In November 2002, Mary Jane Jacob attended B.HERE, the international conference of Engage, the advocacy organisation in Britain for the promotion of gallery education, in collaboration with Baltic in Gateshead. Following her presentation given there, Malcolm Dickson interviewed her on issues arising both from her talk and from her extensive and eclectic curatorial practice.

MD When you worked within institutions, what artistic control did you have?

MJJ Contemporary art can be a difficult practice to contain within the institution of a museum.  At least it seemed so when I began my professional career as a curator.  Most concrete are problems of space (art that physically didn't fit in galleries) and intent (art that wasn¹t meant for galleries, from mass-produced artists books, to temporal, performative gestures and issue-driven protests).  But the disjuncture of contemporary art and institutions has its political side, too, played out in the workaday world of museums where, as collecting institutions, objects are valued over the ideas and the processes of artmaking; and, as privately funded public entities in the U.S., founders and financial supporters are valued over faceless "patrons" and audiences that might be potential visitors but not regulars and certainly not benefactors. 

My intent starting in the late 1970s was to give access to artists left out of our view of art by extending invitations to American artists outside the conventional mainstream.  My choices were accepted by the trustee exhibition committees to which I had to seek approval since this seemed consistent with the contemporary museum mission of searching out the new, the vanguard of the moment.  But there was something else about these choices.  I liked staging shows that made people cry, that moved them because the art connected to the realities of their lives and had the potential to contribute meaning.  So, while my move from working inside the museum to working in places of life beyond the institutional walls, had to do with the physical and conceptual needs of the work of artists, it also was located in my desire to find an ethical and socially interactive space where art could have more meaning for more people.  

MD What different approaches to programming did you practice in this context outside museums?  What inspirational models existed for you in the early Œ90s both within the States and further afield?

MJJ Well, this phase of my work began with the invitation to organize an outdoor sculpture show for the Spoleto Festival in Charleston, South Carolina.  I was initially inspired by alternative museums in which industrial spaces became sympathetic environments for installation art, often commissioned site-specific works, in Western Europe (places like the estate of Count Panza di Biumo or the Crex Collection in Schaffhausen, Switzerland), and to a lesser degree in the U.S.   These were places for works; people were left out of the equation.  By the time we moved squarely into the postcolonial discourse of social difference in the late 1980s, it seemed even more ironic that a consciousness of audience was missing from museum exhibitions and biennials; they featured art advocating social justice, yet those who were themselves the subject remained invisible, absent from the audience.    

MD How do we engage people in art?

MJJ For this the Charleston show (1991) used historic sites that had meaning and became part of the art itself; this had been one of the artistic strategies in "Projekt Skulptur" in Munster in 1987.  But the issues embedded in the locations we used were profound to local citizens who were spiritually connected to those sites, as I later learned.   In my own work that experience was translated into "Culture in Action" in Chicago (1993) that embraced an invigorated sense of the ownership of the public in public art.  This was also the period in which artist Suzanne Lacy was assessing this field through the landmark publication Mapping the Terrain in which she coined the term "new genre public art." The Chicago projects were grounded in issues critical to people's existence and we moved into direct modes of engagement with segments of the population with the intensity of something urgent in your daily life  Artists shared authorship with these members of the public and together we all thought about how art could connect to issues--representing them, remediating them, or just lending meaning.  As a curatorial practice, I found—as a shift away from the way curators seek to validate new artists by exposing their work—I could contribute to validating certain constituencies left out by the art world. This was continued in the "Conversations at The Caste" program during the 1996 Atlanta Olympics that looked at this new genre as an international enterprise.  Each project created a dialogue with a constituency and then the whole was wrapped into a discursive experience through the framing of issues of practice by the artist's collaborative artway of thinking.

MD It was raised by one speaker at the Engage conference that we always return to the familiar once we have exhausted something innovative and self-initiated. "Site-specific" art has come almost full circle in the UK from the move outside the galleries then back in again in a classically reformist way, although there are progressive and conservative aspects to this. However, you have continued to work in Charleston.  Can you tell us how the 1991 exhibition "Places with a Past" differs from your recent multi-year project "Evoking History," how it develops the notion of site- or context-specific art or relates to "new genre public art?"

MJJ The experience of contemporary site-related art “hit home” in Charleston, even though the whole town is essentially a heritage site.  Going back to do a program ten years after "Places," I wanted to both go deeper into that local history and locate its meaning beyond that frame‹to see the ways in which its postcolonial story is at once specific and universal.  The first two installments (2001, 2002) were co-curated with a younger colleague and former student Tumelo Mosaka from Johannesburg.   In the first year, three artists lead teams of locals into critical inquiries that resulted in various forms (a play, a garden, a workshop) meant to break regional traditions of silence about social conditions based in issues of race.  Then, we took a totally different approach that may have seemed reactionary: six artists worked from their own inspirations, not through community collaborations, to create site projects (on a lighthouse, in a plantation, in the last remaining houses in The Borough, a portside African-American neighborhood now erased for tourism and economic development).  Yet, even though these artists spoke with their own voice, the power and beauty of their works spoke to the public with a  deep resonance and true sense of place.  But this series over two years was more than the sum of artists; projects because we had embedded in the community and shared our process openly with ”stakeholders”: people of different social strata, but who all feel an investment in this place and are willing to believe art can be a means of articulating that stake in the legacy of history.   Now, continuing to work in Charleston, my curatorial process has been traded for a community process: along with Suzanne Lacy and artist Rick Lowe (who created the Project Row Houses in Houston), I am part of a volunteer resource team working with local citizens who are organizing to challenge the tourist and economic development of the historic downtown.  And in this we are testing our own ways if working.  We don't know where it will lead-- exactly--but we do know that art and artists are part of the evolving Charleston story of race and representation, housing and educational opportunities, the past and the future of this place.  

MD Do you think you can be effective from the outside?

MJJ One of the primary critiques of community-based practice is the role of the outsider.  But I have learned that by demanding artist and audience to be alike, essentializes both.  I think the practices we are developing today in Charleston can be a case study to help us understand that maintaining the local/insider profile, can conspire against our aims because it can serve to isolate a place and segregate a community?  Moreover, it is also important to undertake the challenges of communication across identities and this can start with artists present within a community.  

In 1997 Lucy Lippard wrote [The Lure of the Local: Senses of Place in a Multicentered Society (New York: The New Press, pp. 280-1] of the 1991 Charleston show that its “practice of importing artists for place-oriented exhibitions” is “increasingly questionable”; doing it “from the outside…it was hard to impress the locals…[and] sophisticated exhibitions like ‘Places With a Past,’ which became the model for art about place rooted less in local community than in myth filtered through the avant garde, tend to be strong in form and weak in connectedness.”  Anyone who has undertaken an education programme or community project, knows the effects can’t be assessed from a distance of place (by a critic who never experienced the project) and must be examined over time.  Such projects unleash a process.  We are still in Charleston and there we are part of a dialogue because, as outsiders, we are valued because we listen, question, provoke, calling those to the table who might not otherwise convene through art. 

MD  Another speaker at the Engage conference, Emily Pringle, stated that education work in galleries isn't a get out of failure from the education system but something quite different. Could you say something here about co-constructive learning, about the artist as co-learner in a community project? What for you is the value of artists working with people?

MJJ Educator-thinkers, going back to American Progressives like John Dewey or, in our own time, Paulo Freire (Pedagogy of the Oppressed), have positioned the student as teacher so that dialogue replaces power in the learning relationship.  A corollary to this is the artist-audience paradigm.  In this, artists as educators are valuable in providing us with new ways of seeing - changing our perception - revealing with new clarity the essential questions so that the audience (learners) can find their own answers. 

MD There are few forums or publications to discuss what counts as genuine involvement, real consultation, and organisational change? There are a lot of claims made for artists working with people and a very loose and uncritical use of those words that can include anything from an artist using people in a community as their subject matter, to a workshop situation in a museum which is framed by art history and interpretation of an artwork, to lots of other things, which in actual fact make up quite an eclectic and developing sector. How would you translate to your own experience or observations the remark made by Tim Brennan at the conference when he said that there are many "lies and fictions that take place around 'socially engaged art'?"

MJJ I think the critical discourse is emerging among a younger generation of artists and practioners (curators, educators, community administrators) some who are attracted to the genuine transformative power of this practice, some who have seen first hand the changes within the lives of individuals or communities these are some of the reasons of which I am aware.  They are forging their own projects as do Nina Pope and Karen Guthrie and para-institutions like B&B of Sophie Hope and Sarah Carrington that each represents generous ways of working with artists, and who, in turn, make space for the audience to be present in the work.  There has been a big shift over the last few years, even within mainstream galleries with the explosion of interactive works leading to what Nicolas Bourriaud has called "Relational Art" (such as Joseph Grigely, Carsten Holler, Jorge Pardo, Carsten Holler, Rirkrit Tiravanija, or Andrea Zittel) that is a social interaction. As to the "lies," this work is hard and anyone who chooses to undertake it will only sustain this practice with commitment.  And, as I said earlier, the value of this art as a social practice often does not reveal itself immediately, but only over time.

MD There is a deep-rooted power relationship between participatory arts (or an art of social concern) and "real art." This is reflected in the relationships between the mainstream cultural institutions and community based arts, and the value systems associated with them. To what extent would you say this constructed barrier has and is being challenged, bridged, or circumvented altogether?  What is the relationship between community-based arts practice and the commercial art world in States - is a project like Rollins and KOS a unique case?  Other misunderstandings also suggest a “lowering of standards” for artists which brings in that notion of quality and value, or more importantly who defines those.

MJJ It is true that 'relational art' is less contentious, less criticized by the mainstream art world because it is located in galleries rather than communities.  Work outside the institution is usually identified with an underclass or a given population, hence, it is seen as “compromised” because it specifically seek to address and communicate with a constituency considered “below” the conventional gallery-going audience.  This is just wrong. Quality exists in all arenas but the level of art-world sophistication of the participant is not the gauge.

MD It has been suggested that there is a market niche for socially engaged art practice at the moment; that it is in vogue.  The interaction between art, social concern and public policy is also beginning to gain some critical mass in the countries of the islands. Given the lack of public funding in the States, how do projects of ambition realise themselves and how can they remain uncompromised by corporate support?  What is the situation for an independent curator in the States right now wanting to put together a show? Where do artists get money to produce new work?