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Critical PerspectivesEssay AbstractsThe full collection of Critical Perspectives Essays can be purchased through the Americans for the Arts bookstore. Ties That Bind, MACLA (Movimiento de Arte y Cultura Latino Americana)
Project Overview
Fifteen families shared their personal stories with artists and scholars (writer and cultural anthropologist Renato Rosaldo among them) in order to create the work. The exhibition, a series of installations including new and old photographs, objects found in the homes, and created environments, reflected artists Lissa Jones and Jennifer Ahn’s interpretations of what they saw, heard, and learned through the process. As described in the MACLA exhibition catalog, “The work creates metaphors of cleanliness and contamination (manifested in a bathroom scene); fragmentation and memory (embodied in cooking strainers); private meanings and public displays (suggested in a laundry line); the comfort of the familiar and the fear of the unknown (captured in shadow boxes); the opening and closing of ethnic identity manifested in mundane everyday routines (expressed through door frames).” Dialogue began with a core group of community leaders and advisors who helped frame the issues; it continued with Latino and Asian community participants whose photos and oral histories reveal the depth of the story of inter-marriage, past and present; and concluded with a public forum. Dialogues challenged prevailing ideas about ethnicity that hold to separate histories and identities to consider instead how the reality of shared histories, bonds of affection, and common aspirations has contributed to the cultural and social landscape of the region. Ties That Bind/Ties That Bond: A Community-Based Art Project in Silicon Valley
Matthews, an educator, curator, writer, and arts activist, examines the aesthetic precedents and critical debates within the history of community-based public art. She considers Ties That Bind within the context of the work of other artists, cultural theorists, and museum curators who have explored underrepresented sociohistorical experiences, often “invisible within dominant visual culture.” She notes the history of vitality in community-oriented works that went unnoticed by art critics or were dismissed as “naïve.” She states that “since the 1990s, however, community-based art has appeared regularly within the mainstream international art world, and collaborative endeavors are now virtually required within the public realm to ensure that art has cultural relevance within its social context. Artists no longer only create objects; they are simultaneously involved in designing frameworks for social interaction.” She describes the “ethnographic” trend in public art, referring to issues in the current literature such as “ethnographic envy” and “aesthetic evangelism.” She cites early examples of public art, such as Suzanne Lacy’s 1987 Crystal Quilt, “a colossal performance spectacle held in Minneapolis’s Crystal Court that featured the life stories of more than 400 elderly women and took over two and a half years and the efforts of more than 500 volunteers, 20 staff members, and a team of 15 collaborating artists to produce.” While ethnographic art tends to allow contradictory detail, the Ties That Bind installation presents, states Matthews, a “range of abstract, metaphoric domestic zones” rather than the “variety of contradictory experiences within Latino-Asian American families.” She continues: “Certainly a Vietnamese-Mexican American couple would be struggling with different kinds of cultural tensions than, say, a Filipino-Guatemalan, Japanese-Panamanian, or a Pakistani-Mexican” family. Matthews notes that art historian Miwon Kwon has traded the “overused and undertheorized” term, “community-based art,” for “collective artistic praxis.” She refers to Kwon’s interest in communities that “are invented during the art process, not communities who already embody reified fixed identities. They consist of a provisional group that finds its bonds through the coordination of the artwork itself; it performs its coming-together to create community where there was not one.” Matthew concludes about Ties That Bind: “Much more than any other project I’ve witnessed, this work aimed to make every participant involved—from the MACLA curators to the artists, to the students and scholars who collaborated in its production, to the interracial married couples whose life experience provided the work’s content—reassess their definition of art practice, community, and personal cultural identity.” Intermarriage and Public Life
This essay provides historical context on intermarriage and then compares individual, private, and subjective perspectives on interracial unions with data from the U.S. Census. Is San Jose a special nexus of Asian-Hispanic intermarriage? Based on factual data, Rosenfeld examines claims by the Ties That Bind project of singularity (that San Jose is different), cosmopolitanism (that San Jose nurtures subcultures that are excluded elsewhere), heterogeneity (that San Jose is more racially diverse), and alternativeness and transgression (that Asian-Hispanic intermarriage fundamentally transgresses against social norms that predominate in other, less cosmopolitan parts of the United States). The essay concludes that the demographic phenomenon of Hispanic-Asian intermarriage is geographically broad and not unique to San Jose. It is rather “how local, how intimate, and how concrete” the experience of the Ties That Bind exhibit is that makes it unique. The intimacy and geographic specificity invite visitors to feel part of the interethnic family. In this way, the exhibit underlines the general public’s participation in the changing roles of race and family in the United States. The Social Life of an Art Installation
Rosaldo describes how the photographs and observations that formed the content of the artwork were taken in the homes of 15 Asian-Latino married couples and their families. In this context, the couples were the hosts, the interviewers their guests. He describes how an unspoken contract arose in which the interviewers, “without saying a word,” agreed to protect their hosts’ secrets. The host and guest were both made more vulnerable by the added audience-artist relationship; the subjects of the art were also present, along with their friends and family, in the audience who came to see it. Rosaldo charts how this very human relationship, of guest and host, developed, how it involved the artists confronting their assumptions about the people who were at the center of the artwork. Making the human relationship a priority over dramatic revelations—that might have made more exciting art—instead made continued conversation between guest and host possible. The civic dialogue, made possible by the nature of the art, had a life of its own. It turned out that the everyday lives of the subjects held more specificity, more subtlety, than the assumed drama of cultural difference. People don’t have to wear badges of ethnic identity in order to express subtle, culturally based differences that the good listener, the quiet and respectful observer, are invited to see and hear. Dialogic Gestures: Doing Artistic Things with Ethnographic Methods
Criticism by Critical Perspectives writers, she reflects, focused on the (over)positive portrayal of interracial family life, and the lack of overt conflict, ethnic differences (even the artists who interviewed the participant families confided they were disappointed in the lack of obvious signs of ethnic identity), or sexual content—in a work that examines love and passion across race and culture. The project’s significance, both in the local community and in the world of community art practice, was in the effort to understand, perhaps even more than to dramatize or interpret. Respectful restraint on the part of the artists in the treatment of personal information—that on the one hand limited the intensity of the artistic statement—also contributed to the success of the artwork in opening up a lively dialogue about social identity. “The fact that so many of the stories of intermarriage dealt with intimate matters—and not always as happy, exciting stories—placed a certain burden on the artists to be, well, less artistic perhaps. It is one thing to make an enthralling statement about bedroom politics in general and in the abstract; it is an entirely different experience and responsibility when the two people involved in that bed and those politics are standing next to you, in front of your work, during the gallery reception.” This relationship led to the work having a social life of its own. Alvarez looks at the project as a meditation on the question, “Can ethnography 'help' art or is it the other way around?” Ironically, though criticism may have focused on the lack of a riveting or shocking artistic statement, it was the medium of the contemporary art installation that the families “loved,” and that allowed them to experience their stories as more dignified than could perhaps be portrayed in “boring, flat” ethnographic photographs. She concludes, “In a twist of fate, then, in Ties that Bind art redeemed anthropology.” |
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