Community Art: An Anthropological Perspective

by Kate Crehan

Overview

Exploring key issues for the anthropology of art and art theory, this fascinating text provides the first in-depth study of community art from an anthropological perspective.The book focuses on the forty year history of Free Form Arts Trust, an arts group that played a major part in the 1970s struggle to carve out a space for community arts in Britain. Turning their back on the world of gallery art, the fine-artist founders of Free Form were determined to use their visual expertise to connect, through collaborative art projects, with the working-class people excluded by the established art world. In seeking to give the residents of poor communities a greater role in shaping their built environment, the artists' aesthetic practice would be transformed.Community Art examines this process of aesthetic transformation and its rejection of the individualized practice of the gallery artist. The Free Form story calls into question common understandings of the categories of "art," "expertise," and "community," and makes this story relevant beyond late twentieth-century and early twenty-first-century Britain.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781847888334
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	11/01/2011
Pages:	224
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Kate Crehan is Professor of Anthropology, College of Staten Island and Graduate Center, City University of New York, USA

Table of Contents

List of Figures vii

Acknowledgements xi

Preface xiii

I The Rejection

1 Art Inside and Outside the Gallery 3

The Art World 5

Art with a Capital A 11

The Art World and Common Sense 18

Charges and Briefs 22

II The Shaping

2 Moving beyond the Gallery 29

Beginnings 29

An Art World Brief 35

Into the 'Community; 38

A Warmly Persuasive Word 40

Back to the Art World 41

'What's It For, Mister?' 44

Freedom and Structure 47

Fun Events v. Artism Lifeism 51

3 From Performance to the Environment 57

'I'm Afraid This Whole Horrible Box Takes Priority' 58

From Visual Systems to Free Form Arts Trust 59

Performance 61

Dead Fish and Totem Poles 72

The Environmental Turn 76

4 Community Arts and the Democratization of Expertise 79

The Rise and Fall of community Arts and Community Architecture 80

Early Environmental Work in Hackney 87

Providing Access to Expertise 91

5 Responding to Local Needs: Goldsmiths 95

Football and Mosiacs 98

Of Distraction and Expression 103

6 Making Art Collaboratively: Provost 111

Paths and Plantings 111

The Mural 115

'Everybody Was Involved in the Mural' 124

The View from the Arts Council 125

7 Theoretical and Political Locations 129

Artists and Ethnography 129

Locating the Free Form Artists 131

The Coming of the Audit Culture 137

III Into The Twenty-First Century

8 Free Form in 2004 141

A Professional Organization 141

The Norwich Commission 148

The Catton Grove Brief 152

9 A Carnival and a Standing Stone 157

The Catton Clear Day Carnival 158

'It's Personalized the Rubbish Collection a Bit More' 162

The Fiddlewood Project 165

Selecting an Artist 165

The Standing Stone 171

'It's Much Better Than That Angel of the North' 177

The End of the Journey 180

Conclusion: Of Art and Community 181

Artists in the 'Community' 181

New Genre Public Art 186

The Free Artist and the 'Nonexclusive Audience' 189

Community Art and the 'Community' 193

References 197

Index 203

Editorial Reviews

The first historical ethnography of community arts, essential reading for students and scholars interested in the growing field of the anthropology of art. - Roger Sansi-Roca, Senior Lecturer in Anthropology, Goldsmiths, University of London

From the Publisher