Critical Perspectives
Goals, Structure, and Process
Critical Perspectives seeks to deepen understanding of arts-based, civic-dialogue work through the engagement of multiple writers with different perspectives to write about each project. In so doing, it expands who has voice and authority in critical writing about civically engaged art. By design, the Critical Perspectives project afforded writers opportunities to connect with each other and to the projects as they progressed. Americans for the Arts aims to publish these writings together in one source. The goals of the Critical Perspectives project and resulting book are:
- to promote inquiry and reflection on artistic and civic intents of civically engaged art;
- to examine how meaning is communicated and derived from the artistic work and the broader project; and
- to encourage civic and cultural discourse through expanded writing about the work.
The three projects, all participants in Animating Democracy, are explored by different sets of writers from various artistic, scholarly, and community vantage points—from within as well as from outside the projects. To varying degrees, the writers (who were chosen for the most part by the project coordinators themselves) had occasion to attend planning meetings, public dialogues, and meetings with artists, as well as final events. There were opportunities to meet with each other to share observations about the work and challenges in relation to their writing. All writers met at a midpoint gathering to share their Critical Perspectives writing experiences. These connections enabled discussion of the nature of arts/humanities-based civic dialogue efforts including issues of representation, authority, and ways that particular aesthetic choices may enhance or limit civic dialogue goals. Many of the same issues of responsibility and accountability, creativity, rigor, and risk that arise in conducting civically engaged art and humanities projects also arose in the process of writing about them. Critical Perspectives surfaces these issues and ideas through Lucy Lippard’s essay, "Shaming the Devil" (included in the Critical Perspectives collection on sale in the Americans for the Arts Bookstore) and Andrea Assaf’s article, A Threshold Moment: Summary and Reflections from a Gathering of Critical Perspectives Writers (pdf), summarizing a 2002 convening of all the writers and guest artists, writers, and scholars.
As Assaf summarizes in “A Threshold Moment”: “While the goal of Critical Perspectives is to expand who has voice and authority in writing about civically engaged art, there’s still further to go in including and empowering the full range of critical voices—‘critical’ both in the sense of offering critique, and in the sense of being deeply important to the accurate representation and understanding of this work.” Critical Perspectives is transparent about the tensions and challenges of civically engaged art and of this related experiment in writing. It does not purport to prescribe a model for either arts-based civic dialogue or writing. Rather, challenges related to the timing of a writer’s connection to a project, the role of a sponsoring organization, multiple agendas for writing, and accessibility and meaning of language are brought forward in a spirit of inquiry and learning.
