Intermediarios de valores.

Placing Myself: My Research Motives and Artistic Practice

This research has grown out of multiple intersecting personal interests. It has been indirectly motivated by a desire to better understand the city in which I grew up and live today, Toronto: its Aboriginal history, too rarely acknowledged; its relationships to other places; its many different social histories; how past conflicts and social movements have shaped its contemporary political and social

dynamics. As a middle-class white settler born and raised in downtown Toronto my experience in this city has been one of economic and cultural privilege. On my maternal grandmothers’ side, I am a fourth-generation Torontonian. People on that side of my family were members of the city’s early Anglo establishment, the elite of old Toronto. They were captains of industry, property owners, people with connections to political and cultural power. My family history also includes outsider experiences in Toronto, including more recent immigration experiences, anti-Semitism and, political persecution, including internment of relatives, the threat of which forced my maternal grandfather into hiding during the 1940s. In combination, this heritage has produced in me both a sense of responsibility to challenge hegemonic constructions of the city’s history (and of national history, more broadly) and an awareness of the incredible fault lines in Toronto’s history as currently presented within the educational system, by the City’s museums and in City of Toronto branding.

40 I am also profoundly aware of current inequities in this city. Toronto is not as ghettoized as many American cities but wealth and poverty are increasingly spatially polarized in this city.136 Also, here next-door neighbours can and do have radically different senses of place depending on their relative privilege or poverty, skin colour, educational background and gender. To my mind, “place” and “community” in this city aren’t remotely synonymous. Strong local networks (i.e. local communities) rarely straddle class differences. I’ve too often witnessed active placemaking activities by local “community” groups that involve the

displacement of people they deem undesirable. While we could benefit socially from strengthened social relationships at a local level and while I personally feel the “lure of the local” (a desire to better know the people I share a neighbourhood and a city with) each example of locality I have known is marked by acute

displacements.

My awareness of Toronto as a city of displacement has become

significantly more profound as I have worked over the years as an activist, artist and educator, with street-involved Toronto residents, racialized youth, and marginalized social institutions. Over fifteen years of work in documentary history, activist art and community art have led me to the questions I engage in this research and have taught me as much about the complexities of place and social engagement as all of the reading I have done on the subject. Over the years, I have worked on a number of projects that attempted to foster civic dialogue through the prism of place. This began when I worked as a researcher for Canada: A People’s History, a CBC television documentary series, which

41 narrated Canadian history through first-person testimonies. After two years of work with the CBC, I moved into freelance work and at the same time co-founded an activist arts collective, Paperfire, which aimed to personalize the (often

impersonal) messages of Toronto’s anti-corporate globalization movement of that time. Paperfire built giant puppets and other spectacle arts and staged numerous public performances in Toronto between 2002-2004. It was through my work with Paperfire that I was introduced to the field of community art. My work in

community art since that time (creating performances, video and audio

installations and, most recently, public plaques) has most directly prompted this doctoral research. Let me outline a few of my experiences, to give some

examples.

In 2005 I co-wrote and co-produced a performance piece with called

Stories From the Badlands with artists Leah Houston and Cat McLeod. Stories From the Badlands examined tensions regarding public safety, crime and poverty

in the Bloor/Lansdowne area of Toronto (near which all of us lived). Disturbed by attempts by a local group to ‘clean up the neighbourhood’, our goal was to

illuminate the ways in which discourses of safety and community can further exclude marginalized populations. Using direct quotes gathered both from interviews with street-involved residents and from the online discussions of neighbourhood “improvement” groups, we wrote a multi-perspectival choral script, which we performed in front of projections of photographic images of the neighbourhood. The following year Leah Houston continued the work we had begun through a community art project with residents of Savards Women’s

42 Shelter at the corner of Bloor/Lansdowne. I produced a short video with shelter residents for that project.

Houston then invited me to co-lead an eight-month community art project with her. We Are Here: The Monument Project (Toronto, 2008) was an

installation project produced collaboratively with residents of two Toronto

homeless shelters (Savards and Strachan House). Leah and I acted as artists in residence in the shelters and spent multiple days a week working on the project in situ for the first months of the project and then every day for the last two months. The work we made with shelter residents consisted of four connected installations. One memorialized homeless people who have died on the streets of Toronto through handmade shrines. Another celebrated the vibrancy and

presence of people who are currently living on the street and in the shelter system through “life chairs”, a visual form Leah had worked with the year before. The third consisted of poetry and photographs created by shelter residents with our help. The fourth was an audio installation that I made, based on recordings I did with shelter residents on themes of home, safety, policing and community and, again, based as well on voices from homeowner-led neighbourhood groups. This installation, titled Community Meeting, brought clashing visions of home and neighbourhood together. In our program, I described the installation in this way:

This is a community meeting with a twist. In it we hear things which often go unsaid when housing is discussed publicly. Here, the voices of people who have lived on the street and in the shelter system, so often ignored when community and neighbourhood are publicly discussed, take center stage, casting a new light on the safety discourse put forth by

43 As the lead artist I saw myself as the convener of the meeting, which would likely erupt were these voices to be heard simultaneously in a real public meeting.

My work on Stories from the Badlands and We Are Here: The Monument

Project, and the process of making Community Meeting in particular, allowed me

to explore the contested nature of urban places and to play with the presentation of directly conflicting emotional relationships to place. For both projects I had to think very carefully about audience reception and to confront head-on the myth that any piece of “public art” can speak equally to all publics. In these projects I was also struggling to find ways to work collaboratively on contentious social issues, issues in which power must be named directly. I was struggling with making work that was antagonistic, in that it challenged securely housed people to question their own assumptions and revealed the bigotry of a well-intentioned middle-class citizen’s group, without turning audience members off. This was an excellent exposure to the challenges of site-specific social engagement.

Another project that contributed to the development of the ideas presented in this dissertation was Oy Di Velt Vern Yinger (Jumblies Theatre, 2008, 2009).

Oy Di Velt Vern Yinger was a community-based performance about the history of

Naivelt, an eighty year-old secular socialist Jewish community on the outskirts of Brampton (near Toronto). It was produced twice, once in the summer of 2008 on site at Naivelt, and again in May 2009 at the Davenport Perth Neighbourhood Centre for the Mayworks Festival of the Working Arts. I did research and gathered oral history for both productions and was also the lead installation

44 designer, working collaboratively with Leah Houston, Michael Burtt, Michaela Otto and dozens of Naivelters, past and present.

Naivelt’s history is controversial, as it has always been an enclave of radical counter-culture and a hotbed of debate. Many of its members were historically persecuted for their political (primarily communist) allegiances. The community is also culturally steeped in internal disagreement and debate, public denunciations and critical conversations (some organized, many impromptu). It is a place to which community members are deeply attached, a second home for many. A number of current Naivelters have multi-generational relationships with the site and the community, and are proud of the roles their parents or

grandparents played in shaping Naivelt. The experience of gathering and

critically presenting a history of Naivelt was, then, bound to be a challenge. This experience was made all the more complicated and interesting for me personally because of my own family’s relationship to Naivelt. My grandparents were

members of the Naivelt community and my mother spent her summers there as a child. Along with a number of other communist party members, however, my family cut off ties with the Naivelt community in the mid-fifties, after Khrushchev exposed the atrocities of Stalin’s regime. The mid to late fifties were a rocky time at Naivelt, as community members were divided over whether to remain

communists or denounce communism. This time is referred to at Naivelt as “the split.”

Working on Oy Di Velt Vern Yinger gave me firsthand experience of the omission of critical perspectives which can occur in any community-based site-

45 specific project, even one undertaken by a community that is, in many respects, keenly aware of historical omissions and hegemonic constructions. I found my family’s experience pushed to the sidelines and was shocked by the vehemence with which contemporary Naivelters responded to the story of “the split.” The dominant narrative that Naivelt has developed about itself tends to omit the rifts of the past, the contradictions and political/ethical dilemmas that members of the community faced in the forties, fifties and sixties. In collaboration with Jumblies Theatre’s artistic director Ruth Howard and with Leah Houston, I had a chance to respond artistically to this in the 2009 production of the show, where we set up an “Interactive Room” which included a “debate table”. At the debate table, anyone could join in carefully facilitated but heated discussions about the very issues that plague the community to this day: Should Naivelters have left in the fifties? What is wrong with communism? Were those who left traitors? Which ideals remain to this day and which should be rethought? This was an excellent opportunity to try out another artistic method of working with conflicting

perspectives about a community.

Stories From the Badlands, We Are Here: The Monument Project and Oy Di Velt Vet Vern Yinger are examples of work in the field of socially engaged art

that has led directly to the research questions this dissertation explores. Jumblies Theatre’s Bridge of One Hair, which I began work on as a student

researcher/video documenter for the VIVA Project in 2005, is another example. It led me to so many questions about the meaning of place in a postcolonial and transnational city like Toronto that I have written an entire chapter of this

46 dissertation on the project. Two and a half years of continued work on the project also immeasurably deepened and challenged my perspectives on ethical artistic collaboration, the meaning of community and the challenges of critical

storytelling.

Finally, ongoing work on my own project DEPARTMENT OF PUBLIC MEMORY (2011- ) has continued to prompt further questions about site-specific social engagement. I have also written an entire chapter of this dissertation on this project. It has brought the challenges of working critically through site- specificity to the fore, as this project is underway at what many perceive to be a time of crisis in Toronto. The project responds directly to contentious

contemporary conditions.

The primary motivation for this research, then, has been to examine how the field that I have ended up working in, socially engaged art, can challenge urban inequities and foster democratic social change. My experiences working in this field have shown me new layers of city life, introduced me to stories and experiences I would never otherwise have encountered. They are perhaps the only situations I’ve experienced in which communities of place really do begin to look inclusive, despite the continued exclusions which I discuss in my in-depth analyses of these projects. Imperfect as they are, these practices represent attempts at real dialogue across difference- dialogue that engages difference rather than shoving it out of the picture. The hunch that these practices hold hope for better forms of placemaking and community-building has spurred this

47 social relations as well as the challenges and tensions that socially engaged artists face in trying to do this through site-specificity.

It is also important to note that over the course of my studies I have observed a kind of zeitgeist with relation to site-specific participatory art

practices. These practices are flourishing and proliferating. Site-specific social engagement is a hot concept in the contemporary art world. There is more and more work in this field but what does it amount to? My desire to probe this question critically has driven my research.

Research Methodology: A Praxis-Based Approach

As both a scholar and someone involved in making socially engaged art, I have applied a praxis-based approach to this research. A praxis-based approach asserts that knowledge production is a dialectical process of action and reflection, and that knowledge should be produced with the goal of social transformation. Popular educator Paulo Freire explained praxis in this way:

We must not negate practice for the sake of theory. To do so would reduce theory to a pure verbalism or intellectualism. By the same token, to negate theory for the sake of practice…is to run the risk of losing oneself in the disconnectedness of practice. It is for this reason that I never advocate either a theoretic elitism or a practice ungrounded in theory, but the unity between theory and practice.138

I have conducted this research in the hopes that I may continue to contribute to creative placemaking in the city of Toronto, where I live. While my research has involved literature reviews, interviews with other artists, and archival work, my knowledge of this field is also grounded in my own practice and I write about this

48 work from a position of ever-increasing familiarity with the complexities and

challenges of practice in this field. In taking up a praxis-based approach I follow in the footsteps of Participatory Action Researchers, who are committed to research in order to further action towards social justice.139 _{I will elaborate on my}

epistemological perspective shortly.

I see my position as a scholar/practitioner as a strength in this research. Too often academic analyses of activist and/or community-based practices either reify such practices or critique them without adequate attention to the

extraordinarily challenging contexts in which they are undertaken. It is my hope that my research avoids both of these pitfalls. Socially engaged artists are always working within the constraints and possibilities of a specific social, cultural,

political and economic context. None of the practices I discuss in this dissertation are by any means perfect and I have undertaken analysis partially in order to consider ways in which they might be improved upon. But neither should any of them be dismissed altogether in light of their pitfalls, blindspots or shortcomings. They can be mined instead for critical insights, which might lead to better choices on the part of future practitioners.

My position as a scholar/practitioner is also a strength because

documentation of process-based art rarely does justice to its breadth or depth. Claire Bishop notes that participatory practices are ideally experienced live and over a long period of time.140 _{She goes on to point out that in-depth research on}

participatory art is scant because few critics or scholars can spend the requisite time immersing themselves in participatory projects. I have had the privilege of

49 immersing myself in two of the three projects I analyze here and this allows me to better address the entirety of the artistic methodology of each of them.

The artistic practices I discuss here illuminate a range of conceptual starting points. Their approaches to participation and to place are different in many respects. Examined comparatively their methodological differences are highlighted. My comparison of these methodologies has not been undertaken in the search for a ‘right way’ of working. A formulaic approach to site-specific art is an oxymoron. Each of these projects has been undertaken in distinct

circumstances and the artists involved have carefully considered those circumstances when designing their projects. Nonetheless, an analysis of

different methodologies is instructive. It reveals a range of paradigms from which to proceed with site-specific engagement, identifies key lenses through which such practices can be considered, and fosters critical thinking about future practices.

I elaborate below on my praxis-based methodology and my position as a scholar/practitioner. Specifically, I discuss: my choice of case studies; my ideological/epistemological stance; and, the methods I have employed to research each of my case studies.

Choice of Case Studies

My interest in approaching this research from the dual perspective of

50 that scholarly analysis is greatly enriched by a nuanced awareness of the context and daily dynamics of a practice, I have chosen to focus on projects in which I have either participated for a considerable length of time or for which I had access to information that revealed the workings behind the practice over a period of years. Here I elaborate on my familiarity with each of my case studies.

REPOhistory

REPOhistory is an art collective I have been interested in for many years but it

was only when I discovered that the collective had archived all of their meeting minutes, correspondences and notes that I considered including REPOhistory as a case study in this research. Typically, researching process-based art practices after the fact proves problematic, as few physical traces of these practices remain, and even fewer are available to the public. These practices are usually under-documented due to short-term funding (or lack of funding altogether) and scant attention on the part of mainstream press and art critics. Sources that do remain, such as grant reports, interviews with artists or follow-up presentations by those involved, also neglect to tell the whole story of such practices, as artists feel pressure to emphasize the “successes” of the work and to maintain existing relationships with project partners and funders by passing over difficulties like