Cultural Agents

You hear the phrases constantly. “The system is failing.” “We just can’t go on like this anymore.” So imagine this. No, that’s it. Just imagine. What would it look like? What would we do differently? And then instead of crowding your mind with the clutter of institutions and what is and is not possible, employ some of that finger-painting recklessness they taught in first grade. Play. What are the possibilities?
“You as an artist are expected to come up with your own rules and your own definition of what art is,” describes Pedro Reyes, an artist from Mexico City. “All spaces are open to innovation in the sense that I don’t think there is one single space of human activity that cannot be re-imagined.”
Art provides the perfect test kitchen for the solving the world’s troubles, and artists around the world are beginning to harness (or release) the energy of art into the world of activism and social change. Examples of this agency are being collected by Cultural Agents, an initiative at Harvard University that recognizes the work of extraordinary artists and organizations around the world that employ art to affect change.
“You can’t be a citizen unless you can put things together in new ways, imagine new possibilities,” says Harvard Professor Doris Sommer, the founder of Cultural Agents. “These kinds of interventions have existed for along time and what we need is to raise awareness so this looks like a possible future activity for more people.”
The works of artists and architects such as Alfredo Jaar and Pedro Reyes illustrate examples of cultural agency and arts interventionism. These are individuals who have been trained in arts and architecture and enjoyed international recognition. A great body of their works incorporates an element of social responsibility.
“I often think of what I do, that if it wasn’t called art, it would still be relevant,” explains Reyes.
Pedro Reyes works with a plethora of media—from a TV puppet series, whose protagonists are Karl Marx and Adam Smith, to constructing pyramidal, vertical parks in Mexico City. Works such as these address a range of social and environmental issues. He has worked with the Guggenheim Museum in New York and in diverse locations across the United States, Europe and Latin America. Reyes lists social dynamics and interaction as a key material in his work: “Works of art which are not finished until there is some input from the public.”
The diverse backgrounds of artists such as Reyes and Jaar, who is now based in New York but fled Chile in the 1980s to escape the Pinochet regime, help them to address various problems on a multiple levels. The interventions are pointed, purposely, and micro, but have a huge splash.
Take for example the project Lights in the City by Alfredo Jaar. It took Jaar’s artistic eye to bring attention to the fact that approximately 15,000 people sleep on the streets every night in Montreal, one of the wealthiest and most frigid cities in North America. In 1999 the city of Montreal invited Jaar to create a Public Intervention. Jaar, to date, has staged over sixty of what he calls Public Interventions: individual art projects that collaborate with cities or groups in order to creatively address social issues. Jaar has created Art Interventions in diverse locations such as the Finnish archipelago, Santiago de Chile, and Milan. His work has addressed issues ranging from immigration to conservation.
When Jaar arrived in Montreal for one of seven investigative visits, he had no preconceptions of his project. During an investigative visit to the city, he chanced on the invisible beings that haunt the streets. Through interviews, Jaar found that the poor and homeless in Montreal felt marginalized and dehumanized. Jaar visited three different shelters near the Old Montreal district; consistently the residents of these temporary homes asked him not to photograph them. When asked, many replied, “This is what hurts. We are invisible. We are treated like urban furniture.”
How did Jaar take this understanding and go beyond the standard work of both artists and NGOs? He was able to imagine something completely different.
What distinguishes the work of cultural agents from social workers, traditional artists and socially manipulative ad-men is the ability, “To go beyond what is expected,” explains Harvard Professor Francesco Erspamer and co-teacher of an undergraduate class titled “Cultural Agents.” From the French Revolution to Obama’s 2008 campaign, Erspamer says, “The fact that art is effective at a social level is clearly understood.” Then, it’s a matter of how to employ that idea.
So Jaar transformed a symbol of Quebecer parliament and culture into a visually stunning site and socially painful reminder of the city’s unwillingness to address an overlooked population.
The cupola of the Marché Bonsecours vaults over the historic district of Montreal. Formerly the seat of the Canadian Parliament, five destructive fires caused the governmental body to abandon the building. Now, tourists weave in and out of the designer shops and chic cafés on the ground floor of the building. Above, the Cupola remains an empty beacon over the elegant neighborhood.
In 1999 for a period of six weeks, the Cupola would, at random intervals, light up a fiery red. Suddenly, while diners enjoyed summer nights on a patio or pedestrians ambled the European rues, one hundred thousand watts of red lights would brilliantly illuminate the Cupola. “The red suggests fire: the fire that destroyed this cupola five times in its history,” explains artist Alfredo Jaar about his project. “This time it is another kind of fire that is destroying that tower. It’s a fire that is actually destroying the society to allow 15,000 people to go homeless every night.”
Each time a person entered the shelter, the sky would light up with the shameful red fire. Ignited by the Cupola, the press and media spread the conflagrant outrage about the thousands of homeless who weathered the freezing winters in the northern city.
Although the polemic Intervention was prematurely taken down by the mayor of Montreal, Jaar’s Intervention brilliantly drew attention to the hushed-up issue of homelessness in the city and painted a glaring portrait of the invisible residents without showing their faces. This was no exclusive gallery showing of portraits of homelessness. This brought the issue straight to all Montreal residents.
Cultural Agents shows that the work of artists such as Alfredo Jaar is not a singular phenomenon. Not only has Jaar been working for decades now, but the idea that art creates effective interventions has become more and more salient in a world stagnated by old institutions.
Though Professor Erspamer emphasizes his role as a theorist in the operation of Cultural Agents, he also notes, “I am Italian, and Italy has been on the verge of disaster since forever.” Acknowledging that Italy’s rich artistic tradition might be its salvation if applied to creative governing is the first step. Erspamer illustrates by pointing to the front page of the Harvard Gazette. Disembodied hands hold up a cardboard sign with the headline: “With jobs in short supply, Harvard analysts discuss what is needed to spur the economy.”
“What this shows is that despite the fact that they are discussing what is needed to spur the economy, part of this sentence is already given as granted,” Erspamer explains. “The discussion is not open, but is already trying to find the solution to spur the economy as if to spur the economy is the solution. Which could well be. But that is not even talked about. And I think that’s what Cultural Agents and the use of art and literature within political economics, social environment. Is that on the contrary does not give anything as granted.”
Using a similar notion, Pedro Reyes sought an alternative way to address gun mortality in a city in northwestern Mexico instead of taking it for granted that the only approach to fighting gang violence is with police violence. In 2008 the Botanical Garden in the city of Culiacán commissioned artists to do interventions in the park. The city had one of the highest mortality rates by gunshot in Mexico. Combining with public and private sector partners, Reyes launched an advertising campaign announcing that citizens in Culiacán could turn in guns in exchange for coupons for household appliances. He called the project Palas por Pistolas (Guns into Shovels). 1,527 weapons were turned over to the campaign. In a public exhibition, Reyes dismantled the arms and melted them down. He made1,527 shovels. With these shovels, Reyes continues to work with citizens of Culiacán and international efforts to plant 1,527 trees.
Reyes re-imagined the horrors of drug violence and transformed violence into environmentalism and guns into shovels. The symbolic value of the project is poignant and manifold. It is also much more than a mere metaphor. As Reyes explained, Palas por Pistolas requires “A physical action as well as a psychological transformation.”
This is a way that arts create impact. It catches us off guard. Nevertheless, we are accustomed to art in prepackaged form. We like museums, places were art can be contained. We walk into a house of culture and expect to leave unchanged, perhaps a little more thoughtful or dazed from spending hours in a dark space. We expect art to play with metaphor, and we can appreciate a clever refiguring of a common theme or icon. But we rarely expect to be provoked to the point of action or even interaction with art.
“I think museums are built as fridges, which are spaces of perfectly controlled environment where works are preserved for posterity. And I think of museums more as ovens where you cook a reality,” says Reyes. So if you are cooking something in the oven you have to watch it, and the work begins to transform.
For instance, last summer Reyes partnered with the Guggenheim in order to create an intervention for museum-goers in Brooklyn. The Sanatorium project admitted a number of “patients” for two hours of four different sessions of therapy. Designed by Reyes and with the help of 70 volunteer therapists, ticketholders entered into a diverse range of treatments for the span of two hours. Meditation, light therapy, sharing secrets, the “works” all aimed at transformation and intimate encounters. The Sanatorium made therapy available to those who wouldn’t normally have access, the way museums give us access to Rembrandts we can’t afford to put on our own walls. It also revealed the action of artwork and the psychological impact that culture can have.
Reyes has taken it as his prerogative as an artist to play with the museum space. Our most basic concepts of culture are being transformed. Within the “fridge” of the museum, the most established institute of culture, Reyes is showing off how art can affect real change. To Reyes, the arts are an intriguing realm where play is allowed. There is no passive art connoisseur. There are spect-actors.
With this point of view, how do we begin to study art? The phenomenon of Cultural Agents carries on into education. Not merely what kinds of artists we are teaching, but also how we are teaching. Artists are reimagining the role of art, and so teachers must begin to envisage a new form of education. The humanities can no longer be stagnant, passive studies of a text or artwork. If How do we teach the arts are more than just passive objects? What happens when humanists begin to interpret these kinds of works?
In the late 1990s, Professor Doris Sommer trailblazed the Cultural Agents Initiative when she recognized a “crisis” in humanist education. She questioned why humanities education was being devalued, why humanities departments across the nation were being cut, and she asked herself what she could do. She identified and pioneered the academic study of artistic agency. She related civic responsibility to engaging and interpreting the process of artistic production. After establishing the field of study, Professor Sommer once again questioned her work as an educator and interpreter within the field of arts activism.
“I hold myself accountable,” said Professor Sommer. “What am I doing as a cultural agent? Is it enough to study brilliant people? Or do brilliant people give you a responsibility to be creative and accountable in your own everyday work?”
Her response, as she explains in her new book, The Work of Art in the World: On Humanistic Education and Civic Agency to be published by University Press later this year, was PRE-Texts, an educational tool that has been implemented internationally and with various aged schoolchildren and teachers. Based on a program in Perú, the PRE-Texts aims to enable teachers and grow. Rather than replicating a pre-packaged tool, the program encourages innovation and re-creation of the principles. At its core, PRE-Texts takes great works of literature, from the likes of Julio Cortázar, Jorge Luis Borges, Ralph Ellison, and Ray Bradbury, and invites participants to explore the text through artistic creation and interpretation. With the help of visiting artists and facilitating teachers, students “play” with literature. They make books, portraits, and poems, they seek out alternative texts, they act, sing, and rap. Using the text as a point of departure, students learn to interpret and question through creation. An essential activity throughout the workshop is questioning, “What did we do?”. Students are not just asked leading questions. They ask the text questions and learn to imagine answers.
This kind of interpretation mimics the work of cultural agents like Jaar and Reyes. Jaar and Reyes have shown that art is not passive. They use creativity to imagine new possibilities. In a field such as humanities, where there seems to be little room for innovation, this kind of energy is vitalizing.
PRE-Texts has also been astoundingly successful. The Ministry of Education in Mexico has adopted the program. It has expanded to new schools in Boston, Puerto Rico, Mexico and Colombia. Educators and students alike express enthusiasm, demonstrate increased collaboration, and expand their appreciation for arts and literature.
“This is my way of turning my own everyday work into something more creative and more responsive,” says Professor Sommer. Without being an artist herself, she was able to take lessons from the great theorists and artists she studied and taught and spin them into an act of cultural agency. As she told herself and as she tells her students, “If you’re going to get anything done you’ve got to be unreasonable.”
PRE-Texts is one manifestation of Professor Sommer’s civic engagement. Her role as an educator continues to inspire students and also to imagine possibilities for the program—such as the unlikely opportunity to develop a similar intervention in Zimbabwe.
“So we’re going to do some art activities and this is going to make students learn?”
Although Harvard University senior Naseemah Mohamed values self-expression through dancing, when she began talking with Professor Sommer about the idea of implementing an arts intervention in a middle school in Zimbabwean schools, she was skeptical.
“I never feel more like myself than when I’m dancing,” says Naseemah Mohamed. A native of Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, she has spent the last two summers conducting thesis research in schools in Zimbabwe. Last year, she enacted a creative program that is now supported by the Ministry of Education. For next year, she received a fellowship to learn flamenco dancing in Spain. In the future she plans pursue higher degrees in education policy.
Naseemah not only had to overcome her own qualms about the project, but she also had to convince educators in Zimbabwe. In an education system where colonial education and corporeal punishment still hold sway, the possibility of staging a successful education program using art-based learning seemed dubious. On top of that, the obstacle that midway through the 9-week program the students would go on vacation cast a shadow on Naseemah’s summer project. The twenty-one-year-old pushed on. She brought in 5 artists to work with students between the ages of 14 and 20. The artists collaborated with the teachers to teach workshops and work through Chinua Achebe’s difficult text Things Fall Apart, in English, with the students. The students began to learn literature through interacting with the arts and arts projects. They acted, sang, rapped, painted, and wrote poetry. At the end, the students presented an exhibition.
“The agency that the students gained in the classroom shocked all of us,” remembers Naseemah, who is currently translating her findings and data into a thesis. “I hypothesized that when you bring in art, teachers begin to not only recognize the individuality and the humanity of the students they are working with, but they also begin to appreciate the work that they are doing.”
Not only did the students increase reading comprehension skills, but the relationship between students and teachers also began to change. The arts intervention began addressing some of the fundamental problems of the Zimbabwean education system and widespread social pessimism, which Naseemah observed during research. This pessimism characterized education as ineffective and useless, an attitude harms both students and those considering careers as teachers.
Naseemah’s intervention used art in order to imagine a new possibility for these students and teachers. Clearly the institutionalized form of education was not working. Injecting the education system with a dose of creative energy gave students the ability to imagine better possibilities and impact both educators and students.
Arts not only press certain pressure points in society that can cause widespread and diverse reactions. It also has revolutionized teaching.
What does this mean for the future? Will art help to solve economic problems? Perhaps. For now, it is an inspiring new horizon that merits attention. Why? Because it is always changing. At the very heart of artists like Jaar and Reyes and educators such as Professors Sommer and Erspamer and Naseemah Mohamed is the idea that art continues to revolutionize, develop and change. Politics, education, immigration, environmentalism, are all fields that need to be re-imagined. There are even areas we don’t yet recognize that could use the disruptive artistic intervention.
Cultural Agents plays to the idea that in arts nothing is assumed. Art surprises. It delights. It innovates and takes risks. Art imagines new solutions; it pushes us beyond repetition of past mistakes. Art and fiction allow us to test out ideas and imagine the impossible. Art holds a mirror to society (a diagnosis, you could say). Cultural Agents recognizes those artists who take that cultural diagnosis one step further and stage an intervention.
As Professor Sommer points out, the “family resemblance” between cultural agents is strong and widespread across artists and education. Given the tools to recognize these resemblance is the first step.
“You can recognize that those family resemblances in other things that people are doing. Fine,” says Professor Sommer. “Then you have done a first level intellectual work identifying what other people are doing. What if you can recognize that those things are done in any field you can imagine. Then what? What responsibility does that visit on you?”