Social Practice

Designers Vincent Fichard and Matthew Jones (couldn’t find a website for them) created alternate road signs in Dubai last month. View the video documentation on YouTube.

It took a few days to make the signs, and a week to shoot, we had over a hundred people reacting to them and they’re still on the streets of Dubai. The wording is in Arabic and English; and the style of the signs are exactly like the construction/info signs you see all over town. [via itsnicethat]

“The Mountain School of Art concerns itself with the development of various academic programs designed as a supplement to those offered by the established art schools, teaching more tangible aspects of art, developing a different, but complimentary, point of view. These topics include law, science, production methods and problems, the commercial art market, relationships with galleries, etc…striving towards unconventional approaches to intellectual, aesthetic, and cultural questions.” (1)

Recently I took a weekend trip with California College of the Art’s first year MFA class to Los Angeles to view galleries and museums there. This trip was organized by the Dialogs and Practices class (a class described as a forum for introducing students to the cultural practices of artists, and arts professionals in the Bay Area, California and beyond, through their work and working methods.) to convey a feel for the art scene(s) of Los Angeles. We saw 4 museums, at least 20 galleries and 2 artist-run spaces. Though many of the exhibitions and artist projects we visited were interesting it was actually a space that I never saw (since class was not in session) called the Mountain School of Arts (MSA), which seemed most complex in its approach and effect on the LA scene.

The MSA is a free school founded by the artists, Piero Golia and Eric Wesley in 2005. To paraphrase from the MSA’s somewhat vague website, the function of the school is to contribute to the cultural history of Los Angeles through the establishment of a tuition-free art school for artists which acts as a fixed cultural center point for artistic discourse within the ever striating fabric of the limitless city of LA.

The program is structured into one, 3-month semester per year beginning in January through the first week of April. Classes take place 2 or more times a week at night from 6 to 9pm in the unglamorous backroom of the Mountain bar in Chinatown (hence the name the Mountain School). The program supports 12 or more students, both local and international who are selected from a pool of applicants (2). The MSA also provides lodging and studio space to the out of town students. Some examples of these classes are; “Sustainable Articulture: how to grow an art practice”, by Michael Darling, assistant curator, moca; “Law & Art”, Eric Wesley, artist, Lonnie Blanchard and Carl Wesley, lawyers; and “Topics in Science & Technology”by Stefano Campagnola, a researcher at Caltech.

Having heard vague and often conflicting descriptions of this school from a number of artists I decided to use this trip to LA as an excuse to find out more about the MSA. I began this search with China Art Object, a gallery in Chinatown, whom I had heard was closely related to the school. There I asked the gallery attendants Meghan and Anna about the school. Both Meghan and Anna were quite familiar with the school though they were pretty unclear on the content and structure of its classes. They told me that the school was funded partially by Steve Hanson an artist and one of the co-owners of both China Art Objects and the Mountain Bar (3) . Significantly the two artists who founded the school are representing by China Art Object. Meghan and Anna also told me that next month there would be a show at China Art Object of the art of the recipient of the MSA’s Martin Kippenburger award, an award presented to the student who drank the most beer during the semester. It was unclear how this was measured. There is an interest in beer due to the programs location above a bar and perhaps its happy hour class meeting time causing many of these classes to be relayed through pints of lager.

I was then referred to Wendy Yao the owner of Ooga Booga an art, clothing, zine, book and music store also in Chinatown, who had taught a class at the MSA. Wendy described the school as really interesting though slightly chaotic. Wendy said that the school though begun as a kind of alternative to art school was recently, due somewhat to its growing notoriety, trying to broaden its student body to incorporate a more diverse group.

Since Wendy had only really been involved once in the school she suggested I talk to Sara Clendening the director of Jack Hanley gallery. Sara was not only a 2007 student but was also reputed to be the girlfriend of Eric Wesley and could therefore provide me with a more privileged perspective. Sara told me that for her the experience was pretty unusual. The first class was a talk by Dan Graham to which 200 some odd people showed up. Dan played punk records on a record player and narrated them for an hour. She said the students were dissuaded from talking about their art. They did not make art in class, though they did read artist writings and would discuss them. The class would also go on field trips to such sites as “Black Pussy” a spectacular and vulgar kind of nightclub/cabaret as sculpture by the tragically deceased artist Jason Rhoades, which was run out of his studio before his death.

The MSA it is not a phenomenon individual to LA (4) there are other free schools in San Francisco, New York, Chicago, Berlin, Sweden and elsewhere. But there is something specific in their choice to meet within an underground yet semi public site of a bar and the power in their intentions to inform artists with other disciplines. Piero Golia one of the founders has commented on the site of the school by stating, “This situation interested us since it is similar to the secret societies in Europe that were fighting for national liberation two-hundred years ago.” (5)  There is something undoubtedly revolutionary about the notion of a free school but with art it is hard to tell whether the above statement is a statement of nostalgic fetishization or a provocation of actual purpose. Within this increasingly dark political moment me I hope for the later.

————

1. The Mountain School Of Arts Website, Objectives http://www.themountainschoolofarts.org/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=4
2 Applications for the 2008 program are available on the Mountain School of Arts website. http://www.themountainschoolofarts.org/2008/MSA%5E_2008_APPLICATION.pdf
3. It is also funded by the Netherlands Consulate in Los Angeles, BeLA Foundation, the Croatian government, Gai (Associazione Giovani Artisti Italiani), the Goethe Institute and 1+1=3.
4. In fact the MSA is 1 of 2 free art schools in LA that have emerged within the last five years, the second being the Sundown Schoolhouse.
5. Holy Mountain – Los Angeles, “Flash Art News - Flash Art Online” 2005. http://flashartonline.com/Archivio/riv_246/news_2.htm

Another book that I had mean to to put down on our reading list for the year:
Magic Moments: Collaborations Between Artists and Young People,
Anna Harding (Ed.), Black Dog Press, London, 2005

Additionally, I had thought it might be a good idea to use the website to track our reading activity, both to let each other know what books we are currently reading, and also to recommend new books for the list. For example, it would be great to know who has picked up a copy of the various books on the list or who may have borrowed something from the Workshop Library.

Also it might be a good idea to use this website to keep track of online articles, pdf downloads, etc… For example, I found the first four chapters of “Pedagogy of the Oppressed” and the entirety of “Empire” online.
Pedagogy of the Oppressed
Empire

Should this be done through the ‘blog or the Wiki? If we used the blog, it might be good to keep a single, common tag, like Pedagogy (or some such) so that we could quicky track things down.

a couple weeks ago i was reading the current ‘issue’ of ARTWURL, curated by HOMEWORK (Ditte Lyngkaer Pedersen, Carlos Motta, Lize Mogel, and Jeuno J.E Kim) a new york based collective whose project is an attempt to apply pedagogical strategies to socially engaged art practices.

Contesting the purported neutrality of education, HOMEWORK aims to examine and engage in alternative pedagogical models to understand the larger historical context, learn to think from within the confronted problem, and to develop creative responses. HOMEWORK is a project based on processes, where each homework is a self-initiated assignment to practice our continuous critical engagement with notions of the “political.”

an interesting project that could be instructive given the context of the workshop this term.

Regine Debatty, editor of We-Make-Money-Not-Art, flexes her interviewing skills once again. This summer, she’s posted insightful dialogs with a range of Social Practitioners.

Most recently, she discussed art and activism with the The Institute for Applied Autonomy. Because the group works anonymously, it’s not clear if the questions were answered collectively, or by a single spokesperson. They raise interesting questions about the current shape and practicality of artistic resistance.

With Rogues Gallery, the robot overcame certain kinds of social conditioning not because of its mechanical capabilities but simply because it was seen as legitimate, based on the assumption that anyone possessing a robot represented some large research institution which probably had the “right” to spray its messages on public space, rather than simply being a couple of crazy people who built a machine in their garage. Imagine if we had tried the same experiment without a robot, using only a few cans of spraypaint – no one would have participated because the action would have been clearly understood as an illegal act of public defacement. [read the entire interview here]

WMMNA’s in-depth conversation with Christine Hill included some introspection on Hill’s recent book project, “Inventory: The Work Of Christine Hill And Volksboutique.” This weaves into a discussion on commerce, money, and the evolution of ‘Volksboutique’ (is it one large project? a series? a franchise?). And a little taste of Hill’s contribution to the Venice Biennale.

This idea of merging income and art occupations culminated with opening the Volksboutique-as-shop in 1996. It was a way of claiming autonomy. It both freed me from being anyone’s employee, and launched me straight into Proprietor-status, and it absolved me from having to rely on the art system to provide me with an audience. It allowed me to build a base of operations, and work from it, which is a device I’ve held onto over years.[read the entire interview here]

Also of interest was a shorter conversation with Mark Tribe about the ‘Port Huron Project’ in which protest speeches from the New Left movements of the 60’s and 70’s are re-enacted at the original site.

We protest the war in Iraq, or the WTO, but it’s hard to imagine that we could really change things in a radical way: put an end to the military industrial complex, replace consumer capitalism with another form of economy, or achieve true democracy. Back then, people seemed to be able to imagine a radically different future. I think it’s vitally important that we recapture some of that utopian spirit. [read the entire interview here]

For two weeks in June, a group of “15 outsider young journalists” put on the “London Project.” A subset of their activities centered around distributing and circulating free books on the London Underground.

“Over the next two weeks we’ll be distributing thousands of second hand books across the tube and we want YOU to get involved. If you see one of our books, please pick it up! Then read it and replace with any book of your choice. Let’s make the tube a giant, free library!”

You can read more on their site, and listen to some recordings of participant’s reactions.

See also:

• BookCrossing
• Read It Swap It
• and BARTreads

Two seemingly dissimilar bedfellows, Nicolas Bourriaud and a ‘digital lifestyle’ magazine, came together in an interview entitled “Your Assignment: Art.” The interview by Leah DeVun with Andrea Grover, concerned Grover’s curatorial efforts around crowdsourcing (previously mentioned here).

Although I’m unconvinced by the precedents that she’s claimed (Matta-Clark’s Food), the contemporary work that she selects is quite interesting when taken as a group: ‘Learning to Love you More‘, ‘Found Magazine‘, ‘Sheep Market‘, ‘Signs That Say What You Want Them to Say, Not Signs That Say What Other People Want You to Say‘ and ‘We Feel Fine‘ (to name a few).

This selection forces some intriguing questions. What is the distinction between something that is truly ‘crowdsourced’ and work that is produced by a more traditional notion of an artist collective (an interesting test case might be Andrea Grover and Jon Rubin’s show Never Been to Houston)? In the interview, DeVun asked bout the role of the editor in crowdsourced works– Grover points to a preference for “the way the assignment is conceived at the beginning” rather than editing after the fact. But she never really answers if, and in what way editing can be part of a successful crowdsourced artwork. The interview also focuses on what makes crowdsourcing fail, and what contributes to effective projects. Grover concludes that clear and well-considered parameters are key, but also fostering a sense of community between participants– a feeling that they are contributing to something greater and larger than anything that they could accomplish alone. [read the entire interview here]

–> An interesting aside: This interview was selected for publication in “Wired” from the opensource (crowdsourced) journalism experiment “Asignment Zero.”

The semester is drawing to a close, and the first group of students who entered into the Social Practices program are now graduating! Congratulations of course are in order to Jen Durban, Carly troncale, Bridget Barnhart, Amanda Herman and Anne Devine. Watch for future posts detailing a PDF book that was produced to give an overview of the work they made while in the program.
There has been a lot of interest and excitement about the incoming group for fall of 2007. Not only will it be the first group to fully step into the new curriculum and the workshop, but it is the largest group we have admitted (7 people). I will be posting images, links and project descriptions for the various people over the next few posts, starting with links to pre-existing websites.

Welcome to Forrest Lewinger, Lynne Mccabe, Anthony Marcellini, Boris Chesakov, Matthew Rana, Ella Watson and Piero Passacantando.

Links to websites and project information:

Ella Watson: Ella Watson videos
Matthew Rana: matthewrana.net, Guerre Atelier Website

Anthony Marcellini : portfolio download
Also It Can Change Website

In the fall of 2006 the Banff Center for the Arts hosted a residency called “The Future of Idea Art.”  One outcome of this gathering was a “Relational Aesthetics Song” (produced on their wiki, naturally).  Here’s a little snippet of a verse:

“
Oh there won’t be any evidence that anything happened when we’re done
Or maybe there will, like someone could leave
A crumpled up kleenex or something like that on the floor for when we’re gone”

Of course, if you don’t like the lyrics– you can always re-write them.

A new web-based (and occasionally physical space) curation project just opened its doors in Berlin (and beyond). SocialDesignSite intends to open the discussion about what ‘Social Design’ is and what changes it might bring about. Their motto, “We cannot not change the world,” is based in the belief that every action we take shapes our social interactions and has broader consequences for the world around us. They describe their role as connecting projects undertaken with a similar Social Design perspective across the globe.

Within the categorization structure that they’ve set forth, ‘art based’ is just one mode out of many that Social design can inhabit. Most categories are a little slim in projects, so it’s hard to get a read about the distinctions (or usefulness) of these divisions. They have also built a ‘discussion’ feature that will allow a message board style conversation about an individual project. They do appear to be soliciting submissions for exhibition on the site, so it will be interesting to watch the growth of their exhibition over the next few months.

They’ll be having their official launch as part of ‘DESIGNMAI 2007′ in Berlin from May 14th to 18th.