Community Subjects
Critical theories of community art provide new ways to consider the question of identity from a non-essentialist perspective that affords us the occasion to conceptualize the relationship between subjective and social formations. In relation to developments in critical cultural theory, the terms “community” and “subject” imply a series of displacements of liberal, nationalist and multicultural conceptions that function as what Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, after Deleuze, refer to as “capture devices,” systems of incorporation and differentiation that alienate living, productive labour from autonomous self-valorization outside the decision-making power of the State and the coercive forms of capitalist integration.1 From a Lacanian, psychoanalytic point of view, capture devices like “identity” are not external to biopolitical production, but are the points de capitonnage (points of ideological suturing) that are inherent to subjectivity and that operate through processes of (dis)identification. What does global neoliberal capitalism want from community subjects? How does identity relate to the voluntary class of virtuous citizens that are today expected to empower the traditional face-to-face community against the vagaries of the neoliberal capitalization of markets–increasing poverty and economic disparity, crumbling infrastructure, mass displacement of populations through unemployment, war and famine–and how can we reimagine a community that is both subject to criticism and a space of democratic contestation? These are some of the questions that are posed by today’s socially engaged community art. In the following, I will consider two competing paradigms of community art and propose a third, alternative framework for critical cultural practice. The first of these is Nicolas Bourriaud’s Esthétique relationnelle, first proposed in 1998.2 Bourriaud describes relational work, for instance, the work of artists like Rirkrit Tiravanija and Liam Gillick, as unfinished, open-ended works that do not provide collectible objects but that are oriented toward social interaction. The creation of communal spaces like bars, lounges, and libraries allows for connective possibilities, participation and unexpected encounters. The low-fi, in-between aesthetic of relational works is nevertheless related to a somewhat deterministic criterion: the shift to a post-Fordist experience and service economy. Bourriaud’s idea of relational aesthetics has received the kind of approval that comes from its association with the work of internationally recognized artists. The criticism it has received, however, is due precisely to its somewhat naive approach to social economy.3 Despite the idea that the participant viewer is part of the work, the model of service provision willfully ignores the divisions of labour that structure the field of culture. While there is an attempt to shift the question of value away from labour toward various other economies or “powers,” the emphasis on “freeness” and “open-endedness” results in a kind of inertia that makes the experience of the work not unlike the experience of the rest of everyday life in a world of exchange. What is significant for our discussion, however, is that relational aesthetics seeks to shift art’s focus away from the 1980s preoccupation with economies of identity. Fixed agendas are replaced by an ambient, transcultural mixing and confusion of codes.
One example of relational work is the Danish collective Superflex’s Free Beer campaign. Free Beer is an “open source beer” modeled on file sharing; the recipe is available to anyone through a Creative Commons license that allows Superflex to bypass the conventional copyrighting of intellectual property...(extract)

ETC