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Blogalogue, Part 4: Lee Montgomery

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npr

Picture taken from Switch22

Lee Montgomery got his BA in Film at Bard College, and an MFA in New Genres from the San Francisco Art Institute. As the founder of Neighborhood Public Radio, Lee has received grants from CEC Artslink, the Creative Work Fund, and the Walter and Elise Haas Fund.  He has been an artist in residence with kuda in Novi Sad, Serbia and the Hochschule fur Bildende Kunst in Hamburg.

Neighborhood Public Radio has been named “Best Super Local Radio Station” by San Francisco magazine and has been featured in The San Francsico Chronicle, Punk Planet magazine, Artforum, the Chicago Reader, and Women’s Wear Daily. As a traveling band of guerilla broadcasters, NPR has hosted thematic broadcasts far and wide, including at both Artist’s Television Access and Southern Exposure Gallery in San Francisco’s Mission District,  The DeYoung Museum and the Museum for Contemporary Art Novi Sad, Serbia.  In 2008, NPR completed an unprecedented 4 month residency in a storefront next door to the Whitney Museum as part of the 2008 Whitney Biennial.

In his solo work, Lee continues to explore d.i.y. approaches to technology and issues of copyright law.

Stick around for my blogalogue with Lee by way of Google Wave…because, as if this blogalogue experiment weren’t interesting enough, now all of you who are still eagerly awaiting your invitations to Google Wave have a chance to see the app put to use in real life! Just slap a red hat on my head and call me Mama Noel. The smiles on your faces that I will never see are thanks enough.


Blogalogueing with Lee Montgomery

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Picture 1

LeE:
this is me.. LeE… the one I told you about.
You:
Hi Lee! You know I just realized I could have probably been doing the interview this whole time, just set a deadline and you coulda responded at your leisure.
You:
Here are the four questions I’ve been using as a jumping off point for all the conversations, esp the first one:

1. How do you define systems, networks, and systems vs. networks?
2. What, if any, system and/or network do you feel you are a part of? As individuals? As artists? As NPR?
3. What, if any, systems and/or networks do you feel you are unwillingly a part of? As individuals? As artists? As NPR?
4. How do you feel that your work interfaces with your definition of systems and network?
5. How does the system and/or network act upon your work? What effect, that is entirely out of your control, do systems and/or networks alone have on your work?

You:
Are you there? Just checking in…
LeE:
now I am here
LeE:
in my office.. headed home in about a half hour…
LeE:
I will start answering these quex as soon as I get home….. and you can follow up at your liesure… this google wave thing is awesome that way.
You:
that sounds great. safe travels!
LeE:
alright.. here begin my answers….

1. How do you define systems, networks, and systems vs. networks?
I think I consider the terms largely synonymous, though due to the vagaries of the English language, and perhaps even the nature of technology/corporate ownership, they can take on vastly different meanings. I was thinking of a sewer system versus a network of sewers, or the Columbia Broadcast System (CBS) versus the Cable News Network (CNN). System seems a more generalized word, and in my mind a more centralized almost fascist sense of the concept, whereas a network implies more of a sense of possibility and connection. It is a framework to be used and moved about within rather than a set of rules to be imposed. That said, I see no significant difference between a sewer system and a network of sewers.

2. What, if any, system and/or network do you feel you are a part of? As an individual? As an artist? As NPR?
With NPR, there has certainly been a commentary on the system of corporate owned media networks in the United States. In my recent personal work there has been an engagement with the system of copyright law in the U.S. and abroad. (i.e. http://www.lee-web.net/symphony/). But these are operations within those sewers I was mentioning before.

On the sunny side of the street from that sewer I have had the pleasure, through these endeavours, of collaborating with a number of artists and artist spaces like Kristin Lucas, Artist’s Television Accces, Southern Exposure, Red76, kuda.org and a host of badass and not so badass expressive individuals who have passed through the doors or in front of the microphones of any of the numerous radio stations that NPR has had the pleasure of establishing for short periods of time of the past 6 years.

Recently I found myself attached to the network of University of New Mexico faculty (not yet a Facebook network), which resulted in working with my colleague Catherine Harris to build a system of propellers activated by a hand operated water pump (I just did the pump)… so now I operate within the network of tinkerers who work with water pumps??? (and believe me, there is a network there) … which I guess also puts me in the Ecological/Land Art network.. which is kinda hard to avoid here in New Mexico.

I guess what I am getting at…. is that I like to consider myself part of a network or a system (in the most positive sense) at all times(a really big one), and the more the merrier, for me. I don’t think I work well in a vacuum or in isolation. I love Facebook… and want to make art with it… I love Lee Walton’s work where he interpret’s his friends status messages, though I’m deeply saddened that he hasn’t made a video about any of mine. (We’re in the Lee network after all.) I’m inclined towards an almost new age interpretation of quantum physics, wherein we all realize ourselves as part of a larger whole system, network, whatevs.

But that new age-y side of me gets slightly more rigorous when Felix Guattari is channeled through Tetsuo Kogawa in the form of chaotic and polymorphous radio, described as therapeutic for the user as opposed to the listener when broadcast networks are not networks at all but a single transmitter operated by a talkative individual to cover a radius more scaled to the human body.

“Polymedia are not intended simply to link smaller units into a larger whole:instead they involve the recovery of electronic technology so that individuals can communicate” -Tetsuo Kogawa, from Toward Polymorphous Radio

….and so I wonder about the value of the system or the network aside from as a means of categorization and organization (and thus control), when ultimately, the good stuff, the art, the fun …. happens when you get down to the individuals, and the chaos… when we recognize and truly engage with the difference within the system/network.

4. How do you feel that your work interfaces with your definition of systems and networks?
I think that I have always tried to work to redefine systems, to look for new ways that old systems can be used or changed. Systems: whether of theory or of control should not exist without a system of feedback; and Networks should exist to be expanded or destroyed based on their necessity. So I believe in pushing at the boundaries of networks and trying the patience of systems. Set up a system with no rules… then when the president of the board of directors of National Public Radio barges into your dinky little storefront on the Upper East Side of Manhattan demanding to know who’s in charge, you can accurately and innocently answer, “No-one”.

I think 3 and 5 are also answered somewhere in here.. though if you are insistent, I will happily answer them in the followup section.

Turkish and Other Delights | Burak Arıkan

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Photo by Nursel Kaymaz.

Burak Arıkan is a busy guy. When we met in Istanbul two months ago to discuss his work, he had recently returned to the city from a net art conference in Sao Paulo, Brazil, was preparing to leave for a human rights conference in Senegal the next day, and already had upcoming trips to China and Mongolia scheduled. In addition to his own art practice, which explores the aesthetics of data and networks as a creative medium, Arıkan conducts workshops, teaching students both how to conceptualize their own visual networks and to use the complex programs that render those networks visible, and is also active with various human rights organizations in Turkey. Most recently, he has been busy preparing new work for the Hüseyin Alptekin retrospective that will serve as the inaugural exhibition at SALT, opening on April 9th, that uses his visual mapping technique to explore aspects of Alptekin’s work and biography.

Arıkan’s work takes many forms and extends all the way down from the final, exhibited objects–digital prints, videos–to the hand-crafted electronics and complex software programs that generate those objects. For nearly seven years, his primary project been capturing and making visible the social, political, and economic networks in which all people are embedded and which provide the basic infrastructure of human society. Sometimes the subject of these works are specific communities, such as 2010’s “Antakya Bienniel Artists Network,” which, by mapping the dynamics between individual artists participating in that exhibitions–who had exhibited in the past with whom, how many exhibitions they had participated in over the course of their careers–created a portrait of both that event and the Turkish contemporary art community generally.

 

Burak Arikan, "Antakya Biennial Artists Network," 2010

Burak Arikan, "Antakya Biennial Artists Network," 2010 (close-up)

Other times the subject is the behavior of a single individual, demonstrating the consequences of hundreds of every day actions and activities, such as 2008’s “MYPOCKET” project, which meticulously traced all of Arıkan’s expenditures over the course of many months and then used an algorithm to predict future spending habits. That Arıkan was able to turn a project that sounds more like a scheme hatched by a credit card executive than an artist into a series of installations and works included in exhibitions in  New York, Berlin, Stuttgart, Valencia, and Istanbul testifies to his ability to think flexibly about art’s relationship to commercial activities and economic relationships.

Burak Arikan, "MyPocket," installation view, Neuberger Museum, 2009.

Arıkan began working with computers at a young age. Disappointed that the first computer his father brought home didn’t have any games, he set about learning how to program his own. Eventually more computer games became available, but he soon grew bored with gaming and moved on to other pursuits.  But in the mid-1990s, when the Internet became increasingly available in Turkey, Arıkan once again became captivated by computer technology.  While at first he and his friends were primarily interested in using the Internet to download guitar tab (the visual guides guitarists use to learn songs’ chord progressions), he quickly became fascinated by the independence from the constraints of place and geographical location which that technology enabled. “The Internet was a very liberating thing for me,” he explains, “and I felt that [sense of liberation]. So I put almost all my efforts into learning about it.”

He learned HTML and started building his own websites. This period of discovery and exploration coincided with Arıkan’s undergraduate work in civil engineering, a topic for which he did not have much enthusiasm, feeling the field to be “archaic,” in large part due to its failure to embrace computerized technology. Increasingly interested in the intersection of technology, politics, and cultural production, he decided to pursue a master’s in visual communication at Bilgi University in Istanbul, which he describes as having “changed my life completely” by opening him up to the world of art history and theory. After completing his degree at Bilgi, he began a second master’s program, in Media Arts and Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Laboratory. Working in MIT’s Physical Language Workshop, led by John Maeda, Arıkan began to explore the aesthetic and conceptual possibilities of networks and networking technology in depth. For example, in the 2005 project Micro Fashion Network: Color, Arıkan and a partner used a camera and custom-designed software program to record and process the colors worn by passersby over a period of time. The accumulated data was then represented using three different methods: as human figures, as abstract boxes, and as a complex network of colors.

Burak Arikan, "Micro Fashion Network," 2005

When the American economy tanked in 2008 and hundreds of thousands of people lost their jobs, the rallying cry of hiring experts brought in by news programs and magazines to advise the panicking, unemployed masses was “harness the power of your network.” In today’s world of e-commerce and viral marketing, networks seem to be worth their weight in gold. But what is the power of a network? And what happens to that power when it’s made visible, its ethereal qualities pinned down like insect specimens and its routes mapped out for all to see?

These are the kinds of questions posed by works such as Ergenekon.tc (2009). For this project, Arıkan created a program that culled information about an alleged extra-military, ultranationalist terrorist group  called Ergenekon from the 2,455 page bill of indictment claiming that the group colluded with government and military officials to discredit the Justice and Development (AKP) party and strengthen the political position of secular politicians and their allies in the Turkish military. Arıkan’s program did what no human could do: it read the entire document and filtered the information it contained, specifically pulling out nouns and then connecting them based on their distance from each other within the text. He then used a second program to draw on this data to generate visual networks of individuals named in the bill of indictment, which he exhibited at Delüks, an exhibition space in Istanbul. In addition to the maps, he also wallpapered the gallery walls with pages from the massive, impenetrable document itself.  Viewers were then encouraged to draw on and embellish the pages at will, inserting their own interpretations of the issue at hand into the exhibition.

Burak Arıkan, "Ergenekon.tc," 2009.

Burak Arıkan, "Ergenekon.tc," installation shot, Delüks, Istanbul, 2009.

In addition to his contributions to the upcoming show at SALT, Arıkan is currently working on making the programs he uses to generate his visual networks online so that anyone can use them. Through his teaching and workshop activities, he is already actively engaged with making these tools available to a wider public, but once online he will be free to move on to other projects. Given Arıkan’s clear insight into the social dynamics of Turkish society and human relations generally, it will undoubtedly be exciting to see where his attention focuses next.

Open Enrollment | In Poor Taste,* Lunch with Jani Leinonen

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Jani Leinonen

I was waiting in line to buy a movie ticket when I heard the news: Jani Leinonen had been incarcerated. Conversations with my Finnish friends in the previous weeks had been gripped with anxiety over the fate of a kidnapped Ronald McDonald figurine from a McDonald’s restaurant in Helsinki. A series of YouTube videos chronicled the antics of the activist group, the Food Liberation Army: beginning with the abduction of a Ronald McDonald statue on January 31, the delivery of eight demands to the McDonald’s corporation to divulge unsavory secrets of their food production processes (see video below), an invitation proffered to McDonald’s employees to speak out, and lastly the grim execution of Ronald McDonald on Friday, February 11, 2011.

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wcBuRSzCbM8]

Nearly two weeks following Ronald’s guillotine-style beheading, Leinonen agreed to recount his recent stay in the big house with me. I had imagined that the artist Jani Leinonen would match the bombastic hype of the events reported in the recent media flurry. Parallels were drawn–I hoped with hyperbole–between the Food Liberation Army and terrorist groups such as al-Qaeda. I prepared myself to face a brash and dangerous character. Truthfully, I was afraid—I don’t make it a habit of lunching with potential terrorists.

My fears were allayed within minutes. It was immediately apparent that the artist and the affable person across the table in a red woven hat with white snowflakes overlap in name only. As we talked, Leinonen picked at a smudge of white paint on his right hand, a gesture that removed the last vestiges of the artist from the conversation. Though the artist might dabble in petty theft and vandalism, Jani, the ordinary person, enjoys snowboarding and strawberry milkshakes. My erroneous preconceptions of Leinonen disintegrated as he explained a belief in the artist’s responsibility to mediate social and civil injustices.

A contemporary artist such as Leinonen is a cultivated spokesperson; the artist is merely a mouthpiece for the cause or agenda that fuels the work. In graduate school in the United States, it cynically occurred to me that self-promotion can sometimes be an indispensable stratagem for success; cleverly, it can be dissolved into the conceptual thrust of one’s artistic output. In Finland, however, those who willingly bask in the limelight are often reproached for immodesty. Far from an exception to the rule, international coverage of Leinonen’s mock terrorism landed him in jail.

God Bless, sign from a street beggar in a gold frame, 2009. Courtesy the artist.

Born in 1978, Leinonen represented Finland in the Nordic & Danish Pavilion during the 2009 Venice Biennale, seven years after his graduation from the Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki. For this exhibition, Leinonen amassed handmade signs from street beggars from numerous countries displaying a synonymous plea for compassion. In the recent project linked to the Food Liberation Army, Leinonen employs and simultaneously holds hostage the marketing structures of corporate giants like McDonald’s, in addition to the celebrity culture perpetuated by the media. Leinonen’s paintings, installations, performances, sculptures, and videos liberally borrow from the colorful language of advertising to comment on production—both the literal systems of food processing and the immaterial residue of cultural producers.

Jani Leinonen, installation shot from the Venice Biennale, 2009. Courtesy the artist.

The following interview took place at Ravintola Nolla in Helsinki on February 22, 2011.

Jacquelyn A. Gleisner: Is that your real name, Jani Leinonen? It sounds like John Lennon to me.

Jani Leinonen: Like a Finnish version? I never thought of it that way, but I guess if you say it quickly. My best friend Riiko and I have this competition to see whose name gets twisted more by foreigners. His full name is Riiko Sakkinen. In Japan it was once spelled Ricco Sannen. My best one was in Pittsburgh–Yanni Leinn.

JAG: And your friend Riiko, is he also part of the Food Liberation Army?

JL: Actually, no. He wanted to be a part of it, but I never told him about it. The whole thing was supposed to be a big secret. Then stuff happened.

JAG: Meaning you were arrested?

JL: Yes, and everyone found out that I was responsible.

JAG: Were there any doubts that you were responsible?

JL: Yeah, because we tried to make it as anonymous as possible. Art is such a fictional way of communicating that people don’t really take it seriously. There are only a handful of people that actually go to galleries and then think the things through that they see. There is a problem of context and also the tag of art. I wanted to make Ronald’s kidnapping look real for as long as possible. There were no names. My plan was to display the whole spectacle in an exhibition a few months from the actual event. Sometimes things don’t really work out the way you plan them. Once my name came out, people thought, “Oh, this was art.” And that neutralized the work.

JAG: Has the McDonald’s corporation responded to any of the questions from the YouTube video?

JL: Well, through the media they have responded to the reporters’ questions, but they were vague.

Jani Leinonen, installation shot from the show "On the Right Track," Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, 2009. Courtesy the artist.

JAG: Is it true that you’re quite a big fan of McDonald’s?

JL: Well, yeah. I go there a lot. I am ashamed of it, but I do. Many of friends here are in the food business. They are trying to make a little revolution by choosing not only organic, but more local, ethical, and non-industrial food products. Some of my friends own an organic grocery store and they have been experiencing the problems in the food industry in the shop. Consumers want cheap food and they think that things have to be done in a certain way. It’s been interesting to follow as an outsider.

These issues are especially important because there is a problem with freedom of speech. People in positions like advertising can’t say the things that they want to say out loud. They’re afraid that the money they are making for their company will go away. Money has shut their mouths. Their position in politics or something else makes them really scared to be involved in anything as radical as stealing a plastic store decoration. I don’t have clients that have demands or contracts with advertisers I have to please. Most people are tied to the place where they get their money. Artists have freedom of speech and a responsibility of speaking.

JAG: Do you more feel hesitant now in light of recent events to speak your mind in future projects?

JL: Yeah, I guess. We never were trying to hide from the police because I thought that they would never bother. They could have just made one phone call and found out that it’s me. We did cover our tracks from the reporters because we needed anonymity. The police incident was very dramatic. There were six cops with search warrants at my studio. They cuffed me and threw me into jail for thirty hours. I thought I was just stealing a store decoration, but I must have done something much worse.

JAG: What happened when you were in jail?

JL: They detained me for twenty-eight hours. I thought that I had made a fictional piece and we were acting like terrorists. All of the images that we used in this project I have used in other media like in my paintings; this was just a different venue. When we put it on the internet, suddenly it became real. I guess the police acted like bad cops after we acted like the bad guys.

When they came to my house, they really roughed me up. And I thought, shit—I have never been to jail! Afterwards my janitor who opened the door for the police said that they were laughing. They were saying that they have never had so much fun, but I was scared as hell. I was thinking, “What the fuck did I do? Did I do something more serious that I didn’t even think of?”

JAG: In the future, are you interested in continuing the cause of exposing the processes of food production in large corporations such as McDonald’s?

JL: I don’t really know if this revealed anything. The initial aim was that the reporters would start asking the questions from McDonald’s. We wanted to hand the reporters a really nice package of information and then they would turn to McDonald’s to ask the questions. Instead, the reporters called the police. I guess it was a failure in that sense. Discussions have started in the media about the food industry, perhaps not directly related to this. Most of my artistic production is about food products, playing with the symbols and the advertising that are used.

JAG: Do your paintings involving pornographic images of women also relate to the food industry or the idea of consumption?

JL: Yeah, actually in most of those pornographic works the clothes that are painted on the women are from food advertisements like ice cream packages, for example. There are maybe ten works that are from high fashion, but most of the porn works are actually from the food industry.

I don’t think that I can stay outside the system. I want to engage with society and create a spectacle. Then the chain of events and the reaction reveals something about the whole of the society and how it works. There’s no way to predict the outcome. I was sure that we would be in the news in Finland, but I never thought I would go to jail. I can laugh about it now, but I wasn’t laughing when I was being thrown in jail.

Jani Leinonen, "Crunchatize Me Cap'n," acrylic paint on pornography, 2009. Courtesy the artist.

JAG: Do you regret doing the last project at all?

JL: No. Of course I said that I regret it during the interrogations. I guess that I did have regrets when I was almost crying in the dark cellar. I told them everything. I thought that I was making another piece of fiction, but somehow it was real. There was no harm done to anybody and I thought we might be actually making people laugh. There was no damage done to any property. The statue is actually there now—we brought Ronald back. It was all very innocent. When you look at it from that perspective, it’s crazy what happened. Now we’ve received so many e-mails from regular people and from people working at McDonald’s. If the piece was originally presented as art, I don’t think that the reception would have been the same.

JAG: So this is not the end for the Food Liberation Army?

JL: No, definitely not. I have many plans.

JAG: Can you talk about how your philosophy regarding socially interactive work started? Can you begin with your experiences as a student here in Helsinki?

JL: I can tell you the history of all my art schools. When I was seven, my mom took me to an art school for children. When I asked her why she took me there, she said that I wanted to go there. She would have never thought of taking me there. I had brilliant teachers there. The best teacher was not an art teacher but a Finnish teacher. She was very Duchampian—she thought that everything was art. She wasn’t just talking about paintings. She talked about literature and how it has affected the politics of the world. She was drawing a huge picture of the world in Finnish class. Then, I was accepted to the Academy during the second grade of high school. I finished the high school in three years and went directly to the Academy. That took five years. I did my civil service in the Academy which was one and a half years. And then I stayed there for two years as an assistant. After that I thought maybe my time in art school is done.

JAG: What was your work like at the Academy of Fine Art?

JL: Very confused. I have been painting since I was a kid, but the puberty of the painting hit me when I was at the academy. Even though I was in the painting department at the academy, I barely painted. I was conceptually challenging the teachers and asking, “Why is this good art, why is this bad art?” Finland’s most famous artist was Juhani Palmu back then. He painted landscapes and he sold a shitload of work. Of course, my professors hated him. I thought that it was such an unjustified hate. It was just landscape painting—it wasn’t really that bad.

There were dozens of artists of the same quality, but the teachers weren’t talking about the others artists at all. It was because this guy was in the media all the time. He was like the rap star of Finnish art back then—he wore lots of gold and had lots of rings and of course, very tacky suits. For me it was very interesting that the professors were only talking about his art. They actually hated him because of his media appearance, not his art.

I decided that I wanted to get to know this guy. I walked into his gallery and I said, “I am from the art school and do you have a summer job for me?” When I worked there over the summer, I got to know him. Everybody was outraged that I went to work for this guy that everybody hated.

Later I used his work as readymades. I took his works as my own to shows to piss people off. It wasn’t about the art. They were using the art, talking through the art about something else—about values and about systems of valuing art. I wanted to make that transparent. I wanted to make them realize that it’s not the art that is actually the issue here but something else.

The whole study process for me was about questioning what’s going on with the media and the art world—opening it up for myself and asking really stupid questions. The professors had all these contradictions about what good art is. They were moralists, especially in the painting department at that time. It really pissed me off. Eventually I became be good friends with many of the professors, but at first I questioned everything.

JAG: Do you have any interest in teaching yourself?

JL: Yeah, I have been teaching some courses and I give lectures all the time. It’s fun— I like it. I haven’t found the right way to combine doing my own art and teaching. Especially lectures, I really stress over them a lot. I would rather hire an actor to do all my lectures because I don’t really enjoy it. I have hired actors in the past to speak for me. Actually the head terrorist in the video is a talented actor who has done a few speeches for me.

One speech was for the board of the University of Helsinki. I was invited me to give a talk at Finland’s Independence Day Gala. There were maybe six hundred people in tuxedos attending the event. I was filming the whole thing with a camera from a balcony. Finally this actor got to the stage. The speech began by talking about the identity of a citizen. What is my national identity and what does it really mean to be a part of a nation? It’s such a huge entity but it is complete fiction—it’s a fictional community. It can’t be a real community because people don’t really know each other. Two thousand miles up north, there are Finns that I have nothing in common with. Still we are in this weird community together.

So, he starts doubting the whole idea of this national identity—perhaps it is not real. He goes on to talk about his own identity. What is really real in my own identity? Most of our identities are created, maybe even our sexuality. It got deeper and deeper and then finally, he said, “Who am I? Am I Jani Leinonen? Maybe you are? Or maybe it’s that guy over there filming the whole thing?” Then suddenly, all six-hundred people turn to my direction, and I waved.

JAG: What are some examples of lectures that you have given in the past?

JL: A long time ago I had this very nice, very business-like PowerPoint presentation. People wanted me to talk about my art but instead, I talked about this company called “Jani Leinonen.” I wore a suit and the presentation showed how the company will grow and what product lines we have. For example, we had uniques and we had mass-productions. I had marketing key chains and leaflets. When I distributed them to the people, they said, “What the fuck is this?” I did it in such a dry, credible manner that everyone thought it was real. It was very interesting because the people were so excited to ask me questions.

Mostly people want to hear me talk about my art and many people from the universities and art schools ask me to talk about artist branding. Suddenly, I am forced to talk about how to market your career as an artist, like what do you do when you are an artist other than paint paintings.

Jani Leinonen, "Oats," acrylic paint on Quaker Oats packaging, 2009. Courtesy the artist.

JAG: Has the notion of branding been something that you’ve emphasized in your own career?

JL: No, not really. Maybe I have unconsciously. This alter ego that has the name as me is a fictional character. I use him to bring out things. He’s not really me. I have my real life and a family—these things have nothing to do with the artist. Since I have been thinking through this fictional character so much, it is actually easy to talk from his perspective.

As a student, I wanted to get to know the art world very well. I was studying it—checking out how things are done. I made up projects that were socially involving. One project was a National Championship of Art which was a wrestling tournament that I invited artists to. The artists wore these huge Sumo suits and they wrestled. The judges were the authorities of the art world—art critics, museum directors, art historians, gallerists—all the most important people in Finland’s art community.

JAG: And who won?

JL: Aurora Reinhard. She’s a Finnish artist. The judges weren’t evaluating the wrestling. They were evaluating the artists based on artistic match or game, even though the artists truly did wrestle. I called Kiasma and asked if they would be interested in hosting this project for one night at its theater. And they said yes. I thought it was more interesting to learn by experience rather than reading about theory. Nobody taught that in school—nobody was talking about the social structures of the art world. They said, “Paint!” And that was that. For me, art has never been about painting only. It is a whole world.

JAG: Is there a hierarchy between painting and your other projects–like the more socially engaging works?

JL: No, I do so many different things. This Ronald thing came out of a certain frustration that I felt. I can’t do certain things with paintings or sculptures—they are just not working. They are not telling the story and people are not taking them seriously. I don’t think painting is dead. There is still an audience for painting, but I wanted to talk to a different audience. People have bizarre expectations and ideas about contemporary art.

Jani Leinonen, "Elovena Sunset," acrylic on canvas, 200 x 320 cm. Courtesy the artist.

JAG: What contemporary art do you like?

JL: Superflex is one of my favorites. Also, my friend Riiko Sakkinen has probably influenced me more than anybody from art history. There’s a French artist called Matthieu Laurette. Most of his work is about kind of system of commodity or exchange. One interesting work of his involved the talk show Good Morning America. There are always people outside the studio waving their signs. And he had this one big sign there that said “I love Debord.” The installation for the show of this piece was the video of his sign and a huge wall of these signs he collected from other people with greetings to Mommy and Poppy. He removed these elements from reality, added his input, and then he displayed the whole thing. It became something very revealing.

JAG: And you had a similar project in which you purchased signs from beggars?

JL: I started buying the signs from beggars six years ago in Texas for one show but since then I have continued. There were twenty-seven signs from eleven different countries in my show at the Venice Biennale but the messages are really all the same.

JAG: And in terms of more art historical influences?

JL: I do love Duchamp, but most of his works are really boring visually. Conceptually, he is amazing. My job is not to determine what will be interpreted from the work. I like to leave the works open so there are many possible interpretations. I am trying to change the meaning of the characters or images that have been given something specific. We kidnapped Ronald McDonald, but it was more about kidnapping the brand.

This idea comes from Duchamp like what he did with the urinal. I guess that in a way Ronald is a urinal. Duchamp changed the context of the urinal and that’s all we did too. I am interested in art but I don’t think that art is the most important thing in the world. That’s why I want to talk about other things, not just about art. Duchamp was focusing on the art world mostly, but there are deeper meanings about the vagueness of meaning in his work—about propaganda and controlling ideas and owning ideas and copyright. He was doing things that still have meaning today.

In addition to Duchamp, Martin Kippenberger is one of my biggest inspirations. If Warhol was making pop art from the top ten brands like the very nicely designed Coca-Colas and Brillo pads, Kippenberger was the poor man’s Warhol. He used tacky and crappy and cheap labels to make his art. I love Warhol, too. I don’t know how to define my art, but I guess it’s like political pop art. I think what I would add to Warhol’s art is the politics. He did have some political views, but of course he was trying to be the mirror of society and not really take a stand about anything. But Kippenberger was making extremely interesting statements through his art.

JAG: And he also worked with clown imagery?

JL: Yeah, I think that artists are clowns. In the King’s court, the joker was the only one that could laugh at the king. Sometimes the clowns were also executed, but nobody could make jokes about the people in power except the Joker. He’s an interesting character because he’s crying and smiling at the same time—like Ronald. He has tears streaming from his eyes but still there’s this huge smile. It’s fascinating that McDonald’s uses this symbol. Most of these characters in the commercial world are billed to be very flat and controlled. They don’t do much. They don’t have backgrounds and they are not robust. But when I see a character like Ronald, I start thinking about what he does when he gets off work and out of the advertisement. For me that’s inspirational— we are human and so are these characters. We all have flaws and we have our dark bedrooms secrets.

JAG: So what does Ronald do, for example, when he’s not working?

JL: He’s such a superstar, but he’s looking for happiness. He’s bigger than Jesus. Who can help him? And now he got involved in this kidnapping thing. It was not his fault.

JAG: Were you liberating him in a way?

JL: Yeah, he was smiling the whole time.

JAG: Until you decapitated him?

JL: He was still smiling. He’s still smiling now, even after the decapitation.

JAG: What’s next for you?

JL: I’m making a movie. Ronald saves the world. He becomes a hero.

JAG: Lastly, what do you eat when you go to McDonald’s?

JL: A quarter-pounder with fries and a small strawberry milkshake.

###

*McDonalds deemed the act to be in “poor taste” in their official statement: “McDonald’s is always available to engage in constructive conversations with our customers, stakeholders and the media. This stunt is in very poor taste and not a responsible approach to meaningful dialog.”

A version of the above text was published in the book Jani Leinonen: Funeral Notice.

Leinonen’s current show, “Finnish activist encounters the cosmopolitan upper classes” is at Galerie Gmurzynska in Zurich, Switzerland until June 4, 2011.

5 Questions (for Contemporary Practice) with Not An Alternative

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"Tate Modern: Tomorrow Is Another Day (After the Economic Crisis)" installation produced by Not An Alternative for the Tate Modern’s 10th anniversary show “No Soul for Sale: A Festival of Independents.” The work implicated corporate sponsor, Morgan Stanley, for its role in the economic crisis. The piece was accompanied by an essay situating the work art historically as in intervention on participatory art, while simultaneously linking it to other local campaigns targeting Tate sponsorship. May 14-16, 2010 Photo by Not An Alternative.

I encountered the art group Not An Alternative for the first time about a month ago in Corona, Queens, where Tania Bruguera (featured last month in 5 Questions) had assembled a panel on “useful art.” What immediately impressed me was the group’s ability to articulate its ongoing project, which aims both to create new spaces for cultural production and to question the ways that various participatory structures (social media, election processes, relational aesthetics) exclude certain subjects and amplify social and economic inequalities by means of participation.

Through their highly engaged work, work that functions somewhere between political activism, social service, and institutional critique, Not An Alternative confront the limits of what political theorist Jodi Dean has called, after a variety of critical theoretical debates, “communicative capitalism.” In a time of communicative capitalism, our political and social participation is increasingly exploited by the use of new media. Not An Alternative foregrounds this fact, presenting ways of navigating a relatively new digital landscape in which values once cherished by the militant left and avant-garde alike–participation, reflexivity, interactivity–have become corporate watchwords for how neoliberalism manages consent in a networked age.

Networked for some, but obviously not for all. Not An Alternative’s work is also crucial in the ways that it foregrounds exclusion, offering ways to visualize the limits of participation in a society in which obviously one’s ability to participate is largely determined by social and economic privilege. As Not An Alternative said during their presentation in Corona, referring to their collaboration with a homeless advocacy group in the Bronx (discussed below), they recognize the important of “desubjectifying” themselves, where to draw attention to their efforts may work against the causes of the community groups with whom they choose to work.

The Not (or nots, plural) of Not An Alternative are significant in a time in which terms like “collaboration,” “participation,” and “interactivity” remain largely unquestioned. What would it mean to drop out, when dropping out would no longer seem an option? Not An Alternative do not so much drop out as use the resources and machinery of communicative capitalism to produce a different set of results that undermine the seamless functioning of neoliberalism. In this way they negate and refuse, but their refusal also has a positive effect.

One such project that has been able to throw a wrench in the flow of communicative capitalism is Not An Alternative’s collaboration with Greenpeace against the Kleenex corporation’s 2007 PR campaign in Times Square, “Let in Out.” Infiltrating the campaign — in which the corporation asked passersby to rehearse meaningful events from their life — at the crucial moment when they were expected to shed tears, they would reveal to Kleenex’s cameras and cameras planted by Not An Alternative/Greenpeace that what truly moved them was the fact that the corporation was still using virgin forests to produce their tissues. When Not An Alternative’s counter-campaign went viral, Kleenex was effectively halted in its efforts to exploit the tears of participants for commercial profit.

Pushing against the structural limitations of new media and of existing institutional dynamics, Not An Alternative extend the work of other artists and activists who have successfully intervened in corporate, liberal democracy through symbolic action — actions which use a terrain of symbols and images against their intended use. They do this while also modeling modes of participation and interactivity that can better organize against neoliberalism, and by creating spaces in which new modes of collective agency can emerge, such as their No↔Space storefront in Williamburg, Brooklyn, where the group gathers for meetings and hosts events for their community.

1. What inspired you to start Not An Alternative?

Not An Alternative formed in the lead-up to the Republican National Convention in NY, a very politically charged time. As a group of people, we came from diverse backgrounds, each interested in a cross-disciplinary approach to our work.  The activists wanted to integrate culture and aesthetics into politics in impactful ways. The artists sought to extend their practice beyond the institution of art. The PR flacks wanted to use their skills to do something other than sell products.

It was an exciting moment, but everyone’s energy went to getting Bush out of office, with an expectation that real change was around the corner. We felt that popular forms of political engagement were too narrowly focused on pragmatic ends at the expense of any truly systemic challenge. Not only that, we felt that in many cases our issue-focused campaigns actually fortified a system we would otherwise wish to oppose.

Capitalism is constructed to instrumentalize any form of engagement.  How can we refuse this? Can we participate productively within a context where it’s either vote, engage, participate, or you’re apathetic. Can we vote no?  We were inspired to create an organization that experimented with a form of engagement that was aimed at confronting the limits of liberal capitalism.

Our name is derived from a famous Margaret Thatcher quote. Her statement “there is no alternative,” originally made in the 1980s, has become emblematic of the idea that there is no exterior to the capitalist system. For years, Thatcher’s statement served as the quote most used to characterize an era in which it is very difficult to imagine any real alternative to the system she described.

In the case of the name Not An Alternative, we promote a misreading of Thatcher’s words that functions as an inversion of their original intention. It represents, where “there is no alternative,” something that actually is no-alternative. With a slight twist, we shift from something in the negative to nothing in the positive.

This shift demonstrates a rupture, an internal antagonism. Our struggles are not between and amongst, but rather within, and against.  A real alternative is not exterior, it can be found in the subject itself.  Not An Alternative has a mission to produce this shift. Our projects, as demonstrated in the example of Thatcher’s quote, are aimed at finding those impossible instances in a given system (its inherent limit) and making them visible.

Not An Alternative and allies working in collaboration with Picture the Homeless on a building occupation in East Harlem, El Barrio. Part of a campaign to bring attention the contradiction and failure in Mayor Bloomberg's five-year plan to end homelessness by making visible the thousands of city and bank owned properties sitting vacant in New City. March 19, 2009. Photo by Andrew Stern.

2. Why do you feel there a need for organizations like Not An Alternative, which produce aesthetic objects and actions that intend a direct effect upon their social contexts and the communities with whom they choose to work (if that’s how you’d describe what Not An Alternative does)?

We wouldn’t describe our practice that way. We would tend not to use the term “produce” to describe our relationship to aesthetic objects. “Remake” might be a better word, as it has never been our intention to introduce new, different, or alternative aesthetics to any situation. Instead, through acts designed to remake what already exists, we aim to transform understandings of what people hold to be true.

We exist currently within a crisis of representation. We come up with new forms and they are integrated directly as fuel for a system that is fundamentally unsustainable.  Our solutions are sucked into the brand identities of institutions. As Not An Alternative, we are not interested in the production of solutions or the inclusion of new subjectivities or symbols, but rather the excavation and occupation of existing ones, revealing an inherent split.

We understand any given thing to be constituted both by its positive attributes and by what it is not, what it refuses or excludes. This omission, or invisible factor, is what we seek to reveal.

Our work takes the form of installations and/or interventions within arts institutions and in public space, and often in collaboration with community groups. With the understanding as we’re entering into these collaborations that our aims are not necessarily the same as the community group’s aims. We aren’t aiming for a specific reform or legislative “win.” We are interested in exposing exclusions, pointing out the limits of a given system, and in doing so, producing shifts or transformations of the system or subjectivity itself.

"Foreclosed Building Façade" produced by Not An Alternative for bank bailout demonstration on Wall St. NYC. Organized by AFL-CIO, SEIU, National People's Action. April 30, 2010 Photo by New York Post.

3. Are there other projects, people, and/or things that have inspired Not An Alternative (past or present)? Please describe.

We draw inspiration from a wide range of sources including but not limited to the realms of art, activism, and theory.

In art we’re interested in what we’d call “un-nominated art,” art that isn’t declared as such, or its designation is even actively disavowed. Duchamp’s urinal, prior to being nominated, would be an example. Once designated, his urinal is elevated above all other urinals, as precious or distinct. We see value in the active refusal of this kind of designation.

In the same vein, we are interested in the anonymous art/activism blocs that appear in one form or another as a part of mass mobilizations: the Book Bloc, Tute Bianche, and Black Bloc. They eschew individualism, refusing to acknowledge their work as a personal artistic expression. These actions aim instead to produce collective symbols of global resistance.

Another art tradition from which we take inspiration is the genre known as “institutional critique,” as represented in the works of Hans Haacke, Jenny Holzer, Mark Dion, Fred Wilson, Andrea Fraser, and Alfredo Jaar. The interventions of these artists use the visual iconography and language of the host institution against itself to reveal a gap, an internal contradiction. However, there are limitations to this practice. The “critical perspective” from which the artist/author speaks constructs a vantage point that is separate from the institution, that is “outside” it, as it were. The artist speaks for herself and the institution can happily sponsor the work without endorsing its position.

But what happens when you speak on behalf of the institution and dissolve the separation? We are interested in forms of identification that are both critical and wholly embedded, negating the removed vantage of an exterior author. In this way, the institution is obliged to take a position.

From the realm of theory we’re inspired by Slavoj Zizek for his determination to fight for radical understandings of causes that most everyone else would consider “lost.” We’re big fans of Bronx-based Picture the Homeless, a homeless-led organization, for taking on what they call the “shelter industrial complex.” They don’t aim for temporary solutions, they demand systemic change.  In this way, we see them as a model for what we wish more groups could be.

Props Production at No↔Space. Not An Alternative’s work involves both questioning the tools of advertising, marketing, public relations, and spectacle production and also leveraging them to affect popular understandings of events, symbols and history. July 15, 2009. Photo by Alana Star.

4. What have been your favorite projects to work on and why?

A recurring theme of our work is what we’d call “participationism.” With participation now a dominant paradigm, structuring social media, art, activism, the architecture of the city, and the economy, we are all integrated into participatory structures whether we want to be or not. We take the position that in order to build a practice that enables political, social, and economic transformation, one must engage power in a way that is specific to its contemporary form.

Too often, it seems, progressives believe that power operates exclusively from above, that command and control emanate from some centralized, closed authority. It is no wonder that many latch on to notions of openness, transparency, and participation as radical ends in themselves, but we must not fetishize process over product. Participatory frameworks are not in and of themselves politically significant, nor is power limited to distant and impersonal structures. We believe that power is diffuse and distributed, operating through us and on us; participation can therefore turn into a vector for dominant ideologies as easily as it can liberate.

Our favorite projects aim to confront the limits of participation or participatory structures, and the way liberal capitalism, which is oriented around a logic of participation, functions to subsume, commodify, and co-opt.

In one project, we were uninvited participants in an urban development ad campaign co-sponsored by the city with real estate developers in El Barrio. Our contribution involved the re-contextualization of their ad campaign aesthetics and promotional slogans (“New York City Means A Place to Call Home”) onto the façade of a vacant building owned by the city during a building occupation action by members of the Bronx-based community group, Picture the Homeless.

The homeless population continues to escalate at the same time that landlords and the city sit on empty buildings. In fact, the total volume of potential apartments in vacant buildings and lots in Manhattan alone exceeds the number of homeless households in shelters and on the street citywide. We sought to reveal the contradiction between the city’s promises and their practice.

In the case of our curatorial work, last year we worked with Eyebeam to co-produce a show called Re:Group: Beyond Models of Consensus.  In it, we presented the work of artists like John Hawke, the Institute for Infinitely Small Things, The Yes Men, Christopher Robbins, and others. Their projects modeled participatory forms of critical engagement that function to foreground the contours and boundaries of participation, reinterpreting the institutional structures they’re participating in as having an inherent antagonism. Visitors were invited to participate in training workshops that open-sourced the artists’ practice, resulting in new participatory interventions.

Not An Alternative Product Box packaging 2004

5. What projects do you see in the future for Not An Alternative? What direction would you like to take the organization in?

Our projects explore the relationship between immaterial and material, the city as a stage. Recently we’ve been moving in the direction of working more explicitly with urbanism and spatial politics. And we’re in good company: increasingly, artists and activists, designers and urban farmers are exploring ideas for the sustainable city. But our fixed gear bikes and rooftop farms, geo-location apps, and LEED certified lofts are lifestyles-cum-commodities, quickly subsumed into city brand campaigns, used to sell a spatial agenda. Kill your Facebook profile, grow your food; you are still a walking talking advertisement for gentrification whether you like it or not.

Everything, including the representation of our own bodies, has become factored into the neoliberal economy. Neoliberalism functions according to a logic that aims at neutralizing conflict by turning expressions of difference into currency that fortifies the system. But we understand the immaterial social and symbolic space, i.e. the world of representation, to be contested terrain. In this environment, subtle alterations of the symbolic geography can radically affect the physical landscape.

Given these conditions, we’re interested in projects that create the coordinates for looking at the space around us in a way that defamiliarizes us from what we see or think we know. It’s an act of remapping. Rather than creating new (commodifiable) forms we see potential in existing forms.  In intervening upon symbols that structure or govern our use of space, we have a certain amount of power to re-order the world.

Event at No↔Space No-Space is host to free lectures, screenings, panel discussions, workshops, and artist presentations. The space also consists of a production workshop, filming studio, and video editing suite. During the day, it is a collaborative office space (aka coworking) for freelancers and cultural producers. May 5, 2011 Photo by Not An Alternative.

A Problematic Introduction

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It’s complicated.
Last year, over 3 million Facebook users willingly adopted this dubious relationship status even after the drop-down menu expanded to accommodate eleven statuses, including newer options like civil union and domestic partnership.

Facebook relationship status options

This status is apt for those who want to publicly define the grey area that is his or her personal life, although its ambiguity may technically make it the only non-status, aside from simply hiding the option altogether. Tucked into the Basic Information page, the brief two (or rather, two and a half) words proclaim something like this: “I may or may not be formerly, presently, or  subsequently interacting with one or more person(s) or thing(s) in a manner in which I define by the fact that I can not or choose not to define it!” In this sense, the complication evades categorization by problematizing, flaunting the complexity and ambiguity of a SimCity in fog. Although it may lurk ominously in the domain of relationships, the complication is also a creative force.

When unpacking sticky situations, one should not expect to discover anything less sticky. With appropriately viscous expectations, I (artist and guest blog alum, Lindsay Lawson) present Art21’s newest column, Problematic, aimed at diffusing, rather than shedding light on subjects that are particularly tricky, paradoxical, and well… problematic. The column borrows its name from friend and artist, Guthrie Lonergan, who suggested “Problematic” as an exhibition title, playing on its buzzword status that has become all too ubiquitous, peppering the rhetoric of art discourses. But everything is problematic if you look hard enough; you just have to will it so.

Consider Michael Asher’s infamous CalArts group critiques, in which a classful of furrowed brows might analyze a single artwork for eight hours or more. One can imagine their arguments being strung together word by word, formulated in real time, each utterance like a stepping stone toward some kind of ultimate point. Presumably the longer they looked, the more they saw; questions begat more questions and sometimes (maybe often), they arrived at equally valid yet incompatible observations. “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…” says Charles Dickens. Those clever students must have occasionally found their panties in a paradoxical twist. At the very least, problems give us something to talk about.

Looking at art is invariably an act of interpretation influenced by context and perspective, but there can never be a single definitive reading. As one steps closer, the view shifts like the elusive end of the rainbow. It is an illusion that moves with respect to the viewer, a strange phenomenon of schizophrenic weather that appears only when conditions are simultaneously cloudy and sunny. Our slippery rainbow is neither here nor there, presenting itself differently to every person who looks up at the sky – the spectrum reflects a different angle for each grad student’s gaze. Similarly, a problematic artwork is a site of inconsistency in the best sense. One might imagine its true and definitive meaning buried deep in the leprechaun’s mythical pot of gold, both being equally elusive prizes. Even the leprechaun maintains a fluid identity: neither wholly good nor wholly evil; a miserly prankster, bearded fashionista, degenerate cobbler.

Lisa finds an impossible object at a garage sale in an episode of "The Simpsons"

Posts will focus on topics that are relevant to art discourses, while simultaneously occupying the foggier edges of logic. In a thematically related piece, I previously wrote about the various inconsistent recollections regarding John Wojtowicz’s 1972 attempted bank robbery in The Third Memory, a video by Pierre Huyghe. The work juxtaposes original news footage of the incident, excerpts of Dog Day Afternoon (a movie based on the true story), and Huyghe’s footage of Wojtowicz reenacting the event almost 30 years later in an ersatz bank set with stand-in extras. A paradox requires at least two incompatible, yet equally plausible components. Huyghe’s piece exposes a paradoxical gap: the greatest slippage of memory comes from the man who directly experienced the events in the first place. Our perception of time and space is riddled with such paradoxes. Memory harbors traces, gravity bends space and time, f@#king magnets (how do they work?). So if our understanding of art is indebted to our tangled perception, we have a lot of straightening out to do.

Problematic publishes on the first Tuesday of every month.

"Miracles" video by Insane Clown Posse

Turkish and Other Delights |Şener Özmen

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Şener Özmen with Erkan Özgen, "Tate'e Giden Yol (Road to Tate Modern)," video, 7'13" (still), 2003. Courtesy the artist and Outlet-Istanbul.

While preparing to travel to Diyarbakır, the largest city in southeastern Turkey, I discovered that telling Turkish people who live outside of that region that you’re going to visit Diyarbakır is akin to telling an average suburban American you’re going to hang out in an inner city housing project or along the wall dividing Israel and Palestine. Their eyes grow big, there’s a lot of gasping and “ooooh”ing, and they ask you, incredulously, “why would you want to go to Diyarbakır? It’s very dangerous there, you know.” Some treated it a bit like I was going on safari–a worthwhile, possibly exotic and educational, endeavor, as long as I had the proper guidance–and protection. Because Diyarbakır is not only the largest city in southeastern Turkey but also the capital of Kurdish culture in Turkey and the epicenter of a significant amount of violence throughout the 1980s and 1990s, inevitably the news of my travels sparked conversation about “the Kurdish question”–that is, the question of what freedoms and rights ethnic Kurds living in Turkey should be granted. For example, since the founding of the Republic, teaching Kurdish in schools and printing or broadcasting media in Kurdish has been outlawed, and celebration of Newroz, the Kurdish New Year, was forbidden. In the past five years some of these restrictions have been eased, but the subject remains controversial, with many über-nationalistic Turks remaining opposed to the reforms.

So why would I want to travel to Diyarbakır? The art scene in Turkey is famously concentrated in Istanbul–what interest could a formally war-torn and politically unstable region of the country hold for a yabancı (foreigner)? In fact, Diyarbakır has produced some of the most active, intelligent, and influential figures in contemporary Turkish art. These would include artist and curator Halil Altındere, Berat Isik, Ahmet Öğüt (who, along with Banu Cennetoğlu, represented Turkey at the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009) as well as Suat Öğüt and Mehmet Öğüt, Erkan Özgen, and Cengiz Tekin. (Fikret Atay, another well-known Kurdish artist, actually hails from Batman, a smaller city located about two hours from Diyarbakır.) All of these artists have exhibited extensively both throughout Turkey and internationally. But the godfather of the Diyarbakır art community is undoubtedly Şener Özmen. For the past twenty years, Özmen has worked not only as an artist but also as a poet, art critic, translator, and teacher. He collaborates constantly with his fellow Diyarbakır-based artists, has nurtured a new generation of artists, produces texts for exhibition catalogues, designs covers for Lîs Publishing (a prominent Kurdish language publishing house based in Diyarbakır), writes fiction and poetry, and supports the work of the Diyarbakır Arts Centre. In an essay included in the recently published monograph A Sener Ozmen Book, critic Süreyyya Evren describes him as “an artist who cannot relax.” When I visited Diyarbakır, I was honored that Özmen took the time from his busy professional and personal life (he is also a father and husband) to serve, along with Cengiz Tekin, as an attentive and wildly entertaining host. At one point, while we were riding a dolmuş (mini-bus) from Diyarbakır to have breakfast at Hasankeyf, a historical site located on the Tigris River (which, sadly, is likely to be destroyed in the near future by a hydroelectric dam project), Özmen casually remarked that this was the first day off from work that he had ever taken. It sounds like hyperbole, but given his extraordinary output, I am inclined to believe this was true.

Şener Özmen with Erkan Özgen, "Tate'e Giden Yol (Road to Tate Modern)," video, 7'13" (still), 2003. Courtesy the artist and Outlet-Istanbul.

I first encountered Özmen’s work at the Istanbul Modern, where I saw his best known work to date, Tate’e Giden Yol (Road to Tate Modern), produced in 2003 in collaboration with Erkan Özgen. In the video Özmen plays a Don Quixote-like figure who, clothed in a suit and tie and armed with a giant lance, rides on horseback through the dusty, rocky mountains of southeastern Turkey in search of the Tate Modern. Though we learn that Özmen and his sidekick (played by Özgen), who follows Özmen astride a donkey, have been traveling for forty days and forty nights, we only see them stop to wash themselves in a mountain stream, carefully removing their highly polished shoes and dress socks in order to wash their feet. On their way they encounter another traveler who is on foot. They hail him in Kurdish and ask him if he can direct them to the Tate Modern. It’s to the left, he tells them, over the mountains. Over the mountains? they ask. Is it far? Yes, he responds, it is very far, but you can make it.

Şener Özmen with Erkan Özgen, "Tate'e Giden Yol (Road to Tate Modern)," video, 7'13" (stills), 2003. Courtesy the artist and Outlet-Istanbul.

Though the goal represented in Road to Tate Modern–journeying via horseback to any place very far from Diyarbakır, much less London–is completely absurd, the earnestness and naiveté with which the protagonists doggedly pursue their objective is both charming and heartbreaking, as the viewer understands–as the protagonists do not–the impossibility of their mission. (But then again who knows? Perhaps horseback is the perfect way to reach the Tate Modern.) This work establishes many of the reoccurring themes of Özmen’s oeuvre: the use of the arid landscape surrounding Diyarbakır as not only a setting but as a symbolic touchstone; restless movement, the inability to stay in a fixed location unless hiding; concern with questions of periphery and center; and the deployment of humor or absurdity as way to protect the view (and perhaps Özmen himself) against the painful reality–the lived experience of Kurds living in Turkey and all people living in that particular region–to which his works speak.

Şener Özmen, "Süper Müslüman (Supermuslim)," photograph (series of 12 images), 2003. Courtesy the artist and Outlet-Istanbul.

This humor plays a similarly important role in another of Özmen’s most well known works, Süper Müslüman (Supermuslim), a series of twelve photographs in which Özmen , dressed in a homemade Superman costume, removes his “cape” and uses it as a prayer rug, going through the ritual movements of Islamic prayer. The hilarity of this act, of the recasting of an American pop culture icon, the ultimate symbol of heroic, masculine strength, as a devote Muslim draws attention to just how much distance currently exists between what we understand as “American” and anything associated with Islam. The humorous reaction we experience in viewing Supermuslim is in large part a symptom of the cognitive dissonance that occurs when we see the ultimate American hero conflated with Islam. At the same time this inability to see Islam as copasetic with American ideals is exactly the mindset that has facilitated the so-called “War On Terror,” which, when viewed in tandem with reports of American military personnel and civilians alike burning and defacing copies of the Quran, continues to look a lot like a war on Islam, regardless of the actual intent.

Şener Özmen, "Köyümüz (Our Village)," video, 7'09" (still), 2004. Courtesy the artist and Outlet-Istanbul.

Because so much of Özmen’s work features not only himself but friends, colleagues, family members, and the immediate environs to which he is so intimately connected, there is also a palpably personal aspect to his work that resonates cleanly with the viewer, regardless of the politics or seemingly local/regional issues that are also at hand. For example, the 2004 video piece titled Köyümüz (Our Village) features two young girls (who happen to be Özmen’s nieces) singing a children’s song in Kurdish. Rather than featuring the sort of innocent lyrics normally associated with children’s songs, the two girls sing about their poverty, their father’s illness and inability to work, and their inability to attend school. Over the course of the seven minute video the song is sung three times; as it progresses through the repetitions, the girls’ faces slowly change, becoming covered in bruises and blood. In addition, the camera appears to be shooting through a round frame, reminiscent of both a gun’s sight and the close cropping technique used by studio photographers in creating sentimental portraits in the early days of photography. Are the girls being targeted by some anonymous villain? Or is Özmen drawing our attention to the act of representation and the dynamics at work when we watch the pain of others? As critic and curator Barbara Heinrich points out, “The source of the violence remains unclear. Rather, these traces appear to stand for the latent violence of social relations, from which there is no escape.” Our Village serves as a reminder that, despite the official state of détente in the region, violence remains an embedded part of daily existence, a reality that both predates the political conflict and lingers on as an unhappy inheritance.

Sener Ozmen, "Kavşak (Crossroads)," photograph, 2009. Courtesy the artist and Outlet-Istanbul.

In a conversation with Özmen and critic İz Öztat included in A Sener Özmen Book, gallerist Azra Tüzünoğlu remarks upon two recent shifts in Özmen’s work: the discontinuing of the use of the landscape around Diyarbakır as a primary pictorial technique, and the withdrawal of Özmen himself as a subject of or character in his pieces. Özmen points to the 2009 photograph Kavşak (Crossroads) as a turning point, the moment in which this shift began. In the photograph, Özmen crouches in a parking lot, head in hand, staring fixedly at his reflection in a puddle of rainwater pooled on the pavement. In the background rise mounds of earth, which seem to be part of an unseen construction site. Behind them rise the ghostly outlines of what may be either television and cellular towers or trees—in either case, signs of life and progress, building and growth. To his left lie a sheath of papers, not only put down but literally cast aside so that he might engage in this moment of self-scrutiny. While Tüzünoğlu reads this as a reenactment of the Greek myth of Narcissus, in which a beautiful man becomes so enamored with his own image reflected in a pool of water that he falls into it and drowns, it seems to me as if Özmen may be literally looking for himself, to see how he fits into Diyarbakır’s new landscape. The trauma of war is no longer an external struggle against an armed enemy, whether visible or concealed, but an internal one, in which those left behind must decide how to cope with the events of the past and move into an uncertain future.

Part of this process for Özmen would seem to mean, for the first time, creating works set outside of Diyarbakır. When we last spoke, he reported that he was working on a new body of videos, in collaboration with his long-time creative partner Cengiz Tekin, being shot in Gaziantep, another large city in southeastern Turkey located very close the border with Syria. (Diyarbakır is further north, closer to the Turkish-Iraqi border.) Undoubtedly these works will continue Özmen’s engagement with issues of identity and the politics of geography and culture, but this shift in locale will inevitably bring up not only new themes and subjects but present new aesthetic opportunities and challenges.

Activist Archiving with Mona Jimenez

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[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8qh6jRzjmcY]

The oft-repeated cliche about the early video movement in the United States is that it was driven by groups of people who came together with a collective desire to put video technologies “into the hands of everybody.” And in many ways, these groups (or collectives) succeeded. Workshops were organized at community centers free of charge to introduce demographics less likely to experiment with video to the medium. Video helped encourage a generation of women, in the process of liberating themselves, to pick up cameras and make experimental media. And information was freely circulated and available to all, via numerous technical manuals and how-to’s, including those printed in the magazine Radical Software, the Spaghetti City Video Manual authored by New York collective The Videofreex, and Dan Sandin‘s and Phil Morton‘s Distribution Religion, which provided a step-by-step guide for recreating an Image Processor.

It is odd, then, given this proliferation of technical know-how, that forty years later, the the number of people with the ability to fix and repair analogue video equipment, and transfer and preserve video tapes (particularly the ½ inch reel-to-reel format popular in 1970s Sony Portapaks) is relatively few. Information has become consolidated, and even programs that aim to teach a new wave of prospective archivists and preservationists the skills to rescue the massive amount of media art created between, roughly, 1968-75, can only achieve so much (especially with dwindling funds and resources.)

According to Mona Jimenez, an associate professor in the Moving Image Archive program at NYU and a veteran of the early video movement herself, preservationists need to get organized. “People [in the archival/preservation community] need to be thinking like activists rather than thinking strictly like preservationists,” says Jimenez, continuing:

There has to be a way to feed those collections back into the communities that produced them to see if they have relevance. There has to be something that starts the process. There are too few people that can put their hands in a deck. Even the simple kind of troubleshooting that we used to do in the seventies. If there were people available then who could run half inch open reel decks, why is it now that so few people can? It’s not like there weren’t a lot of people out there who were running that equipment. We’re running so short of time. I feel like a lot of us have been screaming fire for a long time and nobody is paying any attention.

I met with Jimenez at her New York apartment to discuss her work with Sherry Miller-Hocking in creating the Video History Project—an online archive of text documents, many of which come from Hocking’s own personal archive, that serves as a written history of early video. Though the Video History Project is the most comprehensive archive of this kind, Hocking and Jimenez are not alone in their activities. Among other archives and individuals doing the same are the Videosphere, a project of the Southwest Museum of Engineering, Communications, and Computation, Davidson Gigliotti’s Early Video Project, the Radical Software archive, the Vasulkas’ online archive, jonCates’s Phil Morton Memorial Archive, the Media Burn archive, and cough, cough, my archive. Most of these projects (mine and Cates’s aside) are the impetus of people who were “there.”

A number of my professors at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago who were around in the 1960s and 1970s have told me that my generation (I’m 27) lacks an activist drive. And while I think that’s a gross oversimplification (and in many cases completely erroneous), I do think that over-professionalization in all spheres of the arts, from administration to creation has affected the kind of activities with which people feel enabled to get involved. That’s why when my conversation with Jimenez turned towards a discussion of what she calls “activist archiving,” I felt a great amount of excitement.

“I’ve been testing this idea of activist archiving,” says Jimenez. “It’s kind of pie in the sky a bit. But basically my idea is you have to be organizing towards preservation. You have to be organizing among people who care about a collection. The idea is to try to go into an organization and to try and give that organization some basic physical and intellectual control over their collection. To be able to take a collection and get to the point where somebody can describe it. Where the organization can describe it and describe it to someone else who might be able to fund it.”

Jimenez wants to enable institutions and individuals to take a more grassroots approach to collections, instead of farming out preservation work to a small few with the skills to do it. She has been talking for a while about creating a video summit to bring together like-minded preservationists to get some collections transferred, and she has worked with IMAP (Independent Media Arts Preservation) who runs inexpensive workshops for individuals to learn the basics of video preservation. “A lot of us have been talking for a long time. Let’s just videotape how to diagnose common problems with a video deck, how to make a belt, how to replace the rubber rollers, how to tell if the heads are worn. This is basic stuff. It does require a group of people to do it, though.”

In some cases, collections need to be liberated from institutions, particularly those who take on collections with no plans for future preservation. I want to challenge the notion that collections are necessarily better off locked away in the archives, instead of gathering dust in someone’s basement or apartment. I have seen both kinds of collections and the difference, it seems to me, is moot when there is no access and no plan to make it accessible. Preservation standards are important, but these standards should be understood as guidelines for best practices rather than strict rules to be adhered to at the detriment of making a collection more available and relevant to a contemporary audience.

Individuals need to challenge institutions, to self-educate and embrace the role that amateurs can play in preservation work. As Jimenez makes clear, it is vital it is that people act, and soon. “We’re running out of time. It’s very serious at this point. I don’t know the answer, but we have to just start transferring tapes.”


Creative Rebuild: Theaster Gates in Hyde Park, St. Louis

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Theaster Gates leading a tour of a once-abandoned home that is now central to his creative rehab efforts in Hyde Park, St. Louis. Image courtesy of the Rebuild Foundation.

Artist Theaster Gates likes systems. And what he likes more than a system itself is knowing how to leverage it. Though formally trained in handling clay, Gates also uses the structure of neighborhoods, cultural institutions, and universities as his artistic medium.

Over the past few years, Gates has earned a reputation for his social-based practice, in which he intertwines art, urban planning, and community activism. In a recent conversation, he expressed frustration with the accepted scope of what it means to be an artist. He particularly dislikes the phrases “artist as change agent,” “artist as social worker,” or “artist as entrepreneur.” Gates explained that “the word ‘as’…shifts the possibility that an artist could be entrepreneurial, or have interest in the social, or have interest in architecture. It says you have to be ‘both this and this.’ It separates a person into these compartments. Versus: ‘I’m an artist and my skill set includes these things.’” With degrees in Ceramics, Urban Planning, and Religious Studies – and a brief stint in Pre-Pharmacy – Gates embodies the myriad identities that can be folded into being an artist.

Though Theaster Gates is nearly a household name in Chicago and is widely recognized throughout the art world – he was included in the 2010 Whitney Biennial – he recently has garnered attention in St. Louis for his cultural revitalization initiatives. Last year, Gates founded the Rebuild Foundation, combining the various facets of his practice within a single non-profit organization. The Rebuild Foundation brings together artists, architects, developers, educators, and community activists to help revitalize under-resourced neighborhoods. It currently manages projects in Detroit, Omaha, Chicago, and St. Louis. In just one year alone, the Rebuild Foundation, with the energetic on-site commitment of Dayna Kriz, has become a major force in St. Louis’s Hyde Park neighborhood. Located in north St. Louis, Hyde Park is a historic neighborhood that has fallen upon hard times as a result of post-war deindustrialization and the ensuing population decline.

Juan William Chavez leading an experimental drawing workshop in conjunction with "Urban Expression: Theaster Gates." Courtesy the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts.

At the center of Hyde Park is the Most Holy Trinity Catholic Church and School. In Spring 2010, Most Holy Trinity partnered with the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts on a fifteen-week program called Urban Expression: Theaster Gates. The course was held in conjunction with Urban Alchemy: Gordon Matta Clark, an exhibition similarly inspired by issues of urban abandonment. Throughout the program, Gates worked with at-risk youths in developing reading, writing, and artistic skills that eventually culminated in a master plan for their neighborhood. The program concluded with an exhibition curated by Juan William Chávez at Bruno David Gallery, across the street from the Pulitzer Foundation. The partnership between the Pulitzer Foundation, Most Holy Trinity, Gates, and Chávez helped to counter the popular notion that institutional and grassroots initiatives are structurally devised to work in opposition to one another.

Building donated to the Rebuild Foundation in the foreground; Most Holy Trinity Catholic Church in the background. Photo by Stan Strembicki.

As the program came to an end, Gates wasn’t prepared to terminate the relationship he had established with the Most Holy Trinity students and the Hyde Park community. Instead, he made a more enduring commitment to the neighborhood, asking Dayna Kriz to help oversee a Saturday School program for the students. Also called Urban Expressions, the program now falls under the auspices of the Rebuild Foundation and continues to engage students in cultural and community stewardship. Though Urban Expressions has little in the way of financial resources, it has managed to survive and grow with the support of the Hyde Park community. Gates explained, “If we didn’t have capacity, we had enthusiasm. Where we didn’t have fiscal support, we had ingenuity. When we didn’t have anything, we had the relationships that we developed.”

Just months after kicking off the program, a building was donated to the Rebuild Foundation and the project snowballed yet again, expanding beyond its original scope. Perhaps one of the greatest successes of Urban Expressions is Kriz’s ability to empower others to take a stake in the project. She explains, “when I did not feel confident enough to lead this class and discussion, I reached out to someone who’s more of a professional. It was asking what I’m capable of and what I’m not capable of, asking people to fit where they want to fit.” Now, alongside a team of artists, architects, and community activists, the Rebuild Foundation and the Hyde Park community are working together to imagine the building’s future, exploring how it could be the impetus for community-driven revitalization.

Students removing the siding of the house during "Somethingness: Ways of Seeing and Building," a course led by Theaster Gates. Photo by Stan Strembicki.

After witnessing Gates’s commitment to Hyde Park, Washington University invited him to lead a summer course that would give students hands-on experience in considering both the theoretical and practical sides of cultural regeneration. Sponsored by the university’s Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts and the Pulitzer Foundation, Gates’s course, “Somethingness: Ways of Seeing and Building, concluded just this week. Over three intensive weeks, the course brought together students of social work, architecture, art, and design to work alongside local residents in exploring the possibilities for the donated Hyde Park building. In addition to the direct benefit of having institutional support and a committed team to work on the project, Gates explained that one of the greatest lessons of the course was learned through bringing together multiple disciplines. He said, “these disciplinary silos can sometimes, depending on your training, offer you a very narrow path by which you can live your life in service to the thing that you believe in. So what I’ve been trying to do instead is…to ask what it is that you believe in and what it is you’re interested in and how that can have consequence in Hyde Park.”

Class discussion during "Somethingness: Ways of Seeing and Building." Photo by Stan Strembicki.

In addition to its activities in Hyde Park, the Rebuild Foundation has recently partnered with Beyond Housing to establish another arts-based community center in the heart of Pagedale, St. Louis. The project concentrates on the Salerno House and is managed by artist/social worker Regina Martinez. The combination of art and social work within St. Louis—as evinced not only by Gates’s summer course, but also by the number of culturally engaged students graduating from Washington University’s Brown School of Social Work—is becoming increasingly common (a development that I will explore in greater depth with my next post).

All-too-often, community engagement produces an imbalanced relationship and an artist or an institution sees itself as aiding a deprived community. However, Gates freshly appraises the idea of community engagement, elevating it beyond victimization and making it part of a two-way relationship. Rather than avoid the institutions that have historically contributed to class divisions, de-industrialization, or impoverishment, Gates works alongside them, exploring how institutional structures can be leveraged to more directly benefit the people and the neighborhoods that he cares about. As he explains, “I think about communities a lot, but I’m realizing that I don’t think about communities because I want to save them. I think about communities because I really love systems, and I love people, and I love thinking about how systems could be made better to support the people who live within systems.”

Community Arts Training Institute: A Conversation with Roseann Weiss

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Stan Chisholm, "WaitingForAMountain," 2010. Installation at Art Dimensions Gallery, St. Louis. Chisholm is a graduate of the CAT Institute.

During my time as a guest blogger for Art21, I’ve examined various initiatives that have transformed the cultural landscape of St. Louis. Despite the city’s dwindling population, the arts are prospering in St. Louis, as evidenced by the ever-increasing number of contemporary art organizations, the abundance of creative activity on Cherokee Street, in Grand Center, Old North, and Hyde Park, and the social commitment of artists like Juan William Chávez and Theaster Gates. As I was thinking about how I’d like to wrap up my examination of the St. Louis art scene, I felt the need to more precisely pinpoint the catalyst for cultural activism within the city.

I began this formidable task by arranging meetings with culturally engaged social workers. Social work, like art, is constantly re-defining itself and expanding its perimeters. Over the past year, I’ve become increasingly aware of the growing number of Master of Social Work (MSW) graduates who, coming out of Washington University’s Brown School of Social Work, have pursued careers in the arts. The marriage of social work and contemporary art forms a crucial partnership in arts-based community development. Equipped with macro-level analysis and evaluation skills, the social workers I met with helped me better understand our current artistic movement within the broader social context of St. Louis.

First I met with Lisa Harper Chang, the Community Projects Director at the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts. In 2007, Chang established the initial partnership between the Pulitzer and the Brown School and her contributions have since paved the way for future MSW students—such as Emily Augsburger and Megan Johnson—to fulfill their social work practicums at the Pulitzer. Next I met with Regina Martinez, an artist and social worker, who, as I mentioned in my previous post, is working with Theaster Gates and the Rebuild Foundation to start a community arts center in Pagedale, St. Louis. After that, I interviewed Claire Wolff, founder of Urban Studio Café, a non-profit coffee shop in Old North that used its proceeds for arts programming. Lastly, I met with Amanda Moore McBride, Associate Dean for Social Work at the Brown School, who explained to me that the program’s recent emphasis on cultural activism evolved from a movement from within the student body. Each of these meetings demonstrated how social workers are increasingly helping to refine the goals of community art initiatives in our city.

Urban Studio Café was a non-profit café that supported arts and community projects in North City. It was founded in 2009 by Claire Wolff, CAT Institute alum and MSW graduate from the Brown School of Social Work. This year, Urban Studio Café closed its doors and Old North residents have since opened a new coffee shop in its stead.

Meeting with social workers proved invaluable in my quest to identify the catalysts of cultural activism within St. Louis. During each interview, I was repeatedly advised to speak with Roseann Weiss, Director of Community Art Programs & Public Art Initiatives at the St. Louis Regional Arts Commission (RAC). Weiss, I was told, inspired many MSW candidates to seek careers in the arts. Specifically, her leadership in the Community Arts Training (CAT) Institute has instructed both artists and social service professionals on how to work together to affect positive social change through the arts. With over 200 alums, many whose names have appeared throughout my previous blog posts, the CAT Institute has become a national model for interdisciplinary community arts training. Beyond her role at RAC, Roseann Weiss is a major advocate for the arts in St. Louis, weaving together her background in contemporary art and non-profit management with her passion for community engagement.

In July 2010, artist and CAT Institute alum Juan William Chávez created a snowcone stand for the grand opening of Crown Square in Old North, St. Louis. Chávez created a workshop that focused on snowcone culture and its relationship to the community. Participants created drawings in exchange for free snowcones.

Francesca Wilmott: To begin, for those unfamiliar with the Regional Arts Commission, can you share a little about its background and the role that it plays within St. Louis?

Roseann Weiss: The Regional Arts Commission (RAC) is the St. Louis area’s largest annual funder of the arts, granting about $3 million annually. In addition to financial support through grants, RAC serves as a cultural catalyst in the arts community, providing technical, promotional and other support for arts organizations of all shapes and sizes. RAC receives funding from 4/15ths of the hotel/motel room sales tax revenue from St. Louis City and County, in addition to special project grants from foundations such as the Nathan Cummings, Kresge, and Whitaker Foundations, corporations, the Missouri Arts Council, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

From its inception in 1985, the grant-making policy of RAC not only included providing funds for arts programs facilitated by arts organizations and institutions – but also for those facilitated in non-arts 501(c)(3) organizations, such as community or human service organizations. Always taking a dynamic role in the support of their grantees, RAC staff encourage arts organizations to actively seek partnerships in the greater community. With the notion to unleash the power of art outside the traditional concert halls, theaters and galleries, the Regional Arts Commission staff and community designed the core curriculum for training partners for sustainable community arts programs.

Started by Maggie Ginestra (CAT Institute alum) and Amelia Colette Jones in February 2010, Sloup is a monthly soup dinner that awards micro-grants to creative projects in St. Louis.

FW: How did the Community Arts Training Institute initially begin? How has the program evolved and grown with St. Louis?

RW: The Community Arts Training (CAT) Institute at RAC has been a national model since 1997 and is the oldest sustained training of its kind in the country. (It is sustained because RAC sustains it even when it hasn’t been possible to find other funds.) The CAT Institute facilitates rigorous cross-sector training of community arts partners in an annual five-month curriculum for sixteen fellows — eight artists of all disciplines and eight social service professionals, community organizers, policy makers, and educators. Among the Institute’s goals are strong arts based community programs that amplify the voices of underserved communities, regenerate neighborhoods, and create significant vehicles for positive social change.

CAT Institute fellows participate in more than 55 hours of training, which occur during intensive, two-day sessions once a month for five months and in lab project assignments. The challenging curriculum includes training on partnership and survival strategies, conflict resolution, learning styles, teaching strategies, public relations, identifying funding sources, legal and liability issues in the arts and social services, assessment techniques and advocacy. Fellows complete homework assignments of extensive reading and the development of team lab programs. The learning methods include discussions, critical response to reading assignments, site visits, reviews of case studies, interactions with the community, writing assignments, and participation in interactive projects. All CAT Institute fellows are accepted into the Institute on an underwritten basis. In other words, except for some possible costs of books (which can be borrowed), it’s free.

Characterized by its credibility, creativity, and longevity as a sustained community arts training program active for 15 years, the CAT Institute is uniquely positioned to bring together and to foster a cohort of leaders in an arts integrative approach for skill and capacity building relevant to a particular community. The CAT Institute’s core faculty includes experienced practitioners and nationally recognized advisers in the field. The CAT Institute is in an exciting phase and is expanding its scope. We organized the first At the Crossroads: Community Art & Development Convening in 2010 and will organize another in April 2012. We are also expanding the scope of the Institute. Through a grant from the Kresge Foundation, we are reshaping the curriculum to create a second way of facilitating CAT in a place-based model. In addition, we are designing a “graduate” CAT Institute for those CAT alums who want to go deeper into researching/testing/evaluating their community practice.

Roundtable discussion during the Regional Arts Commission's conference, At the Crossroads: A Community Arts and Development Convening, March 2010.

FW: You recently presented at the Rust Belt to Artist Belt conference in Cleveland and have witnessed cultural revitalization occurring throughout other post-industrial cities. How do you think that cultural activism in St. Louis differs from cultural initiatives in other mid-size American cities?

RW: We are too quiet about all the work going on here. We have a lot of knowledge and experience in activism and arts-based community development – in part because of the training and support available here. CAT Institute alums are embedded everywhere. I just visited Theaster Gates’s projects in St. Louis – there were at least five CAT alums directly involved in what he is doing. I look at the 12-year-old program at the art collaborative at the Peter and Paul Community Center’s transitional program for homeless men. Two CAT grads started it (an artist and a shelter manager) and sustain it and bring in other CAT grads as collaborators. These men created a performance work with the writings they did with Janie Ibur, a CAT faculty member, that never ceases to move any audience when they perform it. Or a new program in Dutchtown with CAT alums and neighborhood youth centered on creating fashion design. The lead artist and community organizer told me that the teens – both young women and men – are waiting for them when they get there in the morning. These examples are only the very tip of the amazing arts-based work going on. But some of it isn’t “sexy” projects – some of it is embedded in places like the Juvenile Detention Center or an immigrants’ organization – but they are very powerful.

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Perhaps more than any other cultural enterprise in St. Louis, the CAT Institute has stimulated the recent growth of cultural activism, helping to redefine St. Louis’s identity through the arts.

Teaching with New York Close Up: Lucas Blalock’s 99¢ Store Still Lifes

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Lucas Blalock, untitled (crystalline screw), 2009

Lucas Blalock’s only plan is to work… preferably in the evenings. He deals with a set of parameters that his tools provide and brings things he purchases at local discount stores into his apartment. From there it’s open season.

In a world filled with artists that create work in a myriad of settings, Lucas Blalock’s situation is fairly similar to the scenario many of our own students face- working at home and trying to hold down a full-time job (or a full-time class schedule) while attempting to make art in between. And while Blalock often creates art with objects he purchases and photographs, right in the living room of his apartment in Williamsburg, his process is quite unlike many of the students we work with.

In Lucas Blalock’s 99¢ Store Still Lifes the artist talks about discovering and creating visual problems in order to solve them vs. starting with an idea and finding a way to photograph it. Blalock comes at making art from somewhat of an opposite angle than what we may be used to, and certainly opposite of someone such as Paolo Ventura. Instead of following through on plans to photograph particular objects in certain ways, he allows himself to be attracted to different things… and then finds a way to solve the problem of making this thing interesting to a viewer, as well as himself:

Sometimes an object will really give me a simple problem to deal with. Other times it’s much more of a kind of flirtation with the objects in the studio that something gets pulled out of it.

There’s a big part of me that can see educators feasting on a short film like this (it runs about 6 minutes) because it shares examples of things that ARE working for Blalock and also finds time to share what happens when things AREN’T working. For example, towards the end of the segment, we see the artist wrestle (literally, physically) with trying to photograph some multicolored foam he brought into the studio. While obviously excited to use this material at the start, Blalock quickly becomes frustrated with it and decides to wait on trying to capture this particular subject matter. The inspiration may have been there, but the material wasn’t “doing” anything to impress him. Instead of forcing the issue, he simply remarks that he may have to hold the foam in the studio for a while before deciding how to work with it. He doesn’t throw it away. He doesn’t have a fit and trash the joint. He simply decides to wait.

Lucas Blalock’s 99¢ Store Still Lifes is an inspiring piece for teachers and students alike because it also illustrates how one can create a complex and stimulating context for making beautiful works of art in a simple space. But Blalock makes sure we understand it’s not easy. For every 20-25 photographs he takes and develops using his large format camera each week, only one or two “really work”. He goes on to explain that the most successful pictures are ones that “don’t fall into a category”. Perhaps an easy label means the work isn’t complex enough? Regardless, here’s to steering clear of categories.

Check out New York Close Up and please be sure to share any artists you are planning on working with… in and out of the classroom! See you next week.

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