Making art in the wrong place: violence and intimacy in Speak English To Me

Abstract

Discourse around socially engaged art practice needs to consider the roles symbolic and representational violence play in collaborative community-based settings. In this article, I examine a dialogical art project, Speak English To Me, which I conducted on the streets of Yeoville, Johannesburg, in 2007 and 2008, in terms of the ‘intersubjective vulnerabilities’ (Kester 2004) and forms of symbolic power (Bourdieu 2005) that emerged in my engagements with the residents of the area. Aspects of the project are closely described in terms of the relationships that developed between myself (as the artist) and the participants, in our collaborative development of aesthetic representations. Using two key texts as a departure point, namely Joseph Gaylard's The retreat of creativity: reflections on the role of the South African visual arts in social development (2005) and Colin Richards’ Bobbit's feast: violence and representation in South African art (1999), I reflect more broadly on the conceptual tensions that exist in local criticism around representational and situational aesthetic practices within a post-colonial context. I assert that socially engaged art practices necessitate a revisiting of the concept of otherness in terms of addressability, audience and modality, and that symbolic wounding in representation is intimately tied up with the context of reception. Through my analysis of Speak English To Me, I conclude that socially engaged art discourses cannot avoid issues of representational violence, and would benefit from understanding them as intrinsic and valuable to aesthetic practices conducted in everyday community settings.