Time is an important factor in differentiating in participatory and community art. The shorter the project, the less potential for the participants to influence its development. People may share a meal with an artist in a gallery or stand naked in the street to be photographed but their influence on the resulting work is marginal. Such works do not require participants to have or use any artistic knowledge or ability. Their experience, feelings or individuality are not required. One participant could be replaced by another and it would make no substantive difference to the art.
A project that develops over weeks, months or – as in the case of Granby 4 Streets – years has another character. Here, relations can become relationships. There is a basis for real negotiation between artist and participant. Power relations may shift as people acquire (or take) knowledge, skills, resources or consciousness. Time allows an art project to become developmental. The work is under no one’s complete control because it is impossible to know how it will evolve. It can only be the product of a genuine process of co-creation.
There are traps in durational work just as intense moments have transformative potential. It’s also true that short events can be the artistic marker of a long process of shared creation (as in the festival below). It would be simplistic to equate time and quality in a binary fashion. That said, longer term work has always held most interest for me.
Note: The images on this page offer contrasting representations of Eastern Europe. At the top is ‘Total Chaos’ an immersive art project by artists collective Reactor which took place over four days in 2006. At the bottom the photos are from a 2003 Living Heritage project in Bulgaria developed by local people over a year that gathered hundreds of people to celebrate the ties of a community dispersed by economic and social change.
François Matarasso 