Wednesday was one such day. After working for a chunk of the afternoon on a workshop/ interventionist proposal for a conference on civic engagement and social justice, I schlepped up to Harvard for a presentation by Steve Lampert and Steve Duncombe on their project How to Win. More tag-team talk than presentation and more investigation than project, How to Win boils down to a very simple concept: what happens when you ask 20 self-described political artists:
How can you know when you’ve been successful?
The people they interviewed for the project, including Hans Haake, Emilie Clark, Dread Scott, took this seemingly straightforward question into all kinds of interlaced territories. When asked to define success in their artmaking, themes emerged such as:
Media Coverage
One-on-One Conversation
Making It RealRecalibration of Reality
(Click through to see links to projects that might fall under these categories)
All of these are workable definitions...depending on your goals. And though the idea caused a great deal of discomfort for some people in the room, when making self-proclaimed political art, having an end goal is not only appropriate but necessary if any change is to happen.
For some artists then, the next question is "...and then what?" If my latest project gets a flood media coverage, how do I leverage that press? Or do I just pat myself on the back and move on to the next project?
If my artwork raises awareness about a particular issue but includes no subsequent action on the part of the viewer, can I still call it a success?
These are questions that keep me up at night in terms of why I have chose art & music as my way of making meaning in the world. Thinking of art as just one piece of a larger strategy towards making change doesn't mean that it shouldn't be taken seriously (and at the same time, having fun with it!)
However, coming back into the office on Thursday, I started to explore how these ideas can be applied to the work our office does here at RISD. We are a young program, barely a year and a half out of the gates. As such, our definition of success is shifting and all over the map. Is this perhaps part of the problem? When you declare specific goals you suddenly open up clear way to evaluate (and be evaluated) as to whether you are making progress. Being so new, is it even appropriate to be pushing an Office agenda, when we are just two amongst a much larger RISD.
Still, if I were to hazard definitions of success chosing from those listed above, I would string several of them together: opening up new spaces between RISD and the city of Providence by provoking discussion by creating platforms for group and one-on-one conversations. This definition is nonetheless incredibly vague...what would happen if instead we set up specific benchmarks such as:
Increasing public engagement course offerings on campus from 12 to 20...
Creating a network of Teaching Assistants who meet regularly to discuss the interconnections between their course work...
To have 1/2 of the freshmen from our Leadership Institute Orientation group taking on leadership roles by the time they are sophomores...
Increasing the number of off-site federal work study students by 10%...
Two new collaborative projects between classes and local non-profits, with appropriate orientation to the ethics of community-engaged art practices...
Specificity in this context is complicated. In order to move many of these initiatives ahead, there needs to be institutional buy-in that RISD is, and should be, a civically-minded community of learners and educators and administrators. In the meanwhile we will continue to push the conversations where we can and leverage the strength of our relationships here on campus and out in the community to propose more concrete definitions.
There is more to be done.
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