and justice, veered from the other stories in structure, tone and content. The narration shifted between two performers, crossed three generations and concluded with a brief musical piece, unlike any of the stories before it. “Ashes” focused on migration, not immigration, which might have fit into the play elsewhere (such as “Invisible” did, which was not about immigration either), but instead the piece was double (perhaps triple) the length of the other stories and given the added prominence of being last in the show.

It was impossible not to think of “Ashes” as the showcase piece, which, I’m afraid, had the unintended effect of overshadowing the immigrants the play sought to celebrate. Why end this show with a story about the history of three generations of Americans, however compelling? Perhaps this piece was intended to foreshadow the challenges that might lie ahead for the other immigrants, but, if so, this point was not made clearly. I remembered after seeing the “The Other Way” that Geer had told me “Ashes” was among the stories they discovered years ago. It seems they may have made a misstep by not waiting for a more appropriate place to use it.

The play’s closing revelation came when the security guards refused to let the miner board the airplane at O’Hare because he was hand-carrying his son’s ashes in a metal container. His fellow travelers told him he can go “the other way” – by trading in his ticket for a bus or train, or he could walk, as the Sudanese boys reminded him. The entire cast abandoned the airport and sought another way to their destinations. The lesson brought the play to a satisfying conclusion and underlined the important themes revealed about Uptown and the immigrant experience.

More important, though, “The Other Way” achieved what an exploration of diversity must in order to be relevant – it transcended it. “We have found that the greatest heroes are walking around our neighborhood,” said Geer just before the show opened. How right, the performances revealed, he is.

Jennifer Roche is a writer. She lives in Chicago.

Visit the Web to learn more about Scrap Mettle SOUL: http://www.scrapmettlesoul.org/.

Original CAN/API publication: June 2004

Socially Engaged Art, Critics and Discontents: An Interview with Art Forum's Claire Bishop

Sun, 13 May 2012 07:33:00 -0500

Originally written for Community Arts Network/Art in the Public Interest, then republished in “Artistic Bedfellows: History, Theories, and Conversations in Collaborative Art Practices,” edited by Holly Crawford and published by University Press of America, 2008.

What criteria should we use to evaluate socially engaged art?

London-based critic Claire Bishop recently raised provocative questions and poked at the critical status quo about the discourse surrounding what she term, “relational” practices — socially engaged art, community-based art, experimental communities, dialogic art, littoral art, participatory, interventionist, research-based and collaborative art.

In socially engaged art, critic Claire Bishop believes the aesthetic is being sacrificed on the altar of social change.

In her article for Artforum (February 2006), titled “The Social Turn: Collaboration and its Discontents,” Bishop argues that the creativity behind socially engaged art is said to “rehumanize” a “numb and fragmented” society. However, she emphasizes that she believes socially engaged art has fallen prey to circumscribed critical examinations. The discourse, she argues, has focused mainly on the artist’s process and intentions, or the project’s socially ameliorative effects, to the neglect of the work’s aesthetic impact.

“Artists are increasingly judged by their working process — the degree to which they supply good or bad models of collaboration,” she writes. “Accusations of mastery and egocentrism are leveled at artists who work with participants to realize a project instead of allowing it to emerge through consensual collaboration.”

“There can be no failed, unsuccessful, unresolved, or boring works of collaborative art because all are equally essential to the task of strengthening the social bond,” she continues. “While I am broadly sympathetic to that ambition, I would argue that it is also crucial to discuss, analyze, and compare such work critically as art.”

Bishop draws on the notion of the aesthetic as defined by philosopher Jacques Rancière, who said that the aesthetic is the “ability to think contradiction.” “For Rancière,” writes Bishop, “the aesthetic doesn’t need to be sacrificed at the altar of social change, as it already inherently contains this ameliorative process.” In other words, art heals. No need to hurry it along.

Bishop identified the writing surrounding the Turkish artists’ collective Oda Projesi as emblematic of the way “aesthetic judgments have been overtaken by ethical criteria.” When Bishop interviewed Oda Projesi for an earlier article, the collective — whose works include fostering community projects with its neighbors out of a three-room apartment in Istanbul — said they were interested in “dynamic and sustained relationships” not aesthetics. In fact, they said they deemed “aesthetic” to be a dangerous word. “This seemed to me to be a curious response,” notes Bishop. “If the aesthetic is dangerous, isn’t that all the more reason it should be interrogated?”

Bishop cites works by British artists Jeremy Deller and Phil Collins, Polish artist Artur Zmijewski and Brussels-born artist Carsten Höller as producing works that yield richer aesthetic possibilities. For example, she mentions Deller’s “The Battle of Orgreave,” which was a reenactment of a 1984 English miners’ confrontation with police, complete with participation by a historical reenactment society. She cites its ambiguous purpose and result, along with its many, often contradictory layers of meaning and interpretation, as yielding a deeper, multifaceted work. She argues that this occurs, in part, because the artist acted on his desires rather than according to particular ethical criteria.

“Their work joins a tradition of highly authored situations that fuse social reality with carefully calculated artifice,” Bishop says of Deller and the others. Like Dadaism before them, they created “intersubjective relations (that) weren’t an end in themselves but rather served to unfold a more complex knot of concerns about pleasure, visibility, engagement, and the conventions of social interaction.”

Bishop clearly wishes to shed the recurring ethical themes in the critical discourse, which she often describes as Christian ideals of self-sacrifice and “good souls,” in favor of embracing the contradiction that naturally arises from the artist’s intentions.

“The best collaborative practices of the past ten years,” she concludes, “address this contradictory pull between autonomy and social intervention, and reflect on this antinomy both in the structure of the work and in the conditions of its reception. It is to this art — however uncomfortable, exploitative, or confusing it may first appear — that we must turn for an alternative to the well-intentioned homilies that today pass for critical discourse on social collaboration.”

Not surprisingly, Bishop’s article generated considerable interest, including a full-page rebuttal by art historian and critic Grant Kester in Artforum’s follow-up issue. CAN asked me to interview her to learn more about her about her thoughts on evaluating socially engaged art and her current work. I caught up with her in early July, and we conducted the interview via e-mail.

Jennifer Roche: Your article, simply put, seems to be a call to examine (or re-examine) the principles under which we evaluate socially engaged art. You say that most socially engaged art has been evaluated from an ethical viewpoint (good vs. bad models of collaboration).

Why do you think the discourse surrounding socially engaged art has lapsed in its critical examination of the field as you’ve described?

Claire Bishop

Claire Bishop: There are several reasons for this, and they range from the pragmatic to the ideological. On the one hand, in Europe at least, the influence of the art critic began to diminish in the early 1990s, and was replaced by the curator as the figure who makes or breaks an artist’s career. And as we know, curatorial writing is on the whole affirmative and rarely expresses reservations about a given artist. When I embarked upon this research I was struck by the fact that most of the project documentation was written by curators. To an extent this is logistical: socially engaged and participatory art projects are so complex, sprawling and context-based that the only person with a handle on the overall project is invariably the curator. But because curatorial work is so often concerned with fair mediation (between artists, audiences and institutions), it is perhaps unsurprising that curatorial writing is oriented toward ethical questions.

The rise of communitarian discourse in the mid-1990s was underpinned by a desire to promote a homogeneous and consensual view of society: an ‘ethical community’ in which political dissensus is dissolved.

On the other hand, we could also claim that an orientation towards the ethical is part of a larger trend in the 1990s, symptomatic of what has been called our “post-political” age. Slavoj Zizek, Jacques Rancière and others have observed an “ethical turn” in philosophy (as evidenced in the resurgence of interest in Emmanuel Levinas, in Giorgio Agamben, and in the idea of “radical evil” amongst Lacanian theorists), and this is also reflected in contemporary politics. The rise of communitarian discourse in the mid-1990s was underpinned by a desire to promote a homogeneous and consensual view of society: an “ethical community” in which political dissensus is dissolved. As Rancière points out in “Malaise dans l’Esthetique” (2004), this thinking also submits art and politics to moral judgments bearing on the validity of their principles and the consequences of their practices. He is not speaking directly of socially engaged art, but these ideas can be carried across with great poignancy.

JR: In your description of what a better critical discourse would require, you argue that the answer might lie in the French philosopher Jacques Rancière’s argument that the “aesthetic is the ability to think contradiction.” Would you elaborate on what you think best collaborative practices exhibit (beyond those projects you describe in your article)?

CB: This is a complicated question. I would like to argue that the best collaborative practices need to be thought of in terms other than their ameliorative consequences; they should also question the very terms of these ameliorative assumptions. My view is inevitably influenced by living in the U.K., where New Labour have for the last nine years instrumentalised art to fulfill policies of social inclusion – a cost-effective way of justifying public spending on the arts while diverting attention away from the structural causes of decreased social participation, which are political and economic (welfare, transport, education, healthcare, etc). In this context it is crucial for art practices to tread a careful line between social intervention and autonomy, since demonstrable outcomes are rapidly co-opted by the state. Temporary Services once asked me which was worse: to be instrumentalised by the state or by the art market. I’m afraid I think it’s the former.

My view is inevitably influenced by living in the U.K., where New Labour have for the last nine years instrumentalised art to fulfill policies of social inclusion…

I am also wary of the idea that there is a privileged medium for works of art. The mere fact of being collaborative, or participatory, or interactive, is not enough to legitimise a work or guarantee its significance. It is more important to observe how it addresses – and intervenes in – the dominant conventions and relations of its time. If we look at the proliferation of collaborative art practices today, it seems that many no longer have the oppositional and anti-authoritarian punch they had in the late 1960s and 1970s – when radical theatre, community arts and critical pedagogy emerged in opposition to dominant modes of social control. Today participation is used by business as a tool for improving efficiency and workforce morale; it is all-pervasive in the mass-media in the form of reality television; and it is a privileged medium for government funding agencies seeking to create the impression of social inclusion. Collaborative practices need to take this knot of conventions on board if they are to have critical bite.

JR: What do you think the heightened critical discourse you’re advocating requires from the artist(s) engaged in socially collaborative art? From the communities considering socially engaged art or participating in it?

[Lacan] would argue that the best socially collaborative art does not derive from a superegoic injunction to “love thy neighbour,” but from the position of “do not give up on your desire.”

CB: It requires intelligence and imagination and risk and pleasure and generosity, both from the artists and the participants. For a while I have been tempted to write an article that pushes the ethical question a bit further, from a Lacanian angle. It would argue that the best socially collaborative art does not derive from a superegoic injunction to “love thy neighbour,” but from the position of “do not give up on your desire.” In other words, pursue your unconscious desire, as far as you can. The former (eg Grace in “Dogville”) involves a sacrificial stance: it is the politically correct position of doing what seems right in the eyes of others. The logic of the latter is about taking responsibility for your own desire, rather than acting out of guilt (for example, about being an artist). In Seminar VII Lacan draws a link between this ethical position and the beautiful. I haven’t written this article as I’m not convinced of its ability to tell us much about contemporary art. But has guided my reading of certain works – by Collins, Zmijewski, Althamer, etc.

JR: You talk in your article quite a bit about the role that the artist’s “authorial status” plays in socially engaged art. Would you explain what you mean by “authorial status” and why you consider it so significant to socially engaged art?

CB: By “authorial status” I simply mean an original and distinctive voice. I have found that socially engaged projects are on the whole rather formulaic and predictable, placing greater emphasis on the participants’ creativity than on rethinking the conventions of participation, which are today somewhat orthodox. There is a common belief that reduced authorial status is more “democratic” and “ethical” than an artist imposing their vision or will on a group of participants. I think we can question all of these assumptions. Overturning the very premises from which social engagement operates can be both artistically and critically invigorating.

JR: Your article stimulated a lot of conversation. One discussion on the Web, in LeisureArts blog, raised a compelling point. The writer said:

I think (Bishop) misses something very important … namely that many of these practices might be better served by not considering them via art critical methodologies at all. There are a number of forms of cultural production that might call for new theoretical tools to interpret properly … I suspect there are many people operating in the domain of art discourse because they have nowhere else to go, even though their interest in connections to an art historical lineage is ancillary at best.

What do you think of this?

I completely agree that turning to other disciplines can help to sharpen our mode of discussion about works of art, particularly those that step into the social arena.

CB: I completely agree that turning to other disciplines can help to sharpen our mode of discussion about works of art, particularly those that step into the social arena. Political philosophy and psychoanalysis have helped me to articulate my reservations about the political claims made for relational aesthetics. I am currently looking at sociology as a way to be more precise about the idea of “inclusion” and “participation” in socially engaged art. The task is to bind these ideas together in a discussion of the work’s overall meaning as art.

But what this quote implies – and which I resist very strongly – is the idea that art is the “last place” to go for engagement, that it is the only remaining “free space.” This idea is dangerous and lazy. It signals a retreat from the political, rather than the invention and assertion of new territories. It is fine for socially engaged and activist work to operate within the domain of art discourse, providing it also contributes something to that discourse (which actually does have an art historical lineage – think of Situationism, Joseph Beuys, Group Material…). It is comparable to a practice-led PhD: the practical work and the theoretical text both have to be PhD standard, equally important contributions to the field. But if the claims for transdisciplinarity are to be taken seriously, then these projects should also function within other discourses too. The situation I would want to avoid is of inconsequential practices that make no impact on either field.

JR: Why does your argument require that the ethical evaluation of socially engaged art be described as Christian? What does that mean for collaborative work arising out of cultures that are not historically Christian?

… if the claims for transdisciplinarity are to be taken seriously, then these projects should also function within other discourses too. The situation I would want to avoid is of inconsequential practices that make no impact on either field.

CB: The argument doesn’t require that the ethical evaluation of socially engaged art be described as Christian – this is simply my cultural reference point for a self-sacrificial position, especially one performed for the eyes of the big Other. This is not to denigrate Christianity per se – there are many things worth salvaging in that tradition, as Zizek has argued. What interests me is his critique of contemporary ethico-political responsibility as a form of ideological absolution: it saves us from having to take on board an “ethics of the Real,” in which we are responsible for our own actions and the potentially traumatic consequences of these actions.

In terms of collaborative work arising from other cultures: this is complicated, and I certainly considered it before using Oda Projesi as a case study. But eventually the focus of my article was the discourse that presently surrounds this work in the West; regardless of where the artist comes from, the work (especially if it circulates here) can still be subject to critical analysis. This doesn’t mean ignoring the cultural context, just being alert to the way in which a reading overdetermined by this can swiftly become an excuse for not thinking through what it means for yourself. I hear these excuses all the time – not in relation to religion, admittedly – but as a form of positive discrimination in which the artist’s culture/identity is more important than what we encounter.

JR: We caught up with you while you were traveling in Thailand to visit The Land Foundation in Chiang Mai. What piqued your interest in visiting them at this time? What did you learn?

CB: I am immensely grateful to the Leverhulme Trust for a research grant. I decided it would be useful to visit the ‘spiritual home’ of relational art, Thailand. The Land in Chiang Mai is one of the most frequently cited examples of a socially engaged ‘relational’ project, and almost all accounts of it are written by curators (Obrist, Birnbaum, etc). I spent four days in and around The Land Foundation, talking to its co-founder, the artist Kamin Lerdchaiprasert, and to Uthit Athimana, Professor of Media Art Design at Chiang Mai University (on the board of the Foundation). My day with Uthit made the whole trip worthwhile as I learnt about Chiang Mai Social Installation: a series of impromptu and participatory performance and live installation festivals in Chiang Mai during the 1990s. These began without knowledge of Rirkrit Tiravanija’s work (he didn’t return to Thailand until 1996), and yet there are clear overlaps.

The Land itself is quite small: a functioning farm allotment-cum-architectural park located a 40-minute drive outside the city. The map to find it is elaborate – like the instructions to reach Spiral Jetty or Double Negative. It is extremely peaceful, and the pavilions are attractively modest. Several things about the project surprised me.

Firstly, the way in which entropy has already taken hold of The Land: Tobias Rehberger’s pavilion was made with Swedish wood for a show at the Moderna Museet, and is now rotting in the tropical climate. Philippe Parreno’s Battery House, which is supposed to generate its own electricity through an “elephant plug,” has never worked. (For Parreno’s film “The Boy From Mars” (2005), the building was lit artificially and a water buffalo “performed” the role originally intended for an elephant.) The building was supposed to fulfil Kamin’s request for a meditation hall, but the concrete floor is curved, and punctuated by many struts, and cannot be used for this purpose. The ratio of water to land on the farm is organised according to the principles of a Buddhist agriculturalist, Chaloui Kaewkong, but this too isn’t really working: the water is stagnant rather than flowing. Ironically, all these “failures” really endeared the project to me.

Secondly, that the only people who live on the site full-time are peasant farmers, who keep the premises ticking over. The bulk of the Foundation’s activities take place in a group of buildings on the edge of the city, in a leafy district called Umong. There is an exhibition space/yoga hall with two offices, a meditation hall, a guest house, and a house with an open kitchen. Rirkrit is building a house on the adjacent plot. Several young people live and work on site, answering the phone and dealing with enquiries. Just after I arrived some of them also accompanied Kamin on an agricultural research trip to the north of Thailand. The week after I left, a group of Singaporean street artists were coming to stay. Umong is the hub of social activities, in contrast to which The Land itself is rather static.

Thirdly, that The Land is the result of conflicting ideas. For Kamin it is essentially a spiritual project. He wants to create an experimental living situation that will help him understand his place in the world, one that will hopefully be good for other people too. He is drawn to an ideal of self-sufficiency (inspired by Chaloui Kaewkong). Rirkrit, I understand, is more interested in an experimental project that fuses art and the social; he is less interested in the spiritual dimension and more open to the possibility of buildings not functioning. Uthit is more sceptical, and has numerous reservations about the project. For example, he thinks that the engagement with experimental agriculture could be pushed much further (by collaborating with the agriculture department at the University, for instance), and that the Foundation should be more open about PR – in other words, that the rhetoric should be more adequate to the reality. The three are old friends, and it is clear that they have a constructive dialogue in which these differences can surface.

JR: What are you working on next?

CB: I’ve just finished editing a reader of key texts on participation in art since the late 1950s, which will be published in September. I’ve also been trying to order all my thoughts on the problem of socially engaged art into a book, but I’m struggling and still feel light years away from a coherent argument. My research fellowship ends in September and then I begin a new job as History of Art lecturer at Warwick University.