Teenaged, bespectacled Magali Bravo confronts the camera straight on as she and her small brother make their way to school through the streets of South Los Angeles. Weaving past the chain link of empty lots, nondescript motels and broad, shadeless expanses, the pair enters three corner markets in search of fresh produce. In crisp white polo shirts and khaki shorts (dress code of choice for LAUSD public schools), Magali and her brother move with a confidence that bespeaks their belonging to the neighborhood - but her face betrays disgust at the processed food choices available. Wrinkling her nose at the camera, the only fresh “produce” she finds are a few sad crates of withered potatoes and bruised bananas on the floor of one liquor store.
“Where do I get my 5?” promotional image, 2007-2009. Courtesy Public Matters, LLC.
Magali’s video, entitled “You Can’t Put a Price on That,” is one of five videos produced through a collaboration between an interdisciplinary artist-run collective and consulting group called Public Matters, the South Los Angeles Healthy Eating Active Communities (HEAC) Initiative, and high school students at The Accelerated School. This youth media project dedicated to exposing the challenges of healthy food access in South L.A. was only one aspect of an integrated action plan that included developing a partnership with the local city council office, creating a “youth ambassador” program at The Accelerated School, bringing together various community organizations, businesses and advocates, and culminating in two Market Makeovers. One of these “makeovers” occurred at Coronada Meat Market, a corner market run by Magali’s godfather, and her video documents members of HEAC as well as her classmates moving displays, repainting, marking clear prices, and generally redecorating the store to highlight fresh produce and healthy food options. [1] Magali was clearly the impetus behind her godfather’s participation, and her energy is palpable, infusing her fellow teens and rendering the peppiness of the thirty-something HEAC project leaders somewhat redundant.
Public Matters, LLC, a self-described “rag-tag group of consultants” [2], is the artist-run initiative behind the production of compelling videos like Magali’s, and the connective tissue linking constituents in many-tendrilled collaborations like the South L.A. Market Makeovers (2007-2009). Their goal, simply stated, is to “work with community members to create media about their neighborhoods…to develop in them a sense of ownership over these places and a belief that they can directly shape their neighborhoods’ future. The media content reflects and benefits the community that has helped create it, advancing a specific community defined agenda or initiative.” [3] Though the precise role of Public Matters shifts over time and within projects, their tendency to involve themselves in social issues of great magnitude (such as tackling South and East L.A. food deserts [4] to provide increased access to healthy food and education about nutrition) necessitates a mode of working that includes multiple partners. For Public Matters, the size and scope of these partnering institutions often matches the enormity of the problems they take on - the group has gone from working with the community organization HEAC to a research center at UCLA (Center for Research in Engineering, Media and Performance, or REMAP), to a major inter-university research institute called the UCLA-USC Center for Population Health and Health Disparities. Along with huge university bureaucracies also come massive funding opportunities, and additional state and federal governmental entities to answer to - for example, the current round of East L.A. market makeovers is funded by a 5-year grant from the National Institutes of Health.>
Los Compadres Market, South Los Angeles, 2007. Courtesy Public Matters, LLC.
Their lack of interest in one-offs and commitment to durational, sustainable projects that bring social benefit places Public Matters in an undefined, hybrid, interdisciplinary realm with many other artist-run initiatives that lack a traditional relationship to object-making and the commercial art market. By their university partners, Public Matters are perceived not as an artist collective, but primarily as on-the-ground liaisons with the most direct contact with schools and community organizations. They introduce a way of engaging stakeholders through participatory media production that differs dramatically from traditional methods of public health messaging. From within their own organization, the boundaries between art, public health, social benefit are fluid, and become labels of convenience for different situations. Creative director Reanne Estrada maintains a separate studio practice, but sees herself engaged in a “continual practice of creative, collaborative problem-solving” in which her solo practice would suffer without Public Matters, and vice versa. Mike Blockstein, principal and founder of Public Matters, very much considers the collective his art practice, and the various other consultants have diverse relationships to what they do as part of Public Matters.[5] In his treatise on art and politics entitled Dark Matter, artist Gregory Sholette sums up this ambivalence towards definition when writing about similarly fluid practices: “I allow those who claim to make ‘art’ define it on their own terms, even if their identification with the practice is provisional, ironic, or tactical, as for example when artist Steve Kurtz (with Critical Art Ensemble) insists ‘I’ll call it whatever I have to in order to communicate with someone.’” [6]
Project 3 (a.k.a. the Market Makeovers crew): Front row (left to right): Brent Langellier, Mike Blockstein, Reanne Estrada, Debra Glik, Alex Ortega, Heather Hammer, Rosa-Elena Garcia, Jeremiah Garza; Back row: Ron Brookmeyer, Nathan Cheng, Mike Prelip. Courtesy Public Matters, LLC.
The UCLA-USC Center for Population Health + Health Disparities Team with Scientific Advisory Board + Community Advisory Board members. Courtesy Public Matters, LLC.
The interdisciplinary, shifting, and hybrid nature of Public Matters by no means implicates a lack of definition in purpose or goal. Rather, their organizational structure is tactical and deliberate, designed to maintain a nimbleness and flexibility supple enough to react effectively to a highly charged and overwhelmingly huge social issue. Perhaps for this reason, Public Matters has chosen to incorporate as an LLC rather than a non-profit - both Blockstein and Estrada worked extensively in the non-profit sector and understand the hierarchical professionalization necessary for such tax-exempt status. They were interested in forging “a new way of doing things as a social enterprise,” becoming essentially a for-profit entity but without any interest in generating profit - rather as a tactical method through which to form useful partnerships yet maintain elasticity in complex public situations. [7] By no means are they alone in this tactical organizing - Gregory Sholette explains that artists today are expert at imitating “a product particular to the post-industrial economy of our time” - the institution - which bespeaks a skill-set “that provides an edge when dealing with the society of risk beyond the longstanding adaptation to structural precariousness.” [8] In the case of Public Matters, this aptitude can be extrapolated beyond the precarity of artists’ positions as cultural producers and applied to the broader situations in which they insert themselves. In response to the “failed states” and “derelict institutions” that perpetuate problems as large as food deserts in the middle of enormous urban centers, artists “take up pieces of a broken world, transforming them into an improved, second-order social reality…” [9]
This oppositional motivation is perhaps too strong in the case of Public Matters, which is an extremely positive, collaborative, and optimistic organization. Yet the specific propensities which run through artist-initiated organizations like this that Sholette identifies, like ” a propensity for flexible work patterns, developing gift-sharing networks, and a capacity for non-linear problem solving” allows artists to uniquely “mimic, exaggerate, or otherwise reshape given reality.” [10] Yet the ability of Public Matters to take on, maintain, and implement innovative projects alongside enormous university partnerships over long periods of time cannot be attributed to a flexible structure alone - in fact, issues of capacity and staffing plague their ambition, and the work can be all-consuming. Rather, the success of the Public Matters model is related to a distinction between artistic and organizational practices that Irit Rogoff discusses in her article “Turning,” quoting a series of essays by philosopher Gerald Raunig. These essays mark a difference between “constituent” practice, in which an organization or collective exists to produce a series of protocols for both the representation and governance of their work (either in opposition to an existing market, or in spite of it). The problem that Rogoff identifies with constituent practice is that it is too easily pre-occupied with the processes through which an assembly is legitimated, and thus sabotages its own innovation and flexibility, opting instead for a regulatory ossification. [11] Rather, Raunig reveals practices like Park Fiction in Hamburg (and I would add Public Matters), as “instituent” practices. These organizations create “instituting events” that bring together a diversity of constituent practices (as in community organizations, schools, governmental entities, universities, individuals), and this plurality counters the closure of the processes at work. As Raunig describes, “The various arrangements of self-organization promote broad participation in instituting, because they newly compose themselves as a constituent power again and again, always tying into new local and global struggles.” [12]
This replicative capacity, the ability to re-invent themselves through a shifting diversity of strategies and networks, is why Public Matters can take on they kinds of projects they do with such limited capacity, and why they can navigate that fine line between “indulging the need to push boundaries and take risks, and being responsible to what we are charged with.” According to Reanne Estrada, this becomes the most integral part of the work, its most interesting and challenging aspect. [13] Public Matters faces a new aspect of this challenge in working with the USC Center for Population Health and Health Disparities on their current round of East Los Angeles market makeovers. The Center is charged with researching and evaluating the work on a large scale with enough rigor and integrity to someday impact policy, and this kind of research agenda and resources are rarely available to an organization like Public Matters (nor similarly scaled artist-run initiatives). The research context poses both an exciting possibility for affecting change and rigorously assessing impact, but also challenges the flexible, non-linear work patterns and instituent events that define Public Matters as an organization. They are learning now to work around concerns about data contamination, defining control and intervention areas, and other such problematics from the research perspective. Yet perhaps it is their very nimbleness and the “license to explore” that they grant to themselves and all of their participants that will allow them to adapt to this new reality as well.
[1] “Where do I get my 5?” Public Matters, LLC, http://www.publicmattersgroup.com/?page_id=721.
[2] Reanne Estrada, interview with author, June 6, 2011.
[3] “What is Public Matters?” Public Matters, LLC, http://www.publicmattersgroup.com/?page_id=2.
[4] Food deserts are manifested by a scarcity of mainstream grocery stores, and where they do exist, they have poor quality produce and high prices. The South Los Angeles food desert is one of the largest in the country, spanning 60 square miles and encompassing 800,000 people. “South Los Angeles,” Public Matters, LLC, http://www.publicmattersgroup.com/?page_id=719.
[5] Reanne Estrada, interview with the author, June 6, 2011.
[6] Gregory Sholette, Dark Matter: Art and Politics in the Age of Enterprise Culture (New York: Pluto Press, 2011), 5.
[7] Reanne Estrada, interview with the author, June 6, 2011.
[8] Sholette, Dark Matter, 152.
[9] Sholette, Dark Matter, 153.
[10] Sholette, Dark Matter, 152-153.
[11] Irit Rogoff, “Turning,” in Curating and the Pedagogical Turn, eds. Paul O’Neill and Mick Wilson (Amsterdam and London: De Appel and Open Editions, 2009), 44.
[12] Rogoff, “Turning,” 45.
[13] Reanne Estrada, interview with author, June 6, 2011.
This is a wonderful opportunity for the right person:
Managing Director
Job Description
Application Deadline EXTENDED: July 10, 2010
Watts House Project is seeking a Managing Director to start full-time in September of 2010. The Managing Director of Watts House Project is responsible for overseeing and coordinating the complex legal, financial, and operational aspects of the organization with the Executive Director. The Managing Director oversees the staff, including the administrator, Resident Coordinator, development team, and interns, and works in tandem with the Executive Director on project phase development and organization. The Managing Director oversees fiscal operations and accountability, and manages the organizational growth with the Executive Director. The Managing Director also programs fundraising and community events, liaises with the Board of Directors and Advisory Board, oversees fundraising with the Executive Director, and liaises with the construction managers and artists involved in the project regarding contractual agreements, legal requirements, finances, permitting, and project stage benchmarks. The Managing Director works in tandem with the Executive Director and Board Committees on protocol and reporting. The Managing Director oversees the Resident Coordinator, and coordinates extensive community outreach and feedback initiatives. The Managing Director is also responsible for maintaining press, website, Basecamp, digital and archived files, donor database, and other organizational systems.
The Managing Director with the Executive Director and the Board is constantly evaluating the long and short-term goals in their effectiveness in achieving the mission of the Watts House Project. The Managing Director will work in close collaboration with the Executive Director in the fulfillment of their responsibilities.
Responsibilities include but are not limited to:
PROGRAMMING RESPONSIBILITIES
* Serves as Chief Organizer with the Executive Director & with Board approval, responsible for selection of artist, architects and designers and whom they collaborate with in House Renovation Projects.
* Assures all projects are produced in accordance to WHP’s programming goals.
* With the Executive Director and with Board approval defines scope and direction of all WHP programming. Work in coordination with Resident Coordinator, Executive Director, additional staff as needed, and Board.
*With the Executive Director and with Board and the Board’s approval, develops and coordinates public programming at the Platform, within the neighborhood and in coordination with residents, stakeholders and organizational partners.
RESOURCE DEVELOPMENT AND FINANCIAL MANAGEMENT
RESPONSIBILITIES
* With the Executive Director and Board of Directors, assures adequate funds are available for annual operations and programs, and to meet strategic goals related to sustainability and/or growth. Creates strategies with Executive Director and the Board for maintaining an engaged donor base, producing effective fundraising activities, and maximizing earned income.
*Works with the Executive Director in the preparation and management of the annual budget for Board approval. Assures effective delegation of financial management responsibilities among the Board of Directors Finance Committee, staff, and outside providers in carrying out the position’s responsibility for the overall financial and operational condition of WHP.
* Partners with the Executive Director and Board of Directors in initiating and preparing long-term plans and budgets.
* Works in coordination with the Executive Director, Development Director and Board and provides oversight in preparation of all grant requests and participates in the proposal process when appropriate.
OPERATIONS RESPONSIBILITIES
*Oversees overall WHP operations of public programs and building projects and assures that all activity is carried out in concert with organizational policies and goals, and in compliance with applicable laws, regulations and building codes.
(a licensed professional must perform these duties with the Managing Director & the Executive Director with Board approvals)
* Works in coordination with the Executive Director in the hiring of staff and consultants upon board approval of position and salary/fee
BOARD AND EXTERNAL RELATIONS RESPONSIBILITIES
*Serves as a liaison (with Executive Director) between WHP staff and board.
* Serves as a liaison for the Board of Advisors and obtains their counsel as appropriate.
* Represents (with Executive Director) WHP in the local community. Works to promote the organization’s influence and visibility in Los Angeles, as well as its national and international profile.Works with the Managing Director and the Board to coordinate and work with other organizations in the area.
* Partners with Executive Director and the Board of Directors to develop and maintain effective communications and systems that ensure the Board’s ability to govern effectively.
* Works effectively with Executive Director and the Board of Directors and in partnership with a variety of individuals and organizations essential to the organization’s success – residents, local stakeholders, artists, dealers, donors, the media, local government, business people, volunteers and the general public.
The ideal candidate for this position will have 3-5 years experience in a high-level management position of a non-profit organization of similar scale. The candidate will have excellent verbal and written communication skills (preferably in both English and Spanish), experience as a community organizer, and preferably experience in the Watts neighborhood or surrounding region. The candidate will have excellent event-planning and organizational skills, and proven ability as a fundraiser. The candidate will have experience relating productively to a highly engaged and involved board, and will put boundless energy into developing a fledgling organization into a well-oiled machine. The candidate will have detail-oriented experience in working with complex legal and fiscal matters, skills in creating and reporting on operational budgets, skills allocating and reporting on restricted grant monies, and a working knowledge of the complexities of community-engaged art and neighborhood development. Knowledge of social and public art practice, community redevelopment, housing, and/or architecture and construction are very helpful. The approved salary for this position is $42,000 per annum.
To apply, send a resume, cover letter, and three references to:
My student educators were fortunate enough to meet Bob Gober a few weeks ago on a walkthrough of the Charles Burchfield retrospective he curated at the Hammer. Gober, preeminent contemporary sculptor and curator of several highly regarded shows, approached my five UCLA students in the midst of their docent training, and quietly introduced himself. He didn’t say much about the show, but impressed upon them gravely how important their jobs were – to him personally as well as to the future audience of this landmark show. “You are representing this show to the world,” he said, urgency in his voice. “That’s a serious job.”
With that introduction, I’d like to consider audience in this post, and to expand the discussion of audience into one of taste and accessibility. As Martha Rosler says, “It seems appropriate to begin a discussion of ‘audience’ by taking note of the fact that there is anything to discuss.”
There has been much written about judgment and taste in regards to fine art, most notably by Bourdieu and those who have built upon his work. Yet as Rosler so astutely points out, a (not so) latent refusal to acknowledge a mass audience (thereby implying a non-art audience) is still par for the course in the art world. She writes: “Unconcern with audience has become a necessary feature of art producers’ professed attitudes and a central element of the ruling ideology of Western art set out by its critical discourse.” This critical discourse rests on the fact that without the need for broad appeal, the purpose of art can remain thus ill-defined. When we need to appeal to a mass audience, we need to more clearly define the purpose of art, and what it can achieve. And if we do that, then we strip art of its freedom, its creativity of expression, and its “art for art’s sake” self-actualization.
I’m a fairly practical person, and I’ve always felt uneasy when people use the “art for art’s sake” phrase, usually as a way to avoid criticality or condemn the political and the contextual. I understand the difficulty in compromising aesthetic judgments to put on shows or make work with the broadest appeal – I am as critical as any of the unchecked blockbuster show, put on to put butts in seats or, as the case may have it, shuffling bodies in crowded galleries. My issue with “art for art’s sake” lies in the obfuscation of how judgment and taste are applied by curators, collectors, and art producers, and in the way that mass audiences are regarded by these professionals. They are either philistines who must be somehow imbued with the “right” sensibility, or the converted whose innate sensibilities enjoy reinforcement. “Art for art’s sake” perpetuates the cultural myth that art is universal, and urges us not to dig deeper into the contextual role of art. We either appreciate it or we don’t, because it is what it is and needs no prior explanation. Rosler pinpoints this divide quite eloquently:
“Mass audiences know that there is a restricted body of knowledge that must be used to interpret the codes of art at the same time that they recognize their outsider status. One is left confronting a void of permissible response out of which the exit line is often an apologetic and self-derogating “I don’t know anything about art, but I know what I [don’t] like.” For the art world audience, the knowledge that informs their taste recedes in unimportance compared with the compliment to their inborn “sensibilities” (taste) that an appreciation of high art offers.”
This view of audience as responsive only to their “inborn sensibilities” gets suspiciously close to a discussion of values, rather than one of acquiring knowledge. As one who has trained in conflict resolution, I know very well that once the argument gets down to values, very little ground can be given or gained through compromise or rational discourse. When art becomes about “knowing” rather than “appreciating,” however, we can begin to analyze the prior knowledge necessary for a rational judgment of art, and the opportunities possible to provide access to these codes.
The Burchfield show is just such an opportunity, and Bob Gober most certainly recognized that when he spoke to my docents with such gravity. He labored precisely and carefully with a pedagogically like-minded colleague of mine, the fantastic curator Cindy Burlingham, to abrogate the notion of the visionary, the genius, the poetic soul. Though Burchfield was all of those things in some way, in Gober’s show, it is clear that the man worked at it his entire life. Through his scrapbooks, his wallpaper, his labored drawings and doodles and carefully reconstructed paintings, we see the vision of a man who built up a knowledge and an understanding of his own practice that only really paid off in the last 15 years of his life. And through this show, visitors have an opportunity to build up their own knowledge – of artistic process, of the time period, of the way the art world worked at the time (a vitrine featuring the remarkable Sunwise Turn bookstore in New York, a little-recognized hub of modernism at the time, is a wonderful window into this social context). Bob Gober was absolutely right to impress upon the docents the seriousness of their job – they have the opportunity to either reinforce art appreciation as the arena of the elite, or to open up a base of knowledge and the painstaking but rewarding study of art as a possibility for anyone.
I’ve had a pretty ridiculous week, so forgive this quick post - with luck, I will have more time to get back to theory and inquiry this weekend. Rather than maintain radio silence, though, I wanted to share my excitement about this announcement from Creative Time that I just received about the fantastic group The Yes Men:
Creative Time is proud to announce:
THE LEONORE ANNENBERG PRIZE FOR ART AND SOCIAL CHANGE FIRST ANNUAL AWARD of $25,000 to THE YES MEN, Oct 23
Creative Time is pleased to announce the inception of a new, annual, $25,000 award: The Leonore Annenberg Prize for Art and Social Change, presented by Creative Time to an artist who has committed her/his life’s work to social change in powerful and productive ways. The first recipient of the prize is The Yes Men, and it will be bestowed during the opening ceremony for The Creative Time Summit: Revolutions in Public Practice, on October 23 from 6 to 8pm in the historic Stephen A. Schwarzman building of the New York Public Library. The ceremony will feature an introduction by Amy Goodman, the host of the award-winning program Democracy Now!. The award is generously supported by The Annenberg Foundation.
From the Press Release:
The Yes Men agree their way into the fortified compounds of commerce, ask questions, and then smuggle out the stories of their hijinks to provide a public glimpse at the behind-the-scenes world of business. Over the years they have also launched some very unconventional products—from the Dow Acceptable Risk calculator (a new industry standard for determining how many deaths are acceptable when achieving large profits), to Vivoleum (a new renewable fuel sourced from the victims of climate change. The gonzo political activists were the subject of a documentary film, The Yes Men (2003), and their new documentary film, The Yes Men Fix the World (2009), was awarded the prestigious audience award at the Berlin International Film Festival.
Still from The Yes Men Fix the World
Their film The Yes Men Fix the World recently debuted in theatres in the UK and on HBO in the United States, and will be released nationally in theatres in October. More information about the film and a trailer can be found at theyesmenfixtheworld.com.
The Yes Men perfectly capture the spirit of the award, which honors an artist or artist group for historically significant work that has an expansive impact on society. At the ceremony, they will give an interactive, performative lecture.
The prize will be awarded in a ceremony that also opens The Creative Time Summit: Revolutions in Public Practice. The Summit is presented by Creative Time and LIVE from the NYPL as part of the LIVE from the NYPL fall season. The Summit continues on October 24, from 10am to 7:30pm, with over 35 international cultural producers whose work has made an impact in the world giving presentations.
These artists, thinkers, and activists range from anarchist collectives to art world luminaries. Their approaches intend to not only reflect, but also act upon moments of historic change, breaking the traditional barriers between art, culture, and politics. The Creative Time Summit will give attendees a chance to see a vast array of artistic practices in rapid-fire presentations, taking place back-to-back all day. These artistic practices defy easy museological categories, and aggressively blend art, politics, and space. Presenters include Okwui Enwezor, Thomas Hirschhorn, Temporary Services, Baltimore Development Cooperative, Not An Alternative, and many more.
I have been a fan of the Yes Men for a long time - they elegantly and brilliantly use satire in pursuing both social justice and political causes, and have a hearty set of balls to boot. They have a knack for infiltrating arenas in which they do not belong and turning inexplicable social systems on their heads. Bravo to them.
If you are interested in seeing their new film, “The Yes Men Fix the World,” the Hammer is hosting the West Coast Premiere on October 21st at 7pm. Check out the website for more information - like all Hammer programs, it is free, so if you are in LA, I hope to see you there.
