CUE then becomes, in the artists’ words, a laboratory: “We’re thinking about this as something akin to us building a laboratory, stocking it with labware and raw materials, giving folks a cursory understanding of the principles that can be explored in a lab, giving them a specific problem to solve, and turning the lab over to them completely.” This analogy places the artists in a role that might be classified as curatorial, pedagogic, or even administrative: they will organize source texts and resources but leave production to others. In this case, how are visitors to evaluate the show? On what aesthetic, social, or educational grounds might Free Radio be assessed? The artists’ intentions are, in a sense, quite modest: in their minds, the experiments can only fail if the lab lacks the materials necessary for communities to develop their identities. At this point, there remain many open questions, including what the communities will produce and whether gallerygoers will participate in workshops or observe as groups learn to broadcast—in short, how the laboratory will look, from the people involved to the art made. If questions about the relations and objects to be produced in this laboratory will only find resolution during the exhibition itself, Gillis and Lambert raise a more fundamental problem: what do we mean by “community,” and how can we better understand communal endeavor? A community, in the artists’ words, emerges through “a shared space, a shared cultural ethos, a shared need, a shared mode of communication, a shared voice, and a shared system for the distribution of information.” But for a community to exist, must its individuals share each of these diverse features? The tensions among these potential commonalities often come to define the nature of a community. For example, the six artist-teachers of the Free Radio Project have worked together largely through Google Docs and Skype, lacking common geography but sharing information and purpose remotely. In an era of networked communications, people are frequently linked across vast distances by cultural ethos or information, but lack a shared space. If the Free Radio Project is a “community” forged for the purposes of this exhibit, one wonders whether the already-existing communities will be adaptable enough to interact with visitors, the Chelsea neighborhood and even, in a new setting, each other. These questions ultimately return us to an interrogation of the notion of “community broadcasting.” Can it spread creative forms of communication rooted in shared experience? While any single Free Radio broadcast is likely to have limited geographic reach, the project is a genuine test of how to extend communal expression beyond the art gallery—something each of the artists have individually worked to achieve in recent years. With this collaboration, Gillis and Lambert offer something utopian, especially in its optimistic trust in the community members who are tasked with the most important transformations of all. They must amplify their voices, by using the tools at their disposal. Perhaps more importantly, they will help re-define the words “broadcast” and “community” in the process.
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