Harrell Fletcher's Blog, page 3

4.26.16

Gabo Camnitizer asked me to write a text for the show that he curated in Sweden called Meaning Making Meaning, below is what I came up with. 

In 2007 I was given an opportunity to start a new MFA program at Portland State University where I had been teaching for three years. I used a new term for the program, Social Practice, that related to my own art activity, the work of a few of my contemporaries, and various historical precedents. The term had already been put into use for an MFA program by my alma mater the California College of Art in San Francisco two years earlier. My idea for the program was that I would reevaluate and alter all aspects of a traditional studio based MFA and in some ways try to merge that with another educational experience I’d had as an apprentice studying organic agriculture at the University of California in Santa Cruz. The apprenticeship was hands on and applied. The forty apprentices lived in tents on the campus farm and grew and sold the vegetables and fruits we produced through a market stand and a CSA (community supported agriculture) program.

I loved the experiential learning that took place in the farm program and wanted to find ways to adapt that to teaching art. The PSU Art and Social Practice Program has now been in operation for nine years. The students don’t have individual studios and instead share and borrow work and classroom space when it is needed. The emphasis is on collaboration, participation, site and context specificity, interdisciplinary, and often incorporates education, localism, social justice, and environmental concerns. The three-year program includes classes in writing, pedagogy, theory, professional practice, contemporary art history, and various changing topics including privilege, performance, documentary, and ethics. The students also work on both their own public projects and group ones including a participatory conference at the end of each school year. We also take program research trips to places like Los Angeles and Mexico City, and go on campouts and retreats in closer-by locations. All of the graduating students produce a public project of some kind (generally not an exhibition), and edit a book on someone else’s work (including John Malpede, Temporary Services, Pedro Reyes, Wendy Ewald, Luis Camnitzer, Pablo Helguera, and many others) as part of our Reference Points book series. By the time the students leave the program they have had a great deal of exposure to artists, ideas, experiences, and ways of working that go way beyond the typical “studio/gallery” model.

Over the years I have been asked many times if the program is in some ways an art project that I’m doing. If this was the case I would think of the students as collaborators, though it is clear that we have different roles that give me much greater power, the main aspect in that respect being that I am paid by the university while they pay the university. I also have an established career in what is now known as the field of Social Practice, while the students are in the process of trying to develop their careers. Still, these dynamics are not dramatically different from the ones in commissioned projects I have worked on for museums and art centers that were specifically intended as art projects. In those cases I have acted in some ways similar to a paid regional theater director who is considered a professional working with amateur actors, costume makers, set designers, etc. My role, unlike the theater director, is less commonly understood, being defined as an artist working with members of the public in participatory ways. But since I am comfortable with that role and don’t have any personal ethical dilemmas functioning that way, I can also easily see the MFA program that I direct as an artwork as well. There are some advantages to that conceptual framework, for instance it allows me to break from convention with the MFA program as much as I might with my commissioned art works, so there are always new things for me and the students to learn and experience. On the other hand the students themselves might resent being thought of as part of my art project, or the university might object to it for one reason or another. So as with all of my work, I’m not really fixated on calling any particular project art unless there is a benefit to doing that. For the purposes of this current exhibition maybe it is interesting to think of the MFA program as an art project, but in other situations it may not be.

People’s Biennial 2014

Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit

2014-2015

I co-curated the second version of the People’s Biennial with Jens Hoffmann in Detroit. We came up with a system of asking established artists from around the country to each select someone that they thought was doing really interesting work but wasn’t well known in the art world, and to then create a small solo show of that person’s work. Each of the little exhibitions were presented together in a small structures installed in the main gallery at MoCAD. These were the participating artists and their collaborators: Jennifer Allora & Guillermo Calzadilla and Robert Rabin, Carson Ellis and Hank Meloy, Dara Friedman and Ishmael Golden Eagle, Wendy Ewald and Denise Dixon, Lee Walton & Harriet Hoover and Mr. Coopers, Colter Jacobsen and Lance Rivers, Liz Magic Laser and Wendy Osserman, Sharon Lockhart and Fearless Fred, Cary Loren and Jimbo Easter, Rick Lowe and Jonathan the Plant Man, Ken Lum and Orkan Telhan, Jeffry Mitchell and Vic Oblas, Scott Reeder and Xav Leplae, Alec Soth and George Wurtzel, Hank Willis Thomas and Baz Dreisinger, Transformazium and James Kidd, Steven Yazzie and Jonathan Bond.

Buy the catalogue here.

3.12.15

I took a little break from this weekly writing project (like a nine month break or something like that, not sure what happened) but I want to start doing it again, maybe every other week or once a month is more realistic, we will see what happens. Writing is eventually what I really want to be doing, somehow this art stuff happened instead and really got me off course, but I have talked with Publication Studio here in Portland and they have agreed to publish a book of my collected writing from about the last twelve or fifteen years (I think maybe fifty pieces, something like that, probably less than 100 pages in total) and now I’m supposed to be getting those all together so that we can get that to happen by the fall. It will be a good summer project for me since I’m planning to limit my travel and finally really deal with my backyard garden which has been in a state of unrealizedness for many, many years, though with all of the perennials and self seeding plants, and my Ruth Stout style of composting directly into the garden beds resulting in all sorts of things popping up all over the place, there is always something out there to harvest and eat.

But I digress; what I wanted to write about today is the concept and practice of “claiming” in relationship to art and specifically social practice. I’ve always struggled with how much students and artists need to know about art to be able to function effectively as artists, sometimes I’ve felt like it might be better to know very little (so as not to be limited by existing frameworks and models), and when it comes to the MFA that I currently am in charge of I encourage people who don’t have undergrad degrees in art to apply, and we have happily accepted folks with degrees in lots of other disciplines, many of whom went on to make amazing art work. If it were in fact up to me, I’d also potentially accept people with no undergrad degree at all just based on their work and life experience, but the university won’t go for that.

At the same time my own knowledge of art history has been very influential on my practice and informs a lot of the work I do in a wide variety of ways both conceptual and aesthetic. Duchamp’s readymades, and Richard Prince and Sherry Levine’s work using appropriation have been very important to me in developing my own practice and projects. I was thrilled as a young student when I learned about those approaches, so it is always interesting to me how presenting those concepts to my own students can have such emotionally negative reactions, they seem to feel that those artists were cheating, and think that their success somehow undermines the students own skills in more traditional artist techniques. I’ve seen undergrads brought to tears when learning about Duchamp and his status in the world of contemporary art.

Anyway, what I wanted to write about here is the potential use of what I’m going to call “claiming” as an artistic method. What I’m talking about has all sorts of potential applications from ones that are just expansions of readymades and appropriation, which is in many ways what I was doing with my project The American War (though I added in site-specific participatory events as well), to other uses which start to operate further a field partly because they can function outside of the need to create some kind of object that can be bought and sold and displayed in an art world venue. I recall that Fischli and Weiss had a project in the late 90’s as part of the Munster Sculpture Project where they just claimed a community garden as their project and directed people to go see it. Actually, I just looked that up and it turns out it was a garden that they had constructed to look like a community garden and it was temporary just for the exhibition time, so that doesn’t work as an example of claiming in the sense that I’m talking about. (Though it does fit well into another topic I’d like to write about sometime which is how prior to the use of the internet it was sometimes hard to find out accurate details about temporary projects and through the reliance of limited documentation or even just word of mouth artists would often be inspired to create something new based on a misinterpretation or lack of details of something that had happened before. That might be something that is being undermined now by so much digital availability to vast documentation and information on the web.) So let’s just say Fischli and Weiss had not created the garden, but had instead just claimed it, would that be valid? For me it’s no different than a photographer taking a picture of a garden (or any other pre-existing thing) and then presenting the print as their work. Some would say that the formalization of the photograph (composition, technical elements, printing, framing, etc.) are what makes the photograph art, which from my point of view (as a fan of appropriation) isn’t necessary to call something art, its really just the act of calling it art that makes it art, but in the case of an artist claiming a garden (or any other pre-existing thing) as their art, there are still various formalizing aspects to doing that. Let’s once again take the garden as a hypothetical example even though in reality it wasn’t done in the way that I thought it was, but let’s suspend reality and pretend that it was. If that had been the case then the project would have been formalized by its inclusion in the program listing along with the other projects that were a part of the show, it would have been on the map showing where all of the sculpture projects were located, there would be a title, description, etc, it would have been included in the exhibition catalog, it would have been documented and re-presented, basically anything that would have happened to a constructed outdoor sculpture that was included in a major exhibition would also have happened to the pre-existing, site-specific, ongoing garden or whatever.

There is a potential problem with this approach that goes beyond just being valid or not as art. It could also be thought of as an imperialistic approach in that the artist without having actually made anything other than a claim, would be seen as the author of a project that someone else or some other group actually created and maintained. This hits on something I’ve also written about related to crediting, and I think it is applicable not only to conceptual claiming projects, but also to almost anything that involves other peoples un-credited contributions to art projects from assistants, fabricators, silent collaborators, participants, etc. In the case of the garden and projects like that it is simple enough to find out who actually created and maintained the garden and then to get approval from them to use the garden as part of an art project and credit them for their role. If it is possible or desirable to share funding then that can happen as well. My sense is that most people would happily have their garden (etc) included in a major art exhibition, especially if they are getting credit and potentially even payment.

Ok, so what if the claimed pre-existing thing isn’t part of a major art project. It can still work without any validating institutional approval or inclusion (though as with all art, that makes it easier to be seen as significant and valuable). There are still other ways for artists to formalize their claim. They can program their own event related to the site or object, they can document it, title it, etc. and then just put it on a website, make a zine about it, present it at a lecture, etc, etc. It could also be more than a single claim, imagine for instance a series of spots that an artist locates and formalizes to go together, like making a music play list the artist could suggest that people check out a certain tree, talk to a particular person at a store, look at a specific book at a library, eat a suggested item at a food cart, etc. all in a detailed out sequence with potentially added information about each location, sort of like a walking tour of the senses. This selection of claimed spots could be made available in a variety of forms, for instance maybe published in a local weekly newspaper or put up as a flier, or just told to a set of people, and in that way becomes applied and no longer just an idea, then can be listed on a resume, presented in lectures, printed in publications etc, just like any other work of art. A related example that also had a huge impact on me were two works by Robert Smithson, his 1967 photo article A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey, in which he describes in a very conversational tone a set of “monuments” which he observed which were in reality industrial units and piles that he was giving extraordinary significance to, basically treating things like art that weren’t intended as art. In a similar piece, The Hotel Palenque from 1972, (initially presented as a slide lecture, and later published in a Parkett magazine where I first encountered it) Smithson details with photos and more nonchalant but validating language a hotel in Mexico that he stayed at which was undergoing at the same time a process of literal construction and de-construction. The only real difference between the Smithson pieces and what I’m suggesting is the way that an audience can be invited to participate in experiencing the chosen claimed places, objects, sounds, etc.

I think the concept of claiming has all sorts of potential artistic and curatorial applications and would be a welcome addition or even substitution for much of the work produced currently by art students and other artists, who instead continue the largely futile production of studio based objects in the hopes of showing and selling in galleries, which is very unlikely given the high volume of art object production and the scarcity of status quo venues.