Text
English
ID: <
10.7202/1066803ar>
·
DOI: <
10.7202/1066803ar>
Abstract
artists collaborating with the public and/or professionals from various fields, including ecology, meet and reformulate, where appropriate, the fundamental values underlying the social and political context of projects such as the rehabilitation of the Nine Mile Run watercourse in Pittsburgh from 1996 to 1999. Recent critical debates on collaborative art have enabled new theoretical models to develop, not only to define these projects in the general context of art practice, but also to identify ethical and aesthetic criteria that can maximise their potential. Several of the key players in this debate started from the concepts of intersubjectivity highlighted in the papers of Félix Guattari, Jacques Rancière and others, proposing to overcome simplistic oppositions between individual subjectivity and the community in order to move towards a more productive ‘topic policy’, in the words of the writer and conservative Okwui Enwezor. The exhibition commissioner Stephen Wright proposes a particularly effective theoretical framework for reflection for collaborative projects which, like the Nine Mile Run Greenway project, do not materialise in the form of visible ‘art’. This article is followed by a text in which artist Tim Collins discusses another more important project he led in Pittsburgh directly after the Nine Mile Run project on which he had collaborated.