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University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

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Collaborative art practice in the public sphere: The death of the artist?

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Collaborative art practice in the public sphere: The death of the artist?

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COLLABORATIVE ART PRACTICE IN THE PUBLIC SPHERE:
THE DEATH OF THE ARTIST?

by

Shelly Lee

A Thesis Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC ROSKI SCHOOL OF FINE ARTS
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
MASTER OF PUBLIC ART STUDIES

May 2011

Copyright 2011 Shelly Lee

ii

Epigraph

-John Cage, Lecture on Nothing, 1959
1

1
Cage, John. “Lecture on Nothing.” in Silence: Lectures and Writings. 1st ed.
Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1961. 109.

iii

Dedication
As promised, this is for Norman.

iv

Acknowledgments
I first wish to extend my gratitude to my thesis committee, Janet Owen Driggs, Susan
Gray and Joshua Decter, for their encouragement, guidance and patience. I would also
like to thank Rhea Anastas and Elizabeth Lovins for leading me through the daunting
thesis process. Nothing would have been accomplished without my husband’s love,
encouragement and faith in me. Finally, none of this would have been possible without
my Mom, Dad and sister who have always supported my endeavors.

v

Table of Contents

Epigraph ii

Dedication iii

Acknowledgments iv

List of Figures vi

Abstract vii

Introduction 1

Chapter 1: Komar and Melamid,
People’s Choice series, 1994–1997 14

Chapter 2: Fritz Haeg,
Edible Estates, 2006 24

Chapter 3: Slanguage Studio, The Peacock Doesn’t See Its Own Ass/
Let’s Twitch Again: Operation Bird Watching in London, 2006 35

Chapter 4: LA Commons, Fear-Less, 2008 and
Serpentine Gallery, Edgware Road Project, 2010 45

Conclusion 56

Bibliography 67

Appendix 71

vi

List of Figures

Figure 1: Komar and Melamid, America’s Most Wanted, 1994 64

Figure 2: Komar and Melamid, America’s Most Unwanted, 1994 65

Figure 3: Komar and Melamid, Russia’s Most Wanted, 1994 66

Figure 4: Fritz Haeg, Edible Estates, 2006 67

Figure 5: Fritz Haeg, Edible Estates, 2006 67

Figure 6: Slanguage Studio, The Peacock Doesn’t See Its Own Ass/
Let’s Twitch Again: Operation Bird Watching in London, 2006 68

Figure 7: Slanguage Studio, The Peacock Doesn’t See Its Own Ass/
Let’s Twitch Again: Operation Bird Watching in London, 2006 69

Figure 8: LA Commons, Fear-Less, 2008 70

vii

Abstract
In The Death of the Author, Roland Barthes employs the term “Author”
2
to describe a
solitary figure who draws from their individual subjectivity and intellect to create an
original work of literature. Transferring Barthes’ concept to the visual arts, the “Artist” is
similarly a figure replete with authority, which authors the original, unchangeable
meaning of a work and gives it existence. Recent collaborative art practice in the public
sphere suggests however, that the Artist is in the process of being displaced from his or
her position as originator and authority. This thesis investigates the degree to which
collaborative art practice in the public sphere has succeeded in removing, or bringing
about the death of, the Artist. Specifically, it explores the position that the Artist has not
died but instead performs a role identified by Miwon Kwon as the “silent manager”
3
.
Each chapter considers an aspect of silent management and its methods as expressed
through selected artworks by Komar and Melamid, Fritz Haeg, Slanguage Studio, LA
Commons and the Serpentine Gallery’s Edgware Road Project.

2
Barthes, Roland. “The Death of the Author” in Image, music, text. Hill and Wang, 1978.
148.

3
Kwon, Miwon. One Place After Another: Site-specific Art and Locational Identity.
Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002. 31.

1

Introduction
Historically, working artists have acted in accord with the sets of conditions
established by their patrons. Perhaps nothing has changed today except the appearance of
authority? Art at the moment is no longer characterized by a hierarchical relationship
between a patron and an artist. Instead, with the function of “patron” multiplied to
include, for example, individual commissioners, sponsoring institutions, civic bodies and
exhibitors, authority is being applied from multiple directions, often simultaneously. The
notion of top-down authority suggested by the figure of a “patron” is further complicated
today in the public sphere, where contemporary collaborative art practices embrace
shared authorship to generate works from the combined interests of participants and the
individual artists and art collectives with whom they work.
Present conditions of artistic practice range from those set by a patron to those
determined by an individual artist in his or her private studio. While artists working in
the public sphere practice within a similar range of conditions, here there is also a strong
contemporary emphasis on devolving an artist’s traditional authority to collaborating
participants. Focusing on artistic collaborations in the public sphere that demonstrate
artists’ attempts to create platforms for multiple authorship, this thesis examines some of
the ways in which such devolution is currently occurring, considers the degree to which
authorship may be being deferred in each case, and ask whether is it possible for an artist
to ever fully relinquish their authority?
This thesis investigates the degree to which collaborative art practices in the
public sphere have succeeded in the removal of, or led to the death of, the “Artist” as an

2

“Author.” In The Death of the Author, Roland Barthes employs the term “Author”
4
to
describe a solitary figure who draws from their individual subjectivity and intellect to
create an original work of literature. According to Barthes, the Author is an obsolete
figure due to the enlightenments offered through Modernism. In the absence of an
“Author-God” to define the meaning of a work, room for interpretation is created for the
active reader. As Barthes aptly states, “the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the
death of the Author.”
5
He posits that the focus of a work’s meaning should be shifted
from its origin with the Author to its reception by the reader.
Barthes proposes the Author should no longer be the center of creative influence,
but should be viewed as a “scriptor.” He uses the term “scriptor” to disrupt the continuity
of power between the terms “Author” and “authority”. Barthes elaborates that the
scriptor exists to produce but not to explain the work and “is born simultaneously with
the text, is in no way equipped with a being preceding or exceeding the writing, [and] is
not the subject with the book as predicate.”
6
Barthes’ articulation of the scriptor’s role
emphasizes the severing of authority and authorship.
A traditional concept of power identifies the “Artist” as a figure replete with
authority who authors the unchangeable meaning of their work and, like the Author-God
described by Barthes, serves as a conduit to “truth” or “reality”. More recently and

4
Barthes, Roland. “The Death of the Author” in Image, music, text. Hill and Wang, 1978.
148.

5
Ibid.

6
Ibid., 145.

3

particularly in the public sphere, there has been a disintegration of this power figure in
the art world. The reasons behind the Artist’s demise can be attributed to the same
influences and events that prompted Barthes’ assertion of the death of the Author.
Barthes’ analysis operates across all cultural strata that consider the rejection of, or
change their approach to, authority figures.
Barthes underscores the impact of language through his use of the term scriptor,
and severs the Author from authority and authorship. Similarly, in The Function of the
Studio, Daniel Buren problematizes the inherent language of the public sphere, which
alters the context of the work. Buren asserts that although the studio is a private and
removed space of origin, the absolute autonomy of the art object is not possible when it is
positioned amidst complex outside forces.
7
In other words, as the art object is circulated
from an artist’s studio, so it adopts or alters meaning based on the site in which it is
installed. Every site, including the modern gallery or white cube, is framed with existing
language and codes that create a context for the artwork. Although there are recognizable
shifts between the artist who works within a private studio and the artist operating in the
public sphere, both workers must consider the effects of existing conditions of the site
that frames their work.
Since contemporary artistic practice in the public sphere has evolved through the
scholarship of Barthes and Buren, it is often declared to be a tool for articulating the
voices of the public who, in a similar way to the silent Barthesian reader, are thought to
be disenfranchised and voiceless. The privileged authority of the Artist, practicing in this

7
Buren, Daniel. “Function of the Museum.” Artforum 12 (September 1973): 68.

4

public field, is therefore intentionally undermined and pictured as dead or dying in order
to amplify the voices of various publics. For example the Richmond Community Public
Art Program “supports art projects between community groups and artists of all
disciplines. Artists and communities working collaboratively can explore issues, ideas
and concerns, voice community identity, express historical and cultural spirit and create
dialogue through art.”
8
As their mission demonstrates, the end product does not need to
be a permanent work of art, but should provide agency, or at least a voice, for the
disenfranchised community members.
In One Place After Another: Site-specific Art and Locational Identity, Miwon
Kwon refers to Barthes’ The Death of the Author and questions whether “the prevailing
relegation of authorship to the conditions of the site, including collaborations and/or
reader-viewers, [is] a continuing Barthesian performance of the ‘death of the author’ or a
recasting of the centrality of the artist as a ‘silent’ manager?”
9
Implying that the Artist is
neither dead nor entirely subsumed by the project participants, Kwon suggests that the
Artist has not died, but instead takes the form of a manager who performs various degrees
of silence. The term “manager” is defined as “a person who has control or direction of an
institution, business, etc.”
10
and “silence” is defined as the “absence of any sound.”
11
But

8
City of Richmond. "Community Public Art Program.”
http://richmondbc.info/__shared/printpages/page10966.htm (accessed February 13, 2011)

9
Kwon, Miwon. One Place After Another: Site-specific Art and Locational Identity.
Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002. 31.

10
Dictionary. “Manager.” http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/manager (accessed
February 27, 2011)

5

the pairing of the words, “silent” and “manager”, insinuates that the figure of the silent
manager some how has limited control and direction. According to Kwon’s question, the
conditions of site appear to prevail over the artist’s authority.
With her term “silent manager” Kwon claims that the Artist has not disappeared,
but has rather donned new clothes. Perhaps some artists don them in order to conform
and leverage their careers, while others genuinely desire to promote change and provide
voices for the disenfranchised. For this thesis, the silent manager can be a person
somewhere in between an éminence grise, “who wields power and influence unofficially
or behind the scenes”
12
and a project manager who plans the objectives and organizes the
logistics for individual projects.
The American composer and music theorist, John Cage, believed that there is no
such thing as silence. In 1951, he visited an anechoic chamber at Harvard University,
which is a room designed with special materials to ensure there are no sounds and echoes
within the space. In the chamber, he expected to hear nothing, but instead he “heard two
sounds, one high and one low.”
13
He later learned that the high sound was his nervous
system in operation and the low one was his blood circulating. This major revelation
affected his compositional philosophy from then on and he believed “There is always

11
Dictionary. “Silence.” http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/silence (accessed
February 13, 2011)

12
Dictionary. “Éminence grise.”
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/%C3%A9minence+grise (accessed February 27,
2011)

13
Cage, John. “Experimental Music.” in Silence: Lectures and Writings. 1st ed.
Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1961. 8.

6

something to see, something to hear. In fact, try as we may to make a silence, we
cannot.”
14
Cage decided that silence or the total absence of sound did not exist. Cage’s
epiphany regarding silence pertains to Kwon’s term because it indicates that the manager,
no matter how powerless, cannot be completely silent.
This thesis investigates the degree to which collaborative art practice in the public
sphere has succeeded in removing, or bringing about the death of, the Artist.
Specifically, it explores the position that the Artist has not died but instead performs a
role of the silent manager. Subsequent chapters examine a range of ways in which silent
management has recently been practiced through selected artworks by Komar and
Melamid, Fritz Haeg, Slanguage Studio, LA Commons and the Serpentine Gallery’s
Edgware Road Project. Each chapter considers the qualities of management strategies
and the degrees of silence enacted.
In the words of art theorist Claire Bishop, in Participation: Documents of
Contemporary Art Series, “Barthes was concerned primarily with literature, but his
insights are analogous to much contemporary art of this period, particularly works that
emphasize the viewer’s role in their completion.”
15
Perhaps Barthes’ statement, “the
birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author,”
16
can be interpreted to

14
Ibid.

15
Bishop, Claire, ed. Participation: Documents of Contemporary Art Series. Cambridge:
MIT Press, 2006. 41.

16
Barthes, Roland. “The Death of the Author” in Image, music, text. Hill and Wang,
1978. 148.

7

apply to contemporary public art practice where the birth of the viewer, as participant,
must be at the cost of the death of the Artist.
The traditional role of the Artist is further disintegrated in the public sphere
because artworks generated here are so often the function of a confluence of different
motivations, visions and efforts. Unlike art that is commissioned for a patron, private
gallery or museum, public art does not leave the artist’s studio as a finished product.
Rather, as Bishop states, when art enters the public sphere it is completed—shaped,
transformed or even re-formed—through a series of negotiations that challenge
traditional concepts of authority. Public art no longer privileges the authorial intention,
but instead works to create platforms for discussion.
In considering the degrees of silence performed by a silent manager, it is
important to note that artworks in the public sphere, which typically start as commissions,
require the commitment of a central figure to manage and deliver the project. Perhaps the
artist, who assumes the position of the silent manager, can be the figure responsible for
the dialogue generated and serve as the face of the project?
Particularly when an artwork is a civic commission, the artist concerned is subject
to a series of negotiations with an often multi-layered public patron who is focused on
public safety and political expediency. Consequently, there are pragmatic considerations
such as budget, deadlines, or site and safety restrictions, which come to outweigh the
authorial preferences of an artist and determine the nature of the work.
Contemporary public practice has changed the ways in which artists delegate
authorship to participants and navigate through compromise. Through a series of

8

negotiations that occur, these art collaborations further sever Artists from their positions
of authority. An artist operating in the public sphere no longer embodies the autonomous
Author, whose individual expression and self-determination is integral to their practice,
but represents a manager who encourages multi-vocality.
Multi-vocal forms of authorship strive to create platforms that activate dialogue
with the public and invite participants to collaborate and possibly contribute to the
project’s framework and content. Grant Kester’s concept of “dialogical aesthetics”
offers some insight into artistic collaborations that promote multi-vocality. In
Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art Kester shares that
various artists, critics and theorist have written about such works in numerous
publications. He writes
For [Suzanne] Lacy, who is also active as a critic, this work represents a “new
genre” of public art. U.K.-base artist/organizers Ian Hunter and Celia Larner
employ the term littoral art to evoke the hybrid or in-between nature of these
practices. French critic Nicolas Bourriaud has coined the term relational
aesthetics to describe works based around communication and exchange. Homi
K. Bhabha, in an essay from the Conversations at the Castle project in Atlanta,
writes of “conversational art,” and Tom Finkelpearl refers to “dialogue-based
public art.”
17

The term “dialogical” is derived from the work of Russian literary theorist Mikhail
Bakhtin who asserted that all human discourse is a complex web of dialogic
interrelations. Kester’s theory aligns with that of Bakhtin when he writes: “the work of
art can be viewed as a kind of conversation—a locus of differing meanings,

17
Kester, Grant H. Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. 9-10.

9

interpretations, and points of view.”
18
Kester further develops the idea of dialogical
aesthetics by emphasizing that the artists and art collectives with whom he is concerned
define their practice around the facilitation of dialogue among diverse communities.
According to Kester, dialogical aesthetics are characterized by a performative and
process-based approach that part from the traditions of object making. Kester describes
these practitioners as “‘context providers’ rather than ‘content providers’…whose work
involves the creative orchestration of collaborative encounters and conversations…”
19

Although the works he categorizes under the title “dialogical aesthetics” appear to differ
significantly from each other, Kester unifies them when he elaborates “these projects all
share a concern with creative facilitation of dialogue and exchange…In these projects, on
the other hand, conversation becomes an integral part of the work itself. ”
20
He further
explores what it means for an artist to surrender self-expression in favor of
intersubjective engagement, which he believes is necessary for a generative process.
Kester theorizes that the products of dialogical aesthetics no longer represent an
artist’s personal subjectivity because intersubjective exchanges are enacted through
discourse between numerous collaborators. The term “discourse” employed in this thesis
relates to Kester’s definition of discourse, which states that it “is not simply a tool to be
used to communicate an a priori ‘content’ with other already formed subjects but is itself

18
Ibid., 10.

19
Ibid., 1.

20
Ibid., 8.

10

intended to model subjectivity.”
21
He differentiates dialogical aesthetics from the
conventional models of aesthetic concern when he claims, “In a dialogical aesthetic, on
the other hand, subjectivity is formed through discourse and intersubjective exchange
itself.”
22
Social interaction facilitates exchanges between the artist and participants and
serves as the critical component that generates content for the artist’s final product.
Such projects as those described by Kester engage a wide spectrum of the public.
For the scope of this thesis, the term “public” includes communities that occupy and
neighbor the site of the artwork, participants who contribute to the work through their
discursive engagement with the artists or art collectives, and the viewing “scriptor” who
completes the work. The levels of public involvement, types of discourse, and modes of
participation in which vary, but each of the works considered in this thesis make efforts
to activate dialogue and appear to generate platforms for multi-vocal authorship.
Chapter 1 examines Komar and Melamid’s People’s Choice series, in which the
artists utilized popular discourse gathered from polls to generate the content for their
paintings. The People’s Choice series consisted of the “Most Wanted” and “Most
Unwanted” paintings of eleven countries. The artists commissioned polling companies in
the eleven countries to conduct scientific polls to discover what people least and most
wanted to see in art. The use of polls was intended to loosely reflect the American
democratic process. Komar and Melamid’s process was meant to change the artist’s role

21
Ibid., 112.

22
Ibid.

11

as a leader and can be considered a response to historic artworks and the organizing
ideologies of Soviet Realism.
Through the People’s Choice series, Komar and Melamid attempted to illustrate
that the broad public is adequately equipped to judge art, in much the same way that the
broad public in America is entrusted with electing the President. The project directly
examined the public by polling popular opinion, which in turn activated dialogue
between the artist and participants.
Chapter 2 examines Fritz Haeg’s Edible Estates, in which the artist appears to
assume the literal role of a manager. For Edible Estates, Haeg authored the framework
for his project, which replaced domestic front lawns with cultivated and highly
productive edible gardens of fruit, herbs, and vegetables. Through discourse, this project
activated an exchange between the artist and participants who served as the actual
implementers of the art. In this case, the artist served as a manager who generated the
framework and directed the dialogue of the project. The participants engaged in this
discussion by perpetuating the artist’s prototype.
Although Haeg may not appear to be the author of each iteration of the project, he
conceptualized the founding ideology for the prototype gardens, which is then replicated
by others. The role of the artist appears marginalized, but Haeg remained the central
figure as he set the framework and created the parameters for his prototypes. The
homeowners were free to plant their gardens in whatever placement they desired, but they
still operated under the guidelines set by the artist.

12

Chapter 3 examines The Peacock Doesn’t See Its Own Ass/Let’s Twitch Again by
Slanguage Studio. For this work, created for the Uncertain States of America exhibition
at the Serpentine Gallery, London, 2006, the founders of Slanguage Studio formed a bird
watching club with five young artists. In general it is the intention of Slanguage Studio
to create a project model that promotes multi-vocality. With The Peacock Doesn’t See Its
Own Ass/Let’s Twitch Again both the framework and the content appear to have been
generated through collaboration between the artists and the participants, and it is indeed
difficult to track where the artists’ roles end and the participants’ roles begin. Although
artistic practice in the public sphere strives to emulate this model, this thesis asks, does it
in fact offer an opportunity to share authorship?
Chapter 4 examines projects, including LA Commons’ Fear-Less and the
Serpentine Gallery’s Edgware Road Project, in which the work of art is understood as a
process of communicative exchange rather than as a physical object. As Kester argues
“the meaning of a given dialogical work is not centered in the physical condition of a
single object or in the imaginative capacity of an individual viewer. Instead, the work is
constituted as an ensemble of effects, operating at number points of discursive
interaction.”
23

Using art to facilitate interaction between people from different segments of Los
Angeles and open doors for continued communication, LA Commons provides a
curatorial model that serves as a basis for dialogue and interaction. The curatorial
objective for the Serpentine Gallery’s Edgware Road Project links local and international

23
Ibid., 189.

13

artists with people living and working in the Edgware Road neighborhood. The project is
based in the Centre for Possible Studies and hosts an exhibition component titled the
People’s Research Seminar. The seminar extends the project’s dialogue to encompass a
larger public by allowing the local community to be a part of the research process.
Each of these chapters will elucidate the role of the artists as silent managers by
analyzing their strategies and the degrees of silence enacted in the projects. These
examinations will serve to clarify whether their silence infers the removal or the death of
the Author. Perhaps the Author’s re-defined position as a manager does indeed serve to
create platforms for multi-vocal authorship; certainly these artworks demonstrate that
artists can craft methods within their practice to share authorship. However, as this thesis
considers in its conclusion, can they completely dissolve their authority?

14

Chapter 1
Collaborative art practices challenge the notion of the artist as a heroic lone
genius by adopting forms of authorship that promote multi-vocality. These multi-vocal
platforms resemble what German philosopher Jürgen Habermas theorizes as the
bourgeois public sphere. In his text The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere,
Habermas defines this term as a space of openness comprised of rational discussions,
political debates and consensus between private individuals.
According to Habermas, the public sphere is where individuals openly and
actively exchange views and knowledge. He attributes the eventual decay of the public
sphere to several factors, including the growth of a commercial mass media that turned
the critical public into a passive consumer public. This sphere originally provided a place
for critical discussion where private individuals came together to form a check on state
power. Like Habermas’ theorization, collaborative art practices in the public sphere
provide discursive platforms that actively promote spaces where individual participants
can collectively critique established forms of authority.
In Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art, Grant
Kester acknowledges Habermas’ theorization of the public sphere as pivotal to his
development of dialogical aesthetics. Habermas asserts “Participants in a public sphere
must adhere to certain performative rules that insulate this discursive space from the
coercion and inequality that constrain human communication in normal daily life.”
24

24
Kester, Grant H. Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. 109.

15

Hierarchical forms of communication such as advertisements, business negotiations and
religious sermons, do not apply to these discursive spaces in the public sphere. Instead,
Habermas proposes that these egalitarian spaces are characterized by unbiased interaction
and argumentation. Although Kester does not assume that consensus is guarantied
through these interactions, he believes that they promote mutual understanding between
private individuals. He insists that discourse generated through artistic collaborations can
liberate the participants from a priori systems that were established to constrain them.
In Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid’s the People’s Choice series, the artists
utilized the discursive spaces of the polling system, which are designed to ensure equality
through the collection of public opinion. In this project, the artists appropriated discourse
from the public to generate content for their series. But from the onset, Komar and
Melamid established their conceptual frame and questioned the artists’ roles as leaders by
complicating their relationships to the work. The artists problematized the nature of
authorship by employing the popular discourse of the polling system.
Komar and Melamid cleverly engaged the public by inviting participants to fill
out their survey system. The information garnered was then used to generate the content
of their work. The artists collaborated with statistical experts and pollsters to craft
questions that gathered information about what people least and most wanted to see in
paintings. By using surveys to obtain answers for their founding question, they parodied
the objective and scientific nature that the polls claim to embody.
The artists commissioned polling companies in eleven countries including the
United States, Russia, China, France, and Kenya. With the aid of these experts, the

16

artists used polling agencies, conversations on the Internet, and town hall style meetings
to sample people’s artistic preferences and draw conclusions about the characteristics of
the least and most wanted paintings among people from various parts of the world. Using
the results, they produced a series of paintings titled the “Most Wanted” and “Most
Unwanted.” They also compiled the book Painting by Numbers: Komar and Melamid’s
Scientific Guide to Art. As evidenced through this publication, their guiding ideology for
the project was not merely to create what people least and most wanted in paintings, but
to critique the objective and scientific methods of the polling system.
After analyzing and interpreting the poll results, Komar and Melamid produced
the paintings America’s Most Wanted, 1994 (see Figure 1) and America’s Most
Unwanted, 1994 (see Figure 2), which were included in the People’s Choice exhibition at
the Alternative Museum in New York in 1994. According to the poll, the most wanted
painting in the United States was
a dishwasher-sized realist landscape with a blue sky, dotted with loosely painted
clouds; a body of water with two wading deer; mountains loosely painted on the
horizon; trees with golden autumn leaves; a family of three tourists carrying guide
books; and standing just left of center, George Washington.”
25

Although the painting incorporated almost all the artistic elements Americans say they
preferred, critic Arthur Danto pointed out that it was a most-wanted painting that no one
could want.
26
Meanwhile, the most unwanted painting was “a paperback-book-sized

25
Hillings, Valerie L. “Komar and Melamid’s Dialogue with (Art) History” Art Journal
58, no. 4 (Winter1999): 58.

17

abstract composition with planar geometric shapes rendered in orange, yellow, and gray,
and with patches of heavy impasto.
27

The visual characteristics of Russia’s Most Wanted, 1994 (see Figure 3) bore a
striking resemblance to America’s Most Wanted. Similar to its American counterpart, it
was also “a realist landscape populated with trees, water, a blue sky, and two casually
dressed people. In contrast to the respondents from the United States, the Russians
selected Christ over George Washington as their favored historical figure.”
28
The visual
characteristics shared between the Russian and American paintings may be attributed to
popular taste that is rooted in the notion of high art. This project demonstrated that the
popular discourse of the polls might not always accurately represent public opinion.
In Painting by Numbers: Komar and Melamid's Scientific Guide to Art, Komar
and Melamid meticulously documented and presented their project as a “scientific guide”
to art making. By attempting to produce a generic product through the use of the polling
system, the artists critiqued American politics as well as the role of art within this system.
In an interview Komar and Melamid proclaimed, “We are not artists; we are

26
“Painting by the Polls” New York Times (December 11, 1997).
http://www.nytimes.com/1997/12/11/opinion/painting-by-the-polls.html (accessed
December 15, 2010).

27
Hillings, Valerie L. “Komar and Melamid’s Dialogue with (Art) History” Art Journal
58, no. 4 (Winter1999): 58.

28
Ibid., 60.

18

conversationalists,”
29
The People’s Choice series provokes a cross-cultural conversation
about established beliefs by critiquing those that encompass art.
By parodying the polling system, Komar and Melamid scrutinized the American
democratic system that is understood to represent what the nation wants. Challenging
fixed systems of representation is a key component of the artists’ practice and they are
known to use Soviet Realism as a point of departure from which to criticize the Soviet
ideology that the style embodies and promotes. In an Artforum article, Andrew Ross
wrote that People’s Choice was not “an attempt to produce populist art. Like market-
research apparatus that it utilizes, its first aim is to produce a public dialogue—or the
appearance of one.”
30
Despite the title, the paintings do not serve as representations of
popular discourse, but rather examine the artists’ relationships to the work by instigating
dialogue.
The information gathered through the surveys was the result of careful
construction under the guiding parameters set by Komar and Melamid. The first poll was
conducted in 1993 in collaboration with the Nation Institute, a nonprofit offshoot of The
Nation magazine. Martilla & Kiley, a public opinion research firm, asked participants
from around the United States a variety of questions to determine the characteristics of
paintings that Americans least and most wanted. The questions were strategically crafted
to avoid the word “art” and provided basic terms to describe visual components. Some

29
Ibid., 61.

30
Ross, Andrew. “Poll Stars: Komar and Melamid’s ‘The People’s Choice’,” Artforum
33, no. 5 (January 1995): 72.

19

questions that were posed in the survey included, “How about design? Do you prefer
seeing bold, stark designs or more playful, whimsical designs?”
31
Participants were also
asked questions that were more specifically related to narrative content such as,
“Thinking back to the paintings of people that you have liked in the past, for the most
part were the figures working, at leisure, or were they posed portraits?”
32
These
questions were carefully formed so the participants would not be intimated.
Although polls have come to represent public opinion and taste in modern
democracies, it is important to note that similar to Komar and Melamid’s survey,
pollsters slant their questions and then further interpret the raw data collected to help
guarantee particular answers. Komar and Melamid parodied these scientific and
objective methods embodied by the polls in order to confront the misconception of a
common denominator to taste and aesthetic experience. With the assistance of the Nation
Institute, the survey questions were constructed to ensure the types of answers that the
artists wanted for their project. The “Most Wanted” and “Most Unwanted” paintings
critique whether polls do in fact reflect what the majority of the people actually want and
believe. Ross considered taste in consumer society as a major instrument of
enfranchisement and exclusion.
33
The People’s Choice series illustrated that forms of

31
Hillings, Valerie L. “Komar and Melamid’s Dialogue with (Art) History” Art Journal
58, no. 4 (Winter1999): 58.

32
Ibid.

33
Ross, Andrew. “Poll Stars: Komar and Melamid’s ‘The People’s Choice’,” Artforum
33, no. 5 (January 1995): 77.

20

consensus can be attained by gauging popular opinion but it also revealed that the
outcome may be undesirable.
The way in which a question is staged is crucial for it can influence the outcome.
Therefore the strategic construction of questions by pollsettters can help guarantee or at
least steer the public opinion towards the desired answers. As theorized by Habermas,
the discursive space of the public sphere was meant to serve as:
the realm of our social life in which something approaching public opinion can be
formed. A portion of the public sphere comes into being in every conversation in
which private individuals assemble to form a public body…This process marks an
important transition from mere opinions (i.e., cultural assumptions, normative
attitudes, collective prejudices and values) to a public opinion which presupposes
a reasoning public, a series of public discussions concerning the exercise of power
which are both critical in intent and institutionally guarantied.
34

By engaging the discursive space of the polls, Komar and Melamid revealed that public
opinion can be steered through a series of strategies to confirm one’s own ideology.
Komar and Melamid attempted to validate the idea that the broad public is as able
to judge art, as it is to elect a political leader. In reference to this project, the artists stated
“Maybe everyone is wrong in this country. We are not wrong because we are the artist.
But we are wrong like the whole country is wrong. Products, politics, are created from
polls is wrong. If using polls for art is wrong, then everyone is wrong”
35
In the People’s
Choice series, Komar and Melamid approached aesthetic value as a matter of absolute
truth rather than cultural taste. The artists believed “If polls tell the truth, or what passes

34
Habermas, Jürgen. “Social Structures of the Public Sphere,” in The Structural
Transformation of the Public Sphere. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991.

35
Ross, Andrew. “Poll Stars: Komar and Melamid’s ‘The People’s Choice’,” Artforum
33, no. 5 (January 1995): 73.

21

for official truth in late capitalism, then polling is a more appropriate tastemaker than the
avant-garde artist—even if the result is not some progressive, proletkult chunk of the
future but a schmaltzy return of art history’s repressed.”
36
Komar shared that their main
concern was not whether the people actually enjoy the work, but it was meant to provoke
thoughts of free will versus predetermination. The artists engineered a tool of popular
discourse to garner answers and results that they may have already suspected.
The answers provided by the participants helped generate the content of the
People’s Choice series, but not the frame of the project. Even though the collected
information from the surveys was interpreted to create Komar and Melamid’s paintings,
they were still assembled under the guiding parameters set by the artists. They used the
tools of the polls to emulate popular discourse. Although Komar and Melamid appear to
be the silent managers of the project, they remained the central figures that built the
machine for their series. The “manager” is defined as “a person who has control or
direction of an institution, business, etc.”
37
In the same manner, Komar and Melamid
were able to keep their control and direction, as the managers, throughout the project.
They also maintained their positions as the Authors because they were in fact very vocal
about their objectives throughout their practice. Rather than the term silent manager, the
artists’ roles resembled the éminence grise because they wielded influence behind the
scenes through their survey questions.

36
Ibid., 76.

37
Dictionary. “Manager.” http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/manager (accessed
February 27, 2011)

22

Komar and Melamid re-defined the roles of the Author by strategically utilizing
language to construct survey questions that confirmed their ideology, which they claimed
polls do as well. While analyzing Roland Barthes’ The Death of the Author, Irit Rogoff
posits the artist, as the Author, can no longer remain the subject if operating within the
discourse of artistic production, but rather “the demise of the culturally heroic author who
exists outside of the discursive formations of culture has brought about a recognition of a
reflexive artistic entity who occupies a set of subject positions vis-à-vis both culture and
ideology.
38
The concept behind the People’s Choice series was tied to the Komar and
Melamid’s particular history and the discourse surrounding Soviet Realism. Miwon
Kwon theorizes, “the legitimacy of the work’s critique is measured by the proximity of
the artist's personal association (converted to expertise) with a particular place, history,
discourse, identity, etc. (converted to content).”
39
Kwon suggests the artist remains a
central figure as the critical elaboration of the piece is conceived and formed around the
artist.
This project appears to be collaborative, but the artists employed popular
discourse as tools to validate their positions. Komar and Melamid attempted to liberate
their participants from the polls by problematizing the a priori systems that were designed
to constrain them. They set the parameters, through their prudent construction of the

38
Rogoff, Irit. “Production Lines.” Collaborative Arts: Conversations on Collaborative
Arts Practise. http://collabarts.org/?p=69 (accessed February 1, 2011)

39
Kwon, Miwon. One Place After Another: Site-specific Art and Locational Identity.
Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002. 51.

23

survey questions, in order to ensure a project that was in line with their principles. The
artists chose to subjugate to the popular voice, but they were by no means silent.
While Komar and Melamid wanted their participants to question the a priori
controls within which they commonly operate, the artists did not create a space for
collaborative practice that purportedly performs the demolition of the established forms
of authority that is the Artist. They did not claim to promote change through the People’s
Choice series, but by parodying the polling system, they took a didactic approach that
revealed the problematic nature of this process. Additionally, the roles of the Authors
were not re-defined, but the tools that they used to generate the content of the project
were re-defined. They orchestrated a platform for multi-vocality that was used to steer
popular opinion, which ultimately furthered the artists’ beliefs. As the Authors, Komar
and Melamid’s authority did not dissolve in the People’s Choice series.

24

Chapter 2
In The Death of the Author, Roland Barthes confronts the image of the Author-
God and introduces the term “scriptor” in order to disrupt the relationship between the
Author and authority. Barthes’ use of language to differentiate the terms Author and
scriptor, reflect the changing role of the artist in collaborative art practices.
Barthes posits that the Author “is thought to nourish the book, which is to say that
he exists before it, thinks, suffers, lives for it, is in the same relation of antecedence to his
work as a father to his child”;
40
while the modem scriptor “is born simultaneously with
the text, is in no way equipped with a being preceding or exceeding the writing, is not the
subject with the book as predicate; there is no other time than that of the enunciation and
every text is eternally written here and now.”
41
Inferring from Barthes’ theory, the
autonomous artist who acts as the Author-God cannot exist in artistic collaborations.
Instead, the artist can be likened to the scriptor who exists simultaneously with the work
and is affected by the social and historical influences that surround it.
If the artist is severed from the concept of authority, then the hierarchy between
the artist and collaborators theoretically do not exist. The artist is no longer privileged as
the progenitor who sets the parameters for the project. In Production Lines, Irit Rogoff
supports Barthes’ assertion that
linguistics has recently provided the destruction of the author with a valuable
analytical tool by showing that the whole of the enunciation is an empty

40
Barthes, Roland. “The Death of the Author” in Image, music, text. Hill and Wang,
1978. 145.

41
Ibid.

25

process…Linguistically, the author is never more than the instance of writing, just
as I is nothing more than the instant of saying I: language known to a ‘subject’,
not a ‘person’, and this subject, empty outside of the very enunciation which
defines it, suffices to make language ‘hold together’, suffices that is to say, to
exhaust it.
42

Gathered from this quote, the Author, in this case the artist is no longer the subject and
must function within the discourse of artistic production. Thus, both the artist and
collaborators can be responsible for the conception of both the frame and parameters of
the project.
Additionally, the lone Author can no longer exist outside the discursive
formations of culture. Barthes affirms this notion when he states “a text is made of
multiple writings, drawn from many cultures and entering into mutual relations of
dialogue, parody, contestation, but there is one place where this multiplicity is focused
and that place is the reader, not, as was hitherto said, the author.”
43
Barthes emphasizes
the unity of a text lies not in its origin from the Author, but its destination to the reader.
And multiplicity is focused on the reader who has various social and cultural influences.
Similar to Barthes’ dismissal of the solitary figure, who authors works of literature
through his or her original imagination, artistic collaborations in the public sphere appear
to dismiss the image of the central Author and strive to offer a platform for multi-vocal
authorship. The artist cannot serve as the sole Author because the artwork is no longer
about its origin, but about its destination.

42
Ibid.

43
Ibid., 148.

26

Like Barthes’ analysis, the focus of Fritz Haeg’s Edible Estates shifts from its
origin from Haeg to its destination to the participants responsible for implementing each
iteration of the work. Haeg employed his publication, Edible Estates: Attack on the
Front Lawn and his personal website to problematize an icon of the American Dream, the
front lawn, and distribute his proscribed framework to the process of transforming front
lawns into edible gardens. To date Edible Estates have been created in eleven locations,
including Istanbul, Turkey, Rome, Italy, Ridgefield, Connecticut, New York, New York,
La Canada Flintridge, California, Baltimore, Maryland, Austin, Texas, London, England,
Maplewood, New Jersey, Lakewood California and Salina, Kansas. This thesis will
examine the second garden that grows in Lakewood, California and which was exhibited
by Machine Projects and Millard Sheets in 2006 (see Figure 4).
Edible Estates was conceived when curator Stacy Switzer, from the Grand Arts in
Kansas City, Missouri, invited Haeg to produce a piece in Salina, Kansas. The
commission dovetailed with Haeg’s desire to create a piece that would expand from the
center of the United States, which happens to be Salina, to engage all U.S. citizens. In an
interview he shared, “Ultimately, I want my work to enter into a mainstream dialogue
without the label ‘contemporary art.’”
44
And in the preface of his book, Haeg wrote that
he felt “uneasy with the insular, self-referential, and hermetic nature of the contemporary
art and architecture community, of which I consider myself a part. Are we elitist,
separatist, or just disinterested…Have we given up on any sort of real dialogue and

44
Haeg, Fritz. “Fritz Haeg on Animal Estates and Edible Estates.” Artforum 47, no. 3
(November 2008): 286.

27

returned to our corners to talk among ourselves?”
45
As Haeg expressed, Edible Estate
aims to engage the entire country and not just the narrow cultural circles on the coasts.
Haeg began his project by placing an advertisement on a listserv. Early in 2006,
Michael Foti, the owner of the garden in Lakewood, California, read on the Internet that
Haeg was searching for a site in the Los Angeles area for the second iteration of the
project. On May 27-29, 2006, over Memorial Day weekend, the Fotis and Haeg planted
the garden with the assistance of local volunteers, friends and others who had heard about
the project and wanted to join the process. In the Foti’s 760-square foot space,
previously occupied by the lawn, they planted artichokes, fennel, chamomile, honeydew
melons, grapes, pink lemons and seventy others plants.
For Haeg, the Edible Estates gardens are intended to serve as provocations on the
street that probe what happens when the public encounters one of these gardens. He
wrote “The front-yard gardeners become street performers for us. Coming out the door
to tend their crops, they enact a daily ritual for the neighbors.”
46
As one of Haeg’s
performers, Michael Foti expressed “It feels a bit weird to spend time out there in front of
the whole neighborhood. I feel like I’m on display. The neighborhood has been
watching.”
47
The Fotis observed that most of the people who encountered their garden
seemed to enjoy it. His wife Jenny Foti often saw people stop and take one of the

45
Haeg, Fritz, eds. Edible Estates: Attack on the Front Lawn. New York: Metropolis
Books; D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishing, 2008. 10.

46
Ibid., 24.

47
Ibid., 72.

28

brochures from the box on the Edible Estates sign (see Figure 5).
48
Although the Fotis
have replicated Haeg’s prototype and followed his parameters, Michael revealed, “I told
him I wasn’t interested in alienating people who choose to have lawns. For me, the
message cannot be that lawns are bad, and if you have one, you’re bad too. I think lawns
are valid. I do think that there are other possibilities though.”
49
In this respect, it is
difficult to determine whether Haeg’s interventionist ideology was amplified or distorted
through the Foti family’s participation.
Haeg researched the history of front lawns and how they came to symbolize the
American Dream. He declared on his website,
to ignite a chain reaction of thoughts that question other antiquated conventions of
home, street, neighborhood, city, and global networks that we take for granted. If
we see that our neighbor’s typical lawn instead can be a beautiful food garden,
perhaps we begin to look at the city around us with new eyes…No matter what
has been handed to us, each of us should be given license to be an active part in
the creation of the cities that we share, and in the process, our private land can be
a public model for the world in which we would like to live.
50

Haeg encouraged participants to stop mindlessly perpetuating the icon of the American
Dream through the cultivation of front lawns. In his publication, Haeg revealed that
during the Eisenhower era, people believed “Nature is not something you surrender to;
rather, if you use enough industrial force, you can bend it to your will. This premise and
the assumption that land and natural resources were in infinite supply are in part what

48
Ibid.

49
Ibid., 66.

50
Haeg, Fritz. “Edible Estates: Attack on the Front Lawn, Excerpt.” Fritz Haeg.
http://www.fritzhaeg.com/garden/initiatives/edibleestates/main.html (accessed October
13, 2010)

29

gave us today’s lawned landscape.”
51
He theorized that this was the reason why
Americans currently believe “The only landscape worthy of the public eye is made of
ornamentals…”
52
Haeg proposed that after being equipped with this historical and
environmental knowledge, it was time for the public to address the questions “how do we
want to occupy the space we have already claimed? Why do we dedicate so much
property to a space that has so minor function and requires many precious resources and
endless hours to maintain, while contaminating our air and water?”
53
He concluded by
persuading readers to consider these questions before choosing to cultivate front lawns.
Through both the actual gardens and via the prototypes that are illustrated and
outlined in his book and website, Haeg communicated and broadcasted his idea to replace
domestic front lawns with cultivated and highly productive edible gardens of fruit, herbs,
and vegetables. This impactful piece promotes an objective to engage people outside the
art world with social issues rather than an exclusive art audience with an art object.
Contained within his book Edible Estates: Attack on the Front Lawn is Haeg’s
“Guideline for Selecting the Regional Prototype Garden Sites.” He encouraged
participants to stop mindlessly perpetuating the icon of the American Dream by
cultivating front lawns. The guiding frame for his project suggests that rather than
maintaining a useless and wasteful front lawn, citizens can transform front lawns into

51
Haeg, Fritz, eds. Edible Estates: Attack on the Front Lawn. New York: Metropolis
Books; D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishing, 2008. 19.

52
Ibid., 17.

53
Ibid., 20-21.

30

productive and sustainable gardens. Haeg explained, “Everything I’m doing is like this
prototype with possibility of being replicated by others. For instance, any initial
motivation for the Edible Estates project…was to make something for the entire
country.”
54
Haeg’s decision to create a prototype for others reflects Miwon Kwon’s
observation that these collaborative types of art “empower the audience by directly
involving them in the making of the art work, either as subjects or, better, as producers
themselves.”
55
Through this artistic collaboration, Haeg attempted to make art accessible
to a wider public by empowering his participants.
Haeg defined his parameters for the gardeners, or implementers, of the project
through the discursive platforms of his book and website. In Guidelines for Selecting the
Regional Prototype Garden Sites, Haeg listed some parameters, stipulating, “The house
should be: on a somewhat lengthy typical residential street lined entirely with
uninterrupted groomed front lawns, in some way conventional, iconic, American, not too
big and not too small.”
56
He continued by listing how the front yard and the prospective
Edible Estates owners or gardeners should be approached. Through the creation of his
prototypes he remained the central figure who managed the dialogue. Haeg was
deliberate in his process of proscribing the frame for his work. Although Haeg appears to

54
Haeg, Fritz. “Fritz Haeg on Animal Estates and Edible Estates.” Artforum 47, no. 3
(November 2008): 286.

55
Kwon, Miwon. One Place After Another: Site-specific Art and Locational Identity.
Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002. 107.

56
Haeg, Fritz, eds. Edible Estates: Attack on the Front Lawn. New York: Metropolis
Books; D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishing, 2008. 50.

31

assume a silent role, one in which he devolved his authority to the owners and gardeners
with whom he collaborated, he served as the manager who directed the dialogue of the
project so the participants could perpetuate his model. Initially, Haeg’s role may appear
marginalized, but his role as the Author remained central as he created the prototypes and
set the parameters for Edible Estates. Therefore, his persona remained strong within the
project.
Despite Haeg’s interventionist intentions, Edible Estates aims to stitch
communities back together by transforming spaces that were previously isolating into
welcoming forums that unite people with one another.
57
He believed the “gardens are
vehicles with which to engage larger issues of the human condition today [that] is about
people and their relationships to each other and to their environment.”
58
Edible Estates
promoted social interaction and the building of relationships through the process of
cultivating gardens. Haeg asserted, “Food grown in our front yards will connect us to the
seasons, the organic cycles of the earth, and our neighbors.”
59
In a recent article, Haeg
shared that he was open to “collabora[ting] with experts, locals, and consultants, freely
working with and depending with others”
60
because of his limited experience and
technical knowledge regarding gardens. With his publication and personal website,

57
Ibid., 23.

58
Ibid., 10.

59
Ibid., 22.

60
Haeg, Fritz. “Fritz Haeg on Animal Estates and Edible Estates.” Artforum 47, no. 3
(November 2008): 286.

32

Haeg’s piece continues to activate dialogue with a wider community where relationships
are formed.
Haeg explained his practice was not about him, but the situation that the work
invited.
61
He is primarily interested in the prototype that any lawn can be transformed
and can continue to proliferate after he leaves. Haeg often does not return to the sites of
his projects so that the gardens can remain for the community. He is not concerned with
the issues of authorship or the final product, but is invested in staging social situations
where relationships can emerge. Similarly Grant Kester asserts, “consultative and
‘dialogic’ art necessitates a shift in our understanding of what art is—away from the
visual and sensory (which are individual experiences) and toward ‘discursive exchange
and negotiation.’”
62

In The Social Turn: Collaboration and its Discontents, Claire Bishop criticizes
Kester’s prioritization of the collaborative process over the aesthetics of the physical
object. She problematizes Kester’s analysis of artistic collaborations and states “He
challenges us to treat communication as an aesthetic form, but, ultimately, he fails to
defend this, and seems perfectly content to allow that a socially collaborative art project
could be deemed a success if it works on the level of social intervention even though it
founders on the level of art.
63
Perhaps Bishop would contend that artists such as Haeg,

61
Ibid.

62
Bishop, Claire. “The Social Turn: Collaboration and its Discontents.” Artforum 46, no.
6 (February 2006): 181.

63
Ibid.

33

who facilitate artistic collaborations in the public sphere, should allocate equal amounts
of effort in the building of relationships through social situations and developing the final
product.
Ultimately, Haeg’s authority is limited and transferred because at some point the
project exists and its agents—the owners and gardeners—are the authorities that the
passerby in the street will see and meet in the garden. Haeg has a genuine desire to
promote change through Edible Estates and he is straightforward about his objectives
from the onset of the project. Therefore, his role resembles that of an éminence grise
from the work’s conception as he wields authority, but remains behind the scenes through
the use of his prototypes that can be duplicated by others. But as each lawn is
transformed into gardens, Haeg’s role is also transformed from the éminence grise to that
of the project manager. He assumes a passive position by facilitating the collaborative
gardening process. Edible Estates reflects the temporal nature of most collaborative
work, where initially the authority is with the artist, but over time here it seems to
devolve to a greater degree to the participants.
The actual planting of the gardens was highly collaborative, but the formation of
Haeg’s ideology was based on his individual intent. Haeg may not appear to be the
Author of each iteration of Edible Estates, but he conceptualized and created the
prototype that is replicated by others. Even though the gardens are located in various
parts of the world, with different owners and gardeners, each garden still embodies and
furthers Haeg’s idea to overthrow the established American icon of front lawns.

34

Haeg assumed a re-defined role of the Author, but remained very vocal about his
objectives throughout the project. As Miwon Kwon suggests, the artist remains the
central figure of the work as the movement and decision of the artist is critical to the
elaboration and narrative of the project. Despite his intentions, Edible Estates still
unfolds around him as he orchestrated both the literal and discursive sites.
Although Haeg tried to create a project that was not about him, it was in directly
about him as it was drawn from his subjectivity. He only devolved his power in relation
to the details while planting the gardens, but he was extremely directive in his
pronouncements, evidenced through the “Guideline for Selecting the Regional Prototype
Garden Sites” in his publication. In effect, the participants are making his work and he is
the fount of authority in Edible Estates. Although he leaves the sites, after their
completion, in order to ensure they remain for the community, the signage and leaflets
that are common to all eleven gardens carry Haeg’s name.

35

Chapter 3
Vito Acconci shared in an interview with Tom Finkelpearl that a public art
proposal is the beginning of a discussion. In Dialogues in Public Art, Acconci states,
“There’s an inherent difficulty in a proposal that’s categorized as ‘art.’ The implication
is that it’s a finished fact, it can’t be modified—the art is inviolable, the artist can’t be
interfered with…A public art proposal is the beginning of a discussion…”
64
If a public
art proposal is in fact the beginning of a discussion, do the multiple insights garnered
from the collaborators detract from the capacity of the individual artist to exercise
individual determination? This may indeed be the case, but at the same time it is
necessary to consider that collaborations are not merely acts of deferring or handing over
power.
Although some personal self-determination may be lost in the context of
collaboration, multi-vocality is gained, and richness is added through discourse. Through
discursive exchanges the artist can extend the opportunity of authorship to others and
create a platform that will enrich both the framework and the content of his or her work.
In Collaboration and Originality, Nancy Roth discusses Vilém Flusser’s theory of
human communication, “communicology,” in order to differentiate the terms “dialogue”
and “discourse”. Roth defines dialogue as “an exchange of stored information that has
the potential to create, that is, to generate genuinely new information (the kind of

64
Finkelpearl, Tom. Dialogues in Public Art. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000. 189.

36

achievement he later refers to as art).”
65
She then clarifies that discourse “refers to the
distribution of this information—critical to its preservation.”
66
Reflecting Roth’s
definition of discourse, the artist who undertakes collaborative practices is able to not
only distribute and preserve information through discourse, but also develop and deepen
the initial concept of their work. To further make the point, Grant Kester argues that
social interaction is a critical component of collaborative artistic practice as it enables
relationships to emerge.
For the installation The Peacock Doesn’t See Its Own Ass/Let’s Twitch Again
Slanguage Studio created a teen bird watching club, enlisted voluntary participants and
activated dialogue and research with them, which in turn generated an installation
comprising research materials, videos and sketches. Complicating the artists’
relationships to the work, the artists offered a platform for multi-vocal authorship and
participants appear to have created the framework and content for the project with
Slanguage Studio.
The framework for The Peacock Doesn’t See Its Own Ass/Let’s Twitch Again is in
line with the vision statement of Slanguage Studio, which focuses on education,
community-building, and interactive exhibitions that foster dialogue. The founders of
Slanguage Studio, the husband and wife team of Mario Ybarra Jr. and Karla Diaz,
initiated the idea of creating a bird watching club. The concept of the club served as the

65
Roth, Nancy. “Collaboration and Originality.” Collaborative Arts: Conversations on
Collaborative Arts Practise. http://collabarts.org/?p=198 (accessed February 1, 2011)

66
Ibid.

37

initial catalyst for the project and guided the process of collecting the contents for the
installation. The installation materials were compiled and created by their collaborators
that were at times in non-hierarchical environments, outside the gallery, such as the bird
watching excursions in Kensington Gardens. Slanguage Studio’s mission states that their
main objective is to foster dialogue and create a learning environment not only for the
public and their participants, but also for the artists themselves. This founding vision
guided their process for generating the frame and content of a project. Ybarra Jr. and
Diaz admitted that they did not have any prior expertise in birds or bird watching. Diaz
added that the participants were not given specific assignments, but were free to perform
their own research based on the topic because they were learning about bird watching
together. Rather than being rooted in the exposition of knowledge, the project’s
installation was rooted in educating, community-building and fostering dialogue with the
public through discursive exchanges and interactivity. It also provided an opportunity to
bring Slanguage Studio’s pedagogical approaches from Wilmington to London.
For the project, The Peacock Doesn’t See Its Own Ass/Let’s Twitch Again was
installed as a part of the Uncertain States of America exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery,
London, in 2006, Slanguage Studio collaborated with the Serpentine Gallery’s Education
Programme and young artists to create the installation. The first members of the bird
watching club were comprised of seven members including Diaz, Ybarra Jr. and five
students, majoring in an assortment of disciplines from various universities in London.
They were initially responsible for researching local birds in the Kensington Gardens
area, working with the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, and borrowing

38

specimens from the Natural History Museum. The seven initial members also developed
the installation, organized bird watching excursions and a bird whistle concerto for the
exhibition’s opening. Eventually additional people were invited to join the club for the
cost of ten pounds. A total of 289 members, who were mostly children and adult art
enthusiasts, joined in London. A notable member of their bird watching club was Yoko
Ono.
The installation in the gallery’s space was interactive and included a handling
table with stuffed birds, skulls and other artifacts, binoculars for studying the surrounding
environment and Ybarra Jr.’s film The Peacock Doesn’t See Its Own Ass playing on
loop
67
(see Figure 6). Working with groups of artists is also a major facet of Slanguage
Studio’s artistic practice, which was apparent particularly in the mural on the back wall
and the giant birds’ nest in the space (see Figure 7). Both parts of the installation were
created in collaboration with the group of young artists.
In a panel discussion at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2010, Ybarra Jr.
recounted a story about an encounter between himself, Diaz and some avid birdwatchers,
which occurred while they were walking their dogs in Wilmington’s Banning Park. It
transpired that the conspicuous group of visitors with binoculars were searching for
Yellow-bellied Sapsuckers and had traveled from Australia specifically to observe these
medium-sized woodpeckers in Banning Park. Diaz and Ybarra Jr. learned that the
Yellow-bellied Sapsuckers make an annual stop at Banning Park to eat fruit before

67
Serpentine Gallery. “Teachers’ Notes. Uncertain States of America: American Art in
the 3rd Millennium.” www.serpentinegallery.org/images/USAteachersnotesFINAL
(accessed January 20, 2011)

39

migrating to the Los Angeles River, and that birdwatchers from all over Europe travel to
Wilmington, California every year to study these birds.
Their serendipitous encounter with the birdwatchers inspired Diaz and Ybarra Jr.
to start their own bird watching club. In an interview, Ybarra Jr. stated
I did once stumble upon a historic residential area of my town that was full of
wild peacocks. At some point in the late 1800s someone had brought these birds
to their yard as pets, and eventually the birds had outgrown the garden. Soon the
whole neighborhood became their habitat…
68

Frequent visitors to Banning Park, Ybarra Jr. and Diaz often encounter large male
peacocks exhibiting their feathers in the sun in people’s front lawns, while taking early
morning walks with their two dachshunds.
Later that same year, the Serpentine Gallery invited Slanguage Studio to join the
Uncertain States of America exhibition. Ybarra Jr. recalled that during the walkthrough
with the Serpentine’s curator, he was led past all the galleries to the garden in the back of
the gallery in Kensington Gardens. At that moment, he remembered a saying his
grandmother used to say during his childhood. He recounted in an interview “Whenever
it seemed I was acting a little too proud or full of myself she would remind me, ‘The
peacock never sees its own ass!’”
69
He admitted “This remark would usually shrink my
ego back down to size and leave me imagining a peacock showing off its colorful front

68
Ybarra Jr., Mario. Text Panel: The Peacock Doesn’t See Its Own Ass/Let’s Twitch
Again. London: Serpentine Gallery, 2006.

69
Ibid.

40

only to have its rear full of peacock poop and ugly brown feathers.”
70
Diaz added that the
story of the peacock is a common Mexican anecdote that reminds people that they are
unable to see themselves when they are too proud.
71
These memories were then related
to getting the “ass end” of the gallery at the Serpentine. The phrase about the peacock
and the term “Twitch,” which is an extreme version of bird watching, were incorporated
in the two-part title.
Diaz and Ybarra Jr. realized people were traveling to Wilmington in order to
study birds in their back yard, which they had not even known about.
72
When the
Serpentine Gallery invited Slanguage Studio to join the exhibition, they learned that the
gallery was surrounded by preserved nature parks. The artists felt that this location was
the ideal site to create a bird watching club that addressed the woodpeckers in Banning
Park. Diaz asserted that Slanguage Studio created work that acts as a catalyst for
conversations that are relevant to a specific time and place. They felt that the topic of
bird watching was pertinent as it is popular in the Kensington Garden area.
73
According
to Diaz, the artists pursued this project in a different way from their other work because
they did not know anything about bird watching. Diaz believes that the role of an artist is
to approach something with curiosity and, after educating themselves on the subjects;
they are then responsible for facilitating a project that educates others.

70
Ibid.

71
Diaz, Karla. 2011. Interview by Author.

72
Ibid.

73
Ibid.

41

Slanguage Studio took an active approach to pedagogy and collaboration in The
Peacock Doesn’t See Its Own Ass/Let’s Twitch Again. Rather than relying on the
educational programs facilitated by the gallery as a part of its standard practice, Diaz and
Ybarra Jr. requested to work directly with the gallery’s Education Programme and
London art students in order to teach the next generation of artists. Diaz expressed that
the collaborative aspect of the project is a major component of their artistic practice.
74

The members of Slanguage Studio make artwork, curate exhibitions, coordinate
events, and lead art-education workshops. Their practice is rooted in “a three-pronged
approach to art-making to include education, community-building, and interactive
exhibitions…Fostering dialogue about the meaning and value of contemporary art,
Slanguage has used their studio space and resources to cultivate relationships between
diverse artists, students, communities, and organizations.”
75
The initial idea for this
project was to create a bird watching club that was inspired by a phrase Ybarra Jr.’s
grandmother used to say during his childhood. The idea was further developed to
encompass an installation that exhibited research materials that were gathered by their
participants including members of the bird watching club, the Serpentine Gallery’s staff,
the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds and the Natural History Museum staff. This
project is an example of the artists serving as silent managers because it is difficult to
track where the Authors’ roles end and where the participants’ roles begin.

74
Ibid.

75
Ybarra, Mario Jr., “About.” Slanguage Studio. http://slanguagestudio.com/about/
(accessed November 1, 2010)

42

Together, the artists and participants researched and generated the contents for the
installation. But this silence was disrupted by their concept behind the bird watching
club, which was based on the artists’ discovery of the woodpeckers. Therefore, although
the artists may not identify themselves as the Authors, their relationships remained strong
and central to the work. As the progenitors of the project, they conceived the catalyzing
concept, which began through their personal associations with the project’s site. As
Miwon Kwon suggests, In One Place After Another: Site-specific Art and Locational
Identity, “the artist remains the central figure of the work and the return of the Author
results from the artist’s personal association (converted to expertise) with a particular
place, history, discourse, identity, etc. (converted to content).”
76
Their personal
memories and history with Banning Park were integral to the conception of the
installation. In this project, Slanguage Studio re-defined the role of the Author in order to
try to provide a platform for multi-vocal authorship.
After close examination of the work’s process, the artists were not completely
silent as the stories about the birdwatchers in Banning Park and the Mexican saying about
the peacock were integral to the foundation of The Peacock Doesn’t See Its Own
Ass/Let’s Twitch Again. Ybarra Jr. and Diaz determined what the topic of the installation
would be and enlisted participants to join their project. They try to assume the role of the
éminence grise, but their roles were not behind the scenes because the source of the work
originated from the artists’ subjective experiences. Although the authority to create the

76
Kwon, Miwon. One Place After Another: Site-specific Art and Locational Identity.
Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002. 51.

43

framework and content seem to be shared between the artist and the participants, this was
not the case, as Slanguage Studio remained the primary Authors. The artists supervised
the participants that worked under their directive and organizing principle for the project.
In reality, the collaboration seems to be more of an act of assistance on the part of the
participants.
They did enact degrees of silence through collaboration with the members of the
bird watching club, Serpentine’s staff, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds and
the Natural History Museum staff. But Ybarra Jr. and Diaz managed the collaborators
and contents of the research materials that were in line with their personal narratives. The
Peacock Doesn’t See Its Own Ass/Let’s Twitch Again did foster dialogue between the
artists, participants and the Serpentine Gallery’s Education Programme through a
pedagogical approach, but the hierarchies of power remained in place as the artists and
gallery directed the project. The artists of Slanguage Studio performed as managers, but
they were not completely silent, as the Artist’s role did not dissolve.
The frame for The Peacock Doesn’t See Its Own Ass/Let’s Twitch Again appears
to offer a platform for multi-vocal authorship that attempted to disintegrate the Author’s
central position. But Ybarra Jr. and Diaz have created the project concept from their
personal experiences, memories and subjectivity. They did not invite bird related
narratives from the students to determine the title of the piece. They also visited the
gallery space and projected their subjectivity immediately, before they had met their
student collaborators. This project is a great example of silent management, but is not a
platform for multi-vocal dialogue because the only voices that were amplified were those

44

of Slanguage Studio. By relating the whole project to their personal stories, the artists
placed themselves very firmly at the center.

45

Chapter 4
In Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art, Grant
Kester examines works by artists and art collectives that are facilitated around dialogue,
adopt a process-based approach and part ways with traditional modes of object making.
LA Commons’ Fear-Less and the Serpentine Gallery’s Edgware Road Project both offer
examples of projects in which the process of communicative exchange is considered as
much a part of the artwork as any physical product it creates. These two organizing
institutions—LA Commons and the Serpentine Gallery—prioritized the discursive
process over the final object, which is in line with Kester’s theory of dialogical aesthetics.
According to Kester:
the meaning of a given dialogical work is not centered in the physical condition of
a single object or in the imaginative capacity of an individual viewer. Instead, the
work is constituted as an ensemble of effects, operating at number points of
discursive interaction. Any given project can be successful at some levels and
less successful at others.
77

Fear-Less and the Edgware Road Project seek to address the implication of surrendering
to intersubjective engagement.
LA Commons provides a curatorial model in which the project serves as the basis
for dialogue and interaction. In all their projects, art is used to facilitate interaction
between people from different segments of Los Angeles and create a forum for continued
communication. Like dialogical work, this curatorial model prioritizes the generative
process over the final product. LA Commons’ mission is to “engage communities in

77
Kester, Grant H. Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. 189.

46

artistic and cultural expression that tells their unique stories and serves as a basis for
dialogue, interaction and a better understanding of Los Angeles.”
78
Every LA Commons
project adheres to the three-part curatorial model of story gathering, designing and art
making. Once the story gathering is done, the artist conceptualizes the design of the
artwork so that the students can create the actual product. They then guide the students to
refine their work. LA Commons has completed a total of twenty-five projects in the last
six years.
For Fear-Less, thirteen artists between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five, created
an art installation in MacArthur Park in 2008 (see Figure 8). The enhanced physical
space was intended to invite park-goers and local residents to transcend their everyday
fears of the MacArthur Park neighborhood. The process for creating Fear-Less consisted
of several phases including mapping the neighborhood, gathering stories, and the design,
fabrication and installation of the objects.
A year before the project, the May Day immigration rallies created a lot of fear in
the MacArthur Park community. On May 1, 2007 protesters rallied at MacArthur Park to
make a political statement against perceived issues regarding illegal immigration in Los
Angeles. Most of the protesters were blocking the streets and disbanded after police
orders. Others refused to disperse and began throwing plastic bottles and rocks at
officers. As a result, the Los Angeles Police Department responded with tear gas, rubber
bullets, and batons. That incident remained indelible in the minds of its community

78
LA Commons. “About LA Commons.” http://www.lacommons.org/#/about/about/
(accessed January 20, 2011)

47

members even after the following year when the students asked interviewees “how do
you move through fear?”
The Central American Resource Center, also known as Carecen, was one of the
many community partners for this project. The organization’s founder and Executive
Director Karen Mack, the Art Programs Director Beth Peterson and the Carecen
representative Rocio Veliz presented the project to the students at Miguel Contreras High
School. Fear-Less was installed on the corner of 7
th
and Alvarado Street and consisted of
a canopy with three long banners overhead covering an area approximately 18-square
feet. The silhouette paintings were created by the art students from the high school and
other young community artists. The concepts for the paintings were based on their own
fears as well as the stories surrounding the community that were collected as part of the
project.
Reyes Rodriguez was the lead artist for Fear-Less. Rodriguez was an ideal
candidate to lead the project as he grew up in the MacArthur Park community and had
many personal connections. After graduating from art school in Long Beach, he worked
in Hollywood as a prop-maker and now runs a gallery space called Tropico De Nopal.
He gained all the skills necessary from his past experience for rigging and installing the
project. Instead of advancing his own visions, he “…felt a responsibility to hear, listen
and see but also to create a framework that would allow room for individual
interpretation and still be beautiful, stimulating and work with the surroundings.”
79
.

79
Mack, Karen. “Engaging Youth in Community-based Cultural Tourism.” Community
Arts Network.

48

Kester writes that “self-sacrifice is triumphant: The artist should renounce authorial
presence in favor of allowing participants to speak through him or her. This self-sacrifice
is accompanied by the idea that art should extract itself from the “useless” domain of the
aesthetic and be fused with social praxis.”
80
In a similar fashion Mack emphasized that
the artists hired for LA Commons projects must act as facilitators. Rodriguez was the
ideal artist for Fear-Less as rather than embody the autonomous figure of the individual
artist he comfortably assumed the role of a facilitator.
Both Mack and Peterson expressed that challenges arise in the organization’s
process when an artist has trouble conceptualizing and articulating the project because it
makes it hard to collaboratively work on the project. An ideal artist for the art
collaborations would resemble the figure in Kester’s description that states “A dialogical
aesthetic suggest a very different image of the artist, one defined in terms of openness, of
listening…and of willingness to accept a position of dependence and intersubjective
vulnerability relative to the viewer or collaborator.”
81
Community building and
interaction are critical components to all the LA Commons projects, and the role of the
artist has been re-defined to ensure that. Although the significance of the physical object
has been secondary, Mack shared that each project needs to have a visual impact that

http://www.communityarts.net/readingroom/archivefiles/2009/12/la_commons_enga.php
(accessed January 20, 2011) 2.

80
Bishop, Claire. “The Social Turn: Collaboration and its Discontents.” Artforum 46, no.
6 (February 2006): 183.

81
Kester, Grant H. Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. 110.

49

adds to the public setting. Peterson believes Fear-Less is still very much a part of the
community, as members remain attached to the conceptual and visual components of the
artwork. Fear-Less has been de-installed, but continues to be accessible to the
neighborhood as it is stored in the nearby Carecen building.
LA Commons implements a multi-phase process that promotes interaction to
accomplish their goals by mapping the neighborhood and local issues, gathering of
images and stories from the community. They use public programs including the
unveiling, community celebrations, classes and tours that highlight locals and their
stories. As a result, the many tour-goers, who had never been to this part of town, engage
with the project through the shared stories of the community.
As the team leader, Peterson leads the projects from beginning to end and
“coordinates the team’s work—developing a schedule of activities, based on input from
the rest of the team, that links program goals and our standard curriculum. The
professional artist serves as facilitators of the artistic process and youth experience and
lead designers for the artwork.”
82
The goal for developing the design is “to create an
artistic framework that leaves room for creative input and collaboration by other
members of the team while ensuring a high degree of artistic excellence.”
83
Although
Peterson does not come from a traditional art background, she has extensive experience

82
Mack, Karen. “Engaging Youth in Community-based Cultural Tourism.” Community
Arts Network.
http://www.communityarts.net/readingroom/archivefiles/2009/12/la_commons_enga.php
(accessed January 20, 2011) 7.

83
Ibid., 8.

50

in community-based arts organization, having worked at the Heart of the Beast Puppet
and Mask Theatre in Minneapolis, MN for sixteen years. Therefore, she is accustomed to
working collaboratively to raise greater community awareness and create an agency for
change.
According to Mack, the projects organized by LA Commons prioritize the
building of social and cultural capital while the aesthetic outcome is secondary.
84

Stating, “the aesthetic doesn’t need to be sacrificed at the altar of social change, as it
already inherently contains this ameliorative promise,”
85
French philosopher Jacques
Rancière argues that one objective does not need to be prioritized over the other.
Rancière believes that, as the social function is already a part of the project, so the value
of aesthetics should not be undermined. Rancière applies critical pressure on projects
such as Fear-Less because he believes the aesthetics of the physical object should be
considered as central as the objective to promote social interaction. While Kester would
counter by offering: “Criticism of dialogical practices should, in my view, be less
concerned with arranging a canonical hierarchy of works than with analyzing, as closely
as possibly, the interrelated moments of discursive interaction within a given project.”
86

Like dialogical aesthetics, Kester would assert that Fear-Less should be critiqued based
on its interactive process.

84
Mack, Karen. 2011. Interview by Author.

85
Bishop, Claire. “The Social Turn: Collaboration and its Discontents.” Artforum 46, no.
6 (February 2006): 183.

86
Kester, Grant H. Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. 189.

51

The Serpentine Gallery’s Edgware Road Project, an exhibition that is currently
ongoing, also serves as an example of the curator acting as an Author. The Projects
Curator, Janna Graham, orchestrates the content of the exhibition by inviting various
artists and art collectives to participate through various programming. The curatorial
premise for the Edgware Road Project states that the work “links local and international
artists with people living and working in this London neighbourhood.”
87
The project is
based in the Centre for Possible Studies, which is home to screenings and events and
serves as the ongoing project archive. As part of the Serpentine Gallery, the Centre for
Possible Studies collaborates with local and international artists, residents, shop-owners
and visitors to London’s Edgware Road area to ultimately generate programming and
content for the gallery’s exhibition. The Edgware Road Project is similar to LA
Commons’ Fear-Less in that both “Dialogical works can challenge dominant
representations of a given community and create a more complex understanding of, and
empathy for, that community among a broader public.”
88
Although the two projects are
sited in distant cities and curated by institutions that differ greatly in size and scope, they
share the characteristic Kester ascribes to dialogical work.
As part of the Serpentine’s Edgware Road Project, this past summer, the Centre
for Possible Studies was transformed into a Free Cinema School, which serves as a space

87
Serpentine Gallery. “Edgware Road Project The Centre for Possible Studies.”
http://www.serpentinegallery.org/2011/01/edgware_road_project_the_centr.html
(accessed January 20, 2011)

88
Kester, Grant H. Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. 115.

52

for collaborative film production, annotation, skills sharing, workshops, and archiving.
Their collaborative production will be presented at the Serpentine Pavilion on September
11, 2011. Another component of the Edgware Road Project is the People’s Research
Seminar, which allows the local Edgware Road community to act as interactive subjects
and be a part of the research process. This seminar is also intentionally sited at the
Centre for Possible Studies as it is “especially concerned with finding ways to operate
outside of the hierarchical structures which are typically employed by cultural
institutions. As an alternative discursive body, The People’s Research Seminar attempts
to embody its own title, as a research seminar for the people.”
89
The Centre for Possible
Studies is located in an old disused café; therefore, it has none of the excluding feel or
embodied hierarchy of a white cube. Instead it resembles the kind of place one can “drop
in”, which serves as a good context for collaboration. The seminars are strategically
organized here, away from the gallery, to evade the inherent codes and language of
authority that frames it. All the research undertaken by the participants in the seminar is
geared towards social engagement with the aim “to provide a platform for free debate
over the type of ethnographic issues that concern the Edgware Road Project in its day to
day work.”
90
This is in line with Kester’s dialogical aesthetics that “emphasizes a critical
interrogation of the processes of production through artistic practice, the loss of the so-

89
Centre for Possible Studies. “People’s Research Seminar, 27 January 2011: The Street-
Part I.” http://centreforpossiblestudies.wordpress.com/ (accessed January 20, 2011)

90
Ibid.

53

called autonomy of the work of art.”
91
Kester asserts that the notion of the heroic
individual artist must be subjugated in order to challenge fixed categorical systems and
instrumentalizing modes of thought.
For their individual projects, LA Commons and the Serpentine Gallery both
orchestrate platforms for multi-vocality that “…understand the work of art as a process of
communicative exchange rather than a physical object.”
92
These projects also address the
question, what happens if the position of the Author as manager dissolves? The curators
and the artists enact silence as they promote and prioritize the collaborative process with
the participants. The degrees of silence enacted in Fear-Less and the Edgware Road
Project have been significant, but the projects have not achieved the death of the Artist
because the role of the Author has not completely dissolved.
The hired artist for Fear-Less, assumed the role of a facilitator that embodied a
different form of authority that was more managerial than authorial. Although the artist
maintained some authority via their management of the project from beginning to end,
this managerial role was not as powerful; particularly given the preset LA Commons
project structure. Instead the facilitator was a figure that was responsible for ensuring
that everything stayed within the prescribed structure than he or she was for facilitating
multi-vocality. The hired artist resembled a project manager who was responsible for
managing the bureaucratic and pragmatic aspects. In this case, perhaps LA Commons

91
Rogoff, Irit. “Production Lines.” Collaborative Arts: Conversations on Collaborative
Arts Practise. http://collabarts.org/?p=69 (accessed February 1, 2011)

92
Kester, Grant H. Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. 90.

54

donned on the role of the Artist, rather than the hired artist for each project. Therefore,
LA Commons resembled the éminence grise, by wielding authority through their program
that directs all their work.
Also LA Common’s three-part curatorial model applied a rigid structure to the
process of Fear-Less. So although the participants were free to create the content of the
project, its framework had already been defined and was contained within the methods
proscribed by LA Commons and the lead artist. But it is notable how their framework
attempted to allow individual interpretation by the participants.
The Edgware Road Project attempts to circumvent the authorial position of the
Serpentine Gallery by basing the project at the Centre for Possible Studies. Graham, the
Projects Curator, endeavors to maintain a level of silence by providing a platform for free
debate through the People’s Research Seminar. Like the artist, Graham tries to renounce
authorial presence by creating programming that allows participants to speak. However,
Graham selected the participating art collectives, neighborhood and organizing idea for
the Edgware Road Project, which introduces participatory and discursive public practices
to the neighborhood. These selections are an act of authorship on the part of the curator
and institution. Even though the participants choose the subjects of the seminars, the
Serpentine Gallery determined that research seminars are important and needed by the
members of the public in Edgware Road. Although the Edgware Road Project avoids the
hierarchy of the organizing gallery, the Author is still present.
Graham’s role is somewhat analogous to the project manger that plans objectives
and organizes logistics, but because she is acting under the authorial hand of the

55

Serpentine Gallery, there are still some inherent hierarchies that remain. After all, the
gallery determines Edgware Road as the site for the project and determines that the
community needs a seminar. Although participants establish the contents of the seminar,
they are still navigating under the frame of the gallery.

56

Conclusion
The centrality of the artist’s role is undermined by artistic collaborations in the
public sphere that attempt to provide opportunities to share authorship. However, as the
progenitor of a project, the artist conceptualizes and maintains access to the art object’s
framework from the onset. Despite the public’s contribution, the artist remains the
central figure, acting as a manager who assumes the crucial position of directing the
project. Although an artist may not openly assert their authority, their individual
ideology is materialized in the framework and furthered through the project.
By assuming the role of a manager, artists may appear to be yielding their
authority to their project participants. Despite this guise of deferment however, the artists
considered in this thesis demonstrate authority by prescribing the parameters that define
the project. In One Place After Another: Site-specific Art and Locational Identity,
Miwon Kwon suggests the artist remains the authorial figure of the work, even though
the authorship appears to be deferred to others because he or she is the progenitor of the
work’s meaning. Kwon posits,
[The] “return of the author” results from the thematization of discursive sites…
because the signifying chain of site-oriented art is constructed foremost by the
movement and decision of the artist, the (critical) elaboration of the project
inevitably unfolds around the artist. That is, the intricate orchestration of literal
and discursive sites that make up a nomadic narrative requires the artist as a
narrator-protagonist.
93

93
Kwon, Miwon. One Place After Another: Site-specific Art and Locational Identity.
Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002. 51.

57

As Kwon expressed, access to the creation of the art object is orchestrated through the
artist. Therefore, the project is still contained within the artist’s concept and remains very
much the artist’s work.
Artists facilitating collaborative art projects in the public sphere have not
succeeded in the removal of or the death of the Artist. Instead they have re-defined the
Author’s role as that of a manager. In each of the works considered by this text, the
artists concerned enact degrees of silence and implement various methods to undermine
the role of the Author, but the changing relationship between the artists and the authority
they have traditionally held does not indicate the “Death of the Author”. Rather these
projects offer platforms for multi-vocal authorship that allow artists to spread their
authority. While the artists may enact degrees of silence, they cannot hide their
dominance as they orchestrate the project to convey their beliefs. These projects suggest
that even when an artist is working to devolve their authority to collaborative partners,
and even if the work offers a good model for social exchange and openness, the authorial
role of the artist cannot be entirely removed. Instead, under the cloak of deferment, the
artist continues to exercise authority to one degree or another.
Such a central position is especially evident in the works by Komar and Melamid.
Here the roles of the Author are re-defined through their strategic use of language by
constructing survey questions that confirm their principles. They employed the popular
discourse of the polling system as tools to validate their political and art historical
positions and to generate the content for their project. Komar and Melamid pursued a
didactic approach by parodying and revealing the flaws of the polling process.

58

The organizing concept behind the People’s Choice series is linked to the artists’
personal history and the discourse surrounding Soviet Realism. Komar and Melamid
attempted to liberate their participants from the polls by problematizing these a priori
systems that were designed to constrain them. The artists intentionally maintained their
central positions as the project’s Authors because they have clear, and clearly vocalized,
objectives for their practice. They designed a platform for facilitating multi-vocality that
ultimately furthered the artists’ ideologies. Komar and Melamid’s authority, as the
Authors, did not dissolve in the People’s Choice series.
In a similar fashion Fritz Haeg uses the discursive platforms provided by
publications and websites to further his objective of overthrowing the established
American icon of front lawns. Haeg may not appear to be the Author of each iteration of
Edible Estates, but he conceptualized and created the prototype that is replicated by
others. Haeg was straightforward by vocalizing his pronouncements from the onset;
therefore, the participants perpetuate his work, as he remains the fount of authority for the
project. Even though the gardens are located in various parts of the world, with different
owners and gardeners, each garden embodies Haeg’s ideology.
Despite his intentions, Edible Estates inevitably unfolds around him as he
orchestrated both the literal and discursive sites. He tried to create a project that was not
about him, but it was in directly about him as it was drawn from his subjectivity. Haeg’s
role eventually diminished to resemble a passive position of the facilitator especially
during the collaborative gardening phase. Like most temporal collaborative work, over
time, the authority of the artist seems to devolve to the participants.

59

The frame for The Peacock Doesn’t See Its Own Ass/Let’s Twitch Again
attempted to disintegrate the Author’s central position. Through discursive exchange,
Slanguage Studio tried to collaboratively create a frame for an interactive installation
with their participants. The artists enacted degrees of silence through their collaboration
with the bird watching club members, Serpentine Gallery’s staff, the Royal Society for
the Protection of Birds and the Natural History Museum staff. They made efforts to
perform as silent managers, but their concept behind the bird watching club, which was
based on the artists’ discovery of the woodpeckers in Banning Park, disrupted any forms
of silence attempted.
Although the artists may not identify themselves as the Authors, their personal
relationships remain central to the work. They acted as the progenitors of meaning by
conceiving the catalyzing concept, which began through their personal associations with
the project’s site. They also did not include other bird related narratives from their
participants to the piece. Slanguage Studio re-defined the role of the Author and tried to
provide a platform for multi-vocal authorship, but the only voices that were amplified
were those of Slanguage Studio. By relating the whole project to their personal
experiences, memories and subjectivity, the artists remained very central to the work.
For their individual projects, LA Commons and the Serpentine Gallery both
orchestrated platforms for multi-vocality. The curators and the artists concerned enacted
degrees of silence as they promoted and prioritized the collaborative process with the
participants over the final product. The increments of silence enacted in Fear-Less and
the Edgware Road Project have been significant, but the projects have not finally

60

succeeded in the removal of the Artist because the role of the Author is still present. Not
only because LA Common’s three-part curatorial model applied a rigid structure to the
process of each project, but because the project facilitator, a hired artist, maintained
authority as a supervisor who managed the project from beginning to end.
Although Reyes Rodriguez, the artist, supervised Fear-Less, his role embodied a
different form of authority that was more managerial than authorial. Rather than
facilitate multi-vocality, Rodriguez ensured that everything stayed within the prescribed
structure that was preset by LA Commons. Instead of the hired artist, LA Commons
assumed the role of the Artist for each project. Despite LA Common’s curatorial model
of story gathering, designing and art making, their framework attempts to allow
individual interpretation by the participants
The Edgware Road Project attempts to circumvent the authorial position of the
Serpentine Gallery by basing the project at the Centre for Possible Studies. Janna
Graham, the Projects Curator at the Serpentine Gallery, endeavors to maintain a level of
silence by providing a platform for free debate through the People’s Research Seminar.
However, the remnants of the curator’s hand are evident through the selection of the
neighborhood, which ultimately determines a majority of its participants. Also there are
still some inherent hierarchies that remain as Graham is curating under the authority of
the Serpentine Gallery.
Also, the organizing idea for the Edgware Road Project, which introduces
participatory and discursive public practices to the neighborhood, is an act of authorship
on the part of the curators and institution. Even though the participants choose the

61

subjects of the seminars, the Serpentine Gallery determined that research seminars are
important and needed by the members of the public in Edgware Road.
In the contemporary public practices discussed in this text, the Artist has not died,
but instead takes the form of a manager who performs various degrees of silence. These
artworks demonstrate that the artists have changed the ways in which they delegate
authorship to participants. However, these artists have not completely dissolved their
authority. Instead the roles of the artists can be categorized somewhere in between the
éminence grise, “who wields power and influence unofficially or behind the scenes”
94

and the project manager who plans the objectives and organizes the logistics for
individual projects. Their positions varied based on the nature of the projects and
transformed through the process.
Komar and Melamid resembled the éminence grise because they wielded
influence behind the scenes through their survey questions and were able to keep their
control and direction throughout the project. While Haeg’s role was initially like that of
the éminence grise as he was straightforward and vocal about his objectives from the
onset of the project. But his role transformed to that of the project manager as he
assumed a passive position during the gardening phase and eventually left the gardens to
the participants. Although Slanguage Studio attempted to assume the part of the
éminence grise, but they did not operate behind the scenes as they remained upfront

94
Dictionary. “Éminence grise.”
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/%C3%A9minence+grise (accessed February 27,
2011)

62

through the source of their work, which originated from the artists’ subjective
experiences.
On the other hand, the roles of the curators and the artists, affiliated with LA
Commons and the Serpentine Gallery, who were promoting and prioritizing the
collaborative process with the participants over the final product, resembled that of the
project manager. Rodriguez was like the project manager who was responsible for
managing the bureaucratic and logistical aspects of the project, while LA Commons was
like the éminence grise, by wielding authority through their three-part curatorial model.
Graham’s role was somewhat similar to the project manger that plans objectives and
organizes logistics as she selected the participating art collectives, neighborhood and
organizing idea for the Edgware Road Project.
Roland Barthes uses the term “scriptor” to disrupt the continuity of power
between the terms Author and authority. Barthes’ articulation of the scriptor’s role
emphasizes this severing of authority and authorship. Within collaborative art practices
in the public sphere, the figure of the Author-God has been disintegrated in the art world.
The reasons behind the demise of the Artist can be attributed to the same influences and
events that prompted Barthes’ assertion of the death of the Author.
Miwon Kwon also uses language to disrupt the continuity of power between the
Artist and authority. Kwon's pairing of the terms “silent” and “manager” implies that the
figure of the silent manager somehow has less authority than the traditional manager.
Through the phrase silent manager, Kwon invokes the bureaucratic process and the multi-
layered public patrons that are concerned with non art-related issues like budget and

63

safety. She implies that the silent managers practicing in the public sphere relinquish
their authority to the conditions of site.
The projects that were selected for this thesis suggest a phrase other than silent
manager that would be more suitable. Perhaps the roles of these artists, in this thesis, are
better expressed through the phrase “artist manager.” The term, artist manager,
references the 18th century notion of the “actor manager.” The actor manager is “a
leading actor who produces and usually stars in his or her own productions.”
95
Similarly,
the artist manager can be the leading artist who produces and usually engages in the
creation his or her own project. This expression of the artist manager may be more
appropriate than the silent manager because Kwon’s term severs the relationship between
the artist and authority, while the artists examined in this thesis actually maintain their
authority.
Since contemporary art practice in the public sphere is often declared to be a tool
for articulating the voices of the public or community, the privileged authority of the
Artist is intentionally undermined. Public art no longer privileges the authorial intention,
but creates a platform for discussion and multi-vocality. With the term silent manager,
Kwon claims that the Artist has not disappeared, but has rather donned new clothes.
Some artists don them in order to conform and leverage their careers, while others
genuinely desire to promote change and provide voices for the disenfranchised.

95
Dictionary. “Actor-manager.” http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/actor-manager
(accessed February 13, 2011)

64

The projects by LA Commons and the Serpentine Gallery offer a close model for
multi-vocal authorship in which the curators attempt to further dissolve the position of
the silent manager. But through these endeavors, the aesthetics of the physical object are
marginalized as social interaction and consensus is prioritized. Like dialogical work, in
contemporary public practice, value lies within the discursive interaction during the
project’s process rather than the physical object. Although social interaction is promoted,
how much of the nature and quality of the participation is predetermined by the artists
and curators? Since the artist’s authority cannot be completely dissolved, it is likely that
they define the interactive exchanges within their projects as well.
As the Author’s role disintegrates, the priority of the aesthetics and criticality of
the final product appears to increasingly become secondary. Perhaps this is something
that has to be considered when evaluating collaborative art practices that promote multi-
vocal authorship. According to James Lingwood, Co-Director of the Artangel Trust,
which commissioned Rachel Whiteread’s House among many other works, House “did
not seek to manufacture some confectionary consensus, as many public works of art are
compelled to do…Indeed it laid bare the limits of language and expectation which afflict
the contentious arena of public art’”
96
Considering Lingwood’s statement, developing an
artificial form of consensus within the public arena only underscores the need for an
Author to take ownership for the project.

96
Kester, Grant H. Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. 19.

65

All of the projects considered here began with the artists’ personal associations
with particular sites, discourse and history, which were integral to the conception of their
pieces. Despite their differing conditions, all of these artistic collaborations indicate the
artist as the primary Author. Although silence is defined as the “absence of any sound,”
97

in the case of these projects, there are degrees of silence that are enacted by the artists.
These artists all attempt silence through various strategies, but none of the artists in the
project enact a “deafening silence,” one in which their authority is completely dissolved.
After visiting the anechoic chamber at Harvard University in 1951, John Cage stated,
“Until I die there will be sounds. And they will continue following my death.”
98
Just as
Cage believed that silence could not exist, the artist as the manager cannot enact
complete silence.
The following year Cage composed 4’33”, which is a composition comprised of
three movements where not a single note is played. It is often mistakenly referred to as
his “silent piece”, but he intended it to consist of the sounds of the environment that were
heard during the performance, rather than four minutes and thirty three seconds of
silence. Just as Cage’s 4’33” is erroneously thought to be absolutely silent, the artists
examined in this thesis manifest a range of tones, qualities and characteristics of silence.
Silence is not nothing, but the degrees of silence change from project to project based on

97
Dictionary. “Silence.” http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/silence (accessed
February 13, 2011)

98
Cage, John. “Experimental Music.” in Silence: Lectures and Writings. 1st ed.
Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1961. 8.

66

the artists’ methods. Each of the works under consideration demonstrates a different
aspect of the response to the Author’s death.
In Dialogues in Public Art, Vito Acconci’s stated, “A public art proposal is the
beginning of a discussion…”
99
If in fact a public art proposal is the beginning of a
discussion, how can there be a discussion if the artist is silent? There must be an artist to
produce a platform for generative interactions and discussions within collaborative
artistic practice. The birth of the participant is not occurring at the cost of the death of
the Artist.

99
Finkelpearl, Tom. Dialogues in Public Art. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000. 189.

67

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71

Appendix

Figure 1: Komar and Melamid, America’s Most Wanted, 1994
Source: Hillings, Valerie L. “Komar and Melamid’s Dialogue with (Art) History” Art
Journal 58, no. 4 (Winter1999): 59.

72

Figure 2: Komar and Melamid, America’s Most Unwanted, 1994
Source: Hillings, Valerie L. “Komar and Melamid’s Dialogue with (Art) History” Art
Journal 58, no. 4 (Winter1999): 59.

73

Figure 3: Komar and Melamid, Russia’s Most Wanted, 1994
Source: Hillings, Valerie L. “Komar and Melamid’s Dialogue with (Art) History” Art
Journal 58, no. 4 (Winter1999): 60.

74

Figure 4: Fritz Haeg, Edible Estates, 2006
Source: Haeg, Fritz. “Edible Estates Regional Prototype Garden #2: Los Angeles,
California.” http://www.fritzhaeg.com/garden/initiatives/edibleestates/losangeles.html
(accessed February 1, 2011)

Figure 5: Fritz Haeg, Edible Estates, 2006
Source: Haeg, Fritz. “Edible Estates Regional Prototype Garden #2: Los Angeles,
California.” http://www.fritzhaeg.com/garden/initiatives/edibleestates/losangeles.html
(accessed February 1, 2011)

75

Figure 6: Slanguage Studio, The Peacock Doesn’t See Its Own Ass/Let’s Twitch Again:
Operation Bird Watching in London, 2006
Source: Courtesy of Karla Diaz (co-founder, Slanguage Studio)

76

Figure 7: Slanguage Studio, The Peacock Doesn’t See Its Own Ass/Let’s Twitch Again:
Operation Bird Watching in London, 2006
Source: Courtesy of Karla Diaz (co-founder, Slanguage Studio)

77

Figure 8: LA Commons, Fear-Less, 2008
Source: Courtesy of Beth Peterson (Community Arts Programs Director, LA Commons)

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