The introduction of dialogue into contemporary art practices marks the emergence of cultural engagement in the public sphere and opens a space for a plurality of voices to enter art system. Insurgent curatorial projects that are based in dialogue that reveal the conflicting and contradictory aspects of dominant cultural narrative help re-defining contemporary art galleries as public spheres. Through collaborative and participatory methods, progressive artists co-create artworks with disenfranchised communities, creating alternatives to the traditional gallery system in which artists, artworks, audiences, and institutions are isolated from the world around them. With a focus on individuals representing various communities – labour organizations, activist groups, cultural groups, and the art world – insurgent curating is defined in terms of dialogue-based activism.
Participatory and collaborative art has developed out of many streams of contemporary art that have challenged modernist understandings of autonomy. Dialogue-based projects are championed as ways to catalyse emancipatory insights and the critique of the dominate narrative of neoliberal capitalism. Dialogical theory and practice can help public art galleries transform themselves into public spheres that allow disenfranchised voices to challenge dominant narratives and social structures, using creative forms of dialogue to instigate conscious change from below
The introduction of dialogue into cultural institutions marks the emergence of cultural engagement in the public sphere and opens a space for a plurality of diverse voices to enter cultural ecosystems. Many public cultural institutions tend to ignore the relationship between society and socio-economic class. This is due to the political and class bias of the professional class. Consequently, the structure and programming of mainstream cultural institutions work to reproduce the massive inequalities that exist in society. These socio-economic inequalities lead to cultural inequalities that keep members of working-class communities out of public art galleries and museums. As a partial remedy to this problem, dialogic and dialogue-based social art practices can help to reveal the conflicting and contradictory perspectives that exist in society and in the dominant cultural narratives of neoliberalism. Whereas ideology makes culture seem monolithic and monological, dialogue-based social art practices are uniquely able to disrupt dominant discourses because they encourage community engagement and disrupt curator-driven exhibition programming. Instead, dialogue gives public art galleries a role to play within communities in struggle.
The development of models of collaboration and participation for artists, gallery workers, community members and the public through which contemporary form of visual and curatorial practice can be co-created. One of the roles of dialogue is to explore how artists and their co-collaborators undertake creative projects through which they develop their mutual interest in social transformation. Dialogue-based art practice is radically different from conventional art practices in which the validation of artworks is mediated through art markets, the academy or peer recognition. The development of socially based practices that promote alternative forms of engagement inside and outside of public art galleries and museums has offered new ways to work with marginalized communities in struggle, producing new meanings and insights in relation to the general trends of neoliberalization, where the public interest is subordinated to the interests of the investor class and the hegemony of anonymous capital markets. Breaking down the usual distinctions between artist, artwork and audience, dialogical projects allow viewers to respond to the artists and influence the construction of the work.
The authority of traditional public art galleries comes from the dissemination of official or national culture as the repository of upper-class tastes and dispositions. According to Tony Bennett, museums and art galleries mask their social, economic and class functions through the mission of education, philanthropy, and public engagement (Bennett 1995). “Museums and art galleries and exhibitions,” he writes, “helped play the role of civilizing agent of the state within the formation of modern government” (1995: 66) The esoteric aspects of culture are class-specific, he argues, and are directly related to the class interests of boards of directors, wealthy patrons, art dealers and collectors.
Since their earliest days, public art galleries have been influenced by the private interests and personal tastes of those who sit on the boards of these institutions, who work as directors and curators, and who also support galleries as members and volunteers. Although the radicalization of art in the 1960s and 70s, with the consequent development of artist-run culture and artist-run galleries, has altered this tendency, the lower circuits of production and consumption tend to function as stepping stones to larger institutions, where galleries maintain modernist definitions of autonomy that define the work of art as an end.
The introduction of dialogue into contemporary art practices marks the emergence of cultural engagement in the public sphere and opens a space for a plurality of voices to enter art system. Participatory and collaborative activist art has developed out of many streams of contemporary art that have challenged modernist understandings of autonomy. The use of dialogue in art projects introduces collaboration with communities at multiple levels, including the conception, production, and reception of the work. As a constructive principle, dialogue encourages the co-production of new meanings and perspectives. The question of novelty in this case is not defined as the need for the art institution to renew itself, but for society to be organized on an inherently new basis. This means that galleries and museums need not be abandoned as bourgeois institutions but can be made into dialogical spaces of communicative interaction. Art galleries can better serve their mandates by providing opportunities for engagement with working-class communities that become conscious of culture as a public resource.
Dialogue through art helps class constituencies become aware of the culture of the elite and look beyond their own, narrowly defined perspective. The valorization of community-based ways of knowing transforms public institutions into spaces of inclusion, emancipation, and change. In the words of Paulo Freire, “consciousness evolves through voice and in dialogue with others, and as learners begin to see themselves as knowers in relation to the world, and as part of an evolving, changing world” (Freire 1970: 40). Freire developed a critical, self-reflexive model of pedagogy that makes learning into an ongoing process of transformation.