Introduction to The Citizen Artist: 20 Years of Art in the Public Arena

Throughout its 20-year history, High Performance magazine has been a journalistic home for new, unrecognized and innovative work in the arts. From its beginnings in performance art to its last few years covering community-based art, the magazine maintained a steady focus on art that was serious in its personal artistic intent and underappreciated in public perception. If an artist was doing it and someone else was screaming, “That’s not art!” we took that as our cue that High Performance should take a look at it.

We were traveling editorially through territories that weren’t on the map yet, and when you travel like that, you find your way by talking to the locals. In our case, the “locals” were the artists who were doing the work. From the first issue to the last, High Performance has relied heavily on the artist’s voice, with interviews, firsthand accounts or artists writing about other artists. We never really considered this a “critical methodology” rather it was the only logical strategy, given that the ideas these artists were working with were so new that there was no critical vocabulary to apply to them.

We considered our editorial approach to be a useful foundation for, and a necessary precursor to, the development of critical discussion around the art we covered. And when a form such as performance art became validated to the point of being part of the critical discourse, it was time for us to look in new directions.

Our editorial journey took us down some roads that later became freeways, and some roads that are now overgrown with weeds. The magazine reflects a wide variety of concerns that developed in the arts during its 20-year history. In considering what we might include in an anthology of writings from the magazine, we realized that there was no one anthology that could both reflect the history of the magazine and at the same time exist as a coherent book. So we settled for the fact that this is an anthology from High Performance, but it is not the anthology from High Performance.

What we chose to do in developing this anthology was to look at both where the magazine started and where it ended. Interestingly, the first essay in the first issue was Richard Newton’s interview with Suzanne Lacy, and the last essay in the last issue was Aida Mancillas’ firstperson essay “Citizen Artist,” both of which are included in this book. We realized immediately that not only was there a direct connection between the two stories, but that they gave coherence to one particular thread that ran throughout the magazine’s history. That thread was the artists’ ongoing concern with art that reached beyond the traditional forms, content and context of the arts to engage itself in the lives of the broader community.

We used the title of Aida Mancillas’ essay, “The Citizen Artist,” to title the book because we felt it was this impulse by artists to locate themselves in the concerns of the world around them that best characterized this collection of essays. We have divided the essays into three broad areas of more specific concern; “The Art/Life Experiment,” “The Artist as Activist” and “The Artist as Citizen.”

These three areas of concern also roughly reflect three chronological time periods in the magazine’s existence. Certainly this chronology is significant to the magazine and reflects in some ways the development of its editorial concerns. It also reflects the fact that these artistic concerns had a certain prominence when we chose to write about them.

However, it would be overly simplistic to suggest that this was a linear progression of ideas in the manner that is so common to art history. History, as it’s defined by events, influences and precedents, is an elusive and cyclical thing. Ideas are constantly being developed and then forgotten, only to be rediscovered by later generations. In fact, it might be said that ideas remain constant through time; there are just moments when they resonate with greater purpose. So while we might, in retrospect, cite numerous precedents to the work presented here, it seems more to the point to suggest, not that these ideas are new, but that for this particular moment they have a resonance and a relevance that makes them worth noting.

Some of the artists presented here represent bodies of work that could easily encompass all three areas of concern, and their inclusion in any one area should not be viewed as limiting. Others have remained committed over time to a single focus. Some have a scholarly awareness of the precedents to their work, while others have found themselves serendipitously involved in similar directions.

In addition to our focus on selecting essays that reflected this particular thread, we also focused on selecting essays that reflected the artist’s voice. The vast majority of essays are either interviews with artists, often by other artists, or firstperson essays by artists. As a result, sometimes the analysis one often expects in an anthology is left up to the reader; in its place is an intimate view of the artist’s concerns and motivations. We consider that intimate view to be a valuable addition to the critical and documentary books already in existence (see bibliography).

Setting the Table

In preparing to read these essays, it’s useful to consider the cultural and artistic context that existed in the late ’70s when High Performance was founded.

Formally, the arts had been going through an extended period of radical experimentation dating back to the 19th century. The post-World War II period alone had seen such seminal activity as John Cage’s revolutionary concepts of sound and music, and his interdisciplinary collaborations with the likes of dancer Merce Cunningham and painter Robert Rauschenberg; the theater experiments of Jerzy Grotowski, the Living Theater of Julian Beck and Judith Malina, and others; Alan Kaprow’s Happenings and Joseph Beuys’ Social Sculptures; the postmodern dance experiments that took place at the Judson Church Theater; and the improvisational poetry of the Beats. This list is far from complete, but illustrates the fact that by the mid-’70s artists had essentially established the permission to manifest their art in whatever form they chose.

Politically, young adults of the ’70s had experienced the Civil Rights and Feminist Movements, Vietnam War protests, worldwide student demonstrations, Black Panthers, multiple assassinations and the resignation of a President in disgrace. People were empowered to be outspoken and to “take it to the streets” if necessary. The idea that the arts could be adjunct to political causes was already firmly established in the work of such groups as the Free Southern Theater, Bread and Puppet Theater and the Chicano muralists who supported the United Farm Workers.

Socially, artists were still experiencing the anarchistic freedoms of the ’60s, the impact of Eastern philosophies and the more pragmatic self-empowerment movement. New and accessible technologies were blossoming, from video to xerography, synthesizers and cassette tape recorders. Postmodern thought was at work in various enclaves. The U.S. government created the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and the Comprehensive Education and Training Act (CETA), both of which channeled all-important money into the hands of artists.

All of these events together created a time so ripe for artistic experimentation that one can hardly imagine it in today’s more conservative political, social and artistic climate. It produced both innovation and excess, and it was left to those who succeeded it to sort the wheat from the chaff.

20 Years of Art in the Public Arena

During the ’70s there was much discussion among artists about “the public,” and lots of the art that was done reflected experiments on the part of artists to circumvent traditional art venues and establish a direct connection to the intended audience. Newly accessible technology was viewed as a means to “democratize” art, and artists armed with portable video units or cassette recorders began creating, presenting and even broadcasting their own experimental media productions. The copy machine was often the tool of choice for producing “unlimited multiples”—correspondence art, artist’s books and periodicals—that could be cheaply created and distributed. There were impromptu public performances and temporary site-specific installations. Serving all of these ideas was the development and growth of artist co-ops and artist-run alternative spaces, where artistic experiments could have direct public access.

All of these developments came together in the art/life experiments of the time. Members of the public who dared venture a peek often found themselves bewildered by formal experiments they had no vocabulary to comprehend, or annoyed by confrontations they had no desire to engage with. When these art/life experiments succeeded it was usually through the appropriation of mass-media techniques, which the public could definitely understand, or through a certain imaginative charm that made the effort to understand more palatable for the public.

At the time, southern California was a particular hotbed of artistic experimentation. Exposure to artists like Chris Burden and Paul McCarthy and, in particular, the work coming out of the strong feminist art community inspired Linda Burnham to found High Performance in 1978. The magazine was created in response to the need for a journal of record to document these art experiments. Its name derived from the fact that, for better or worse, most of this work was done under the rubric of “performance art.”

This self-imposed view of High Performance as a performance art magazine worked well for the first three or four years, but it gradually became apparent that such editorial specificity was arbitrarily limiting. The creative impulses that guided that early performance art could be found throughout the creative arts—in dance, theater, music and beyond. And it was these creative impulses, not a commitment to the definition of performance art, that inspired the magazine in the first place. As a result, the magazine started expanding its editorial focus to look at art and its public experiments through a multidisciplinary lens.

Nor could the magazine remain focused on the experiments with form that were so typical of the earliest work it covered. By the mid-’80s, experiments with the formal boundaries of art were on the decline, in part because the alternative spaces had now become institutional homes for experimental art. Perhaps unwittingly, institutionalization brought with it the development of formal parameters, and the resulting staged performances and gallery exhibitions took much the same structure as they might in a traditional venue. It was also true that the best of the work itself was achieving an acceptance that made it accessible to such venues.

A generation earlier, feminist artists had taken advantage of the freedom in the formal experimentation of the time to introduce social and political content into their work. This inspired a broad range of artists to use their art to address such issues as the environment, cultural diversity, homophobia, disarmament and more.

Artists had an overwhelming sense that they no longer had to separate the task of creating art from the social issues that had an impact on the rest of their lives, and for many, a sense that the content was the most important aspect of the art. They were often dealing with such life-and-death or highly charged issues as AIDS, racism, and pollution. The savvy activist artist knew that if your form alienated the public, your message didn’t get through. So the form got more conservative as the content got more radical.

This “artist as activist” work sometimes came up short because, in spite of expressed concerns for social good, artists often remained a subculture separate and alien from the public they purported to serve. “Preaching to the converted” was an oft-heard criticism of artists who remained inside the art world structure to present their politicized point of view, and it was not a criticism the artists took lightly.

Both the activist artists and the presenters who supported them got bolder in their efforts to find a public for their messages. In this atmosphere of increased stridency, the arts suddenly found themselves at war with a conservative public in 1989. Regardless of how politicized the content of artists’ work was up to that point, the de facto content of the work now became “freedom of expression,” as critics tried to muzzle controversial artists and presenters, as well as do away with any government agency willing to fund them. It’s a war that’s still going on as we write this book, with battles won and lost on both sides. But one of the most significant, though less recognized, losses for activist artists has been the co-opting of their content. Too often the focus has been on their right to speak, not on what they say when they’re given a voice.

For many, the Culture Wars red-flagged the fact that in spite of the artist’s sense of art being important for the public, the public, by and large, did not share that view. And it was further evident that artists were having little impact on that perception by battling with conservatives in the media. Consciously or not, artists had cultivated the perception that they were somehow separate and different from the public, and conservative critics were all too pleased to use that historical bit of arrogance to keep artists alienated and on the defensive.

In this atmosphere in the early ’90s we began to notice that more and more socially committed artists were changing the context of their work. Artists who used to regularly appear in the pages of the magazine were dropping out of sight. When we tracked them down we found that they were now doing art with at-risk youth or in prisons or hospices or just in their neighborhoods. They believed that the arbitrary separation of art world and real world had made them less effective as artists, and caused them to call into question their commitment to the public. This new sensibility didn’t necessarily reject the art world, but rather viewed it as one of many contexts in which art could exist. It followed that the context of art was just as crucial to its success as the form and content.

These artists have chosen to invest themselves directly in the public in such a way that they are no longer viewing the public from the outside, but rather are an integral part of that public. In such a context, the art that develops is a direct reflection of the particular culture in which it is created. This creates an entirely different relationship between the artist and the public, because where the artist is invested in the public, the public is invested in art. The art need be no less innovative or experimental when the public views the work as developing from a common experience.

The irony, or course, is that this is not really a new context for art at all, but rather one of the oldest—the artist as an integral part of a larger community. It’s a traditional context that is still common in many societies and even within isolated subcultures of our own society. But it’s in direct contrast to the isolationist view of the artist that has dominated Western culture.

It’s the “artist as citizen,” a concept that seems so obvious that one can only wonder how it became so alien. Is it a threat to traditional Western art practice? Hardly. Nor should it be. It’s to everybody’s benefit that the arts have multiple contexts in which to thrive. Socially committed, community-engaged artists add depth to our culture and re-enchant their chosen publics, coming back to the reason why art was ever important in the first place.

Orginally pubished as part of The Citizen Artist by Critical Press, 1998.

Original CAN/API publication: September 2002