Last week, the fantastic Justin Langlois of Broken City Lab asked me to answer this question for an interview series they are doing:
Is social practice, as a term or label, more valuable in extending the reach and possibility of visual artists, or more valuable as an articulation of an entirely different space and mode of production?
Interesting question, and I had a great time answering it. You can read my submission here.
The parting thought of my answer is that there is danger in the label social practice, the danger of false expectation - that everything will be fun, easy, feel-good, and bring people together. When in fact, social practice can often be challenging, disturbing, and deal with some really unpleasant subject matter, all to attempt to bring light to some injustice or rework societal systems from some different angle.
Installation of the map outside of LAPD headquarters. Suzanne Lacy, Three Weeks in January, 2012.
As a case in point, soon after I wrote this answer I went to Suzanne Lacy’s Three Weeks in January candlelight vigil and performance. This reiteration of her 1977 projectThree Weeks in May visually catalogued the past three weeks’ incidents of reported rape in Los Angeles through an enormous map installation on the exterior of the LAPD headquarters downtown, accompanied by months of conversations with activists, educational seminars, performances, a sound installation, and various other elements that comprise a signature Lacy project. The culminating performance asked audience members to share their stories, reflect on the crisis of rape in individual lives and in the city as a whole, and finally to commit to a goal to end rape and sexual violence in the next 40 years. Most powerfully, generations of rape activists took the stage at the end after sharing some truly heart-wrenching stories that were difficult to hear, and more than once brought tears to my eyes.
Activists at the final ceremony for Three Weeks in January, January 27.
As squirm-worthy as it seems on the surface, truly examining this subject is a rarity in any forum, especially if one does not have to. It is easy to simply push out of one’s mind. But such is the importance of projects like Lacy’s and their power. As if to reinforce these thoughts in my head, one supporter of the project thanked me for being there. “This means a lot that you are here,” she said. “There are a lot of more fun events you could have gone to tonight.” She was right, but I wouldn’t have traded in my meaningful experience for anything easier or more feel-good.
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.
I recently wrote an article on similarities in the recent evolution of anarchist groups in Los Angeles and art collectives or artists engaging in social practice, specifically comparing the Revolutionary Autonomous Communities‘ weekly food program and the Artists for Social Justice. Below is an excerpt in which I attempt to trace historical similarities between the avant-garde and anarchism, finally contrasting those to relatively recent strategies of horizontalism, reflexivity, and exchange.
Look out for Issue #7 of the Journal of Aesthetics and Protest when it comes out in a couple of weeks – not only will you find my full article, but also a constellation of other great writings.
The similarities between the avant-garde and anarchism extend beyond their similar “shock and rupture” tactics; political theorists and art historians alike have declared both to be failed movements. In the avant-garde movement, this failure arises from a paradoxical hierarchy encased in the primacy of the art object. If the art object itself contains the power to elicit epiphany, than the artist is elevated to a status “uniquely open to the world,” and viewers that are open to the transformative experience of the object are likewise more educated and socially aware than those who are not.[1]
Anarchists struggle with a similar created hierarchy, often denouncing those with any connection to institutions and systems of the current society. This has led to an insular mindset dominated by ideologues, with adherence to extremism serving as a measure of commitment. The desire to completely dissociate has undermined the goals of systematic revolution and greater freedom, replacing one hegemony with another.
Complicating these intrinsic problematics is the proven ability of capitalist systems to subsume and harness radical tactics into new forms of control. Belgian political philosopher Chantal Mouffé writes: “The aesthetic strategies of the counterculture: the search for authenticity, the ideal of self-management, the anti-hierarchical exigency, are now used in order to promote the conditions required by the current mode of capitalist regulation, replacing the disciplinary framework characteristic of the Fordist period.”[2] As mass marketing employs the surface aesthetics of the avant-garde or revolutionary iconography to imbue brands with “cool,” strategies of the alternative arts movement are now foundational pillars of the worldwide art market, and corporate structures (as in Google or Apple) embrace a superficial ideal of egalitarian self-management, the “shock and rupture” tactics of the radical left are effectively deflated.
Because of this systematic adaptability, many have claimed “any form of critique is automatically recuperated and neutralized by capitalism.”[3] In the past few years, however, both artistic practice and anarchist organizing have come to embrace new strategies of radicality that are distanced from “shock” tactics in their commitment to a social and spatial awareness. Exemplified by the two Los Angeles groups (theanarchist RAC, and artistic Artists for Social Justice) that started in 2007, this radicality emerges in self-reflexive organization and practical exchange.
[1]Grant Kester, Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art(Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2004), 27.
[2] Chantal Mouffé, “Art and Democracy: Art as an Agonistic Intervention in Public Space,” Art as a Public Issue 14 (2008), 7.
“How might one structure an institution that is designed to problematize the idea of the institution?”
In Summer’s Artforum, Taraneh Fazeli poses this question in her reflection on the Night School, a recent hybrid collective artwork-as-pedagogical-structure conceived by Anton Vidokle and housed by the New Museum in New York City.
This question implicitly accepts the paradox of institutional critique, and Vidokle’s search for an answer bespeaks a series of prior attempts and “productive failures” like Manifesta 6. This biennial in Cyprus was organized around an art school structure, but was cancelled before it began. This prompted notions of experimentation and interesting failure, which became the central themes of “United Nations Plaza,” the result of Manifesta 6’s relocation to Berlin comprising a series of lectures and discussions that subverted pedagogical convention.
The Night School grew out of this project and morphed into a series of seminars and workshops over a year that involved multiple artists and cultural thinkers giving both public sessions and private workshops. The “core group” of 28 accepted applicants (of which Taraheh Fazali was one) committed themselves to a year of private sessions and meetings in addition to the public events. The series of eleven seminars were offered on three “tracks,” each on the last weekend of each month. The tracks were loosely organized around subjects like progressive cultural practices (Liam Gillick, Martha Rosler, and Boris Groys), artistic agency (Walid Raad, Jalal Toufic, Okwui Enwezor, Maria Lind, and Paul Chan) and self-organization in the field of cultural production (Rirkrit Tiravanija, Zhang Wei and Hu Fang, Natascha Sadr Haghighian and Raqs Media Collective).
Fazeli recalls her participation in the Night School’s core group, and ultimately believes that Night School was mix of successes and failures – success at facilitating a core group of art world insiders to achieve greater theoretical and cultural knowledge as well as the social networks that provide the armature for professional advancement - but a failure in its ability to problematize the institution in which it exists. Rather it legitimated the museum as a “center for power” and “hotbed of intellectual activity” as Martha Schwendener of the Village Voice describes – the museum easily co-opted dissent by inviting it in, and assembling art stars and individuals with high intellectual capital to participate in this series raised the New Museum’s cutting-edge profile.
I understand the “failure” that Fazeli talks about – the “public” audience of the Night School events could not experience the same level of engagement as the privileged core group and were already self-selected due to societal conventions surrounding museums. As Schwendener says, it was a “long way from Paolo Freire or…Hebert Kohl teaching kids in Harlem.” But institutions exist to perpetuate themselves, and the New Museum has an audience of art students and art world types who were exceedingly well served by this project. Both writers admit how complicated, gratifying, and ethical it was compared to a traditional pedagogical model. It is not really the purpose of the museum to teach the oppressed or to solve societal problems. The museum can, however, function as a site where these questions are raised and discussed, where education and institutions and power can be decoded and reapplied. Just because the museum benefits from such structures is no reason for them not to exist.
So the question remains – can such discussion and sustained pedagogical structures actually problematize the institutions in which they exist? If they can only do so by somehow breaking down and delegitimizing the umbrella institution, then no. The art world doesn’t work that way, not in reality. But working subtly within the paradox of institutional critique, adding to institutional reputation while simultaneously raising questions of theory and power amongst the stakeholders (the art world) can only be beneficial. One aspect does not negate the other. It is disingenuous to wish for a purity of critique, to ignore real contexts or real barriers – that constitutes shooting oneself in the foot before the project even begins (Manifesta, perhaps?). Much better to dream up an interesting structure with the best of theoretical intentions in mind, and see what transpires in all its complex and messy glory.
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.
With the famous and elusive Kogi Korean BBQ Taco Truck parked just outside, the foot traffic in and out of LAXART, a small non-profit gallery on the Culver City art row, was astounding last night. The crowds might also have been due to the dearth of good summer art shows, and a heightened anticipation for the fall season of edgy new shows and lots of fabulous new work. A steady stream of people wandered into Mexican artist Gustavo Artigas’s project room and filled out ballots to petition that one of six Los Angeles landmarks be demolished. The buildings in question - the Disney Concert Hall, the Pacific Design Center, the Broad Contemporary Art Museum at LACMA, the Kodak Theater, the Staples Center, and the Rodeo Drive boutiques - were selected by a group of Los Angeles architects as those with the least aesthetic value. The voting structures were giant podium-sized ballot boxes with color photographs of the six buildings in question under a piece of plexi on top, and pollees filled out small printed ballots to drop in. The LAXART voting site was the project’s hub, but it was certainly not the only one - the artist has created a website as well as a series of voting structures to be placed throughout the city.
The Staples Center, Downtown (Figueroa Corridor)
Rodeo Drive Boutiques, Beverly Hills
Broad Contemporary Art Center, Mid-Wilshire
The Pacific Design Center, West Hollywood
The Kodak Theater, Hollywood
Walt Disney Concert Hall, Downtown (Bunker Hill)
The press release describes this project thusly: “Artigas’s highly accessible yet formally and intellectually advanced artist interventions in Los Angeles expose the thinness of community and the vast tensions that can foreshadow societal breakdown.”
In general, I agree with that statement. Artigas has a knack for pointing out tension and social resilience in highly elegant metaphors, like his Games series, but I was less certain of the efficacy of this Demolition project in achieving the same results. I actually wrote this bit of the press release on his Games series, about a year ago when I still worked at LAXART and the project was in its initial stages. I’d like to quote it here, because I think reflects quite accurately what I like about Artigas’s work, and will help to highlight some of my issues with Vote for Demolition.
“Gustavo Artigas’s broader practice encompasses institutional critique, the exposure of social tensions through artificially devised, game-based platforms, and the exploration of how abstract notions like borders and social contracts affect reality. These provocative interventions progressed to a new level at the cross-border exhibition inSITE 2000, in which Artigas realized his two-part piece Rules of the Game I & II. In Rules of the Game I, the artist installed handball courts on both sides of the Unites States/Mexico border, which were quickly taken over and utilized by residents. The playful interactions that occurred when a ball would fall on the opposite side of the fence only to be congenially returned emphasized the realities of migration and the superficiality of the made-up border space. Artigas further developed this layered social commentary with Rules of the Game II, in which a Mexican football (soccer) team and an American basketball team negotiated for space on the same court in a Tijuana high school. The tensions and jostling, sometimes approaching violence, were ultimately resolved as the players learned to move fluidly around and between one another, living symbiotically but within two very separate frameworks. His work is simultaneously instantly accessible and highly poetic, and he masterfully uses conflicts to tease out insights into the real out of a morass of socially abstracted concepts.”
Gustavo Artigas, Rules of the Game II, 2000
Glowing press release language aside, I do actually love those two pieces in their simplicity and their power. With Vote for Demolition, though, I just am having trouble making the metaphor work in quite the same way. It is real, in the way that these games were real - there is a familiar process of voting, the petition will be formal and legal, and the possibility of demolition does actually exist outside of fantasy - but just like the games, the actual results are likely to be inconsequential, and the greater meaning is grasped from the symbol this staging becomes. So what does the symbolic hope for demolition, both the voting process and the destruction of a building mean? Clearly Artigas wants to shine a light on the arbitrary nature of the built environment, and recast spatial configuring as a democratic process. He singles out architects to make the building selection, highlighting a generational divide in architectural taste, then polling the public for their opinions on these supposed eyesores. But how is he defining the complex layers of community in Los Angeles? Is he really digging deep into the process of polling, investigating how spatial imaginations shift if you are the audience member at Disney concert hall, or the homeless man outside, or the juror who must park there, or the resident of the apartment building across the way who is blinded by the reflected sun every morning? How are we able to do anything other than speculate randomly about this process and its results?
I am curious to see how the data is brought to bear in the finished incarnation, what insights can be garnered from this demolition effort. Artigas seems to have little commentary on the meaning of architecture in our lives, and is relying on the results of his data to interpret its effect on the societal fabric. Yet I fear his simplistic polling process will yield very little information, and is an underdeveloped idea in comparison to the magnetic poetry of his Games pieces.
This past Wednesday, I gave a brief talk on Joseph Beuys, an artist I find endlessly fascinating because of his hugely influential pedagogical ideas that extend far beyond the physical objects he produced. The talk was a part of the Hammer’s Lunchtime Art Talks, little 30 minute curator-led talks that occur every Wednesday at 12:30pm and are quite popular with the many office building employees around Westwood. The talks are mostly made up of both regulars and those who just wander in … two straight-laced graying men come in regularly, a few well-dressed female employees from the Occidental Petroleum office tower above the Hammer, a youngish 30-something guy in a business suit, a few retirees, some foreign tourists. Some students, scruffy and clutching moleskine notebooks to top it off. The audience for my Beuys talk was fairly representative of this group, and I chose to orient the talk around one of Beuys’ best-known multiples, the Noiseless Eraser (Schnellman No. 101).
Joseph Beuys, Noiseless Blackboard Eraser, 1974
The object was small, literally an eraser that Beuys had signed and then stamped with the seal of his “Organization for Direct Democracy,” originally produced by New York Blackboard, Inc. It was made of pressed felt, a material Beuys knew well, and was surprisingly multicolored, with lovely bits of colored wool running throughout. One of our registrars pulled it out of the depths of our Grunwald Collection, surprising even herself as the collection is mostly works on paper. Since it was so small, we all gathered around a table in the Grunwald center to look at it, and the looks ran the gamut from surprise to confusion to aggression. One woman shocked me by picking up the eraser and shoving it in her friend’s face, “Hey, get a good look!” she cried, laughing.
I launched into my talk after the eraser was returned safely back to the table. I spoke about Beuys’ view on multiples, his idea that the art object represented mutability rather than permanence, that materiality was tenuous and constantly changing due to chemical processes. He saw multiples as objects of condensation for his ideas, as vehicles for distribution. This explained why he made so many (Noiseless Eraser had 550 editions), and why he dreamed of someday creating multiples in the 10s and 20 thousands. He wanted these objects to reach a wide number of people, but also had enough fascination in the methods of distribution in the art world that he accepted the object might only ever be possessed by the world’s elite collectors. In his own words:
“It’s a sort of prop for the memory, yes, a sort of prop in case something different happens in the future.
I’m interested in the distribution of physical vehicles in the form of editions because I’m interested in spreading ideas.
The objects are only understandable in relations to my ideas. The work I do politically has a different effect on people because such a product exists than it would have if the means of expression were only the written word.
Although these products may not seem suitable for bringing about political change, I think more emanates from them than if the ideas behind them were revealed directly.”
I then connected this object to Beuys’ philosophical ideas about the application of heat as initiating change, whether it be Erotic, metaphorical, or physical heat. He believed that one could achieve symbolic acts of transcendence through these chemical conversions. Felt was a material closely connected to heat for Beuys, and hearkens back to his own origin myth, the famous and controversial story of himself being wrapped in felt and fat by Tartar tribesmen in Crimea after his airplane was shot down in World War II. He also had an elevated understanding of the parameters of art, and saw his role in society as that of a shaman or teacher who could guide society in new directions. These “actions” were a different kind of application of heat, and just as much a part of his art practice as his installations, drawings, or sculptures.
Several of Beuys’ well-known sculptures from the 70s were blackboards covered in his scrawls about reform and political activism, the products left behind from his didactic lectures. He saw the lectures as the creative process through which these works were formed. Many of his central concepts and mottos could be found in this work, like “Capital = Art” and “Everyone is an artist.” This “deep pedagogical impulse” as Ina Blom calls it, separated him from other artists in the avant-garde project like Duchamp and Brecht. Whereas these artists believed that the art object itself was imbued with the ability to shock and transform society, Beuys preferred to supplement this intrinsic power by explicitly teaching lessons of artistic and political changed. For Beuys, seeing an unrealized potential in the world and trying to enact it pedagogically was a very different way of viewing the avant-garde project than the chance-based and passive tactics of Brecht and other Fluxus artists.
There I ended the talk by citing my belief in Beuys ongoing influence on generations of younger pedagogically and socially-oriented artists. “Any questions?” I asked.
Hands shot up immediately, first from one of the straight-laced older guys. He asked me first how much the eraser cost (I didn’t know, turns out it goes for around $600-$1000). He asked me who produced the eraser, then he came out with this: “Beuys is playing a joke on us. Capital=art, he said it himself. He’s not being serious, he’s doing this to play up the market, sell this junk as art and pull one over on us.” His frustration with Beuys was palpable. Before I could answer, though, a young guy with a scruffy beard who looked riled up himself said, “No, I think Beuys is completely serious. He sees these objects as imbued with a spiritual power, the ability to spark thoughts and ideas, to initiate change, to shake us out of our complacency.” A British tourist turned to her friend and asked, “Do you think it’s art, Sheila?” Sheila answered, “I think art is anything that an artist can imbue with meaning. And Beuys imbued this with meaning, so yes, I think it’s art.” Someone else said, “It’s like a party favor, a small reminder of some of his more radical ideas.” The straightlaced guy shook his head angrily.
That was about the extent of the conversation, but it was by far one of the more lively discussions we’d had at a Lunchtime Art Talk in a while. It hit me that Beuys’ eraser had acted as a provocation in precisely the fashion he had intended, and for a moment, the museum had become a dynamic place of learning rather than a cemetery for dead things. In Beuys’ words, it was for a moment, more like “a university, with a special department for objects.” To provoke such situations was, to him, the true pedagogical role of the artist.
