Challenges to Reciprocity: Gift exchange as a theoretical framework of community arts practice (original) (raw)

Community arts have the potential to develop and sustain relationships between artists and participants, which can create the desire for individuals to connect with communities. In an environment of diminishing arts funding, arts practitioners and supporters have placed an increasing emphasis on developing evaluation strategies that provide evidence for the social, cultural and economic impact of community arts. Most current evaluation strategies, however, do not adequately capture the various impacts, from the potential for long-term change for individuals to the level of training received by participants, and the diversity of career trajectories that open up. The absence of engagement in the theoretical side of the practice from within the community arts movement has long been recognised but there is no adequate response from either the scholarly or artistic communities that recognises the creative process unique to community arts. There is an urgent need for practitioners to be able to promote the effectiveness of community arts without compromising or overly simplifying what is a complex practice. This article draws on research completed as part of my PhD thesis which aimed to provide community arts practitioners with a theoretical framework that will highlight the uniqueness and complexity of community arts as an art form, particularly in its capacity to achieve both social and artistic outcomes. To do this, I draw on gift exchange theory to articulate the creative process and the ways in which this theory explains the ties and connections with community participants. Community art builds social ties by creating and strengthening relationships between artists, participants and the broader community. I argue that these relationships are fostered according to the depth of the desire and associated obligation to maintain the gift exchanges. It is the obligations that are present within gift exchange that bind relationships and allow the gift to move. By applying the theoretical framework of gift exchange to community arts practitioners' creative process, I argue that there is a need to refocus attention on the relationship between artist and participant. In order to develop evaluation strategies aligned to the values of community arts practitioners, this relationship must be acknowledged as integral to the creative process in community arts, and therefore essential to the assessment of the social and artistic outcomes. This article will analyse how gift exchange operates within the process and the performance of a community arts project. Once the first gift of a creative space and opportunity to participate in a collaborative artistic process is accepted by a recipient, this may lead to multiple gift exchanges. The performance project City Quest will be the feature of this article. City Quest was performed by Powerhouse Youth Theatre (PYT) in December 2007 and was a community outdoor performance event played out in the format of a video game in the city centre of Fairfield, NSW. This case study will also investigate how a disruption to gift exchange may occur when there is a breakdown of trust between donor and recipient, and how this can be further destabilised by pressures that may emerge when commodity exchange and gift exchange are tied together. I will conclude by highlighting the correlation between the success of a gift relationship and the creative outcomes of a community arts project, and consider the implications this has on the development of community arts practice and its evaluation. I will briefly establish the historical background of gift exchange theory in order to contextualise my arguments within a broader framework. Gift exchange theory has its origins in anthropological literature. Marcel seminal essay The Gift, first published in 1922, is the initial starting point for the majority of theorising regarding gift exchange and gift economies within anthropology. His essay and the conclusions he draws about the presence of gift exchange in primitive and modern societies has led to the development of many contemporary theories around exchange, though his essay has also been much debated and contested since its publication. Many theorists debate the interpretations that Mauss drew from his research into primitive communities (see Bourdieu, 1997), though this debate has also been integral to the development of understandings about human desires associated with the exchange of material and immaterial gifts . I will enter into this debate by recognising the obligations that Mauss argues are present in gift exchange, and how these can be identified within community art practice. This analysis of obligations and desires will allow the community arts field to move forward in theorising the functionality and value of community arts in society.