Archive for September, 2003

Biennales of a Fluxy Kind and Creative Citizenship

Published
by
Lucas
on September 20, 2003
in Fluxus and odds and ends
. 0 Comments

In Newcastle (NSW), October 2003, there is a proposed project, The Empty Show Biennale (ESB)… It will be the 4th Empty Show, the first 2 taking place in Melbourne, the 3rd Canberra, and the 4th in Sydney. It is a growing phenomenon, with artists taking over an empty building, “interior decorating it”, and then launching a clandestine opening party, some of which have been shut down by police. The ESB in Newcastle is designed to be “self organising” - anyone can be involved, groups of artists are encouraged to find their own venues and make their show happen, without worrying about where and what others are up to. The autonomous shows are connected by a publicity website. Nobody`s in charge, nobody can be held responsible, right?

Reminds me of when I was in London in 2000. There was a great “spoof” biennale called “The London Biennale” (LB) which sounds very impressive, London being a big city and all.

The LB was initiated by David Medalla, an ole Filipino-English Fluxus artist, so, being Fluxy, of course anyone who wanted to could be involved. This would definitely cause some anxiety in the parallel universe of Important Biennales, which are all about exclusivity and prestige.

We would meet each monday night in a bookstore, sometimes upwards of 60 bodies, all bristling with ideas for projects, exhibitions, and, mainly, performances somewhere in public space. info would be shared as to good locations, labour exchange, “i wanna get involved”.

The biennale ran for 4 months, may june july aug of 2000. A calendar was updated daily on a website and the readymade rent-a-crowd of biennale participants was always on hand for events.

For me, the best LB projects were those which actually used the sociability of those meetings to develop contacts and make work, rather than just advertise an event. in one of these, a german artist, Andreas Uhl, claimed a piece of antarctica which had broken off (due to global warming) as a sovereign nation, called “Fadeland”, which had an open citizenship policy. The project grew as more and more people signed up as citizens and ambassadors of Fadeland, a nation which, as its icebulk drifted north, was gradually melting and “fading”. Its borders were designed to shrink. Somebody wrote a national anthem (”our land is made of water” was my favourite line) and a choir was assembled to sing it in a proud ceremony, in which a huge block of ice was shipped up the london canals, melting all the while. It was a hoot. And in the context of the LB, which included dozens and dozens of non-english artists (who, like me, were hanging out in London because the place, while cold and grey, is so damn interesting), we already HAD our Fadeland - an association of individuals supporting each other, which transcended national borders. (ps, in case anyone needs to know, I am the official Australian ambassador to Fadeland).

I guess what I`m sayin is that autonomously “organised” projects (like the proposed Empty Show Biennale) can work. Ya dont need curators. Just energy and somebody who`s clever with websites. Which I see is already taken care of…at www.anonart.org. [postscript: this website is no longer there].

ps…just noticed another artist who has worked with passports, Tom Muller. His project, World Passport, has a different idea - to issue passports so that you are registered as a “World Citizen”. See http://www.worldpassport.biz/history.asp It seems his production values are very high, and a passport costs $150 too (Fadeland citizenship registration, from memory, cost five pounds). Strangely, there is a site with a very similar idea (World Passports) which doesn’t seem to have any “art content” whatsoever (i could be wrong!)…http://www.worldservice.org

Arte Reembolso/Art Rebate

Published
by
Lucas
on September 17, 2003
in spatial politics
. 0 Comments

Have just been reading about the “Art-Rebate” project that happened in San Diego in 1993.

(John C. Welchman, Bait or Tackle? An Assisted Commentary on Art Rebate/Arte Reembolso, Art and Text 48, May 1994, p31…)

Three artists got a grant of US$5000 to complete a public art piece as part of an exhibition called “La Frontera/The Border” at the Centro Cultural de la Raza and the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego. The artists divided $4500 of the money into ten dollar bills, and handed them out, one at a time, to “undocumented immigrant workers” in the San Diego area. The premise was clear - to provide a “rebate” (more symbolic than financially useful) to some of the many thousands of “illegal” workers in southern California, who “pay considerably more taxes than they consume in public services and welfare. The fact of their labor poses no or little threat the the job security of other local workers. The immigrants take jobs and accept standards that are below the expectation threshold of citizen-workers. They are unjustly scapegoated for the economic fallibility of the state”.

It`s an interesting action, partly because it is deliberately antagonistic - certainly the artists knew that Art Rebate was going to irritate the national funding body which provided the grant, via the Museum. The barrage of negative (and positive) media stimulated by the project`s press releases were very much to be considered an integral part of the project itself. In fact, this symbolic value in Art Rebate somewhat outweighs its potential practical benefits…although one columnist pointed out, some recipients immediately rushed off to buy lunch with their rebate, it has to be said, the $10 is not going to buy much more than that.

Welchman describes Art Rebate as “post-conceptual”…I suppose the reason for this is that it shares some things in common with the kinds of “conceptual” work made in the early 1970s, ie an interest in its own means of production (where does art come from, what are the channels and structures that create and distribute the art?), yet, the “post-” is appropriate, not only because of the two decade time lag, but also because Art Rebate has some characteristics which were very rarely found in the original (capital C) Conceptual Art… namely, a specific, local, interaction with real-world politics (completely separate from the politics of the art-world).

(Art Rebate/Arte Reembolso, July 1993, Louis Hock, Liz Sisco, David Avalos)

[postscript - more San Diego/Tijuana stuff (about architect Teddy Cruz) here.]

[postscript 2:

As Sisco noted in a discussion of the Art Rebate/Arte Reembolso project of 1995, 'Art is about framing and re-framing things, and [David Avalos, Louis Hock, and I] think that the way that this issue [undocumented immigrant workers in Southern California] has been framed is a problem’ In other words, Sisco and her collaborators bring an aesthetic awareness of the function of framing (in which what is excluded is as important as what is included) to their examination of the ways in which the mass media and politicians in Southern California have worked to construct a particular image of undocumented immigrant workers.

…The above quote is from pp12-13 of an essay “Ongoing Negotiations: Afterimage and the Analysis of Activist Art”, by Kester, Grant H, in a book (edited by him) called Art, Activism and Oppositionality - Essays from Afterimage, 1998, Duke. The Sisco quote originally comes from a panel discussion “Production and Representation in Contemporary Art” at the Cranbrook Academy of Art (Nov 11, 1995).
Kester also refers readers to an article about these artists by Cylena Simonds, called “Public Audit: an Interview with Elizabeth Sisco, Louis Hock and David Avalos” in Afterimage 22, No 1 (Summer 1994) pp 8-11.