Community as Context
Panelists: Julie Ault (moderator), Bob Haozous, Mierle Laderman Ukeles

Ault: I am trying to collect my thoughts and put them under the category of community, but for me the term community is not bankrupt. At the same time, it's a term that has been used and abused a lot in institutionalizing processes over the last few years, in particular. The term community has been bandied about a lot in cultural contexts, with a whole array of aims and agendas. I am a little squeamish at this point, when I hear things like "the community" because I haven't got a clue what that really means. I know it is often just a euphemism for what the NEA guidelines call under-served populations. When people say "the community" my antenna goes up. Community as a notion can make us feel connected to certain people, but for me it is always contextual. I ask myself, as an artist, what are the various communities and identifications of community that I am engaged with in a particular project. I was struck when Mierle used the term "the community." I wondered if you could reflect a bit on that. Could you reflect on distinctions between how you as an artist perceive institutions' use of the term. That might feed into a discussion of commissioned work and how those dynamics work between commissioning institutions and artists.

Ukeles: My interest in community comes from the notion of common. That is a desire on my part since I wrote the manifesto for maintenance art in 1969. This was out of feminist revolutionary fervor, that we had to start all over again. We had to start all over again with everybody inside the frame. That had never existed in the history of the world, ever. So that, to do this, I felt we had to shatter the frames that had been there before, the frames that enabled people to make assumptions when they met me as the well-educated person that I am, and different assumptions when they met me pushing a baby carriage. In the second situation, I am trying to keep myself together as an artist and trying to keep the baby alive, and they would ask, "Do you do anything?" I was in such a rage because my voice got ripped away from me. That was the fire out of which this work came. I felt we have to start over again. How do we do that? We come from all these different cultures, a lot of which are antagonistic. We have to find what we share in common. What I felt was a rich place to start was the city. Here we are together in the city. What do we have to do to stay together peacefully? What do we all do? We make garbage. We all have to do certain jobs to keep ourselves going. Those are common jobs. No one can say they don't understand garbage. I was searching for common terms to build from. My stuff is simple stuff. To build from the beginning, starting all over again, inescapably, every person on earth is inside this picture. I am shocked that you said "the community" because I didn't think I said "the." It's always a struggle and a collision.

Ault: It was in relation to the MOCA piece, when you were talking about that piece, and I wasn't sure what you were talking about because I didn't hear a definition of what the community was. Were you talking about the museum community? Or geographic? Or an idea?

Ukeles: I don't know. There is not "the." We have to create this. This does not exist. "The community" is a funding tool. We don't even know how to speak to each other. I think that is where we are. There's a desire on the part of some people to talk to other people. How we are in such a primitive mode. I always located my work inside of a public system that was already publicly owned. It has to do with public ownership. Everybody is already an owner in the public domain of the garbage system. I own the fire trucks, even though they don't want me to put my hands on the trucks. In my public commission for a fire house I proposed to make a piece that would push the fire truck out so the kids could put their hands on the symbol of power. I was told, we don't want them touching our fire truck.

Ault: That is not surprising. It's a question for ourselves. It would be useful to think about community in a more precise way that makes a counter position to the abuses of language that funding agencies have been involved in. I don't want to make it sound all bad. I think it is good that museums and art institutions are opening their doors in some ways, but a lot of the internal workings of the museums have not changed. So you have to wonder what's decoration and what is long lasting. The pitch for community based work and the shift in arts funding to support socially active and community based work is in direct relation to the funding crisis around the NEA. I think it would be useful for us to think about community as a set of possibilities and potentials, and ways we can precisely talk about artistic practices that engage and perhaps represent at times, and not fall into the traps set by a very imprecise euphemism.

Ukeles: I agree. The director of MOCA in Los Angeles, Richard Koshalek, approved this show because he said if we in the museum world don't build a bigger audience, we will go out of business. So many people feel so cut off from art that there won't be an audience in the future. His statement shows the institutional nervousness. They got a bunch of artists who have not been waiting for the museum to invite them, but who want to talk a common talk, and see themselves not only, as he said, as in a culture of individual gain, but inside communities, with other people. Your identity is built not only alone, but with others. I agree with you that you have to be really careful and precise about understanding the institutions who will enable you to build a bigger work than you could manage on your own. You have to understand what their self interests are. I worked with many city workers. I would say that almost none of the people had ever been to the museum and really weren't all that interested. They were interested in meeting with me in their place, but did not see their identity enlarged because I was inviting them to be in a cultural institution. That did not happen. That was disappointing to me.

Ault: Bob, do you want to add to this?

Haozous: The question of community is something I am dealing with now after all these years. I came to realize I have been working for 25 years as a contemporary artist and people in my own community didn't know what I did. Also, my father worked 60 years as an Indian contemporary artist and nobody knew how it affected the community. I see my personal community making art and having the same lack of effect and knowing that, separate from the art world, we have a strong sense of community as Indian people and as humans. We talk about very complex issues that other people don't talk about that relate to our families and our tribal affiliations, that we don't speak about in our art. So I don't know whether I am trying to develop a sense of community, but I am trying to break down the restrictions that keep us from relating to our sense of community. The market, a historic presentation of ourselves, a romantic presentation of ourselves, don't allow us to talk about issues that are more direct and more real than are allowed by the market. Stimulating a new direction and creating a new communal sense appeals to me. I don't have a community in terms of who I relate to and am responsible for. One of the things I am trying to do with the Venice Biennale project is to bring into some kind of dialogue the concept of cultural participation or cultural responsibility. It's only with cultural responsibility that you will have a cultural place. We don't have a cultural place in the art community except in economic return and prestige to relate to our own people. It's always through some vague concept of talent. What does that mean? How can you give prestige back to your people unless you are directing to them? It is important to me to open a dialogue with Indian people for ourselves. Unfortunately, that dialogue has to transcend the traditional methods of museum presentation or public presentation and really deal with issues that are real or painful. That is as far as I have gotten. I don't know where it can go. I am trying to open the door. One of the things I am finding out is that what I do is only a small step. If I fail, that's all right. It doesn't matter because maybe I am opening a door for someone else to succeed later on.

Ukeles: You are saying you have a lot of things that you talk about within. For me, this is a hard thing. You know what you are talking about because you are talking community talk. You grew up in this community and you know what you are talking about. That is inside the community. As a contemporary artist, do you see your job as breaking down the restrictions? You said it is important for people to create their own identity, not to accept the identity pushed on them from the market. If your work is to develop this language inside, do you want to stay there? Artists never want to stay in any one place. If you can get your community to talk really straight to each other, what is the relationship between that and the outside world, communities with overlapping edges? Do you see your job as refining the language inside? You are also talking about the Venice Biennale, a much larger scale. Inside Sanitation, everybody knows who's really great and who's full of baloney and how valuable people are. As a group, there's a feeling that outside people don't value anybody inside so a protective barrier is erected between inside and outside. So what is the job of the artist?

Haozous: I don't know the answer. I personally believe art should be self portraiture. That is basically it. I don't know if my example is going to stimulate or destroy any kind of communal sense, but it has to be dealt with as a portrait and I see exclusion to be an important issue, so I deal with it. I see racial exclusion so I deal with it. But that may have nothing to do with the community from the inside. The community is an idealistic dream of what we could be. That is what stimulates me. That's all. I don't know what the answer will be. A lot of my work in my studio is from a European origin in how to make art, so it is a contradiction to a Native American way. But I think I should be speaking about issues that are important to me as a potential communal participant.

Question: What is your definition of public? Public versus private, which is ownership?

Haozous: Public is anything once it leaves my studio. That's all.

Question: Could you comment on the idea of self portraiture in relationship to working in communities other than your own? In particular, I mean in terms of religious, personal, economic terms. You both work in situations of other more often than not. It often engages the sense of the other in the process of making the work.

Ault: I don't know what you mean by that. Or, I don't understand that identification.

Comment: For Mierle, doing "Touch Sanitation" was very much about engaging a community other than your own, and defined in certain ways, at least from my perspective. The work you are doing in Maine right now similarly can be seen as working in a community other than your personal, lived community.

Ault: Before we can answer questions like that it would be important to know what your definition of community is. When you say Mierle's own community, is that based on geographic location or what?

Comment: Let me simplify my question. Do you both see your work as self portrait as well, and if not, how would you define it in relationship to portraiture?

Ault: I wouldn't define my work in relationship to self portraiture necessarily. I usually try to not be too descriptive about it, defining the work as one thing or the other. But when pressed, I would say it is more involved in cultural descriptions or models of descriptions of culture. With the work I showed this morning that Group Material was involved in, or in exhibitions I have organized independently, I have a role and investment, but my identification with the subject and topics of a given project is on a number of levels. If you want to throw in the word community, I would say I am part of many constellations or frameworks that could be understood as forms of community. When you said other, I couldn't think of a project that Group Material did, for instance, where we weren't dealing with our culture. Our culture is massive. That is why I titled my presentation "Where Does the Exhibition End?" There is no inside and outside. Ultimately there is an element of self portrayal within that, but it is through a vocabulary of larger culture and specific interests.

Ukeles: "Touch Sanitation" was a portrait, not of me, but of New York City. The only way that I could think of making a portrait of the city was to attempt to link a living system of those who keep the city alive. The only way I could figure out to do that was literally to go to each person and face each person and say, "Thank you for keeping New York City alive." It was not a distancing portrait of "the other." It was the opposite. I used to make these fiery speeches at roll call because the people I met felt so alienated and invisible. I would say I was not there to look at you or to study you or to analyze you, but to be with you. The "with" is communitarian language. The portrait was not of myself, but of the living city. I see the city as an ecological system in which humans play a role.

Comment: Community is an issue I have been grappling with as well. I see the community as being a fluid entity that is constantly changing. There is no community that hasn't changed over time, as people move geographically or socially. We are all part of the human construct that aspires to assure that everyone is able to relish in the common good. We all aspire to issues of the common good at some level. Without the individual aspiration, the community is stifled. If the community isn't in place for the individual, the individual can't aspire. I've been reading Traditions in Modernity: Philosophical Reflections in the African Experience. It talks about a moderate form of communitarianism that deals with those concepts. As long as we understand that we are members of the human race, the community is well served. Unfortunately, we have power structures in place that subvert that notion at some level. To me, community is not necessarily descriptive of any one particular group or entity.

Ault: You are seeing it less as compartmentalization and more as a general human, civic good. I wish I felt that way. I don't have this idea of the human community. It's too general for me to identify with. Some questions could easily come out of what you have raised in terms of relations between the individual and the collective. Someone asked Bob about referencing dominant culture in his work, and I think about how Group Material's work tries to critically respond to aspects of culture and political life. The other was to be constructive in that. We were continually referencing and critiquing and working within what you might think of as mainstream possibilities. A lot of artists in the eighties defined their practices around enemy politics. In our case there was Reagan and conservatism. For Gran Fury there was the AIDS crisis and the people in government who withheld resources. A lot of activist artistic practices would have to redefine themselves if they weren't struggling with the differentiations of the dominant culture. In the early nineties many activist art groups and collective structures have dissipated or become institutionalized. There is a narrowing and privatization of the cultural field, as well as the privatization of a lot of public activities. That can be seen as a demise of civic intention and participation. Group Material's collective life was from 1979 to 1996, but we were in death throes for at least five years. After Clinton got elected, Group Material and other artists, at first, thought things would be better and they didn't have to be so adversarial. Also, people outgrow certain strategies.

Ukeles: I have experiences where communities that I think I come out of, that taught me how to think as a community person, made me feel I can have an individual identity, but be part of something beyond myself. I am thinking specifically of a Jewish community. I came out of a very strong Jewish community. The traditional, scholarly Jewish community is immersed in sacred books and 4,000 years of learning. They have discussions with rabbis that lived 600 years ago as if they were alive. The dialogue is so living that it transcends time and space. Except that women don't have the right to open their mouths in that dialogue. I love them but I hate them, because they call me a licentious idolater. I like the licentious part, but it pisses me off. I keep thinking that I learned that my identity is enriched, not diminished, by being inside something, yet they take away my voice. They don't care at all about my work; they don't know how to come to my work. I am so disappointed. Community is tricky. You defined community as who are you responsible for and responsible to. The older I get, I feel I have a responsibility to artists who have supported me. I owe them. It's weird now; Reagan was easier in a way. I keep waiting for Clinton to speak up for the NEA. These are strange times. A lot of organizations are censoring themselves, shutting down. The Western art culture isn't very communitarian, but other artists and some arts administrators act as community people, and I owe them. I was on a design team. I will not say what city. In the northwest. The team of a bunch of artists came up with a statement by Chief Joseph, who was one of the great people of history, about the land. He made statements about the land that are the most wise and beautiful statements. We found one that we proposed be in Native Indian language and put along the whole transit line, so you have to travel the whole line to read the whole thing. It's a piece that gets divided as it moves through the 15 stations, ending out in the countryside. On the way back it is in English. I personally feel much land ought be returned to Indians, that is the only way. We have many cultures in this country, but genocide has occurred and we haven't begun to deal with it, and a lot has to happen to begin to deal with that. Millions of people were killed here and we don't know their voices or hear their history. Well, the authorities, who commissioned us, said it was a beautiful statement, but we can't privilege Chief Joseph. If we have one foreign language, we have to have all languages of all the cultures of this place. So they cancelled the piece.

Question: In producing work that has a purpose, a moral purpose or matters of integrity, where do aesthetic issues come in? How do you set aesthetic goals? How much importance do you give to the aesthetic side of the production of work?

Haozous: I don't know. Every time I look at an art book I realize how ignorant I am, so I just do what comes, I don't analyze it. I want to say a statement about what you just said about Chief Joseph. My father told me a story about one of his best students in American Indian arts in Santa Fe. My dad was very traditional and had a stone piece and was talking about what you see in it. One contemporary artist, who is making tons of money now, said he saw a big dollar sign. It humors me to hear someone talking about Chief Joseph, who died 100 years ago, and his words. If you talk to contemporary Indians, they see dollar signs, bingo, gambling, a new car, drugs, violence. I don't know about my response to community or what the community thinks of me, but I do know that if my community is unhealthy, as an artist I should talk about it. Why should we talk about the Chief Josephs and the Geronimos. The wisdom of our people is right there. My brother is a severe alcoholic. I was in that same thing, I was going to do a sculpture of Geronimo as a student. My brother came out and was in an alcoholic stupor, and he said, oh, you are going to do a bigger and better Geronimo. Who cares? Where am I? It comes back to portraiture. How do you define portraiture? I am just learning now that I don't own myself. I have a responsibility to speak for a lot of people, otherwise, who cares? Am I just going to make art? I decided a long time ago that I am not going to make a bigger and better Geronimo. My sense of aesthetic is not important. What's important is what I do in my studio.

Younger: When we talked on the phone, I found very interesting the idea of being responsible to five generations in the past or six generations in the future as a way to guide your decision making. I see some of those things in what you are saying Mierle. Who do you feel you are responsible to as an artist? And Julie, too.

Ault: I wish I could have an easier time with these questions, but I can't grasp that kind of question. I, of course, feel responsible to myself and the people I am working with. There are lots of possible answers, but it is case by case. I don't have a notion of myself as an artist, but that I work as an artist sometimes. So I don't feel comfortable talking in the vocabularies of working with moral issues or responsibility or civic issues. It's not my vocabulary. I see aesthetics as ideological and I respond to visual vocabularies and work with that. I don't see moral issues and content issues and aesthetic issues as separate. Clearly aesthetics include content; they are not just a carrier of content. The way something is communicated inflects the whole thing. I don't have strict aesthetic allegiances. But I respond to certain types of material, the way certain things look. I like good design and think an exhibition has to be designed in a way that is engaging and visually exciting. But I would have to qualify all those terms with what I think is seductive or visually engaging. Maybe someone else can answer the responsibility question.

Question: It started with the story of your baby; maybe you could elaborate on that Mierle.

Ukeles: Before I had a baby, I had no allegiances to anyone except Jackson Pollock. If anybody would interfere with making my work, I would get away from them as fast as possible. And I felt my responsibility was to myself as an artist. Period. I was doing something good by doing that, by going as deeply into myself as I could. That was my avant garde art job. When I had a baby it was a crisis for me to have this human being that I wanted and was responsible for putting her needs ahead of my needs. Actually, everything she did, bringing two hands together, the symmetry of the human being, going from crawling to walking, the incredible developmental stages; as she discovered the world, I discovered the world as well. I discovered the outside world, not just my internal weather. In my case, this turning outward was a direct result of the crisis of having to deal with the Western notion of individual expression and discovering the world and how wonderful it was to be connected. I think we have a responsibility to keep our own voices, even if it gets us in messy situations. It's hard to be brave enough to keep your own voice. Because the dominant culture is so sneaky.

Question: Mierle, it seems that you were very comfortable at the fire station. How were you accepted when you first approached the Department of Sanitation?

Ukeles: My interest in the Sanitation Department happened at the height of the fiscal crisis in the mid seventies, when up to 65% of all of their equipment was broken at any time, and there would be one bathroom for 40 people. Many sanitation sections were in abandoned jails. It was a disaster. It was unfit for human habitation, the setting the city gave these workers who we were completely dependent on. The sickness of being unable to see that we are in need of each other, that we are dependent on each other, that there weren't words in the culture that honored that dependency was so clear. It was the mirror of the woman who is told, I know what you are, you stay, you do, you are, without ever asking her. It was the social manifestation of the woman's voice. I talked to people for a year and a half before I made my first move. By then I had spoken to so many people that I knew what the deal was. They were in such a desperate mode that even an artist was acceptable. It was a moment of flexibility. I made a proposal to the Department of Cultural Affairs, because they never paid me, that they create something called "PAIRS," "Public Artists in Residence." I still think it's a great idea, with money to pay people for long residencies, so they can really dig in for two or three years, and get paid like a human being. That should come from the Mayor's budget, so it is not sucked out of health and hospitals or sanitation or fire. It went up a few levels, but didn't happen. It's good to have artists around because they make portraits.

Question: Listening to all of you, it seems to me that the message is the meaning. I believe in the seduction of the objects and aesthetics. When you go through your process of making art, like the work at MOCA, do you think about the after? How can you get the message further out into the community after the show? You share this with us, but is it continuing afterwards?

Ault: Mierle mentioned arts communities as being central to her. I feel the same way. The secondary representation of work of artistic practices, whether in university settings or art magazines, are important. It is also nice if it can go to other places, but a lot of times it doesn't. For some activist practices, the primary audience is the media audience that came from having a poster project or demonstration making it into the news. It's inevitable that a lot of what artists engaged with social issues are doing is going to have the most long-lasting effects in the art field, in providing information, strategies, models, ideas and dialogues. Art is still extremely compartmentalized in our society. Some of the problems we've been addressing today have to do with the roles art has in American culture which is nearly nonexistant. It isn't socially respected or compensated in any meaningful way. If you don't make objects, then you can't make a living as an artist. It is a very different situation in some European countries in the place art holds in the social fabric. Artists are respected. Here there is a polarized representation of the artist as the person who puts the crucifix in urine or the artist in People Magazine. Then there is the whole public art, community based, institutional critique domain, which is somewhat new.

Question: It seems like the power of your work is the information, even though the objects are seductive. How do you continue to get that out?

Ukeles: Can I respond to the MOCA thing? I had wild fantasies about the end of this piece at MOCA. Very few of them happened. You can use numbers as indicators of success, which is a media marketing way of thinking about it. But significant things did happen. They happened on an individual level between a few people sitting around the piece. There were eight formal peace talks. Every one came at the issue of building peace from a different way. Every time the table became a different place, and they were truly remarkable occurrances. A lot of the unburnings were remarkable creations. Getting the thing to happen was, in itself, pretty cool. Did it really do all that much for making peace in the U.S.? Maybe it made some of the language of building peace a little more refined. People looked at each other in a more quiet way. There were a lot of moving events. And that is good enough. The ripple effect happens with continuing to talk about it in situations like this.

Question: Can you just touch one person and have that be enough? How many people is enough?

Ault: One is not enough.

Ukeles: No, one is not enough.

Ault: It's a communicative endeavor.

Younger: Bob, you have been writing notes; what are you thinking about?

Haozous: I draw a lot. This is not what I do. I've been thinking about how early in my career I assumed lots of things, one of which was watching my peers make distinctions about what an artist was. They always separated their culture from the art. They said they were an artist first and an Indian second which to me is a functional way of defining yourself in market terms, to be able to fit in with a more contemporary art hierarchy. But I have always considered art to be a cultural expression. And the definition of culture can be specific or general. I decided a long time ago that I want my children to be Apache, philosophically and spiritually. I also decided it had nothing to do with blood, but with philosophy. There is much more to be gained from culture specifics than generalities. That is my decision. When I hear people talk about art in a general sense, it is contrary to what I have taught myself to believe. That is what I have been thinking about. I know who I am. I am an Indian artist, and it doesn't matter. It gives me a strong safe platform to direct my statement. I am not trying to heal the world or one person, just to analyze what my motivation is and how time relates to my statement. As I talk to more and more people, I find out that time is an essential element in the production of art. I want my art to be long term. I want it to come from a long way and to go a long way. But that doesn't mean anything, because it doesn't matter. What matters is that I produce art and I use my intelligence and my wisdom the best I can. That is what I've been thinking about.

Question: I want to see if you agree with some of the things I've been thinking about while you were talking. Going back to the issue of responsibility, I think a lot of the comments you've all made in the last twenty minutes speak to that issue. Maybe a way to elaborate on that is to talk about who it is that you are putting your message out there for. Societally, the art world is a small percentage, and I assume that, ideally, you would want to reach a broader audience. How do you feel about reaching out to them? Is it important? Are you interested in having a dialogue with people who come into contact with your work?

Ault: Absolutely. A few minutes ago, when I was talking about responding by not responding to Cheryl's question about responsibility, I meant that it is very general for me to say I feel responsible to a certain group or an idea or aesthetic or whatever. At the same time, of course, when you are involved in making work, there are lots of people and ideas that you hold in mind as the recipients, participants, people who will be part of and use the work. In my experience, each situation is different. You can lump some museum projects together. But at the Whitney Museum there are a lot of different audiences, so I would not want to put forward a monolithic notion of an audience. I am aware of speaking to someone or to people who would use an exhibition. I wish I could think of a word other than responsibility. If there is any clear notion that I hold while working, it is how people potentially use the exhibition. With an exhibition you have an interesting situation, because there is a room that is a composition. There are a lot of possibilities for readings within that. I am interested in those multiple possibilities. People in the art field are not the sole audience. The art field is the place that is affected most, I think, by the work I have been involved with. That is where the repercussions and consequences are in terms of artistic practices. Hopefully, the exhibition makes something happen in other audiences as well, but I can't say what that might be exactly. At times, Group Material was anxious to understand how things were received and frustrated to not see concrete effects. You have to trust that if it satisfies you in a certain way, and the working process is fruitful, it is a good sign. Hopefully that process can be replicated for the viewer in how they understand what they are seeing.

Haozous: I also don't like using the word responsibility. But it does open a dialogue, and I like that. It makes people question.

Question: Maybe a better word would be contribution.

Haozous: One of the reasons I use responsibility is because in the Native community the artists are throwing away their genius and claiming all the benefits and not participating. It is a responsibility, if they want it. Contribution is also a good word.

Younger: We talked about that earlier in the conference, your responsibility to democracy, to change what needs to be changed in your community. That is not a question you can answer, but something to think about.

Haozous: Another responsibility is economic. It sounds bad, but it is a part of the life of anybody.

Analysis by Toshihiro Komatsu (with Beth Peckman)

Julie Ault moderated the panel discussion on community as context with Mierle Laderman Ukeles and Bob Haozous. Conversation began as a means to counter the ambiguity of the term community when used in public discourse. For each panel member, the term community was applied not to unifying professional practices, i.e. being an artist, but to broader social, residential configurations. Discussion of artistic practices entailed examining panel members means for engaging the greater community as individually defined. This reflected the panels general sentiment that artists, and therefore art, function as part of a greater good rather than independent of social and cultural confines.

In presenting their concerns with engaging a community, each panel member revealed his or her conceptual interpretation of community. Julie Ault began by distinguishing between the definition of the term community when artists use the term and when institutions use the same term. Ault analyzed the term in order to consider its contextual status. Her interest is in artistic practices engaged with experiences of community on both theoretical and practical levels. Mierle Ukeles strength as an artist comes from being within-community, and seeing within-community. For Ukeles, community is a notion of commonality: we are in the city, we make garbage. She presented an understanding of community rooted in the concrete, physical realm of shared experience. Bob Haozous, the third panel member, talked about his sense of community and the idea of creating a new communal sense. Haozous expressed community in terms of a dialogue with those to which he chooses to respond. His multi-generational concept of self expands the community in which he is to function as a participant, and toward which he is responsible.

These three panel members shared an understanding of community that defines who we are as individuals through our relationships with others. This is contrary to the, "Who are you? What do you do?" inquiry commonly exchanged in social situations as the equation by which strangers can become acquainted. Their discourse loosely represents mind, body and soul, approaches, respectively, to defining community.

Throughout the discussion the panel members remarks reflected concern for the lack of communal task and communal sense in a modern, western society based on individualism. Neighborhood co-operation and a sense of communal responsibility are seen as casualties of [pick yourself up by your] bootstrap modernity. The worship of individual achievement has come at the expense of the proverbial village it takes to raise a child.

For each of these panelists, one could argue that successful art is a political venture. The impact on any one individual would be important only in terms of relating that individual to another. These panelists grant art insignificant intrinsic value as aesthetic entities alone. Aesthetics, and art itself, retain power through usage, as a means to an end rather than an end in and of itself. Moral concerns aside, if one is to address, inspire or motivate any community, the basics remain: know what is in common and who is united.