Grant Kester is an associate professor of art history at the University of California, San Diego. In 2004, he published Conversation Pieces: Community + Communication in Modern Art (University of California Press), the first book-length study to thoroughly investigate the relation between (post-)modern art and community art.

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We begin with a few provocative statements that clearly indicate where Kester comes from:

Community art ‘projects all share a concern with the creative facilitation of dialogue and exchange. While it is common for a work of art to provoke dialogue among viewers, this typically occurs in response to a finished object. In community art projects, on the other hand, conversation becomes an integral part of the work itself’ (8).
Community artists ‘replace the conventional, “banking” style of art (to borrow a phrase from the educational theorist Paolo Freire) ‘in which the artist deposits an expressive content into a physical object, to be withdrawn later by the viewer – with a process of dialogue and collaboration’ (10).

Judging by these opening statements, the crux of Kester’s argument is that the emphasis in community art is on the interaction between professional artist and participant and that its essence can, therefore, not be grasped by conventional art critics: ‘When contemporary critics confront [community art] projects, they often apply a formal, pleasure-based methodology that cannot value, or even recognize, the communicative interactions that these artists find so important. As a result, [community art is] criticized for being unaesthetic and dismissed as “failed art”’ (10-11)

‘[Sometimes community art projects are] not considered art at all’, writes Kester: ‘or only provisionally so, and critical engagement limited to calculating its socio-political efficacy. Also, sympathetic critics tend to fear criticism, because they don’t want to attack the issue or the community involved’ (11).
Kester takes us back on a journey through art history, to explain where the idea stems from that art can only remain pure through poetic isolation and withdrawal. During the 17th and 18th centuries it was believed ‘that only a handful of “men of delicate taste” were, as yet, sensitive enough to achieve the disinterest necessary for true aesthetic contemplation’ (29).

Later, the modern avant-garde developed ‘a series of strategies designed to anchor the meaning of the work so thoroughly in the recalcitrant individuality of the artist, and to frustrate existing norms and expectations so completely, as to render it utterly unpalatable to the appropriative powers of consumer culture. The act of semantic resistance gradually becomes an end in itself and one of the defining characteristics of avant-garde art’ (32). In other words: art strove to become as incomprehensible as possible.

What it boils down to, according to Kester, is that we ‘typically view the artist as a heroic figure, actualizing his or her will through the transformation of nature or alchemically elevating the primitive, the degraded, and the vernacular into great art. Throughout, the locus of expressive meaning remains the radically autonomous figure of the individual artist. A [community art] aesthetic suggests a very different image of the artist, one defined in terms of openness, of listening […] and of a willingness to accept a position of dependence and intersubjective vulnerability relative to the viewer or collaborator’ (110).

Later in the book, Kester provides a useful overview of community art practice in the context of urban reform and the conservative political debate about the alleged moral flaws of the poor who are held responsible for their own predicament (and not capitalism, or institutionalized racism). He surveys a whole list of initiatives in the UK and the US starting in the late 19th C that strove to combat the moral degradation of the poor. The settlement house workers, for example: earnest young women and men from the middle and upper classes who established outposts of bourgeois normalcy in the midst of immigrant neighborhoods, as if they were missionaries or ‘evangelists’ (134-5). He then leaps to the culture wars of the 1990s, when conservatives in the US created an interpretive framework within which a whole series of interrelated economic conditions could be blamed on the actions of certain ‘dangerous’ populations (migrant workers and single black mothers) as a way of circumventing more systematic forms of analysis and policy relative to poverty (137-8).

This excursion provides Kester with a launching pad for considering the potential misappropriation of community art for conservative agendas or political control in troubled urban zones. Kester argues that the function of the community artist ‘can, in some respects, be compared with the reformer or social worker. Both the community artist and the social worker possess a set of skills (bureaucratic, diagnostic, aesthetic/expressive, and so forth) and have access to public and private funding (through grant writing, official status, and institutional sponsorship) with the goal of bringing about some transformation in the condition of individuals who are presumed to be in need’ (137). The degree to which community artists, despite their own progressive rhetoric and undoubtedly against their will, can become instruments of government policy, is well worth considering.

By formulating such probing questions Kester avoids the uncritical cheer-leading of much writing on community art, while still remaining sympathetic to the art form. He convincingly argues, then, that community art cannot be analyzed with a conventional approach to art, but he does not make it very clear what it should be replaced with other than thorough meticulous documentation of the mulitple ‘conversations’ in community art processes. Which is exactly what the Community Art Lab proposes to do.