Martin Patrick
If art and politics meet at all, it’s in the obligation to work concretely in the present toward an ideal that may never be fully attainable.
Barry Schwabsky[1]
The distinction between art practice and other creative human endeavors is irrelevant to us.
Temporary Services[2]
Today we are living inside evolving spaces between screens and commercial walls, and are hollow to our core when it comes to being fully present. The single serving experience economy is taking its toll, and artistic space is becoming its battleground.
Petri Saarikko[3]
This essay focuses on contemporary art’s increasing incorporation of so-called ‘social practices’ over the past two decades. How are we to regard this moment as social practice has been commented upon more widely, disseminated within critical and curatorial venues, and becomes problematic and challenging in so many respects? What happens when a micro-scaled process-based work is subsumed into the global art economy? How can collectives take advantage of ‘group mind’? What are the distinguishing factors between creative and symbolic representations and ‘actual’ activism? How do social practices function within contemporary curatorial culture? How does an emphasis upon collectivism and participation effect, strain, and potentially expand traditional notions of creative authorship?
Contemporary art depends on its social capacity, potentiality, and reach just as it is manifestly at odds with it. The aspiration for art to achieve social goals is amplified as entertainment streams swiftly into our daily lives, while art is often much less prominent. Art is often created in contexts of relative isolation, but a central concern is how, when, and why it relates to its external contexts: Which audiences? Made for what reasons, and in dialogue with whom exactly? Many terms that needn’t be brought together in tandem are frequently treated in convergence, such as the collaborative and the socially engaged. That is to say, many collaborative practices might not have a social imperative specifically in mind, and could have as many differing approaches as art made in a solitary manner.
Although one can trace a long and varied list of socially-involved art projects as historical precedents for the recent proliferation of such projects in institutional contexts, many writers have dated the social turn to the 1990s, with the increasing amount of high-profile curatorial projects; collaborative, dialogical, relational, and situational works; and the steady integration of performance art and performative projects into academic discourse. In the following sections, I will thread together some provisional responses to the above issues and questions. In ‘Discursive Shifts and Contradictory Critiques,’ I briefly discuss a number of writers’ thoughts both in relation to social practice and to art and society more generally, including those of Franco Berardi, Boris Groys, Ivan Illich, Jeremy Rifkin, and Anthony Schrag. Their statements are discussed for two reasons, both to demonstrate the timeliness and comparative urgency of social engagement, and to present a wide range of equally valid interpretations of such terms as conviviality or the social in relation to contemporary art.
In section two, ‘Affects/Effects of Socially Engaged and Collaborative Projects,’ I refer to commentaries by artists, curators, and writers including Theaster Gates, Dan Peterman, John Preus, Gregory Sholette, Nato Thompson, and Temporary Services. In the final section, ‘Social Models of Curating: Art Spaces and Living Spaces,’ I discuss three initiatives which involve small-scale, independently run artists’ galleries located adjacent to the living spaces of the artists (and their families). The examples share marked similarities, yet occurred in globally dispersed locations: The Suburban (Oak Park, Illinois), SHOW (Wellington, New Zealand), and Kallio Kunsthalle (Helsinki, Finland).
Discursive Shifts and Contradictory Critiques
The writings around social practice have been extremely contentious; increasing both in volume and relative prominence.[4] I would like to trace a path around some of this material without rehearsing all of the most well-trodden debates, particularly those around curator Nicolas Bourriaud’s ‘relational aesthetics.’ Numerous critics have taken pains to emphasize the role of the antagonistic and the conflicted within the most significant socially engaged works, Claire Bishop once leading the charge.[5] One of the best analyses of the contradictory aspects of the relational paradigm is to be found in Grant Kester’s book The One and the Many in which the author calls out: ‘the deep suspicion which both Bishop and Bourriaud hold for art practices which surrender some autonomy to collaborators and which involve the artist directly in the (implicitly compromised) machinations of political resistance.’[6]
But there are many other artists and writers who make insightful points along these lines, who have been referenced less often. For example, British artist and writer Anthony Schrag makes the point that ‘being a bit of an asshole’ might actually be beneficial for achieving the goals of a socially engaged project, particularly zeroing in on the fact that being an ‘asshole’ means to be ‘contemptible’ and it’s this latter term that makes the difference, as in bringing contempt, disobedience, and disrespect to the status quo and its codes in order to present a valid, subversive challenge.[7]
Schrag also notes that: ‘the asshole is not intentionally rude, but rather is merely operating from different rule-sets than the dominant and accepted cultural framework.’[8] Along with this enticing—or polarizing—set up for his discussion, Schrag has done his homework on UK arts policy, including the increasing instrumentalisation of ‘public art’ since Blair’s New Labour tenure, and afterwards, when quite cynically the Conservative coalition government simultaneously advanced a policy of austerity as well as sustaining certain community projects on the cheaper end of the arts policy spectrum, lending the outward appearance of social awareness.
In Schrag’s counter-intuitive estimation, since the 2008 global economic crisis, times have been relatively good for community-based project involvement. This was arguably the case in Aotearoa New Zealand as well, during the period in which the National government’s regime continually reduced its arts support and involvement. Schrag predictably raises Bishop’s antipathy towards the emphasis upon conviviality rather than antagonism in socially engaged and relational practices, and continues:
The framing of participatory art projects as ‘nice’ can also be seen to emerge from state-funded, Social Exclusion policies, in which the erasure of ‘exclusion’ (in favour of a universal and convivial ‘inclusion’) is the primary goal. This elides with the notion that publicly funded, policy-enacting agencies – i.e., Local Authorities – cannot be seen to support projects that are overtly exclusionary, selfish or contentious, as they are public bodies and must, therefore, represent the entirety of the public. They cannot, in their public position, but defer to the entirety of the social and thus the majority of public projects in the United Kingdom maintain a ‘state aesthetic’ that are – to be simplistic – safe, nice and good for everyone.[9]
Owing to the reoccurring mandate that ‘everyone must get along,’ the potential for an anodyne array of projects in the social realm emerges, while Schrag’s contention is that: ‘the asshole is he or she who is willing to be disobedient to those who set the rules; he or she is willing to call those rules in question; to ensure they are not amoral or unethical or uncritical. The asshole with participatory practices is the artist that is willing to take the risk to bite the hand that feeds in order to produce both critically aware and ethical art projects, as well as expose problematic policy.’[10] Writer Michael Birchall insightfully remarks: ‘The difficulty faced with socially engaged art is the act of unifying the social conditions; communities, whether they are unstable or not, do not always require an opening up or a dialogue instigated by an artist, a curator, or an institution.’[11]
Schrag lends another interesting edge to his analysis if viewed through the prism of his own works (two of which he uses as case studies) particularly ‘The Legacy of City Council Arts Projects’ (2008) in which he brought by taxi (he uses the term ‘kidnapped’) a number of arts management professionals from the museum sector to the housing estate in which he was enlisted to make a socially collaborative project, as an intervention. While this would seem almost a logical operational procedure, it is indeed rare to have the tables turned. In this instance resulting in a consultation in the community, but surrounded by community members, an unusual circumstance in the coldblooded, relatively removed zone of institutional curating.
Also intriguing, given the current emphasis on art fairs, biennials, and large scale events in the global art context is Schrag’s artwork Lure of the Lost: A Contemporary Pilgrimage (2015) undertaken from the north of Scotland to the Venice Biennale, a journey of more than 2500 kilometers, conducted over the course of three months. Schrag commenced his trek on 13th June, St. Anthony’s Feast Day, being the patron saint of the lost. His performance calls attention to multiple aspects of the current era: the politics of selection/rejection, relative mobility, and the creation of durational performance works in the public sphere.
Fig. 1. Anthony Schrag, Lure of the Lost: A Contemporary Pilgrimage, 2015. Image courtesy of the artist. Photo by Stuart Armitt.
Lure of the Lost was commissioned and in part publicly funded, but the project has a considerable amount of institutional critique embedded in its premise. However, in reading the artist’s lengthy blog recording the encounters he had on the way to Venice, the work shifts down to a different scale, not relating to ambition but in terms of its emphasis upon interpersonal dialogue with other individuals and groups.[12] Schrag was more frequently asked about the logistical elements of his journey (the ‘whats’) rather than the conceptual imperatives (the ‘whys’) but in considering either, both entered into the discussion.
Schrag transported to Venice an Oak seedling purportedly originating from one of artist Joseph Beuys’ social sculpture ventures, but from the photographic evidence it appeared less a heroic and valedictory gesture to carry this to Venice than melancholic and quixotic. Shifting from ‘thinking from making’ to ‘thinking as making’—so to speak—recalls Beuys’ definition of social sculpture, when he spoke of: ‘how the concept of sculpting can be extended to the invisible materials used by everyone. THINKING FORMS— how we mold our thoughts or SPOKEN FORMS— how we shape our thoughts into words or SOCIAL SCULPTURE— how we mold and shape the world in which we live: SCULPTURE AS AN EVOLUTIONARY PROCESS; EVERYONE AN ARTIST.’[13]
In a densely articulated but provocative set of comments by veteran critic Boris Groys, he writes of the significance of ‘art activism’ being in the crux of contradictory impulses and traditions.
On the one hand, art activism politicizes art, uses art as political design—that is, as a tool in the political struggles of our time. … Design is an integral part of our culture, and it would make no sense to forbid its use by politically oppositional movements under the pretext that this use leads to the spectacularization, the theatricalization of political protest. … But art activism cannot escape a much more radical, revolutionary tradition of the aestheticization of politics—the acceptance of one’s own failure, understood as a premonition and prefiguration of the coming failure of the status quo in its totality, leaving no room for its possible improvement or correction.[14]
But there is a brighter side, as Groys argues, finding this contradiction:
a good thing. First of all, only self-contradictory practices are true in a deeper sense of the word. And secondly, in our contemporary world, only art indicates the possibility of revolution as a radical change beyond the horizon of our present desires and expectations.[15]
Eliciting the figure of the u-turn, Groys is not thwarted by the prospect of the ‘total aestheticization’ that we are living within and surrounded by: ‘One can aestheticize the world—and at the same time act within it. In fact, total aestheticization does not block political action; it enhances it. Total aestheticization means that we see the current status quo as already dead, already abolished. And it means further that every action that is directed towards the stabilization of the status quo will ultimately show itself as ineffective—and every action that is directed towards the destruction of the status quo will succeed.’[16]
When reconsidering contentious disagreements around ‘the convivial’, it is significant to shift the frame of reference here, toward a text that is often overlooked today, despite its prescient arguments. Tools for Conviviality (1973) by the visionary theorist of education and society Ivan Illich critiqued the increasingly technocratic and managerial social context of the era, and if read in the context of the 21st Century his arguments are all too hauntingly familiar. Illich’s salient remarks are rarely cited today, so it becomes important to quote two passages at length:
Present institutional purposes, which hallow industrial productivity at the expense of convivial effectiveness, are a major factor in the amorphousness and meaninglessness that plague contemporary society. The increasing demand for products has come to define society’s process. I will suggest how this present trend can be reversed and how modern science and technology can be used to endow human activity with unprecedented effectiveness. This reversal would permit the evolution of a life style and of a political system which give priority to the protection, the maximum use, and the enjoyment of the one resource that is almost equally distributed among all people: personal energy under personal control. I will argue that we can no longer live and work effectively without public controls over tools and institutions that curtail or negate any person’s right to the creative use of his or her energy. For this purpose we need procedures to ensure that controls over the tools of society are established and governed by political process rather than by decisions by experts.[17]
Contemporary readers might easily discern a Socialist idealism prevailing here, but Illich’s core ideas resonate strongly with more recent progressive notions, such as those of attorney Lawrence Lessig, environmentalist Bill McKibben, economist Jeremy Rifkin, politician Bernie Sanders, and the countless ecologically-driven discussions occurring over the past decade. Illich also echoes other figures who actively critiqued mid-twentieth century alienation, including Buckminster Fuller and Herbert Marcuse:
This world-wide crisis of world-wide institutions can lead to a new consciousness about the nature of tools and to majority action for their control. If tools are not controlled politically, they will be managed in a belated technocratic response to disaster. Freedom and dignity will continue to dissolve into an unprecedented enslavement of man to his tools. As an alternative to technocratic disaster, I propose the vision of a convivial society. A convivial society would be the result of social arrangements that guarantee for each member the most ample and free access to the tools of the community and limit this freedom only in favor of another member’s equal freedom. At present people tend to relinquish the task of envisaging the future to a professional elite. They transfer power to politicians who promise to build up the machinery to deliver this future. They accept a growing range of power levels in society when inequality is needed to maintain high outputs. Political institutions themselves become draft mechanisms to press people into complicity with output goals. What is right comes to be subordinated to what is good for institutions. Justice is debased to mean the equal distribution of institutional wares.[18]
Illich’s enduring relevance resides in several respects: his critique of the supposed infallibility of institutions; advocacy of shifting social relations in a more democratic direction; and emphasis upon preserving the freedom of individuals and use of their energies for ‘non-productive’—that is to say, creative—pursuits rather than industrial outputs. This valuing of creative potentiality separated from being a mere mode of production into an experience unto itself and the value of an interpersonal ‘conviviality’ provides significant background context for more recent discussions around relational and socially engaged art, and is again reminiscent of Beuys’ notion of social sculpture as a catalyst towards the release of revolutionary creative energy.
Comments by Illich also summon those of Italian theorist Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi. In his 2012 book The Uprising: On Poetry and Finance, Berardi writes that: ‘The financialization of the capitalist economy implies a growing abstraction of work from its useful function, and of communication from its bodily dimension.’[19] According to Berardi: ‘finance has turned into a social virus that turns things into symbols. The symbolic spiral of financialization is sucking down and swallowing up the world of physical things, of concrete skills and knowledge.’[20] And the ‘financial class,’ as Berardi terms it—essentially the so-called 1%—reaps the benefits of these increasingly virtualized transactions.
The systematic manipulation of language, Berardi argues, is impoverishing society: ‘Debt is an act of language, a promise. The transformation of debt into an absolute necessity is an effect of the religion of neoliberalism, which is leading the contemporary world towards barbarism and social devastation.’[21] For Berardi, hope lies in poetry. ‘Poetry is language’s excess: poetry is what in language cannot be reduced to information, and is not exchangeable, but gives way to a new common ground of understanding, of shared meaning: the creation of a new world.’[22]
For economist and social theorist Jeremy Rifkin, the potential for a more ecological understanding of the world stems from the Third Industrial Revolution, the period into which we are just emerging. Amidst transformations in labour, technology, and productivity that displace and revise existing notions of employment and the marketplace, Rifkin argues that a new era of empathic collaboration is upon us in the wake of a downturn in industrial productivity. Rifkin asserts that the non-profit third sector becomes more appealing for younger people raised in the era of social networking and virtual spaces:
Like the open-source commons that make up the very sinew of virtual space, the third sector is a commons as well, where people share their talents and lives with another for the sheer joy of social connectivity. And like the Internet, the core assumption in civil society is that giving oneself to the larger networked community optimizes the value of the group as well as its individual members.[23]
Resembling Illich’s critique of a bureaucratic society, Rifkin writes: ‘in the third sector, the relationships are an end in themselves, and are therefore imbued with intrinsic value rather than mere utility value.’ And in an interesting parallel with Berardi’s discussion of the significance of ‘poetry,’ Rifkin supports the value of ‘play’ and argues that the collaborative era ushers in more opportunity for social engagement in ‘deep play,’ stating:
I use the term deep play because what I’m talking about is not frivolous entertainment but, rather, empathic engagement with one’s fellow human beings. Deep play is the way we experience the other, transcend ourselves, and connect to broader, ever more inclusive communities of life in our common search for universality. The third sector is where we participate, even on the simplest of levels, in the most important journey of life—the exploration of the meaning of our existence.[24]
Rifkin’s observations, although not speaking directly towards the cultural sphere, are highly resonant in regard to the amount of ‘deep play’ occurring in the arts and non-profit art projects, within galleries and via temporal initiatives and events, activist efforts, collaborations, workshops, loose coalitions, and residencies. The next two sections will move further into exploring examples of such efforts.
Affects/Effects of Social and Collaborative Projects
One of the most striking factors that emerges when analyzing socially engaged practices is the very real sense of how much engaging with communities informs and educates artists, curators, writers, and other arts professionals rather than the other way around. This is also reflected in the reaction, reception, and residual effects of a project. Is it a bit too much to ask for a lasting effect from a project; and can truly significant projects take the form of short-lived events?
And how incorporative, encompassing, and wide-ranging might a socially motivated project become? What important affects/effects might the works anticipate and provoke?
How directly must artists reference politics and respond to political concerns to be considered politically engaged artists? Curator Nato Thompson comments in Seeing Power, a book sketching his ongoing involvement with commissioning social practice artworks, that:
For many involved in the arts, an artwork must remain opaque enough to invite a proper amount of speculation and guesswork. Confusion is applauded over the crass simplicity of the obvious. An artwork easily open to interpretation provides a certain freedom from instrumentalization—from an agenda—and allows a viewer to experience speculation and consideration. In activism though, clarity is celebrated, and a cogent message can reach a wide audience and can serve as a weapon. The two ends of this dynamic, which I refer to as the ambiguous and didactic, have long proven irreconcilable.[25]
It would be impossible to address all of the above wide-ranging and open-ended questions in depth, but I enlist them here to provide background context as I continue the various discussions in this essay. As artist and writer Gregory Sholette maintains in his analysis of distinctions between recent social practice and its precedents within community-based art:
One difference is the move away from producing an artistic ‘work,’ such as a mural, exhibition, book, video, or some tangible outcome or object, and towards the choreographing of social experiences itself as a form of socially engaged art practice. In other words, activities such as collaborative programming, performance, documentation, protest, publishing, shopping, mutual learning, discussion, as well as walking, eating, or some other typically ephemeral pursuit is all that social practice sometimes results in. It’s not that traditional community-based art generated no social relations, but rather that social practice treats the social itself as a medium and material of expression.[26]
Sholette is one of the most acute voices within contemporary social practice, having been involved for decades in the field, predating the comparatively recent surge of interest, and he describes this complex phenomenon in concise fashion:
By working with human affect and experience as an artistic medium social practice draws directly upon the state of society that we actually find ourselves in today: fragmented and alienated by decades of privatization, monetization, and ultra-deregulation. In the absence of any truly democratic governance, works of socially engaged art seem to be filling in a lost social by enacting community participation and horizontal collaboration, and by seeking to create micro-collectives and intentional communities. On the surface, it’s as if they were making a performative proposition about a truant social sphere they hope will return once the grownups notice it’s gone missing.[27]
Sholette notes the micro- rather than mega- projects that characterize the recent wave of socially engaged works, often diffusing sincere motives into banal outcomes, writing caustically that: ‘hell is undoubtedly paved with many good interventions.’[28] Reading Sholette’s discussion of the carnivalesque quality in the 2004 exhibition The Interventionists curated by Thompson at MassMOCA, I’m sympathetic to the notion that much social practice is indeed absurd, humorous, volatile, and evades the solemnity or literalism that one might (falsely) attribute to a stereotype of ‘social’ art. Works responding to huge social issues can certainly co-exist with satire, as has often occurred in many tactical media efforts.
In addition, it’s important to acknowledge the deficiencies and limits of ‘community’ and ‘collaboration’ as those terms have been increasingly adopted into the discourses of economic imperatives, neo-liberal ideologies, and power structures. Artist Martha Rosler expresses skepticism, stating: ‘Young artists perennially reinvent the idea of collaborative projects, which are the norm in the rest of the world of work and community and only artificially discouraged, for the sake of artistic entrepreneurism and ‘signature control,’ in the art market world.’ Rosler also notes ‘some disquiet’ when thinking of past collective efforts such as communist workers’ councils or car design ‘quality circles.’[29]
Writer Jasper Bernes signals a note of caution in his appraisal of artist Melanie Gilligan’s films on the neo-liberal climate:
we shouldn’t lose sight of the long list of bad collectivisms nourished by anti-individualist discourse. As preceding generations knew all too well, the discourse of the people can be used for the most repugnant of populist, corporatist, fascist, or statist projects. In the face of a new capitalism happy to deploy ideas of ‘sharing’ and ‘friendship’, we would do well to sharpen our sense of the distinctions worth preserving. Perhaps the pertinent line of opposition does not run between individuality and collectivity but between different forms of community, forms which imply, as a matter of course, different definitions of the individual: on the one hand, what Jacques Camatte, following Marx, calls the ‘community of capital’, and on the other, ‘the human community.’[30]
Examining the human, artistic community is definitely the direction in which I would like to proceed in the remainder of this essay, with particular focus on artists’ projects and the overlap with inventive curatorial strategies and methods, and the ways domestic, lived spaces inform efforts to maintain smaller-scaled art spaces.
Chicago has historically been one of the most active centers in the United States for developing and supporting socially engaged practices, and thus becomes an interesting place to explore some of the varieties of social and collaborative practice, and some of the questions I raised above. Artists relevant to this inquiry include: Dan Peterman, Theaster Gates, John Preus, and Temporary Services.[31] Chicago’s dynamic art community is defined by a few key factors: many high profile art schools graduating emerging artists every year, and employing artists as staff, fewer commercial galleries, a large number of public institutions, as well as fringe efforts that can remain short term ‘pop-up’ initiatives, although some of them seed much longer endeavors. I would like to focus on a number of representative efforts by significant artists that have occurred within this context.[32]
Some features of Chicago’s art scene are locally specific, but word does spread. Although it is frequently demoted to less than ‘the second city’ in some accountings of the US artworld (after Los Angeles), it has historically offered a tough and gritty critical environment within a city of extreme contradictions, once hosting one of the best national art magazines the New Art Examiner, and later hosting such critical fora as the podcast Bad at Sports. Chicago’s history of non-profit ventures has also been lengthy and formidable. I want to consider how such ongoing alternative and social ventures have continued; but are increasingly interwoven into efforts connected to the broader fine art economy.
Dan Peterman is one of the most representative artists in Chicago’s art scene, as his projects have ranged from speculative utopian to logistic utilitarian, both community and artworld-based, and have provided a map towards a particular model of creative and social imagining. Peterman has said that art in Chicago is ‘not just to represent culture but [also] to afford the possibility for culture in which art could be more of a social force.’[33] This reading of art as more energetic force than static object relates to the uses of many of Peterman’s own projects, which have included a public dance floor, urban park seats, and various anachronistic and quotidian readymades reconfigured into finely crafted, idiosyncratic tools.
Fig. 2. Dan Peterman, Running Table, 1997, Recycled, post-consumer plastic, 28 x 36 x 1200 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and Andrea Rosen Gallery, NY.
A fringe ecology is made manifest in Peterman’s practice which has used cast-off materials recycled into both public artworks and practical, usable, well-designed objects and support systems, especially via his working base set within a South Side neighborhood, a not-for-profit center called The Experimental Station. This effort comprises numerous activities that rather than solely focusing on art, address community needs: a bicycle workshop, food distribution network, and more. The Experimental Station’s roots were in an earlier resource center in the same area, dating from 1969 and run by Ken Dunn. In the 1980s, Peterman began working there and subsequently took over the site. Although it suffered the effects of a devastating fire in 2001 the Station rebuilt and continued in the same vicinity.
Reflecting upon the Experimental Station and its heritage, Peterman commented:
I felt an attraction to a counterculture which brought all kinds of things together, from rigorous academic directions to ‘feel-good,’ ‘do-it-in-your-garden’ sentiments. There was a whole range of approaches that somehow coexisted. There also were dynamics that were a bit camouflaged but very problematic in the sense of being hard to change or resist. It was hard to assert order within that kind of formlessness, to do anything except let it be, let everybody get along–just like in all the clichés. There was a kind of friction between individualistic tendencies and collective ones.[34]
While Peterman keeps his focus local and works as an art educator, he maintains gallery representation in New York, and his practice, particularly due to its responsiveness to conceptual and environmental concerns, has been well received abroad, especially in Europe. But what is equally interesting about Peterman’s approach is his blurring of art and activist categorizations and nominative designations. Rather than avoiding those questions, he insightfully articulates his specific point of view:
This project has certainly been influenced by what you might call elements of an ecological consciousness, the appreciation of complexity being one of them. But there are other equally important elements. For example, you might be attracted to something aesthetically, through artistic training and an awareness of pattern, texture, form, etcetera, and those qualities of that thing may move into politics or social relations or some similarly broadened arena of social concern. It’s hard to define how this hybrid activity is or should be seen—aesthetic, biological, political—and I’m not particularly interested in making those distinctions.[35]
This blurring of distinctions has been shared by other initiatives within Chicago such as the collective Temporary Services whose statement I chose as one epigraph for this essay: ‘The distinction between art practice and other creative human endeavors is irrelevant to us.’ The group has functioned as a printing house (there are over 116 Temporary Service publications, including the above interview with Peterman), archive, communications hub, and other actions as much as an art collective per se. This demonstrates their commitment towards conceptual flexibility and the incorporation of multiple modes of practice. Drawing as much of their inspiration from the DIY punk ethos of independent bands as design and social initiatives this leaves room for changes and shifts in the scope of activity. Temporary Services’ current members are the artists Brett Bloom and Marc Fischer (who have worked together since 1998; artist Salem Collo-Julin participated from 2000-2014).
Fig. 3. Temporary Services, Booklet Cloud, 2013, Texas State University, San Marcos, TX, 2013. Image courtesy of the artists.
Temporary Services have emphasized factors of access, multiplicity, and portability within their works such that the ways in which information is transmitted is woven into the methodologies used in their projects. Access is not taken lightly in that publications and imagery are available freely or inexpensively via their website and licensed under the Creative Commons to further enable circulation. In their earlier projects the group worked on an ongoing basis with the portion of American society most lacking in access: its citizens living within the prison system. A range of works, documents, and publications, were spawned from this initiative, including collaborations with artists in prison and projects examining aspects of prison life. Among these were a selection of drawings by Angelo, an artist incarcerated in California; an archive collecting examples of Prisoners’ Inventions, and an campaign to obtain magazine subscriptions for inmates.
Fig. 4. ‘Prisoners’ Inventions,’ drawings and writings by Angelo in collaboration with Temporary Services, 2006. Image courtesy of Temporary Services.
In 2007, Temporary Services assembled a series of interviews with and articles about art and ‘non-art’ collectives for a book entitled Group Work. For the members, the project was generated by a number of considerations: ‘Being a group, for us, means reiterating our place in a larger general culture of people working with other people. It’s this kind of self-analysis that led us to seek out other groups and their histories, and bring this book to the table.’[36] Interviewees included: General Idea’s A. A. Bronson; Chicago artists Haha; ‘Jane’ a.k.a. The Abortion Counseling Service of the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union (CWLU); Austrian artists WochenKlausur; Dutch punk band The Ex; Croatian curators ‘What, How & for Whom’; San Francisco proto-hippies The Diggers; the band Funkadelic; and NYC art/activists Political Art Documentation/Distribution (PAD/D). The very range of this roster speaks toward Temporary Services’ inclusive approach and egalitarian ethos.
More recently Theaster Gates has become the Chicago-based artist gaining the most media attention, for a wide range of artistic endeavors, which cut across and actively hybridize sectors of knowledge production. To a degree, his practice operates in a related mode to that of Peterman, but Gates has amped up the artworld, economic, and social capital assigned to his works, being a very high visibility managerial presence. As with many contemporary artists, he is engagingly charismatic within such avenues of dissemination as the TED talk, the artist lecture, or the performative presentation. This fact, paralleling a range of ambitious, often spectacular artworks enables Gates to cross into areas of the public sphere that often are closed to artists, or seem antithetical to certain grass roots approaches; you are as likely to see Gates profiled in glossy business magazines as art journals.
Gates’ practice, both in its specifics and commonalities with the broader field of social practice, offer intriguing entry points to a discussion around authorship and subjectivity. Gates in many respects is merging the byline of individually conceived and rendered art projects with a collective involvement in the negotiation and realization of such projects, to gain financing, community awareness, and buy-in from contributors, whether patrons or assistants. Gates is a project manager in a way that has often been associated with the curatorial as much as the artistic role. Gates’ combination of lateral movement and relative fluidity in terms of the subjective positioning and socially scripted roles he consciously inhabits has assisted a range of events to occur within his dynamic practice.
Dorchester Projects, Gates’ refurbishing and fitting out of properties he purchased on the South Side of Chicago transforming them into a studio, reading room, archive, and social center has been the central focus of discussions around his work, as it enacts and becomes a literal ‘housing’ for so many intersecting real world issues in tandem with its revised consideration of both material culture and conceptual strands of art practice. Gates turned a discarded, underused space in a neighbourhood with vibrant cultural history – yet hugely affected by debilitating aspects of economic disenfranchisement – into a place in which many discordant energies could not only coincide, but enact a generative rethinking and reevaluation: of books and records rescued from bankrupt stores; an art history department’s glass slides treated as cultural treasures rather than anachronistic detritus; soul food served within Japanese pottery made carefully on-site for that purpose.
Gates has progressed from projects that were initially modest to larger, public ventures. His training as a ceramicist and craftsman has been partially overshadowed by his interest in public policy and renovation of the urban fabric (Gates also holds a degree in urban planning, and once worked for the Chicago Transit Authority, organizing its art projects). But Gates still reiterates his ties with the art community and the significance of materials and materiality. What becomes particularly notable in Gates’ work, beyond its impact in terms of a site-responsive awareness and aestheticism, is how it operates across segments of the public sphere, reengaging with the art world, by shrewdly bridging socially motivated practices with the hard, economic realities of art biennales, fairs, and galleries.
Curator Claire Doherty has commented that differently from some earlier durational projects:
Just as this South Side territory acts a gathering point and resource for ongoing activities, so Dorchester Projects and Gates’ studio acts as the production nerve centre for a set of worldwide projects that are consciously framed within the institutional context of an art exhibition (such as his contribution to dOCUMENTA (13) in 2012, thereby creating a circular economy.[37][37]
In speaking, Gates maintains a confident, engaging tone that echoes his many roles: artist, activist, businessman, manager, motivational speaker and/or minister. This raises the question: who is the author of the works and when? The Gates who negotiates with the mayor of Chicago, or becomes the emphatic public spokesperson for his projects, or who involves himself in aspects of the design and enacting of his large-scale plans? Art historian Matthew Jesse Jackson offers a vivid account of Gates’ performance persona:
Late summer in Aspen. The Anderson Ranch Arts Center. High-end art collectors and curious locals milling around. Veuve Clicquot, a vat of chilled shrimp. The vegetarians gnaw tofu skewers. Capacity crowd. They’re here to hear Gates and the Black Monks of Mississippi, his band. In no time Gates is belting out these angular dirges about a nineteenth century potter named Dave the Slave. (Four years back, Gates did this same performance in Chicago. Five people were at that gig, and three of them worked for the gallery.) Anyway, the crowd’s frozen in place like it’s Madame Tussauds. They hope this black man in front of them is not really and truly angry, but they’re fearing this black man in front of them really and truly is. He looks mean. Singing mean. After ten minutes of Plastic Ono Band primal screaming interlaced with some high-pitched gospel interludes, Gates is staring at the ground, immobile, silent. Doing a damned good imitation of Catatonic Gates. Then, up pops that tight-shaven head, a big happy-to-be-alive smile strobe-lights the audience—and, like lightning cracking long and hard in July, the White People Go Apeshit: ‘He’s not angry, honey! He’s just acting!’ They’re exulting like Bobby Thomson’s rounding third behind the shrimp.[38]
Gates’ practice involves an intricately crafted mix of personae. While his aesthetic often involves the reworking of modern vernacular minimalism, broadly speaking Gates is a maximalist, possessing a 21st Century identification with the artist becoming and inhabiting as many roles as possible.
Gates has worked closely and actively with others in the construction of Dorchester Projects. One of these artists is John Preus, who often incorporates his abilities as a skilled carpenter and sculptor and applies that to deftly reusing and crafting existing materials. Preus was the lead designer and fabricator for the two earliest Dorchester houses, the Archive House and the Listening House, has also worked closely with Dan Peterman and the Experimental Station, and has participated in several art collectives.
In 2014, Preus designed and built an enormous construction called The Beast within the interior of Chicago’s Hyde Park Art Center. The Beast in question resembled a giant steer, its component materials incorporating recycled wood and furniture from closed Chicago Public Schools. Preus’ project involved multiple collaborators, was the culmination of a yearlong residency, and benefited from a successful crowd-funding campaign to assist its final stages of completion. Upon erecting the structure, Preus hosted a range of discursive events within The Beast, including music, panels, storytelling, and dinners.
Fig. 5. John Preus, The Beast-exterior, 2014, solo exhibition at the Hyde Park Art Center, Materials collected from closed Chicago public schools, wood, felt carpet padding. Image courtesy of the artist. Photo: Tom van Eynde.
As a result, a different pedagogical environment was resuscitated in the gallery, literally within the belly of the work. Preus commented that:
I consider it a great success that it has become the high school hangout, and a venue for all manner of public meetings and conversations, that it has created a somewhat novel form of reflective behavior, unlike others that I have experienced, a combination of wariness, delight, adventurousness, speculative ripeness, a willingness to venture big ideas. But maybe it is, by and large, a form of what Simon Critchley calls ‘mannered situationism,’ which describes the limits of theater, and the lot of all art world versions of politics, which brings us back to Debord and the spectacle. I think of it as a spectacle in the sense that the Trojan horse was a spectacle, a decoy appearing as a gift. But there are many ways to think about a decoy. An icon is also a decoy, intended to project a reality beyond the surface of the image. It works to the degree that it seduces your attention, but then becomes a lens beyond the surface of the image.[39]
Fig. 6. John Preus, Interior of The Beast during moth-inspired story hour, a four part series on themes associated with The Beast. Image courtesy of the artist.
The Beast confounded some viewers with the striking differences between its interior and exterior appearance, as Thea Liberty Nichols writes:
Stepping into The Beast is like going down the rabbit-hole to Wonderland. From the outside, it seems much smaller, and muted by sleep or death. Inside it’s brightly lit by flood lights strung from the arched masonry overhead. A winding path of inlets, bump-outs, and cubbyholes terminate at the windowed garage doors that serve as part of the art center’s exterior wall. When the doors are open, it’s not unusual to see kids whizzing in and out shouting, find an out-of-sight viewer upstairs reading, or spot teenagers noodling on the chair swing. There’s a moment of confusion when you step back out onto the sidewalk and into the surrounding neighborhood though, because you realize that rather then bring everyday life into the art space, Preus has pushed art out into the everyday world.[40]
Preus has also moved in The Beast project from concentrating on the small scale, domestic, and utilitarian, to the larger scaled and utopian. At the same time, he preserves an intimacy due to his careful uses of materials and aesthetic choices. From youth events to philosophical discussions, The Beast became an example of ‘social sculpture’ that enacted a multiplicity of ideas rather than simply representing them. Preus knowingly referenced Beuys by fashioning The Beast’s skin from felt carpet underpadding rescued from a nearby dumpster, discarded by a local office.
Social Models of Curating: Art Spaces and Living Spaces
If there have been vast changes in the definition of curatorial practice, one of the most significant shifts has been in the direction of the contextual, dialogical, interventionist, participatory, relational, and situational. Curator Paul O’Neill has noted these changes and more in his lucid account of contemporary curating The Culture of Curating and the Curating of Culture(s) (2012). O’Neill follows the trajectories of the past several decades, particularly the ways curators became increasingly recognized via their authorial roles in the late 1980s, moving towards a ‘supervisibility’ of curators during the 1990s.
The amplification of the notion of the curator as an agent responsible for overall exhibition structure and narrative established the now-ubiquitous usage of the phrase ‘curated by’ (in the context of exhibition invitations, press releases, and catalogs). As a normative attribute to all exhibitions, ‘curated by’ articulates a semi-autonomous authorial role for the curator. Curating in the context of group exhibitions—the exhibition form that most clearly brought the curator to the fore and helped to establish the ‘curated by’ credential—made evident the idea that there is an agency other than the artist at work within all exhibitions, and that the exhibition is a form of curatorial vocabulary with its own grammar.[41]
If one traces the implications of the context O’Neill is describing, the authorial role of curators is still strong and used to both secure and launch projects and to attach a ‘vision’ to exhibition projects. The author/curator can become a brand as much as the artists involved, and sometimes even more so. Historically there are many precedents for a strong reading of curatorial authorship, such as in Cold War-era Poland, with its ‘author’s galleries’ which were often run by artist/curators in apartments, non-art contexts, and other peripheral spaces. Here authorship was meant to signify the close relation between works shown and curatorial ideologies, often involving an interest in unconventional, conceptualist-driven alternatives.[42]
In a potentially intriguing development as artists have become more dispersed in their practices, often taking on collaborative or curatorial roles, the role of the curator is frequently considered a singular authorial voice. As notions of what art might consist of conceptually and aesthetically have loosened, the curator is often a guide or interpreter of cryptic or indecipherable artworks. This role parallels the ‘educational turn’ noted within the contexts of both curatorial practices and event-based artworks. As artist-writer Mick Wilson has noted, the discursive elements once perceived as peripheral to the art exhibition have now gained in centrality, ‘becoming the main event.’[43]
This pedagogical turn in contemporary art runs alongside ongoing crises in art educational contexts, from astronomical tuition fees and massive student debt to the increase in alternative ‘free’ alternatives, although many such ventures exist in close proximal and symbiotic relation to mainstream universities and art schools. As critic Andrew Berardini, who teaches at the free of charge artist-run Mountain School of Arts in Los Angeles, noted in a 2015 essay: ‘In Southern California, the cost of an MFA ranges from $31,000 at UCLA a public university, to just under $79,000 at Art Center, a private school. This does not include accommodation, food, materials, books, etc. It only includes tuition.’[44]
Over the past decade, the emphasis upon authorial, discursive, educational modes of curatorial practice has been evidenced across a spectrum of art world sectors, from micro-gallery ventures to the initiatives of museums and biennials. However, even if a going concern, it has been voiced very differently depending on the initiators, participants, and public involved. I’m increasingly interested in how domestic spaces and art spaces inform one another. Artists have often maintained small-scale exhibition contexts closely linked to their own living areas and domestic environments. I will now consider aspects of the production and reception of a number of such projects, conceptually linked by some shared concerns: The Suburban (USA), SHOW (Aotearoa NZ), and Kallio Kunsthalle (Finland).
A primary link between these different ventures is the ways artists create non-institutions that may have a capacity for transforming into ‘actual’ formalized institutions, but actively resist growing larger. Various factors influence these contexts, including capital, shared goals of participants, and the ability to increase awareness and legibility, along with a creative intensity and integrity. They involve artists having multiple positions within diverse settings in the arts. For example, Michelle Grabner who has run (along with her partner the artist Brad Killam) The Suburban, and its later offshoot The Poor Farm, is a painter, educator, curator, and writer. All of these identities have been crucial components influencing Grabner’s ability to structure a long-running, renowned art space.
Fig. 7. The Suburban, exterior view, Oak Park, IL. Image courtesy of The Suburban.
Grabner and Killam have operated The Suburban since 1999 (and relocated the gallery to Milwaukee in September 2015). For much of its existence, the gallery consisted of an unimposing, cinderblock building adjacent to their home in Oak Park, a suburb located nine miles west of Chicago. Inspired by other alternative gallery efforts, such as Robin Klassnik’s East End London space Matt’s Gallery (in turn inspired by Polish author’s galleries of the 1980s such as Akumulatory in Poznań) the artists planned a space that would be informal, self-funded, and occupy a presence somewhere between a studio and a gallery space. As Grabner noted on the occasion of The Suburban’s ten year anniversary:
Exhibitions here tend to follow one of three routes. Some artists break off a little piece of their usual production and show it here to see what it looks like in this context. Others take the opportunity to develop a minor yet key part of their work. Still others will jump out of their skin, so to speak, and try something completely different than their usual practice. Who shows at the Suburban is related to our movement through the world and who we encounter through the normal networking process; our relationships are with artists rather than with the commercial galleries that represent them. Extending an invitation to exhibit is a curatorial decision. There’s no getting around that, but there is a way of sharing it. Since 2003, we’ve had two spaces––one small, one very small––that run concurrent exhibitions. We deemphasize the curatorial model by letting one artist invite another. This introduces us to more new artists, it reduces potential interpersonal friction, and it recognizes networking as another shaping force in the contemporary art world.[45]
In the above description, the phrase ‘who shows at the Suburban is related to our movement through the world’ merges the gallery’s procedural methodology with the couple’s life activities and ‘the normal networking process.’
Fig. 8. An opening event at The Suburban, Image courtesy of The Suburban.
Openings at the Suburban can seem cheerfully domestic, as a weekend evening barbeque is tended outside the space, and artists share beers in the open air; the claustrophobic atmosphere of so many official art events banished from the proceedings. If this would resemble any typical barbecue in Chicago’s outlying suburbs, the Suburban has hosted an impressive range of national and international artists. In 2007, Grabner’s retrospective at the University Galleries at Illinois State featured a recreation of The Suburban within the space, hosting mini-exhibitions throughout the course of a survey of Grabner’s own projects.
As critic Lane Relyea noted in his catalogue essay, questioning the exact motives and outcomes of this uncanny reinstall:
The meaning gained from recreating the actual cinderblock structure owes not to some act of reification, an exploiting of the gallery’s ability to serve as a free-floating sign of itself, but rather the opposite; the purpose is to ground The Suburban and its function in a specific context. … And what exactly is this context? Just look around: its specificities continue to unfold throughout the rest of the show—in Grabner’s photographs, for example, which often feature hers and Killam’s garden and the houses of some of their Oak Park neighbors; and in the cooking-lesson videotapes, for which their kitchen serves as soundstage. Also on display are some of Grabner’s paintings from the mid to late 90s, which appropriate as source material various washcloths, blankets, and other textiles and found patterns from around the home.[46]
A number of issues are raised here not the least having a mix of emerging artists and established figures hosted in the same tiny (8 x 8 ft/2.4 x 2.4 m) once-utilitarian shed. Moreover, the active flow between spaces, the domestic space adjacent to the art space; and the spaces of Grabner’s own distinctive practice as a painter, videomaker, writer, and curator. A more recent exhibition of Grabner’s work was aptly entitled: I work from home.[47]
Another more short-lived venture, although manifesting a related curatorial ethos, was Jenny Gillam and Eugene Hansen’s gallery SHOW, running from 2004-06 in Wellington, New Zealand. Several project spaces had closed in Auckland where the artists lived, and during the process of planning a new effort, the couple relocated to Wellington to take up teaching positions. Wellington, a much smaller cultural setting than Auckland had far fewer non-profit exhibition contexts, apart from larger-scale institutions. As Gillam writes in the preface to a publication that retrospectively documents SHOW:
We established SHOW because we felt we were not seeing enough of the work of a number of artists we respected and as artists we need to see art that both challenges and engages us. At some point we realised we didn’t need to wait for others to provide us with the exhibitions we wanted to see, nor could we rely on existing galleries to have interests that were aligned with our own. Simply, we wanted our local art world to expand in such a way that might encourage more speculative art practices.[48]
Gillam and Hansen took particular care in ways that departed from larger, more established spaces, such as their decisions not to hold public program events, apply for public funding, or place wall texts or notes with the work. This assertion of independence and a desire to speak towards an existing, informed art community but potentially grow that base without undue compromise is the kind of approach that can rapidly become co-opted or disrupted if transported into a larger institutional framework. The tensions of organizing a space adjacent to your flat increase when the art involved interferes with your daily rituals. In writing of Australian performance artist David Cross’ inflatable sculptural installation, Hansen noted: ‘Saturday 10 AM, get up and make the gallery minder a coffee. Can’t sleep in anyway, bloody David and his industrial blower.’[49] But the couple’s beloved Jack Russell terrier Frank might get an opportunity to perch on the gallery minder’s lap. Sometimes small is better.
Fig. 9. Maddie Leach, A Cord of Wood (or How to Light a Dark Corner), April/May 2005, SHOW Wellington, New Zealand. Image courtesy of the artist.
SHOW’s exhibitions tended toward installations, but wide-ranging examples, incorporating performance, sound, video, and durational events. It’s a cautionary tale about the artworld’s conservatism that to create a space that considers a range of media perfectly viable to be shown in the same context, especially by mid-career artists whose works are not viewed as ‘saleable’ in the conventional sense, becomes a bold endeavor. Much of the commercial artworld functions around low-risk, high-return propositions such that experimentally focused project spaces are difficult to foster and maintain. Paradoxically so, as given this situation, their role is very much needed. SHOW highlighted collaborative practice also, unsurprising as Gillam and Hansen have worked together as a collaborative team in multiple projects and with other artists as well. Hansen in his own interdisciplinary practice—and under the alias ‘vjRex’—featuring sculpture, sound, and video works collaboratively most of the time.
Fig. 10. vjRex and Dr Kron, Insidious Pop, March/April 2005, SHOW Wellington, New Zealand. Image courtesy of Jenny Gillam and Eugene Hansen.
Hansen and Gillam have continued ‘post-SHOW’ with pursuit of their own art projects and curatorial efforts. One of the most recent enlists webcasts as a method of curating performance and event-based projects in a real-time online environment. This draws upon Hansen’s research into online gaming environments and streamed music performances. Creating the platform testpattern.tv is their attempt to initiate a ‘virtual project space’ for fortnightly events having the potential to include a wider audience than the several dozen viewers that would attend SHOW’s openings, a micro-effort that created a ripple effect throughout Aotearoa New Zealand’s art community.
Efforts like those of Gillam and Hansen speak toward the demands of creating high quality exhibitions in a small-scale context. The benefits of such exhibitions are a relative autonomy and freedom without being directly co-opted by external pressures. This approach allows for curatorial latitude, combined with a commitment to preserving eclecticism, playfulness, and variety. SHOW’s exhibitions featured many process-based and ephemeral projects that haven’t always been shown in New Zealand’s dealer galleries, despite the fact that a substantial portion of its art community have participated in performative, post-object, and relational projects.
According to a statement posted for the 2014 Stockholm Independent Art Fair:
Kallio Kunsthalle is a pocket of art in the heart in Kallio [note: Kallio in translation means ‘bedrock’]. Its principles are based on the European Year of Volunteering 20111. It is a product of artists, scholars, and local associations. Kallio Kunsthalle’s main partner is Helsingin Optimistit, and its site is at the former meeting room of the Association for Healthy Lifestyles, as Toinen Linja 31 Helsinki. Kallio Contemporary Art Museum is a 160 x 160 cm table with a glass top. During the exhibition year a best- (or worst-) of exhibition will be collected in the table, which will, in the end, go touring.[50]
Kallio Kunsthalle reflects the acerbic sense of humor and irreverence of its founder Petri Saarikko, who incorporates diverse creative approaches within Kallio Kunsthalle. Examples include works by one of the most notorious criminals of Northern Europe, to the paintings of an antiquarian bookseller, and the tools of a blacksmith. Saarikko refers to himself as having had a Jekyll and Hyde career, the former being his day job as an interactive software designer and IT expert, and the latter his evenings spent as a gallerist and institutional critique artist. If the term Kunsthalle evokes a large exhibition space, Saarikko’s gallery occupies a modestly sized storefront space.
Fig. 11. Kallio Kunsthalle, Aboriginal Kunsthalle, Kallio, Helsinki, Finland, 2016. The Aboriginal Kunsthalle exhibition presented the graphic etching and aquatint works of Aboriginal contemporary artists. Image courtesy of Petri Saarikko.
For several years, Saarikko and his partner the Swiss-Haitian artist Sasha Huber lived adjacent to their gallery in Helsinki, with their studio not far away, nor the childcare center for their young son Basil. This information is relevant insofar as Saarikko and Huber have interwoven aspects of their lived existence into their art projects. As Huber becomes more renowned as an artist, the family has travelled widely to international residencies. Saarikko calls the Kunsthalle a ‘living social space’ and has used the term ‘curating the social’ over the course of his activities. As an experienced IT systems designer, he has a well-informed but critical perspective on the neo-liberal environment: ‘I am concerned about the role of authoritarian social engineering appearing visibly in the domain of free art practice. We are not far from acknowledging how utilitarian forces attempt once again to instrumentalise some of the freest forms of knowledge production.’[51]
Kallio Kunsthalle has made an active curatorial space for emerging and established artists, outsider artists, and non-artists. Saarikko’s commitment to the gallery has involved preserving its unpredictable programming, actively open to encounters with the world surrounding the gallery, intentionally letting it flow into the space. Saarikko has often appeared energized by surrounding pressures, which have paradoxically fueled the dynamic projects exhibited in the gallery. This recalls Fluxus artist Robert Filliou’s aphorism: ‘Art is that which makes life more interesting than art.’
Fig. 12. Kallio Kunsthalle, Ernst Collection, Te Whare Hēra Gallery, Wellington, New Zealand, 2015. An expanding suitcase collection of fragments and narratives from exhibiting artists and non-artists. Image courtesy of Petri Saarikko.
In Saarikko’s words:
Encountering new people and their narratives passing through the Kunsthalle keeps me going. It’s definitely not their nubile or theoretically deconstructed bodies, but discovering and meeting pure strangers, and the unknown. Wherever I settle would surely allow me to establish an agency or a community of some kind. It’s about commitment and discovery of meaning from our surroundings. The question of existence regarding a space like Kallio Kunsthalle is no longer really economical. It’s an ideological setting that pervasively renders visible those brutal collective forces that limit the freedom of expression and freedom of art in our society. Tough questions that relate to structural and even cultural violence.[52]
The forces to which Saarikko alludes in his phrase ‘structural and even cultural violence’ are ubiquitous at this point, from the short sightedness of many political and institutional institutions globally, to the disputes within cultural discourse.
Along these lines of inquiry, within the context of a manifesto-style pamphlet published in 2016, the art historian David Joselit in his essay ‘In Praise of Small’ states:
What should the responsibility of art institutions be at a time when the verb to curate has migrated from the context of museums to describe, for instance, the choice of amenities in a luxury real estate development, or the selection of artisanal cheeses? In this context to curate belongs to a long line of ideological practices for producing distinction. Do those of us involved in ‘curating’ (artists, critics, art historians, institutional curators, engaged patrons) need to assume responsibility for this massive appropriation of ‘art’ as a tool for prettifying the dominance of the 1%?[53]
Joselit writes in the wake of the diminishing support for and future prospects of alternative art spaces in New York, and concludes: ‘While large institutions canonize—i.e., turn information into history—small arts organizations may pluralize its shapes (as in all species of conceptual art), as well as the stories it can tell. To make information malleable and mobile again in unexpected ways, and to resist its enclosure by elites and its reification into dominant narratives is to make art political.’[54]
By keeping spaces that assert an idealized autonomy necessarily small in scale and also, correspondingly, precarious, cultural work can operate with awareness of exterior pressures yet without entirely succumbing to them. Whether “heterotopic” or not, spaces such as The Suburban, SHOW, and the Kallio Kunsthalle have hosted an abundance of events and exhibition projects. The very act of maintaining such opportunities supports different, significant trajectories for communication and dissemination, fostering experimental contexts for the future.
***
This essay was originally published in the book Across the Art/Life Divide: Performance, Subjectivity, and Social Practice in Contemporary Art (Intellect, Ltd/University of Chicago Press, 2017).
[1] Schwabsky, Barry. The Nation, 12 Jan 2012.
[2] From statement on Temporary Services’ website, accessed 06 September 2020, www.temporaryservices.org
[3] ‘Petri Saarikko’, 09-15 (Norköping: Werkstad Konsthall, 2015).
[4] Relevant sources on contemporary art and activism include the following: McKee, Yates. Strike Art: Contemporary Art and the Post-Occupy Condition (New York: Verso, 2016); Sholette, Gregory. Delirium and Resistance: Activist Art and the Crisis of Capitalism (London: Pluto Press, 2017); Boyd, Andrew. Beautiful Trouble: A Toolbox for Revolution (New York: OR Books, 2012); Thompson, Nato (ed.) Living as Form: Socially Engaged Art from 1991-2011 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2012); and Léger, Marc James (ed.) Culture and Contestation in the New Century (Bristol: Intellect, 2011).
[5] See Bishop, Claire. Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (New York: Verso, 2012).
[6] Kester, Grant. The One and the Many: Contemporary Collaborative Art in a Global Context (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011).
[7] Schrag, Anthony. ‘The Benefits of Being a Bit of an Asshole’, Journal of Arts & Communities, 6:2-3, 2014, 85–97.
[11] Birchall, Michael G. ‘Socially Engaged Art in the 1990s and beyond’, OnCurating 25, accessed 06 September 2020, https://www.on-curating.org/issue-25-reader/socially-engaged-art-in-the-1990s-and-beyond.html
[12] Schrag, Anthony. Lure of the Lost: Huntly to the Venice Biennale, accessed 06 September 2020, https://theartpilgrimage.wordpress.com/
[13] Beuys, Joseph, Carin Kuoni (ed.). Energy Plan for the Western Man: Joseph Beuys in America (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1990), 19.
[14] Groys, Boris. ‘On Art Activism’, e-flux journal, 56, June 2014, accessed 06 September 2020, http://www.e-flux.com/journal/on-art-activism/
[17] Illich, Ivan. Tools for Conviviality, 1973, accessed 06 September 2020, https://arl.human.cornell.edu/linked docs/Illich_Tools_for_Conviviality.pdf
[19] Berardi, Franco ‘Bifo’. The Uprising: On Poetry and Finance (Los Angeles: semiotext(e), 2012), 19.
[23] Rifkin, Jeremy. The Third Industrial Revolution: How Lateral Power Is Transforming Energy, the Economy, and the World (New York: St. Martin’s, 2013), 268.
[25] Thompson, Nato. Seeing Power: Art and Activism in the 21st Century (New York: Melville House, 2014) e-book.
[26] Sholette, Gregory. ‘Delirium and Resistance After the Social Turn’, FIELD: A Journal of Socially-Engaged Art Criticism, 1, Spring 2015, accessed 06 September 2020, http://field-journal.com/issue-1/sholette
[29] Rosler, Martha. ‘Take the Money and Run? Can Political and Socio-critical art “survive”?’, e-flux journal, 12, January 2010, accessed 06 September 2020, https://www.e-flux.com/journal/12/61338/take-the-money-and-run-can-political-and-socio-critical-art-survive/
[30] Bernes, Jasper. ‘Capital and Community: On Melanie Gilligan’s Trilogy’, Mute, 23 June 2015, accessed 06 September 2020, https://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/capital-and-community-melanie-gilligan’s-trilogy
[31] Somewhat similarly, Pittsburgh’s scene has hosted socially conscious, and aesthetically progressive ventures. Milwaukee has also been active on a scale in-between these two larger cities, but with some resemblance. The list goes on though. Artist Roger White in his book The Contemporaries: Travels in the 21st-Century Art World (New York: Bloomsbury USA, 2015) uses Milwaukee as a case study for an argument toward regional rather than national/international centers as holding much untapped potential for contemporary artists.
[32] See the four titles in the Chicago Social Practice History Series, edited by Mary Jane Jacob and Kate Zeller, published by The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and distributed by the University of Chicago Press in 2014-15: Immersive Life Practices, Support Networks, Art Against the Law, and Institutions and Imaginaries.
[33] Gagnon, Rachel. ‘Planning Social Practice: An Interview with Mary Jane Jacob’, art21, Sept/Oct 2014, accessed 06 September 2020, http://blog.art21.org/2014/09/17/planning-social-practice-an-interview-with-mary-jane-jacob/
[34] Wang, Dan S. Downtime at the Experimental Station: A Conversation with Dan Peterman (Chicago: Temporary Services, 2004) accessed 06 September 2020, http://www.temporaryservices.org/downtime.pdf
[36] Temporary Services (ed.). Group Work (New York: Printed Matter, 2007).
[37] Doherty, Claire. Public Art (Now): Out of Time, Out of Place (London: Art Books Publishing, 2015), 167.
[38] Jackson, Matthew Jesse. ‘The Emperor of the Post-Medium Condition’, in Gates, Theaster. 12 Ballads for Huguenot House (Köln: Walther König, 2012), 18-19.
[39] Preus, John. ARTSLANT Interview with Thea Liberty Nichols, 30 June 2014, accessed 06 September 2020, http://johnpreus.com/about/press/artslant-interview-with-thea-liberty-nichols/
[41] O’Neill, Paul. The Culture of Curating and the Curating of Culture(s) (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2011), 32.
[42] Polit, Paweł, and Piotr Woźniakiewicz (eds.). Conceptual Reflection in Polish Art: Experiences of Discourse: 1965-1975 (Warsaw: Centre for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle, 2000).
[43] O’Neill, Paul, and Mick Wilson (eds.). Curating and the Educational Turn (London: Open Editions, 2010).
[44] Berardini, Andrew. ‘How to Start an Art School’, Momus: A Return to Art Criticism, 10 Feb 2015, accessed 06 September 2020, http://momus.ca/how-to-start-an-art-school/
For further background context, see Madoff, Steven Henry (ed.). Art School: Propositions for the 21st Century (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009), and Singerman, Howard. Art Subjects: Making Artists in the American University (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).
[45] ‘Michelle Grabner and Brad Killam Talk about the Suburban’s Tenth Anniversary’, Artforum, Summer 2010, accessed 06 September 2020, http://artforum.com/words/id=26066
[46] Blinderman, Barry (ed.). Michelle Grabner (Normal: University Galleries, 2007), 9.
[47] Michelle Grabner: I Work From Home, Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland, November 1, 2013-February 16, 2014. This exhibition also featured a replica of The Suburban in the museum.
[48] Gillam, Jenny. ‘Preface’, SHOW (Auckland: Enzyme Publishing, 2009), ii.
[49] Hansen, Eugene. ‘Re-Tard: David Cross’, SHOW, 98.
[50] Kallio Kunsthalle at Supermarket Art Fair, Stockholm, accessed 06 September 2020, http://www.supermarketartfair.com/exhibitor/kallio-kunsthalle/2014
[51] ‘Petri Saarikko’, in 09-15 (Norköping: Werkstad Konsthall, 2015).
[53] Joselit, David. ‘In Praise of Small’, Near Contact (New York: Common Practice, 2016), 5.
Martin Patrick is a critic, historian, writer, and contributor to a wide variety of publications. His book Across the Art/Life Divide: Performance, Subjectivity, and Social Practice in Contemporary Art was published in 2018. His chapter ‘Exploring Posthuman Masquerade and Becoming’ was included in Animism in Art and Performance (2017). He is currently co-editing a special issue on Fluxus for the journal OnCurating. Martin has been a writing resident at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity and a Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Chicago. He is an Associate Professor of Art at Massey University in Wellington, New Zealand.