Harrell Fletcher's Blog, page 2

12.19.18

12.19.18

I’ve been talking with my students lately about the radical potential of conceptual art. Part of what I’m suggesting is that conceptual art or “conceptualism” (the art historical term for that category of work) was radical in the sense that it challenged existing formalism, and attempted to offer alternatives to the status quo commercial system, but quickly became aestheticized and commodified as it gained acceptance in the art world. So both the early work (pre-usage of the term conceptual art) produced by Duchamp, Manzoni, etc and classic work by the artists known as conceptualists like Kosuth and Weiner was “radical” in its departure from formal object based modernist work (impressionists, cubists, etc in the case of Duchamp, and abstract expressionism for the conceptualists) and created an interesting and liberating set of methods for making art, but possibly because in both cases the artists and work found great acceptance in the art world (which is really the commercial art world) those approaches to making art didn’t have a chance to be realized in more politically and socially impactful ways. There are exceptions to this in the strategies that were used by activist groups including Act Up, interventionists like the Yes Men, and artist collectives, notably The Gorilla Girls, all of which employed conceptual devices in the pursuit of revealing hidden information and promoting political agendas. But what I’m finding interesting in regard to conceptual art is how it can become understood and used by people who may not have knowledge of modern art history, people who might want to employ conceptual art methods in their daily lives and circumstances but who are have not been trained as artists. I’m thinking about conceptual art that can be produced in prison, or in a grade school, or any other non-art context and venue by the people who are in those places normally.

I’m currently leading a conceptual art class in a minimum-security prison. We meet every two weeks for an hour. Its part of a larger set of activities the PSU Art and Social Practice MFA program facilitates at the prison. I show examples of past conceptual work and we have seminar style discussions. One of the reasons that I’m interested in introducing conceptual art to a prison context is because unlike other art approaches—sculpture, painting, photography, video, installation, etc. conceptual art requires no materials, no studios, no galleries, or any other resources of that kind. Once conceptual art methods are understood they can be used to produce projects immediately, with no approval, and without any costs.

It has been a slow but very engaging process working through existing ideas of what art can be and what artists can do and offering up broader parameters emphasizing conceptually based approaches. There have been times of revelation and excitement as the process unfolds. People who previously had never considered non-object based ways of making art have come up with thoughtful conceptual project ideas that redefine the physical and psychological context of the prison. One person suggested that we could as a group look out of our classroom window at the people making their way to the yard for a period of time and claim that as a work of art. We discussed formalizing elements for the piece that would help it to be understood as art by adding a title, date, etc. The thought of writing that information up on a label and attaching it to the wall next to the window was contemplated. Finding a way to document the project also provoked various ideas, as well as how it could be added to a CV and other professional materials to potentially be used to apply for funding to support more projects.

An interesting moment happened while discussing conceptual art during one class when one of the people in the group turned to me and said that he liked the ideas but needed another example help him understand things better. I paused for a second and then said that the class we were in was in fact a conceptual art work. The person who asked the question nodded his head, and a knowing murmur arose from the group. I will be curious to see how things develop further.

9.5.18

I brought this topic up with my grad students last Spring. It seems obvious, but I think people can loose track of this for a variety of reasons—the idea of actually enjoying the work you do as an artist. Being an artist is an unorthodox thing to do in society in general with various struggles to overcome, so you would think that if someone was putting in the effort to make that happen they would deeply enjoy whatever artistic activity it was that they practiced. But that doesn’t always happen. The original impulse to be an artist often gets reoriented as things like school, commercial sales, reviews, grant applications, trends, routines, etc start to impact the way that an artist works. Success, though only a problem for a very few people who try to make it as an artist, can also have unexpected negative effects. Pressure from expectations, becoming overly busy, and a need to produce more and more product can take its toll and alter what might have been a hoped for dream into an unpleasant grind.

 

I asked my students to stop and really consider what aspects of their practice give them pleasure and satisfaction, and what parts become unpleasant and annoying. Sometimes it’s hard to sort out exactly where pleasure ends and unpleasantness starts. Some of the students call this the “fun factor.” I’m a little leery of referring to this condition as merely “fun” because though fun might be part of it, the kind of pleasure that I’m talking about might also include rigorous work, hardcore conceptualization, debate and conflict, addressing difficult topics and various other non-fun sounding activities. That’s because pleasure is very individually defined, so I don’t want to suggest that what I’m talking about is only about superficial fun, unless that’s what you are into and want to be experiencing as part of your practice as an artist (probably some level of fun is important for everyone).

 

What I am advocating for is an evaluation of each person’s activities as an artist, including all of the effort that goes into supporting the artwork, and to then to determine if there is a priority being placed on the things in life that give each artist pleasure, or if somehow the balance has gotten off and there is more time spent on work that is not enjoyable.

 

From a social practice point of view it is possible to think very expansively about what kind of work you might want to be doing since that approach is not dependent on spending time in a studio (or quasi studio) and there is no need to make objects that might have a commercial appeal for the gallery system. If it turns out that you really like spending time in an isolated place that you have to pay rent for while trying to make rarified objects that rich people might want to buy then you just have to be one of the 2% (or whatever small number it is) of people trying to do that who actually support themselves that way long term, or get yourself a day job and pursue that type of art making on the side if it really brings you satisfaction. My sense is that most artists don’t really want to function in a strictly studio/gallery model and if freed from that system (which is mostly a matter of psychologically breaking away from the conditioning that society has created to limit the idea of what an artist is and how they get paid for what they do) they will have more options for finding pleasure in their practice. I have discussed that dynamic in other writings so I’ll get back to the main point–what aspects of your work as an artist give you pleasure, and how does your practice as an artist support doing those things?

 

In my discussions with students this sometimes takes a while to sort out. Originally they might have really liked to spend time drawing or making sculptural objects and that’s what lead them to become an artist, but along the way they realized that they didn’t want to always make drawings or sculptural objects, and the art world system didn’t seem appealing once they were able to experience a taste of it. Luckily artists have incredible freedom and once they realize that they can construct a practice that combines all sorts of interests–maybe a little drawing, research, teaching, walking, sleeping, working in a garden, having discussions with groups of people outside of your friends and family, working with kids, curating, etc–they can creatively choose to do what they really want to do.

 

Having the freedom and flexibility to construct a diversified practice is a major piece in developing a pleasurable life as an artist. But there is another element that is also pervasive in derailing the ability to achieve that pursuit. It is the idea of success. Artists who are trying to operate in the art world largely have similar ideas about what success looks like. I think that perception primarily comes from social/educational conditioning that is really more about commercial gallery interests than creating satisfying individual artistic practices. Success in those terms means having high-end commercial gallery representation, sales, inclusion in important museum collections and international biennials, reviews in art magazines and newspapers, awards from foundations, residencies, etc. All of that requires lots of travel, time spent in studios with assistants and fabricators, socializing at openings and art fairs, staying current with trends, and often times making work when would rather be doing something else.

 

From what I’ve experienced and observed the problem is that expectations for success are set too high (based on art world convention) and don’t include individual deviation. My suggestion is for artists to examine their unique needs and desires. It might not be of interest for some people to achieve certain status quo aspects of art world success, and instead there might be more value placed on just being successful enough to have consistent but less prestigious projects happening. The projects could be of a diverse nature and without object production, which would be oppositional to the needs of the commercial gallery system. The projects could be localized and possibly might be produced in partnership with non-art funding organizations. The artist might want to spend only part of their week working in a studio or office and the rest of the time doing other seemingly non-work related activities, which could none the less be useful to the development of their practice. If instead of attempting to be a successful artist in the terms of the art world artists found their own concepts of success for their practice, perhaps they would also find more pleasure and satisfaction in their lives and would create precedents that other artists could follow leading them to greater satisfaction as well.

4.7.18

I’ve been negligent about writing for a year or two, these things happen. I’m going to try to get back into writing regularly again.

Ok, so here is a topic—the potential positive relationship between studio art and artists and projects by artists doing social practice type work. There has always been some level of antagonism between these two groups, and some of it is understandable. From the perspective of the orthodoxy (studio/gallery artists) any new approach can be threatening. As an artist that is invested in a conventional way of working (even if that way isn’t functioning from a support perspective) it can be challenging when artists working in other ways that may seem to involve less labor and hoop jumping receive recognition and support. It’s destabilizing, and frustrating, and all of those things. And from the perspective of the upstart socially engaged artist the dominance of the studio/gallery model seems unfair and marginalizing, and in various ways those dominant conventions sometimes indicate that socially engaged work might not even be art (and its never fun to be told that your art isn’t art). In the end the two approaches don’t really have a lot of overlap, they are about as different as painting is from documentary filmmaking, and in that same way should not be seen as competition to each other.

This is a generalization, but usually studio artists want to primarily show their object-based work in gallery spaces (in galleries, art centers, and museums) where as artists doing social practice often work outside of conventional art spaces, and even when they do make work for art contexts they are frequently more interested in non-gallery locations within the institution or in making work that happens only temporarily in gallery spaces while studio-based art is being displayed. Sometimes that work might be responding to a museum’s collection or the work of an artist being shown in the gallery space. In that sense the social practice work can be seen as an augmentation of what is already being presented adding new perspectives to typical exhibition dynamics.

But there is another way that socially engaged art is sometimes mutually supportive of studio-based work. Some social practice projects are designed to contain studio-based work. For an example I’ll use King School Museum of Contemporary Art (KSMoCA), which is a contemporary art museum located inside of a Portland public school. The project, which I created with Lisa Jarrett and now also includes many other collaborators, was constructed conceptually as a large, expanding, and ongoing social practice project. But inside of that framework is the need and desire to present work by studio-based artists in a variety of ways. The primary and longest standing version of that is a rotating set of exhibitions in which well known studio-based artists show their original work, but also do lectures and workshops with students at the school as well.

We have now engaged numerous studio based artists in the KSMoCA project over the last four years or so and all of them have been excited to have the opportunity to show their work in an unusual context with an audience that they don’t normally reach. They have also enjoyed interacting directly with the students at the school. Generally, studio-based artists are not ever asked to leave their status quo environments for making and showing work, but that doesn’t mean that they won’t respond well to that possibility when it is given. I think there is a lot more room for that sort of thing to happen in all kinds of contexts, giving studio artists many more chances to show their work than in the limited set of traditional galleries and museums that exist in any given location.

The benefit in this symbiotic relationship for the socially engaged artist creating a structure like KSMoCA is that it is necessary to have work to show and artists to engage with inside of the framework that they have created. Obviously, not all socially engaged projects need the content of studio-based artists, many of them work with non-artists or with people who don’t consider themselves artists. But in some cases social engaged artists can function like unconventional curators for studio-based artists, facilitating the presentation of their work in contexts that go way outside of the normal capacity of more traditional curators.

(A side question that might come up then is why don’t socially engaged artists just call themselves curators? The answer from my perspective is that curatorial strategies are just one among many approaches that a socially engaged artist can use in producing a project, so being labeled solely as a curator would be limiting, where as working as an artist (at least in my definition) can include switch around roles, cross lines, and hybridize in ways like almost no other practice.)

This same type of supportive relationship dynamic that I’m describing between socially engaged art and studio-based art can also apply to socially engaged art and performance, film, literature, music, architecture, etc. Basically, conventional artists of all sorts have nothing to fear in regards to socially engaged art, and potentially a lot to gain from it.

 

Warren Hatch: An Appreciation

In 1995 I came across a seed catalog (The 1995 Ethnobotanical Catalog of Seeds, by J.L Hudson, Seedsman). It had some amazing seed listings and articles (one in particular that I was really interested in challenged the concept of “native plants”) and also included a section of recommended books by various authors as well as, and most intriguing to me, a “video microscope series” by someone named Warren Hatch. The description of Hatch and his videos were fascinating.

Not long after that I found one of Hatch’s videos in a public library somewhere in California. The footage, editing, and voiceover were all amazing to me. I loved the idea of an amateur scientist making his discoveries available to the world through VHS tapes distributed to libraries. Hatch stayed in my mind as an inspiration and someone that I hoped to somehow meet someday.

Many years later I found out that Hatch had moved from Los Angeles where he had made his early videos in his apartment, back to Portland, Oregon where he had grown up. By then I was also living in Portland, and was working on a curatorial project with Jens Hoffmann called the People’s Biennial. Jens and I were conducting research for a traveling exhibition in five cities across the US (including Portland) to find work by interesting people who weren’t already involved in the art world. The show we then created travelled back to all five of the cities. Hatch was at the top of my list as someone I wanted to include. It took some doing, but I eventually tracked him down and he allowed us to present one of his videos Bees and Wasps: An Appreciation in the show.

I knew that I wanted to find another way to get Hatch’s work out to a larger public and the internet seemed like the perfect solution, but when I mentioned the idea to Hatch he didn’t seem particularly interested, so I let it go. Then about six year later he showed up as a substitute teacher in my daughter’s third grade class. I was volunteering in the school library that day and when my daughter’s group came in I asked her what she thought of Mr. Hatch, she said that all of the kids loved him, that he talked about bugs all day, showed them his videos, and talked about his recently self-published book In One Yard: Close to Nature, which documented hundreds of insects, plants, and animals that he found in his backyard.

Hatch seemed happy to see me so I used the opportunity to ask him again if he might be interested in posting some of his videos on YouTube. This time he said that he would like to to, but didn’t want to have to figure out how to do it technically. I told him that I would be happy to help and gave him my contact info.

A few weeks later, Hatch contacted me and said that he was ready to try to post a video. I went over to his house and got a tour of his photography and video set ups and his backyard which was very interesting. He gave me a hard drive with his latest video on it also called In One Yard: Close to Nature which contains similar content as his book and uses his normal text titles and explanations, but does not yet include his distinctive voiceover which all of his previous videos feature, but is still totally great. My assistant Allie Hankins quickly created a Warren A. Hatch channel and posted the first video. Hatch reviewed it and was pleased with the results and allowed us to include four more videos with the potential of additional ones to come from his archive.

I hope that you enjoy Warren A. Hatch’s work as much as I do.

You can view his YouTube channel here.

[See image gallery at www.harrellfletcher.com]

KSMoCA

2014-ongoing

Martin Luther King Jr. School

4906 NE 6th Ave. 

Portland, OR

KSMoCA (King School Museum of Contemporary Art) is a contemporary art museum within the walls of a functioning preK-8 public school in NE Portland, OR. It is a collaborative project with PSU faculty Lisa Jarrett, students from King elementary school and Portland State University’s College of the Arts. The project creates an unusual pairing between early education and internationally renowned artists and their work.

Students at the school learn through experience about museum practice and careers as they are facilitated through the roles of curators, installers, publicists, copywriters, registrars and docents. KSMoCA re-imagines the way museums, public schools, and universities shape people, culture, and perspectives by cultivating a space for art to educate within and beyond the classroom.

Each rotating exhibition is presented for two months, and permanent projects are being added to the school environment on an ongoing basis.

http://www.ksmoca.com/

[See image gallery at www.harrellfletcher.com]

 

The Music That Makes Us

March 13 – April 24, 2016

Disjecta, Portland, OR

Exhibition organized with Emma Colburn, Roz Crews, Amanda Leigh Evans, Emily Fitzgerald, Lauren Moran, Anke Schüttler, Renee Sills, and Kimberly Sutherland

With Zahra Ahmed, De La Salle North Catholic High School Choir, Dorian Neira and Daniel “D.J. Max” Lasuncet, Austin Green, Robin Gordon and the Celebration Tabernacle Ministry of Music, Kenton Brass, Kenton Church Choir, Shirley A. Meador, The Obo Addy Legacy Project, Peninsula School in collaboration with Caldera, Heather Perkins, André Roberson, Lisa Schonberg, Norman Sylvester, and The World Famous Kenton Club

Curated by Chiara Giovando

The Music That Makes Us was conceived and organized with the PSU Art and Social Practice MFA Program in collaboration with music related partners from the Kenton neighborhood, where Disjecta is located. Community members with musical practices were invited to collaborate on an exhibition of ephemera that explored the broad range of musical experiences in the neighborhood. The project culminated with a closing reception/festival of performances by the musicians featured in the exhibition, ranging from local church and school choirs to bands and individual artists.

Gallery Guide

Poster

[See image gallery at www.harrellfletcher.com]

9.2.16

I wrote the following for this year’s group of PSU Art and Social Practice MFA students to consider in an attempt to understand their own intentions for their practice and work. It might be of use to other folks as well:

 

How would you like to see your practice as a whole function? By that I mean    what do you want to be doing to occupy your time as an artist? For a conventional artist that might mean working in a studio making objects, showing in galleries, spending time doing career administration etc. How do you want your practice to alter or expand from those conventions?

 

What do you want the work to be that you make as part of your practice? For a standard studio artist the answer might be oil paintings on canvas and lithographic prints or something like that. What kind of work do you want to make as a socially engaged artist?

 

Who would you like your audience to be? Typically for artists it is assumed that the audience is a generic set of people who attend art world functions and go to galleries and museums. Perhaps the highest value audience would be made up of curators, gallerists, collectors, and arts writers, and maybe other artists. For a social practice artist those people might also be desirable as part of an audience, but maybe they are less important than a local audience that could include non-art oriented people. Some of those audience members also might become participants or collaborators in a social practice type project. Who do you have in mind as your ideal audience for your work?

 

How is the work distributed? For a studio artist the ideal answer to this question is that a gallery would show, sell, and ship work to collectors and museums. For a social practice artists there might not be any objects to sell and ship in the traditional way, so perhaps distribute isn’t exactly the right word, maybe “deliver” would be better and that includes developing contexts for the work to be made and shown in etc. Basically, how is your audience going to be able encounter and experience your work? This also gets into the topic of primary, secondary, and tertiary audiences. The primary one are people directly involved with the project possibly as participants, the secondary set isn’t personally involved with working one the project but is able to directly experience the completed work, and the tertiary audience only encounters the work in mediated ways—documentation, including publications, web, presentations, and even word of mouth.

 

Finally, how do you want to be supported to do your work? The standard artist response to this would be sales through a commercial gallery, possibly augmented by teaching, lectures, grants, etc. Though that may be the general hope that artists have very few achieve those things especially enough sales to make a living. As an artist working with social engagement sales may not be an option at all and instead along with teaching, lectures, and grants, you might want to be more innovative about other sources of funding which could include commissions from art and non-art organizations, small business approaches, non-college related educational activities, self initiated artist-in-residencies, etc.

 

There probably will be lots of crossover within the answers to these questions. The answers will undoubtedly change over time as well, but I think it is useful to consider them as a way to make decisions and actions that can help realize a subjectively desirable practice and support syste

Collective Museum

Public Doors and Windows  

UCSC Institute of the Arts & Sciences 

Santa Cruz, California

2015

I worked with Molly Sherman and Nolan Calisch as part of our collaboration Public Doors and Windows on a project for The Institute of the Arts and Sciences (IAS) at UCSC. We spent two years researching to produce a vast campus-wide “museum” complete with signage, a exhibition dispersed through five university buildings, a museum tour, a catalogue, and a mobile website Collective Museum. The project opened with a temporary exhibition at Sesnon Gallery at Porter College presenting sculptures made by students responding to the significant sites on campus documented by the project.

[See image gallery at www.harrellfletcher.com]

NEA Interview

National Endowment for the Arts

Artworks Podcast

2016

I was interviewed by Josephine Reed at the NEA

Read the transcript here.

 

Neighborhood Food Systems

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

Open Studio

2015

I was asked to created an assignment for Mark Bradford’s Open Studio project at SFMoMA:

https://www.sfmoma.org/read/open-studio-harrell-fletcher/