One Place After the Other

Mark Dion,  Tree
Community Engaged Art

Richard Serra, Tilted Arc
Site Specific Art (Plop art)
disconnected from community

One Place After Another

Kwon

Kwon discusses the differences in community engaged art and site specific art. He states that site specific art is disconnected from the space it is presented which causes it to have one message and non engaged. However, community engaged art is when the space becomes part of the presentation itself and the site is the theme of the presentation. Community engaged art connects with the citizens living in the community, engages people, takes takes on a political issue to stand take an activist stand and have an ongoing existence in it’s space. 

“The slide from site-specific to issue-specific in public art can be seen as yet another example of the ways in which the concept of the site has moved away from one of concrete physical location. ... The invocation of the community-specific and the audience-specific, in which the site is displaced by a group of people assumed to share some sense of common/communal identity based on (experiences of) ethnicity, gender, geographical proximity, political affiliation, religious beliefs, social and economic classes, etc. can be described as an extension of the discursive virtulization of the site, at least to the extent that identity itself is constructed within a complex discursive field.” (112)

“...This is not to romanticize the role of the artist as a lonely outcast or to presume that the community and the art world themselves have stable identities. In fact, the uncertainty of identity experienced by the artists is symptomatic of identities of all parties involved in the complex network of activities comprising community-based art, including the community, the curator, and the institution.” (137)

Walter Benjamin states that the industrial revolution and mechanical reproduction take away from the aura of the original thing. One could argue that community engaged art takes away from the community’s original aura and changes the aspects of the community too much. I believe that community engaged art is a good thing but I do agree with Benjamin in the thought that how much intervention is too much?