Work in progress (2009-present) interactive audiolfactory installation investigating creolized scents in Chicago.

Caroline Picard: This series started for me because I kept hearing the word hybridity — in multiple conversations about different art works or practices, hybridity started to sound like a buzzword. While on the one hand, I know what the word means of course, it also feels like a term that carries a certain amount of baggage. I was hoping to try and identify what that baggage was and, even, pin down (if possible) what hybridity means. Perhaps part of its intent is to remain fluid and unpinnable — as a kind of strategy resistant to traditional power structures — at least that seems to be an element that motivates your own work. Can you talk a little bit about more why hybridity is important to you? [As an aside, I'd add that this interview took place several months ago, at the inception of the Occupy Movement)

Gwenn-Aël Lynn: Hybrid is a word originating from the biological sciences. It indicates the cross breeding of different species or plants, often through human manipulation. However I am using it in the manner that Homi Bhabha defined in the 1990s. So, in my case, it is really a cultural term. I'm actually pushing this definition a little further, because what I'm really after is creolization, a term used, in particular, by Edouard Glissant, a Creole speaking Martinican poet, who, sadly, passed away recently. Where Hybridity is the offspring of two entities (in other words it hinges on a binary system), creolization allows for multplicity, a mixture where the different parts remain autonomous, a place of endless permutation. It speaks of a process, of something in constant flux, instead of just two parts synthesized into one. I'm actually looking for an appropriate translation of the French word métissage, and I think it is really interesting that there is no literal equivalent in English. There are many expressions like “mixed-race,” “bi-racial,” etc. but they all result from colonial racial ideologies, and I simply don't believe that these terms are relevant to today's society. Not that we should stop acknowledging “race” in America, but rather if our language is still predicated on colonial racial terms, we'll never move forward. The mere concept of race is very confining. Meanwhile. the global world is mutating. Therefore I settled on creolisation as the closest meaning to métissage, an intercultural process (and cross breeding by the same token), that granted is a by-product of colonialism, but also gave birth to new languages: Creole(s); new religions: Vodoo, Candomble, Santeria; new ways of cooking: Caribean, Reunionese, Mauritian, Brazilian, Mexican, etc. And indeed these cultural phenomena, over a long history, often occurred under complex power structures (whether under the European Colonial expansion, or the various invasions that have shaped modern day India, or even the succession of empires around the Mediterranean basin.)

CP: How does this subject resonate with you?

GAL: I guess I should also specify that I am a hybrid, but not in a racial term, because I have a french mother and an American father (from California) and I grew up between two households, over two continents, speaking two languages. So, I've always had, at least, a dual understanding of the world. In fact, one of the key moments I became aware that I was not simply “French” or “American” occurred while visiting my former in-laws on Reunion Island (A French “Over-Seas department”(1) in the Indian Ocean) where a local journalist asked me if I considered myself a métis [mixed race] because of my dual origins. I hesitated for a little while before answering “yes.” This answer would not be acceptable in a racially structured society like the United States (because I’m actually not the result of miscegenation, however I am culturally mixed), but on this island, where race relations are differently problematic, it was a possible answer, precisely because the Reunionese revel in creolisation. So when confronted with the North American way of dealing with race, creolization gives me a place that I can navigate, and more importantly where I can meet and share with other people, who are not like me, but who also possess this sense of belonging to a multiplicity rather than a single group or community. This creolized place is not only racially or visually motivated; it is linguistic (for people who command more than just English) transgender, and last but not least, political.

CP: It sounds like your understanding of creolization opens up at that point to include other kinds of mixes — like you say, mixes of sexual orientation, or gender etc.

GAL: Yes, I am naturally attracted towards other hybrids, and discourses, and practices, that embody such identity(ies). And, one of the things that have always disturbed me about the United States is that race theory, discourse, and emancipation has become very inward looking; we have all these very different hyphenated Americans (African-Americans, Asian-Americans, Italian-Americans, Irish-Americans, Mexican-Americans, and the list is quasi infinite) but this hyphen does not provide any room for those who belong to more than just one ethnic community. And there are many historical reasons to account for these racial divides (like, for instance, the “One-drop rule”)(2), it is a bit like, indeed we are a melting pot, but the content of the pot never melted. However, we tend to forget that the civil rights movement, for example, even though it started in the segregated South by those very people whose liberties had been restricted for so long. The civil rights movement had only been possible, and became successful by uniting across racial divides as “people.” If you look at pictures from those days you see people from all walks of life — there is a majority of Black folks of course, but you also see Jews, Whites, and in parallel you have Cesar Chavez uniting farm workers in California, and the formation of the American Indian Movement. As a matter of fact my father recalls participating in a protest against a segregated Woolworths in Santa Monica, CA, in the late fifties. Angry racist Whites were throwing stones at the protesters. Yet it’s through efforts and sacrifices of this kind that change was enacted. And so, today, I feel that “We Americans,” unlike other cultures that have also felt the yoke of colonialism, like India, Brazil, or Mexico, we do not embrace our creolized nature. And we certainly don’t give space to those who refuse to identify as belonging to a single racial, or cultural, and gender category.

BlackXican Pozole. Performance detail 2011. Gwenn-Aël LYNN and Hermes Santana collaborated to make and serve a pozole dinner in a performative way, emphasizing its olfactory dimension. (see note 6 for details)

 CP: Do you feel like we should try to shed identity altogether?

GAL: Of course not. It is not about: “let’s all mingle and become so homogenous that there is no difference left.” Rather, it is about the possibility of having multiplicity within each of us, and to relate to each other while embracing our differences. I think, but I’m not sure, that this is one possible interpretation of what Antonio Negri calls the “multitude.” So it becomes a multitude of multiplicities, the ferment for new democracy. On a simpler level there is a gastronomic metaphor that, I find, illustrates multiplicity very well:

Our preference, for miscegenation as thought, will go to the soup, for it is respectful of its components leaving them intact in a sober and tolerant broth.3
[From the Dictionnaire du Métissage
by Francois Laplantine and Alexis Nouss,
Paris, Pauvert Editions 2001]

CP: Where does that leave us now? And why do you think people are so interested in hybridity?

GAL: You know, there are moments when, I feel we are where we are, in the middle of the Great Recession, with a Black president, who is actually a “hybrid,” but who campaigned as a “black” candidate (instead of a mixed-race candidate, because of the “One-drop rule” I was speaking of earlier) and decided to show his birth certificate to answer pressure from the Republicans, because it is in the interest of Capitalism to have us divided like this. Divide and Conquer is an old colonial strategy to gain the upper hand. So if the American people is divided along ethnic classes that makes more cheap labour for Capitalism, because we are not going to get together to fight back. It’s easier to blame the Mexican immigrant worker because he is supposedly taking our jobs, or vice-versa to blame the Black worker, or the Unemployed because, as a citizen, he has access to what’s left of the welfare system, medicaid, etc. It’s easier to blame each other for the situation we are in than to reach out, and try to organize each other across divides, to actually take control and decide for our own fate. It’s a lot easier to let a bunch of flunkies on Capitol Hill haggle over the debt ceiling for weeks on end, while it’s getting harder for all of us to put food on our plates. And this goes for artists too, we are workers, we are manual and intellectual workers, but we are divided along medium, schools, hell we are divided along race too! And many of us accept to work very hard practically for free. Some of us even put themselves in debt in the hope of finishing a project because we are at a point where there no longer is any viable support for making art. But who reaps the fruit of this hard labour? The art market. Has it ever invested into an ambitious artistic project? Does Sotheby’s give back to the community when it scores a big sale? Nope! It lets the local art council support as best as can the making of art, and comes afterward to harvest the product without even leaving a dime behind. And yet we all put up with this system, or rather we just witness its passing. There are some in the community who are trying to raise some awareness about this labor division within the art world.

CP: Do you have an example?

GAL: I am thinking of Temporary Services, for example, who released a newspaper last year. There is American for the Arts but they are really more of an Art in Education advocacy group in DC. How about a group who advocates for better “art making conditions,” for the possibility of being a full time artist, rather than an artist with three or four different odd jobs and no time for art making for example? Recently, as part of the Occupy Wall Street movement, there has also been Occupy Museum and Occupy Art.In France, some artists are trying to self organize under various headings to fight for more support and better policies, but it is one high steep hill. So, anyways, these are some of the reasons why I make work that addresses questions related to hybridity.

"Kretek," 2006, photograph: Maartin Van Loosbroek (see note 7 for details)

CP: How has this stuff influenced your own practice?

GAL: In terms of art projects, well there is this interactive Audiolfactory (4) installation I started working on in 2009, and for which I was awarded a CAAP grant dy the DCA of Chicago, but it’s unfortunately still in progress (I say unfortunate because I had originally planned on wrapping it in one year!).

CP: Doesn’t your work incorporate smell?

GAL: I started by engaging in conversation with other hybrids about their understanding of creolization and I asked them to relate their experience to smells, in order to garner scents that could be described as “Hybrid” (again not in a chemical or biological sense, but rather as associated to a hybrid experience). In order to meet my interviewees I relied on ads placed on the CAR website, on Facebook, on fliers placed in key coffee houses, and on cultural centers such as the American Indian Center on Wilson avenue, the Center on Halsted, the Korean American Center, The Tibetan Cultural Center in Evanston, the Asian American Museum in Chinatown, the Japanese American Historical Society, as well as word to mouth communication. Methodologically I did not rely only on conversation (in other words on language) to determine what these smells could be, I also conducted a performative scent workshop to see if the “performative body” would suggest other scents, in which Sebastian Alvarez participated. This workshop actually led to other scents, but the unforeseen issue is that it has now grown into a performance workshop that I have been asked to conduct in several places (including Lithuania) with no particular connection to hybridity. Anyways, after all these smells were suggested, I then collaborated with two perfumers : Michel Roudnitska (based in the South of France), and Christophe Laudamiel (based in New York) to reproduce these scents. I am not disclosing what they are yet, because I want the experience to be fresh and unmediated when this installation opens to the public (no set dates yet), but some of them are really surprising and interesting.

CP: Does the piece focus solely on smell?

GAL: Sounds will be associated to each scent station, and for this section of the project I am collaborating with an experimental DJ: Christophe Gilmore aka FluiD, who is originally from Los Angeles, but is now based in Chicago, and is actually Creole. Some of the comments and observations that were made by the various hybrids I engaged with will also find their ways into these sound samples, but I have to work that out with them, making sure they agree with the edits, get their permission etc. But these abstracts will greatly complexify the definition of creolization I gave earlier.

CP: It sounds like your understanding of this terminology, and your investigation of that terminology, changes depending on who you work with.

GAL: One of the great things about working with people (rather than alone or “in the name of”) is that it really gives you a plurality of meanings, and forces definitions to be very fluid and transient, but it is also hard because you have to make sure nobody is left behind or frustrated by the process. All of the participants to the project get credited in the end, but that’s a few months away. Each sound/smell station will be in the form of rice paper maché sculptures (mostly because I need material that at the same time contains but let smells and sounds ooze through) in the shape of noses and ears, so as you can see the hybrid nature of this installation really resides in its scents and sounds and not so much in its visual aspect. And that’s a deliberate choice, because it is the eyesight that makes us see race (skin surface level). Whereas it is not so present (but not completely absent either) in our aural and olfactory phenomenology. As Stuart Hall once said: “race enters the visual field.” There is actually a number of texts on visual hegemony and how this differs when it comes down to olfaction, but that discussion would take many more pages. But in a few words I can say that I’m addressing the question of creolization through smells to open up a new territory, not to be charted visually, but to practice rhizomatic studies to sense how identities, formed out of multiplicity, can get together and generate new sensibilities, new relations and hopefully new knowledge in how we can form inter-related and diverse groups of human beings.

GAL: While working on the above mentioned project, my former roommate moved out, so I placed an ad on Craigslist to find a new one, and one of the respondents happened to be someone I had initially interviewed for the project. So he moved in, and we are getting along well. As the project has been taking so long to complete I have been hosting “hybrid dinners” at my house once a year to keep in touch with my fellow hybrids but also to let them know I am still working on the installation, and to continue our conversations. For one of these dinners, Hermes (that’s my roommate) decided to make a Black-Xican Pozole (as you may have guessed he is Black and Mexican, and a fantabulous professional chef). It’s a pozole made the Mexican way, but it also incorporates elements of soul food like collard greens, and ham hock. Shortly thereafter I was invited, by Alberto Aguilar and Jorge Lucero, to contribute to a show they were curating: Hecho en Casa, a program of events that verged on acts of domesticity. So Hermes and I decided to turn the dinner into a public performance.

Finally as a last example, I could mention a previous interactive odour and sound installation (2006) which, when I made it I did not think of in terms of hybridity, but looking back I think it would qualify, even though, at that time, I did not have the theoretical baggage, let alone the drive, to conceive of it as a hybrid project. It’s an installation that I made while being an artist in residence in the Netherlands, in Enschede, close to the German border, via the European Pepinieres for Young Artists network, Transartists and the media department of the AKI. I wanted to address the fact that in current European discourse, and in particular in the Netherlands, despite years of immigrant labor and influx from the former colonies, identity is still defined from the center, the White Dutch majority. For instance, the Dutch government passed a law, a few years ago, that forces new immigrants to be fluent in Dutch. Yet there are plenty of Dutch citizens who are from the former colonies, and speak other languages. From my perspective this definition is very problematic, so in order to come up with a postcolonial definition of the contemporary Netherlands I met and engaged with Dutch nationals who had some kind of affiliation with the former colonies. As expected I met many different kinds of people, some with very traumatic histories, because independence was not a peaceful process, others because when they came to the mainland they had to deal with blatant racism. Some of these questions and stories were integrated, along with music composed by Antony Maubert, into the sound part of this installation, and others (I had a lot of data) were indexed on an audio CD that was released with the opening of the show in Enschede. And as an answer to the push for monolinguism by the authorities, the soundtracks of this project total 8 languages (Afrikaan, Bahassa, Balinese, Dutch, English, Papiamento, Taki-Taki, and Zulu). Indeed, Dutch is not the only language spoken today in the Netherlands. So it is by no means exhaustive, but instead reflect the people I met, while in residence. This project was my initial collaboration with Michel Roudnistka for the smells. Looking back at that project, I tried to manifest ideas of creolization by using a non-dialectical structure. A sensory experience organized by associations in order to foster connections and expand ideas of communities, language, identities, etc.

floor plan of the interactive odour and sound installation at De Overslag, Eindhoven, 2007.

But regarding hybridity specifically in regard to this installation from 2006, I think my most interesting find was that when Indonesia was occupied by the Dutch there were Indos who used the following expressions to describe their ancestry: the Motherland was Indonesia, and Fatherland described the Netherlands, because often, Indos were the children of a Dutch male civil servant who had married an Indonesian woman. This example was narrated by Johan Ghysels (an Indo photographer from Enschede) on the soundtrack associated to the odor of Kretek (clove cigarettes). In his words “we were the in-between layer” of Dutch colonial society, between the white elite and the Indonesian natives, rejected by the latter because more privileged, and despised by the former for not being “completely” Dutch. As a matter of fact, many of the people I talked to, in the course of this project, described themselves as “in-between”. When independence struck, many of the Indos had to leave for fear of being exterminated by Indonesian Nationalists who identified them with the oppressors. So they sought refuge in the Netherlands where they had some relatives but once there, as Gill Bollegraf, another Indo photographer from Enschede, told me, they were confronted by really strange behavior. An incident happened to her mother (Gil was born in the Netherlands): one day at the market, after her arrival in the Netherlands in the sixties, a little White Dutch kid lifted her skirt to see if she had a tail, because he thought she was a monkey. So a few Indos went to California to start a new life but the majority of them, nevertheless, stayed in the Netherlands. Today they have organized themselves into different associations (http://www.nasi-idjo.nl/), they have their own music, food, etc. It is a striving culture, but always remains at their core, this sense of having been forcibly displaced.

____________________________________

(1) Read: former colony, whose inhabitants decided to remain within the French République when the colonial empire broke down in the 60′s and 70′s. It boasts one of the most creolized population in the world.
(2) Meaning any person with “one drop of black blood” was considered as black under the Racial Integrity Act, despite the fact that many were mixed-race people.
(3) This quote is my rough translation of the following text, and operates a distinction between two kinds of soups: the potage -which is a soup where all the ingredients have been grinded and blended and a soupe where all the ingredients are left as they are, floating in their broth: “Notre préférence, nonobstant nos penchants gastronomiques et leurs goûts respectifs, ira, pour une pensée du métissage, à la soupe. Car elle est respectueuse de ses composantes qu’elle laisse intactes dans un bouillon sobre et tolérant. Le potage, lui, broie, mélange, passe, bref il fusionne, visant à l’homogène.”
(4)Sound and smell

IMAGE NOTES
(5) Roots… (a speaking garden) 2010. Installation made while in residence at the Pépinières Européennes pour Jeunes Artistes in St. Cloud, France. A sound enhanced winter garden. Foreigners, and nationals with experience abroad, recommended the plants constituting this installation. While in residence, I met with them and conducted interviews discussing the metaphor of roots, as pertaining to one’s origins. During the exhibition, abstracts from these interviews were triggered by the visitors, whose displacements were monitored by discrete c-mos cameras and a computer where these displacements were analyzed by two open source software: Processing and Pure Data. Pure Data patch built by Ben Carney.
(6) This dinner took place at Cobalt Studios, located in Pilsen, and was sonified with a “Pilsen” soundscape. It was part of a series of event: Hecho en Case/Home made curated by Alberto Aguilar and Jorge Lucero. A program of events that verged on acts of domesticity.
(7) interactive odour and sound installation (2006). Detail of kretek diffuser (clove and tobacco). Scents, sounds, electronics, infra-red motion detector, MIDI box (an open source interface), software, computer. This project was realized while in residence in Enschede, the Netherlands, via the European exchange program for young artists: “European pépinières [nursery] for young artists”. Collaborators: Paul Jansen Klomp (new media artist), Antony Maubert (composer), and Michel Roudnitska. (perfumer).
This installation has been shown in Enschede at Villa deBank in April 2006, in Eindhoven at De Overslag in March 2007, and at Casino Luxembourg, Forum for Contemporary Art, Luxembourg in September 2007.

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The question of what social practice art actually is, who is defining its parameters and to what end, is a hot mess. Since the 1990s, a number of mostly European and North American art critics and historians have struggled to understand a notoriously chaotic set of practices, under an ever changing set of  names including new genre public art, socially-engaged practice, relational art, dialogical aesthetics, etc. While I have no interest in throwing my hat in the art historical ring on that one (and I think the folks over at 127prince.org are doing a good job on talking through the issues), I admit that I like the identity crisis that social practice art is always wrestling with. It’s rapidly becoming professionalized through MFA programs, like California College of Arts, Otis College of Art, and PSU. Yet it also heralds a kind of everyday creativity and social connectivity that is supposedly available to anyone with or without an art degree.

I’ve thought about this with my collaborators at InCUBATE over the last couple years and we’ve participated in a lot of conversations where people tear their hair out trying to figure out where social practice begins and ends. Defining the actual parameters of “social practice art” seems to be a red herring. Sometimes a dinner party should just be a dinner party, sometimes calling a dinner party an art project makes it a richer experience for the individuals participating. Social practice art doesn’t necessarily create more democratic exchange between art and audiences, often times it creates hierarchical distinctions between artists in art school and ordinary people with creative hobbies and interests that don’t have anything to do with an art career. But while it continues to be problematic territory, the larger anxiety it brings up is pretty interesting. How are artists defining the communities their work operates in, especially when traditional contexts such as commercial galleries, museums, and non-profits aren’t the intended landing pad? If one’s work is about engaging publics supposedly outside the artworld and eschewing art-speak when it comes to creative expression, who cares if it’s called art other than social practice artists? The issue then becomes not how to judge social practice within the confines of other art disciplines, but rather how the value of that work is being defined and by who. If social practice offers us anything, it openly asks not what kind of artist one wants to be but what kind of person one wants to be and how one wants their work to operate in the world.

Thinking back to that conference too, I felt a sense of camaraderie from the Chicago contingent (people like Hideous Beast, Sara Black and John Preus, Anne Elizabeth Moore, Shannon Stratton, Randall Szott, and more), something like a mixture of healthy skepticism and a sense that yes, we’ve also been thinking about this for a while now too and let’s get into it. I’ve long been inspired by groups and spaces in Chicago who have taken the art/social-engagement approach (Temporary Services, Mess Hall, Haha, Department of Space and Land Reclamation, Pilot TV, FEELTANK, Experimental Station, AREA Chicago, the Stockyard Institute, just to name a few) and maybe those people would really not like to be lumped into the “social practice” conversation. But to me, their work asks the essential questions about the social and political ramifications of participating in the artworld.

So I hope these Bad at Sports posts on the “social practice scene in Chicago and beyond” somehow incorporate that Chicago attitude that I’m struggling to articulate. I’m going to be doing interviews with Chicagoans and artists from elsewhere, asking them what they think about the audience for their work. For this first post, I interviewed artist, activist and writer Ashley Hunt. I first encountered his work as part of his collaborative project (with David Thorne, Katya Sander, Sharon Hayes & Andrew Geyer), 9 Scripts from a Nation at War at documenta 12 in 2007, a piece which cut directly through the curatorial excess of that sprawling exhibition. Since then I’ve followed his writing in the Journal of Aesthetics and Protest, An Atlas of Radical Cartography and other places. When he told me he was touring his project Notes on the Emptying of a City, a performance/film about post-Katrina New Orleans, I asked him to do a performance at threewalls, where I work as Program Director.

More on that event is here
More on his work can be found at www.ashleyhuntwork.net / www.correctionsproject.com.

Here is the conversation we had:

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Please join everyone at the Fair for two days of art, books, talks, things for sale, things for free, and more….including short discussions about the work of various participating organizations scheduled throughout the day.

The whos (as in, who will be at Fair):
Antena
AREA Chicago
Bad At Sports
CAFF: “Find us in the real world motherfuckers!”
Gallery 400
Esteban Garcia
Golden Age
Green Lantern Press
Half Letter Press
Terence Hannum
Harold Arts
Imperfect Articles
InCUBATE
Clifton Meador & guests
David Moré
No Coast
Onsmith Dog Stew & Monkey Nudd Wine
Pros Arts Studio
Proximity Magazine
Radah & Team
Spudnik Press
Bert Stabler
threewalls
WhiteWalls

The whens, wheres and hows:

Friday, February 26, Noon – 6 pm
Saturday, February 27, Noon – 6 pm

Two days of art, books, talks, things for sale, things for free, and more!

Organized by Temporary Services in conjunction with ART WORK: A NATIONAL CONVERSATION ABOUT ART, LABOR, AND ECONOMICS • www.artandwork.us

LOCATION
G400 Lecture Room & Gallery 400 at the Art & Design Hall, University of Illnois, Chicago
400 S. Peoria St (at Van Buren)
www.gallery400.aa.uic.edu • 312-996-6114

And while you are there:

Check out The Free Store, a concurrent exhibition at Gallery 400 taking the form of “a nomadic, temporary free store that irregularly visits a variety of Chicagoland neighborhoods.” The Free Store asks you to get involved by coming to the store, bringing stuff you want to give away, and taking stuff that you want. There is no restriction on what you can take. You don’t even have to haggle!  Just take it!

**Items can be dropped off at Gallery 400 during open hours. The Free Store organizers are always happy to accept donations (everything except for people, animals, and illegal/toxic substances).

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“The idea that calling what you do “work” makes it “legitimate” or “meaningful” is the crux of the problem I have with much of what one finds in Art Work. This sort of thinking is everywhere on the left and Marx does in fact provide the theoretical mirror in which many self-identified “cultural workers” (I always shudder at this phrase) see themselves. Jean Baudrillard, the still mostly Marxist incarnation of which Bryan-Wilson cites, moved very quickly into a position not easily integrated within her piece or this newspaper as a whole. In his book The Mirror of Production he writes “The critical theory of the mode of production does not touch the principle of production.” That is to say that Marxist analysis too readily embraces the terms of the debate and therefore provides a mere functional critique, one that Baudrillard might note, “…deciphers the functioning of the system of political economy; but at the same time it reproduces it as model.”

Read Szott’s full argument here, along with comments responding to his post. Okay, and now I also feel appropriately shamed by my own use of the word ‘culture worker,’ which I agree can be cumbersome, pretentious, and plain-old lame sounding, but how else to encompass the different types of work we want to talk about under a single umbrella? Suggestions?

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Put out by Temporary Services (who were interviewed on the Podcast in Episode 218) the newspaper, distributed in both print and online forms,  looks for alternative routes past market-based economies through articles that address resource sharing, collective action and other methods of keeping on with the keeping on when there’s very little money to oil the gears. In an article titled “This is Our Real Job,” the Temporary Services crew outline their primary source of dissatisaction with the status quo: the dominance of market forces over the production of art. It’s a well-worded introduction to the project that frames the discourses contained within as a whole. In a key paragraph, they argue,

“For far too long, the rhetoric and logic of the market has dominated the production of discourse and livelihoods around art. Letting the market decide, as Reagan, Milton Friedman, and other ghosts of capital past cried, has drastically limited what we think art is and can be in our society. We have seen how quickly the commercial market collapsed, hurting large numbers of people. The commercial art market in the United States has hemorrhaged gallery after gallery. The flocks in the stables have been turned loose into the wilds of uncertainty and worry that the rest of us live in as normalcy. There will be no bailout or economic triage to save the galleries. The financial collapse has put a big crack in the hegemony over resources and discourse that the commercial system has long enjoyed. It is now even harder to see success in the speculative art market as a viable option for most artists, though the dictates of the market are still what gets passed off as curriculum for an MFA at most universities.”

My favorite section of the newspaper is tagged “Personal Economy.” Here, individual contributors really get honest –albeit anonymously–about their own financial situations as culture workers. It ‘aint pretty. But it’s strangely empowering to learn that other people are in similar boats as you are–working for free or close to it, struggling to balance soul-crushing day jobs with creative labor, and trying to make real connections with peers that aren’t based solely on what the  other person can do for you.

As a writer, I mostly work for free, and I often feel embarrassed about that. Although it’s not like I made tons of cash when I worked as a museum professional, nowadays I don’t contribute any meaningful income to my family’s bank account, and yet I am engaged in “work” that takes me away from the household labor to which, as a stay at home mother and an extremely reluctant housewife, I must also be committed. Despite my own personal distaste for the type of fevered rhetoric to which projects like Art Work typically fall prey (i.e., lots of poetically-written bitching, with precious few workable solutions put forth) I found most of the articles in Art Work to be incredibly compelling and personally meaningful. “The personal is political,” Anne Elizabeth Moore reminds us in her contribution to the newspaper. By demanding that we start talking openly and explicitly about money and its impact on the work we do, Art Work reframes that old bromide in ways that have the potential to rouse and discomfit us anew.

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In a piece titled Public Opinion written late last week for Artforum.com, Claire Bishop reports on Creative Time’s Summit on “Revolutions in Public Practice” held at the New York Public Library a few weeks ago. The summit presented an overview of current practices that encompass “everything from participatory performance to allotment squatting to socially conscious photography,” as Bishop described it. At the summit, artists such Vic Muniz, Harrell Fletcher, Tania Bruguera, Rene Gabri (hey Rene!), Dara Greenwald, Thomas Hirschhorn, Maria Lind, Francisca Insulza, Liam Gillick and numerous others (including this week’s podcast guests Temporary Services) made short presentations of current works and related projects.

Bishop offered a somewhat skeptical and occasionally snarky take on the proceedings. In particular she questioned the Summit’s use of the word ‘revolution,’ given that many of the practices she observed were in her opinion not exactly new. She argued,

There was a striking similarity between many of the presentations and 1970s gestures of institutional escape, as well as to early-’90s “new genre” public art (the term coined by artist Suzanne Lacy, who also spoke at the summit). The big difference between then and now was the staggeringly dry and soulless language deployed by many of today’s artists who took to the podium. At countless points in the day, my eyes glazed over to the sound of earnest monologues announcing, “My practice is about creating platforms for a critical interface with overlooked spaces, networking with local communities to provide self-organized resources and coproducing social relations . . .” Aaagh!

Bishop summarily dismissed the projects presented by Vic Muniz and Harrell Fletcher “for their reality t.v. sentimentality” while chiding the Summit for its “predominant tone of collective agreement” and overall lack of “friction.” She concluded:

“At its best, the “Revolutions” summit offered an immensely valuable overview of a wide range of engaged practices otherwise lacking visibility in New York, while the discursive format provided an appropriate alternative to the exhibition as a means of presenting this often visually evasive work. Socially, it was dynamic—and in this respect, it had much in common with the energy of Hans Ulrich Obrist’s marathons. On the other hand, the summit was only an overview and did nothing to problematize “public practice” as a direction in contemporary art. It assumed (along with many of the positions presented) that art as a discipline can and should be marshaled toward social justice. I would have liked to see more pondering of the specifically artistic competences that can be deployed toward these ends.”

In the Talkback section, Muniz, Fletcher, and several others weigh in with dissenting assessments of the Summit – and here is where the topic gets truly interesting. Creative Time curator and event co-organizer Nato Thompson offers a particularly thoughtful and measured rebuttal which, among other issues, questioned the usefulness of Bishop’s approach to the event– an approach that, in this instance, at least, may have missed the point entirely. Thompson explained,

We chose this format so that the work could speak for itself and the audience would be left to consider all the problems and solutions they provide. Another motivation was simply to provide a platform in NYC for this type of work. Certainly, there is much more to be said, and we intend to provide more spaces for this work. Ultimately, we need to re-engage the critical project of thinking through culture’s relationship to the issues and concerns of everyday life. We must stop this antipathy for thinking and market friendly pseudo-populism that has swept the critical stage (while admitting the disaster that jargon-laden Marxist art criticism has wreaked on political art) and instead, take seriously the potential for the arts to participate in the concerns that actually matter in the world. From this difficult vantage point (that is how projects actually transform the social landscape), the discussions around political public practice may possess an urgency capable of pushing the discussion beyond the prescribed domain of art.”

Go read the article and subsequent exchanges for yourselves, if you haven’t already. The discussion has generated some real heat, and should be of particular interest to artists and other cultural workers who frame their work as a form of “public practice” rather than as art with a capital A.

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• Episode 250: Nato Thompson

This week for your listening pleasure Bad at Sports has dispatched Shannon Stratton and Duncan MacKenzie to Illinois’ glorious Kankakee to meet up with the artists of Temporary Services. They query Brett Bloom, Salem Collo-Julin, and Marc Fischer about social practice and the group’s decade long history.

The new www.badatsports.com is here! Come check out our redesign!

Sunday the 8th we all need to once again make a trek down to Hyde Park to pick up the Artists Run Chicago Digest. In it you will find contributions by Lori Waxman, Dan Gunn, and little ole Bad at Sports!

What follows is from http://www.studiochicago.org/arc-release/

Artists Run Chicago Digest Release
Sunday, November 8, 2:00 – 5:00pm
Hyde Park Art Center
5020 S. Cornell
Chicago, IL 60615

Join the Hyde Park Art Center, threewalls and The Green Lantern Press, as they celebrate the release of the Artists Run Chicago Digest.

The A.R.C. Digest: Published by threewalls and The Green Lantern
Press, The Artists Run Chicago Digest documents Chicago artist-run ‘spaces’ active between 1999 and 2009 offering a look at the various platforms that often act as extensions to studio practice.

As the official catalog of Artists Run Chicago, an exhibition that
featured 34 artist-run spaces from around the city from May 10-July 5, 2009 at the Hyde Park Art Center, The A.R.C. Digest acts as compliment to and extension of the exhibition, with interviews, essays, and an audio supplement presenting a 10-year time period in Chicago’s artist-run culture while providing history, reflection, critique and dialog about artist-run culture, its importance, difficulties, sustainability and necessity as well as its specificity to a community and generation.
Kankakee
Shannon Stratton
Marc Fischer
Salem Collo-Julin
Brett Bloom
Temporary Services
Artists Run Chicago
Artists Run Chicago Digest
threewalls
Green Lantern
Half Letter Press
NEA
The Library Project
Harold Washington Library
Hans-Peter Feldmann
Mess Hall
Groups and Spaces
Public Collectors
“Against Competition”
Chris Kennedy
Scott Rigby
Drupal
I Space
Prisoners’ Inventions

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