What Mary Jane Jacob did in Chicago with artists in the two years between 1991 and 1993—that is, radically redefine the relationship between public artists and their audience—with her event Culture in Action, Seth Goldenberg and Liz Newton pulled off in Denver with ten artists in eight days with Dialog:City.

Call it the democratization of art. In the 15 years since Culture in Action, the idea of building consensus and engaging non-art issues through art has become a mainstream aspect of “new genre public art.” That is, through works, events, and happenings, audiences are supposed to be empowered by becoming partners as the subjects or producers of art.

Dialog:City brought together ten international virtuosos—including Lynn Hershman Leeson and Minsuk Cho—with local artists, performers, and community organizations to produce ten site-specific art installations throughout Denver during the Democratic National Convention, August 21 to 29. The event attempted to blur the lines between art and life, to address critical social issues, and to create a festival-like atmosphere of collaborative thinking. It created an ecosystem of cultural, civic, and creative investigations.

Yet in the hyperspotlight of the DNC, with the crammed schedules of delegates and the avoidance tactics of locals, attendance at events was lower than anticipated. The Green Constitutional Congress, a symposium on the future of environmental action that was one of artist Charlie Cannon’s contributions, occurred during Michelle Obama’s prime-time speech. So one might question how much democratization and empowerment there really was at Dialog:City events.

The Green Constitutional Congress did, however, convene some of the most influential grassroots and policy leaders of the sustainability movement to explore why it is vitally important to today’s political landscape. Moderated by Bruce Mau, designer of The Massive Change multicity exhibition in 2004, the symposium featured Bill Becker, executive director of the Presidential Climate Action Project; Cannon, designer, educator, and director of the Innovation Studio at Rhode Island School of Design; Majora Carter, a MacArthur “Genius” fellow; Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of GOOD Worldwide and co-founder of Ethos Water; Paul Miller aka DJ Spooky, a conceptual artist, writer, and musician; and David Orr, the Paul Sears Distinguished Professor of Environmental Studies and Politics at Oberlin College in Ohio.

“Our goal is getting to forever,” Mau told the sparse audience. “How do we live life without stealing from future generations? Live life without stealing life?”

Mau recently launched In Good We Trust, a multiyear project that will examine what he says is the conflict between the positive and generous spirit of the American character and the controversial perception that the world has of the United States.

Each panelist addressed the audience and then, working with Goldenberg, orchestrated an innovative construction that let audience members interact directly with panelists, and even record their own soapbox message on video. Billed as “conversational chaos,” the small audience allowed for less chaos and more conversation.

The night before, Denver became the second city in the world to host the full production of Terra Nova: The Antarctica Suite by DJ Spooky. His multimedia production was the most well attended event of Dialog:City. Miller described it as “the people’s opera,” because the performance happened in the Ellie Caulkins Opera House. But it was more techno-kaleidoscope-slideshow—a Rorschach test of carbon emissions, cells, atoms, charts, and ice.

“The ice is a geological clock. It moves at a rhythm made of human fictions” flashed on one of the video screens.

Miller made field recordings of the ice sheets melting in Antarctica, then mixed them with visuals from Getty Images and expressed the enigma that is Antarctica—an uninhabited continent with no government, not owned by any country.

“Music and art are mirrors that we hold up to society and reflect back,” Miller told the audience during the Green symposium, pointing out that it is the artists who say, show, and express that another world is possible. “What are we doing on this planet? How are we all connected?”

That connection is something the Spurse collective, an open-ended group of individuals and organizations, attempted to explore through the action of listening. Providing a map and suggestions for experiences called Eleven Listening Posts for an Entangled Agent: Denver, the collective explored the connection between listening and our position in the world, listening as a way of “feeling into the world,” listening as it produces “an ecosystemic environment of forces,” and listening as it produces “a geography of affect.” The group suggested ideas such as pretending to be a cougar tracking a deer, recording the movement of migrant birds, sampling the water in Cherry Creek, and standing beneath the intersection of interstate highways and listening to the concrete columns, all as ways to communicate with the world.

“Art is a form of unmaking one territory and transforming it into another,” the collective writes in its map-pamphlet.

Unmaking and transforming are at the heart of Luke DuBois’s installation Hindsight is Always 20/20, which debuted at Dialog:City. DuBois developed a computer program and, working with the American Presidency Project, examined the State of the Union addresses of 41 of 43 presidents. Creating a hierarchy to rank how frequently a word was used in each address, he then displayed the results as Snellen eye charts exhibited as freestanding light boxes. By analyzing the language used and consumed, DuBois unmakes and transforms each address into an almost poetic form that drives home the manifesto of each president.

Lines one and two for Abraham Lincoln:
Emancipation
Rebellion Proclamation

And George W. Bush:
TERROR
IRAQ IRAQI

It’s war and terror that Polish artist Krzysztof Wodiczko explores, with the goal of providing a deeper level of understanding about what it means to serve our country in the military and try to reintegrate back into society upon returning home. In The Veteran Vehicle Project, Wodiczko transformed a tan Humvee into a multi-media projector and gave voice to homeless veterans at Denver’s Cherokee House. The Hummer shot text and sound with visual, auditory, and emotional impact. Working with America’s Road Home and Colorado’s Road Home (two nonprofit organizations focused on ending family homelessness), the veterans served as co-creators of the art piece, and the work aimed to increase levels of public discourse about homelessness among veterans—currently, 33 percent of all homeless people in the U.S. are vets.

Veterans weren’t the only community members to act as effective co-creators. Sharon Hayes invited members of the gay, lesbian, and transgender community in Denver to stage a mass public recitation of her original hybrid text Revolutionary Love: I Am Your Worst Fear. Part letter, part coming-out text, part revolutionary battle cry, part response to political structures, the text let performers assert their power amid anti-gay protesters. This happening recalled the Free Love movement of the ’60s and ’70s, the Stonewall riots, and gay liberation in what Hayes described as “the complicated intersection between love and politics.”

Ann Hamilton’s O also featured community members. The artist worked with John Kuzma, who composed a choral piece using only the vowel sound o. Voices gathered in the atrium of the Denver Center for the Performing Arts from the Spirituals Project, the Colorado Children’s Chorale, and the Montview Presbyterian Church Choir to provide what Hamilton called a new American voice. That voice may be informed by Ralph Waldo Emerson’s speech “The American Scholar,” in which he said: “Events, actions arise, that must be sung, that will sing themselves. Who can doubt that poetry will revive and lead in a new age, as the star in the constellation Harp, which now flames in our zenith, astronomers announce, shall one day be the pole-star for a thousand years.”

In a metaphor for how individual voices work together, Hamilton, an internationally renowned artist and the recipient of a MacArthur fellowship in 1993, created a work that moves almost entirely away from visual art. The sound o was not chosen for Obama but for the shape the mouth makes when moving from silence to speech—a single vowel, abstract and nonconfrontational, attempting to rise above the political rhetoric.

Moving away from visual art abstractly and democratically is at the heart of new genre public art. If democracy and the arts have been democratized, what Dialog:City attempted to do was make that word an active verb. It didn’t always work. Conversations were sparked, initiated, questioned, performed, displayed, projected, and woven together in layers, mapped for exploration like an ecosystem. But the featured artists were not from Denver, and the local community did not show up. In fact, local artists wrote on the event website that they were “offended and embarrassed that it is perceived that to have arrived artistically as a city, we must import talent.”

To create enduring and dynamic change, the dialogue must continue. Dialog:City should be more than a one-time production of the Denver Office of Cultural Affairs. Otherwise, it is nothing more than a publicity stunt to show how progressive and cultured Denver has become and to attempt to squelch its cow-town image for good. •

Democratizing Culture • In Guad We Trust • Desert Edge: SF Design Weekend 08
The Design Road: SF Design Weekend 08 • Back to the Future
Living Green—and Yellow and Blue and Red • Experience Design—the Jewelry of Hollie Ambrose
Experience Fashion—the Music of Michael Stearns • Business Profiles • Living Urban • Contributors