Paper short abstract:

This joint paper will look at the different strategies that artists use to employ ritual to engage communities with place. Four artworks by Joseph Beuys, Marcus Coates, Alastair MacLennan and Shimon Attie, that have engaged communities in times of transition, will be discussed and the effects assessed via the responses of audience-participants.

Paper long abstract:

This paper will draw from debates in visual culture and social anthropology to explore the ways that artists employ ritual to engage communities with places in the UK in processes of transition on large and small scales. Beginning with a discussion of Joseph Beuys' "Celtic Kinloch Rannoch" (Scottish Symphony) 1970, the paper will go to discuss three contemporary works. In "Journey to the Lower World" 2003 Marcus Coates employs humour and ritual to help residents of a tower block earmarked for demolition to come to terms with the changes that they will face. In "Lure in Rule" 2008 Alastair MacLennan created a work along a footbridge in the market town of Cardigan undergoing regeneration that gently emphasized the celebration of life in times of change. Shimon Attie was commissioned in 2006 by the village community of Aberfan, Wales to create a new work that responded to the 1966 disaster in which 130 people were killed by a falling coal slagheap. In "The Attraction of Onlookers: Aberfan - an Anatomy of a Welsh Village", Attie employs great sensitivity to the villagers' need to both remember the tragedy of the past and to move beyond it.

The paper will emphasis the response of audience-participants to address the questions: How do peoples' experiences of rituals in places that are familiar to them alter their perception of those places? To what degree are such actions a form of re-making of place, a call to address the question of how places could or might become?