The Metamorphosis of Art and Money, Michael Howard

(2009)

Like many artists, I exhibit my work so that other people can experience it. Most artists also use an exhibition as a way to sell their work and thereby support themselves, or at least cover their expenses.

I have always shied away from selling my sculptures and paintings, not because I have any less need of financial resources for my work, but because the idea of ownership and attributing monetary value to art is so foreign to my experience. For me, a work of art is a meditation for inner contemplation, not an object to possess. Art is to be with, not to have.

In this short essay I outline why my drawings, paintings and sculptures are not for sale. More importantly, I explore an alternative way of thinking about art and money. In this context, I introduce my thoughts about a Community Art Association that would serve the artistic needs of the community in new ways by applying the principles of Community Supported Agriculture to Community Supported Art.

I offer these new ways of thinking about art as a stimulus to new ways of thinking about the dire social and economic challenges of our time. To all but the most entrenched they are a clear signal that we must begin in earnest to transform our economic thinking to serve the fullness of human life rather than the other way around in which human beings are expected to conform to the narrow demands of economic thinking.

The same inner spark that moves me to create new artistic forms also moves me to create new social and economic forms that are more in harmony with the spiritual intentions of my art.

*******

Natural artistic capacity is often referred to as a gift. For someone with an artistic gift it is unthinkable to not exercise it, for that would be to squander one’s gift.

One gift often inspires another gift. That is why those with an artistic gift have a deep need to share the fruits of their art with others. In the first instance, artists want nothing more than to share the spiritual experience of their creative work. Because of this, artists can be spiritually fulfilled simply in having other people show interest in their work-- authentic expressions of appreciation never hurt.

However, artists cannot live and work by appreciation alone; they must find ways to cover the costs of their materials and gallery expenses and to support themselves and their families. The idea of selling artwork is born from the simple chemistry of economic necessity and the fact that paintings and sculptures are physical objects. It is the union of these two factors that leads us to regard visual works of art as commodities.

Some artists see no problem in selling their work, while others, such as myself, feel extremely conflicted. This inner conflict seems to be rooted in the tension between the spiritual and physical dimensions of art. For much of my life I have assumed it was some shortcoming in me that blocked me from adapting to the ways of the world. The present economic upheavals embolden me to think that perhaps in reality the shortcomings lie more in the ways of the world, including the ways of the art market.

The convention of selling works of art assumes that there is some intrinsic relationship between their spiritual value and their monetary value. In reality, these are two distinct matters that have nothing to do with each other. We buy and sell a work of art, as with most other things, as a way to transfer the rights of ownership from one person to another. This transfer of ownership is facilitated by the exchange of an agreed upon monetary value. In order to determine the monetary value of an artwork both parties must quantify not only tangible factors, such as its size and materials, but also intangibles, such as spiritual quality and value.

There are two problems with this commonplace approach to selling works of art: the idea of ownership, and equating spiritual value with monetary value.

To understand this we need to take into account not only the perspective of the artist, but also the vital role of the viewer of art. It is widely recognized that the greatest masterpiece is incomplete as long as other people have not seen it. Simply by opening him- or herself to the spirit of an artwork, the viewer completes the creative activity of the artist. In contemplating a work of art the viewer both receives a spiritual gift and, at the same time, gives a spiritual gift to the artist.

A meaningful experience with a work of art, even when challenging, stirs in most people some feeling of gratitude and appreciation. Sometimes a work of art can so resonate in us that we may want to buy it so that we can experience it again and again. Most often we do not act upon this because our financial resources constrain us. However, even if someone can afford to buy a work of art, is ownership the only or best way to express our appreciation and support? Are there alternatives?

We do not readily apply the idea of ownership to a play, a musical composition, a poem or novel. If we enjoy a play, musical composition or a novel, we may see it performed a number of times, or buy a recording or printed copy. Often there is an original manuscript that someone owns, but usually this is approached in a spirit of public or communal stewardship. The idea of stewardship conveys better than ownership the sense that a performing or literary work of art is a spiritual gift belonging to human society as a whole and not a commodity to be owned by an individual.

The only explanation I see for our treating a visual artwork as a commodity for individual ownership is our inclination to attend to its physical properties more than its spiritual qualities. If the spiritual qualities of a painting or sculpture were our primary focus--and their physical properties were secondary--then we would regard a visual work of art as a kind of performance similar to a concert or play. As our experience of visual works of art focuses more on their spiritual quality then their physical properties, we are likely to feel more disposed towards stewardship then ownership of artwork.

One of the main advantages of stewardship is that it allows the spiritual and physical dimensions of art to be brought into harmony.

If an individual or community expresses interest and appreciation in a work of art, it is conceivable that the artist--or a representative of the artist--would give them the artwork for an agreed upon period of time. Such an arrangement would be founded on the understanding that their transaction concerns the transfer of spiritual stewardship and not physical ownership.

Clearly the artwork cannot be given away indiscriminately; therefore the artist or artist’s representative would retain the freedom to decide who will or will not receive the artwork and for how long. But having determined that an individual or a community is worthy of such stewardship, the significant aspect of this transaction is not so much in the outer arrangements as in the thoughts and feelings brought toward it. As one steward to another, each will experience the transfer of the artwork as freely given by the artist and freely received by the art recipient. The giving and receiving of the artwork are done in the spirit of a gift exchange.

If, for any reason, economic support were not an issue, then the transfer of the artwork would be complete through this purely spiritual gift exchange. This would be the case even if there were reason for both parties to sign a contractual agreement defining the parameters of the loan. However, if economic support is an issue, how can this be addressed, if not by selling the artwork? How does the idea of stewardship help us in this regard?

The transfer I described above can be understood as a form of lending rather than selling an artwork. The idea of loaning works of art gives both the artist and the art recipient more flexibility about agreeing to a temporary transfer of the artwork rather than a permanent one. It also suggests a familiar economic structure. Friends may loan something without introducing any economic considerations, but as strangers we usually expect to pay something. We call this renting. We pay not only to purchase and own a house or car; under certain circumstances we are prepared to pay a rent for their temporary use. So instead of selling or loaning it is conceivable to rent a work of art.

While renting art is a workable alternative, it does not adequately harmonize the economic exchange with the spiritual exchange. For this we must explore the feasibility and desirability of approaching the spiritual and economic exchanges as two distinct matters rather than bringing them together as we do when selling or renting a work of art.

The idea of stewardship guided us with the spiritual exchange of the artwork; it can also lead us to a new possibility when it comes to the economic exchange. When taking up the economic side of an art exchange, it is not helpful for the artist and art recipient to discuss the spiritual value of the artwork. The spiritual value of the artwork was implicit to and resolved in the spiritual exchange—where, by the way, economic considerations should not play a part. Now, however, it is appropriate for the art recipient to inquire about and for the artist to share a picture of the material costs, the amount of time spent in creating the work and other similar factors. The artist might also ask about the financial parameters that the art recipient is working within. Such a conversation could lead the artist to propose a level or range for the economic exchange.

Based on some variation of such interest in the actual costs involved in creating the art, including the artist’s livelihood, the art recipient who is motivated and guided by the idea of stewardship could regard making a financial contribution to the artist’s on-going work as part of that role. Rather than paying a certain sum in order to buy a work of art, through stewardship the art recipient could approach the economic side of the exchange also in the free spirit of gifting. A truly enlightened steward could offer economic support with the insight that he or she is not paying for the artwork already completed but is supporting the creation of new work. In this sense, the economic support is a gift into the future without regard for personal enrichment.

To outer appearances such an exchange of artwork and money may not seem so different from selling or renting. However, the inner shift from the attitude of ownership to stewardship is of the greatest significance because it allows both parties of the exchange to participate in an entirely different spirit.

Stewardship allows the artist to freely transfer the spiritual gift of his or her art to someone else. Likewise, stewardship allows the art recipient to freely receive the spiritual experience of the artwork and to freely give back their appreciation for its spiritual value.

Through stewardship the artist freely dedicates the physical and economic resources needed to create the work of art, and the art recipient freely contributes to the artist’s economic costs and livelihood.

When the spiritual give and take is treated independently from the economic give and take, the spiritual and physical dimensions of any art exchange are harmonized by being given and received in freedom.

A true work of art can be born only as a free creative deed. When the possessiveness inherent in ownership and the quantification of spiritual value into monetary value are layered onto a work of art, an unfree element is introduced. For a work of art to fulfill its spiritual service and find its rightful place in human life, the economic support of art must also be born as a free creative deed.

As a practical matter, it may prove burdensome for artists to negotiate the transfer of stewardship in every case. For this, it would be desirable for individuals who have the capacities and interest to take on the administrative activities related to the circulation and funding of the artwork within the community. This could be accomplished through a Community Art Association based on the principles of Community Supported Agriculture.

Such an association could come into being only if there is an unmet need living in the community from two sides:

Artists who are looking for new ways to serve the cultural/spiritual needs of the community. Individuals in the community who want to cultivate a deeper relationship with art and artists.

Artists who want to explore new social/economic forms for circulating and funding their work. Individuals in the community who want to explore new ways of supporting the arts.

I am hopeful that the time is ripe for exploring new ways for art to serve community life. I have every reason to believe there is a mutual interest and need living in non-artists as much as artists to make the arts a more vital and essential part of human life.

The prospect of forming a Community Art Association provides the immediate opportunity for artists and friends of the arts to come together for open and heartfelt conversation about the place of art in their lives. This would surely lead to an on-going collaboration in the sphere of art that would enrich the community as a whole.


Above copied from: http://www.livingformstudio.com/Livingformstudio-Michael_Howard/The_Metamorphosis_of_Art_and_Money_.html

Book Excerpt - Suzanne Lacy: Spaces Between, Sharon Irish

“Suzanne Lacy: Spaces Between” by Sharon Irish (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010)

The Community Arts Network is honored to present an excerpt from “Suzanne Lacy: Spaces Between,” a new book by Sharon Irish and the first in-depth look at the work of an artist who has been doing important community-engaged art since the 1970s. Lacy’s artwork has been radically political, urgently demanding and intensely compassionate. As a teacher, she has laid down landmark theories for viewing and evaluating public art, particularly those involving community participation. Lacy’s own book “Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art” is a staple in the curricula of the many new degree programs in community cultural development. In our own history, Lacy was the cover girl in 1978 for Issue #1 of High Performance magazine, the forerunner of CAN, and her new work continues to draw the attention of our readers.

In her introduction to this book, Irish notes that Lacy’s art has been labeled “body art, conceptual art, performance art, feminist art, political art and new genre public art,” and it continually crosses borders laid down by art history and criticism. It’s challenging enough, she says, writing about a painting on the wall, but “when the art involves hundreds of people over months or years … and the subject matter is current and controversial, the mental diagram can become a jumble of ideas bumping crazily against each other and ricocheting off at different angles.”

In order to investigate Lacy’s work, Irish has discovered a “network of nodes” that she calls “the three P’s: positionality, performance and participation.” This network forms the structure of the book. Irish’s introduction of these terms focuses a new lens on the engaged art of today, for which Suzanne Lacy’s work has led the way. We join the introduction halfway through Irish’s approach to “performance,” glancing at the importance of “place” and “coalition building” in Lacy’s new genre public art, and then her approach to “participation.” —Linda Frye Burnham

Place

Another way that Schneider’s “historical weight” of privilege and disprivilege may have bearing is in the spaces in which we act and interact. Geographer Edward Soja noted that “life stories [are] as intrinsically and revealingly spatial as they are temporal and social.” Thus, in addition to gender and racialization, my discussion includes the particular sites of Lacy’s art making. Anne Enke’s 2007 book Finding the Movement: Sexuality, Contested Space, and Feminist Activism is exceptionally valuable in that her

analysis focuses on the ways in which women intervened in public landscapes and social geographies already structured around gender, race, class, and sexual exclusions and on the ways that these processes in turn shaped feminism. A focus on contested space, as opposed to a focus on feminist identity, helps explain how feminism replicated exclusions even as feminists developed powerful critiques of social hierarchy.

Examining the actual spaces involved in Lacy’s art making offers insights into how her projects critiqued everyday urban areas, or not. Geographic aspects often join with our behaviors to normalize hierarchies that remain unquestioned by many of us. Thus, when a performance occurs in public, connecting, say, oppression, visual form, and urban site, the impact increases through linkages of these nodes in an imaginary network.

Coalition Building: Traveling Between

Coalition building is hard because it requires finding some common ground on which to come together, creating enough trust to hold that space open, while recognizing simultaneously that substantial differences exist. For Lacy, the subjugated status of women in this patriarchal society provided that common ground. Affirming that personal experiences among women vary widely, Lacy nevertheless has maintained that women can and should join together to address oppressions that affect us all. These joint efforts then are carried out as allies, although “sisterhood” still echoes through her work.

What Lacy has called “[t]he ‘expanding self’ became a metaphor for the process of moving the boundaries of one’s identity outward to encompass other women, groups of women and eventually all people.” Lacy’s curiosity, generosity, and outrage compelled her to explore what life was like beyond her individual body for those different from her in race, ethnicity, age, and life experiences. In a 1993 article, critic Lucy Lippard described Lacy:

An inveterate border-crosser, she has long been almost indecently curious about everyone else’s experiences, charging into new areas where angels fear to tread—a vicarious chameleon, or perhaps a beneficent cultural cannibal, cultivating multiple selves as a way of understanding injustice and survival.

Lacy’s “indecent curiosity” fueled her indefatigable coalition building, a node that links to participation, positionality, and public performance art.

To the extent possible, Lacy placed herself within different human configurations, physically, mentally, spatially, and historically.68 Her art forced her to shift realities, to “travel.” Although, of course, she could never fully reproduce the worlds of others, she “traveled between” these contrasting worlds, exploring a liminal space that philosopher María Lugones defined as “the place where one becomes most fully aware of one’s multiplicity.” Lugones used the term traveling to describe a person’s movements among different social groups or “worlds,” which themselves are no more stable than an individual’s identity.

To make art in coalition, moving beyond unexamined or unified identities, promises an art that forges flexible connections, allowing ongoing dialogue. But without an insistent and continual analysis of power relations, especially one’s own, the art may well serve to reinforce the status quo and trendy, “decorative” multiculturalism. Lacy’s friendship with artist Judy Baca, among other relationships, challenged her to think more deeply about the complexity of race and racist attitudes in the United States. In order to “cross over” into another’s existence, she began to collaborate with others from whom she could learn.

Participation

While Lacy herself usually was the catalyst in a process that culminated in an art project, she often collaborated with others. Lacy thus shared agency for a work of art with participants who joined her in its creation. Curator Lars Bang Larsen wrote in 1999 about the ways in which “social and aesthetic understanding are integrated into each other” as “social aesthetics.” This sort of “osmotic exchange” in Lacy’s work sometimes produced an integrated result but also presented the possibility for unresolved or multiple endings. Just as the creation of her art existed along a continuum, so too did the reception of it, what I call “participatory reception.” In 1995, she wrote, “Of interest is not simply the makeup or identity of the audience but to what degree audience participation forms and informs the work—how it functions as integral to the work’s structure.”

Lacy’s art challenges assessment of it because participants helped create representations of the ideas at the same time they observed those representations. The meanings they perceived during the collaborative process at times altered the imagery, and the meanings evolved. Lacy has written that “[m]any of the forms we have come to assume as part of community-engaged art—its multivocality, for example, its pluralism of styles of presentation and its postscript-like conversations—are aesthetic evolutions developed through confrontation and resolution of confl ict during the making.”

While certainly the imagery in any one of Lacy’s projects has its own merits, intrinsic worth, and interest and can indeed be evaluated aesthetically, “traditional” formal evaluation is not sufficient for new genre public art. The compelling aspect of Lacy’s approach is the degree to which she pushes art into the public so that questions of aesthetics, ethics, audience, reception, and creation are amplified. Once amplified, these issues and people’s responses to them provide feedback into the art process itself, contributing to that reception loop.

Lacy has long worked between theory and practice—writing, teaching, directing, making. Her writings formulated theory for new artistic configurations. She has diagrammed artistic positions on an axis moving from private actions of the artist as experiencer, then reporter and analyst toward public activism. She herself then has been an indispensable participant in meaning making, contributing to public discussions about oppression, privilege, and liberation. Her contribution, in theory and in practice, has been to close the distance between production and reception.

Further, she suggested a model for analyzing the audience “as a series of concentric circles with permeable membranes that allow continual movement back and forth.” The genesis of a work—a circle at the center of this diagram—is encircled by rings of collaborators, volunteers, and performers, those watching the event (“immediate audience”), and the media audience. Lacy labeled the final ring the “audience of myth and memory” (Figure 2). Lacy’s “target” diagram helps distinguish among the various layers of audience; the center—“the creative impetus”—is labeled “origination and responsibility.” While I appreciate that Lacy takes responsibility for her art as well as includes herself in the credit for its genesis and that she states that the circles are “permeable,” I find my nodes-in-networks model more useful. The artist is an essential node, but including her in the network of collaborators, performers, and audience stresses the reciprocal nature of Lacy’s approach to public art. Rebecca Schneider asked, “What can reciprocity look like? How can we do it? … Reciprocity suggests a two-way street but it does not necessarily reconstitute the delimiting binaries which feminists and postcolonial theorists have been fighting to undermine.” Reciprocity and “how to do it” have been fundamental to nearly all of Lacy’s projects.

“The public” in the sense I am using it here includes person-to-person encounters, group dynamics, institutional responses, and social networks. These interactions shift and infl uence the art process on many levels. Artistic practice such as Lacy’s embodied art lends itself to an exploration of the terms of engagement—art arises from an individual artist, is shaped by that artist’s identities and concerns, but also by those who cocreate the piece. Cocreators may include an arts commissioner, a mayor, or people in the art production, for example. Art functions as a tool for reflection: there is a reciprocity between the practice of art making and the theory that informs that practice.

Strategies to communicate effectively with people not ordinarily attentive to the arts have long occupied Lacy. This challenge underlies her involvement in media literacy, press conferences, performances outside of galleries and museums, and collaborations with communities outside of art circles. In 1995, she commented:

[T]here’s also an appropriate contradiction between, on one hand, the way in which artists are trained to express self and to make meaning by drawing on interior sensibilities, and, on the other, the demands of a new public arena for dialogic and collaborative modes. I personally find it a very exciting confl ict because it is essentially the metaphor of self and other.… Consequently, what we have to resolve, spiritually, is the sense of no-self or an encompassing all-self, and, in art, we have to do at least some negotiating between our reality and other realities.

Naming Participation

Grant Kester’s 2004 book Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art discussed what he called “dialogical art,” an “inclination” in art that foregrounds interchange and process. Lacy’s work with teens in the 1990s in Oakland, California, is featured prominently in his book. He labeled Lacy’s work as transitional, meaning, I believe, that her art drew upon both community arts and “the post-Greenbergian diaspora of arts practices,” such as Happenings. She also retained control of the visual image to a degree that some of the younger practitioners he discussed do not.

Kester usefully formulated a philosophical background for dialogical art, discussing discourse ethics and feminist interpretations of specific contexts for interactions. He stressed that this approach to art is “durational rather than immediate.” Conversation Pieces deepened my analysis of Lacy’s art by suggesting that we “need a way to understand how identity might change over time—not through some instantaneous thunderclap of insight but through a more subtle, and no doubt imperfect, process of collectively generated and cumulatively experienced transformation.…” The book enumerated three aspects of a dialogical aesthetic: first, art functions as “a more or less open space within contemporary culture”; second, it involves “a form of spatial rather than temporal imagination”; and third, it aims to achieve “these durational and spatial insights through dialogical and collaborative encounters with others.” The spatial imagination, what Kester described as “the ability to comprehend and represent complex social and environmental systems,” and the creation of artistic structures to facilitate encounters are particularly salient in Lacy’s work and help to link the social dynamics of participation to the place and form of Lacy’s projects. In keeping with my nodal scheme, I will examine both interactions over the longterm and the immediate embodied responses related to Lacy’s art projects.

Kester named other terms similar to dialogical art: Ian Hunter and Celia Larner used the label “littoral art,” a geographical term describing a shoreline and thus evoking a place where two different “bodies” touch. Other critics have discussed “conversational art” (Homi Bhabha) and “dialogue-based public art” (Tom Finkelpearl). Nicolas Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics focused on art of the 1990s that involved the art audience as a microcommunity; his analysis concerned art’s role as “be[ing] ways of living and models of action within the existing real, whatever the scale chosen by the artist.”

Problems of Participation

In my experience, when an artist engages with politics as Lacy has done, some advocates for social change get their hopes up during the preparatory stages—tackling a social problem—and then experience bitter disappointment when the artist moves on. Some critics claimed that while Lacy’s art challenged the status quo in political arenas locally and nationally, the artist then departed, adding another community to her résumé while leaving local folks to wonder what actions should come next. Yet Lacy’s practice has been a complicated amalgam of arrivals, departures, and returns. As early as 1982, she asked, “What is the artist’s responsibility to her collaborators, performers, and audience after the performance is over?” She then offered several examples of long-term, community-based art but also suggested a larger model, “a network of women across the country who are working together on a single project with local goals as well as a sense of belonging to a nationwide project.” Ever questing, she vowed to continue “to struggle with the problems of sustaining energy within specific communities… ; clarifying the relationship of action-oriented goals to broad-based coalition building;… and generating a sense of participation in a national vision with women in geographic locations.”

Her efforts to recreate “metaphors of community, over and over” involved substantial travel, tightly scheduled with her job and other commitments. Some projects no doubt left some participants feeling they had been given short shrift. I suggest that “in-betweenness” is both the problem and the resolution in her work; she is moving among nodes when others expect her to commit to stasis. In spring 1978, in an interview with artist Richard Newton that was published in High Performance magazine, Lacy tellingly explained her artistic process and how it contrasted with political organizing: “I am trying to represent myself to the feminist community as an artist and not as an organizer: I greedily hold on to the ability to make my own images, and make clear-cut distinctions about how much organizing I’m going to be involved with.” Lacy’s art emerged from the relationships among her, her collaborators, and audience members; in other words, these interactions were not in themselves the art, but they were crucial to her art making.

French curator Nicolas Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics had a large impact in the Anglophone art world when it was initially translated into English in 2002. Bourriaud’s optimistic and sketchy book attempted to set the terms for an approach to art in the 1990s that created a community with an art audience, such as the work of Rirkrit Tiravanija. Claiming that art “tightens the space of relations” and “produces a specific sociability,” Bourriaud’s arguments have eluded me because I remain puzzled by just how the disparate artists he names—from Vanessa Beecroft to Liam Gillick, from Felix Gonzalez-Torres to Philippe Parreno—either fit into “relational aesthetics” or share aesthetic criteria. The “hands-on utopias” offering a “rich loam for social experiments” that Bourriaud described do indeed share a “coexistence criterion” that “permit [the viewer] to enter into a dialogue,” but the range of issues and options on display by the artists under consideration do not seem to me to cohere into anything but the designation “art.” Furthermore, the relationships that interest Bourriaud seem to be apolitical.

Perhaps the reason that Bourriaud’s work has been cited so widely is because there remains a need for ways to discuss relational art; for me, his contribution has been in framing some questions and generalizations. “[W]hat does a form become when it is plunged into the dimension of dialogue?” “As part of a ‘relationist’ theory of art, intersubjectivity does not only represent the social setting for the reception of art, which is its ‘environment’ its ‘field’ (Bourdieu), but also becomes the quintessence of artistic practice.” Detailing what happens to forms-in-dialogue and trying to be precise about intersubjectivities are what I try to do here in relation to Lacy’s art practice. Bourriaud’s statement—“The nineties saw the emergence of collective forms of intelligence and the ‘network’ mode in the handling of artistic work”—validates my own network schema, although I suggest that Lacy pioneered this “network mode” with others in the 1970s, for political, feminist purposes.

Bourriaud’s interest centered on evaluating the quality of the relationships that unfolded in the work of various artists, but he never fully defined what the artists he considered might mean by “community.” This criticism by Claire Bishop highlights a key problem in relational art: artists and participants coming together do not necessarily a community make, nor does being together in art inherently promote democratic processes. Bishop claimed that for Bourriaud “all relations that permit ‘dialogue’ are automatically assumed to be democratic and therefore good.” Anthony Downey further noted that “relational art practices do not necessarily mirror—although they may replicate—the conditions of the social milieu in which they exist; rather they generate and propagate those very conditions.”

The goals of Lacy’s works are not always as “convivial” as those of the artists that Bourriaud promoted. Instead of fostering a “feel-good” community, Lacy has often aimed to create structures for conversations that name and discuss difficult issues rather than resolve them, fully aware that dissent will be as much a part of those interactions as agreement. In part antagonism is inevitable given the lack of common discursive frameworks among some of the participants. Bodies coming together, however, also introduce nonverbal ways of knowing that complicate performances and life with a range of tacit behaviors.

Lacy’s works invariably involve conflict, some unpredictable and unintentional outcomes, and some heated criticism, in part because of the provocative themes involved and in part because the “spaces between” in her art allow for multiple interpretations, ambiguity, and disagreement. In her large-scale works, Lacy has insisted on providing an aesthetic and social context for many points of view. Lacy’s performances have offended some who have felt that she overstepped, seemingly speaking for those whose voices she intended to amplify. Others have objected that her focus on women as a group has minimized their differences, discounting very real challenges of race and class.

Participation in the Art World

Negotiation between realities—particularly the world of contemporary art in the West and folks usually outside of those art circles—has been at the foundation of Lacy’s artmaking process. Lacy often sought connections among her peers, arts as they are practiced in communities, and the historic avant-garde. Since contemporary experimental art is anathema to many—at best we tend to dismiss it as just weird—accessibility to her art forms has been crucial to Lacy. She noted the difficulty of bridging these two worlds, “audiences outside of the art world” and “our own concerns.” By inviting members of the public into her performances, as cocreators, participants, and observers, she linked other nodes in the network, shaping both the artistic performance and the reception of it by the general public.

The avant-garde as I use it here refers not just to experimental imagery created as an alternative to established forms and media but also to the ways in which the art was produced. Lacy’s generation experimented with avant-garde modes of production that included collective or collaborative methods of creation and presentation or exhibition outside of the usual gallery or museum settings. These approaches challenged the status quo and helped younger artists tackle the star system of authorship more directly. Yet by “avant-garde” I do not mean an unchanging response, because clearly issues both within and outside of the art world have shifted and continue to do so. By placing the emphasis on production, on the social and economic position of art, the forms and media used do not necessarily have to be in the vanguard; they can bridge between different audiences.

This interest in linking disparate groups has been generative throughout Lacy’s career. She has deliberately and consistently sought collaborators beyond the art world. In 1975, while living in Los Angeles, she developed a close working relationship with Evalina Newman, a woman in her midfifties who had been forced to leave her cleaning job due to reactions to the chemicals at work. Ms. Newman, with time on her hands, had filled her apartment with a quilting frame and organized a sewing and crafts circle for other women in the Watts housing complex, the Guy Miller Homes for the Elderly, where she lived. The Miller Homes and the community center had been built on sites that sustained major damage during the 1965 Watts uprising. While the women sewed, they shared their personal histories and their fears about actions of the neighborhood teens. They also crocheted pot holders and covers for tissue boxes, along with stitching quilts. Lacy joined this art-making circle as part of her job with the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA). As a CETA artist, she “wanted to explore with a single community how performance might combine with their self interests and how it might, as well, enable that community to inter face with other communities.” Lacy created a photo-quilt series about her friendship with Ms. Newman.

Over the course of three years, Lacy and the Women of Watts did a series of installations and performances in and around the Guy Miller Homes. For example, they displayed their art in the recreation hall and invited neighbors, politicians, and Los Angeles– area artists to their exhibits in order to alert officials to their concerns about crime. Lacy asked in 1980, “What makes one person’s environment a home, another’s an artwork?” She recognized a shift by a number of her contemporaries toward engagement with extra-artistic concerns, while still drawing on past ideas in the art world. She wanted to assess conceptual art by her peers, like Linda Montano, Jo Hanson, and Martha Rosler, among others, in terms of “the success of their intentions in ‘real life’ as well as in the art milieu.”

In activities with the Women of Watts, as with her other works, Lacy was interested in creating spaces, literally and figuratively, where everyone’s creative output could be valued without placing it in a hierarchy of artistic quality. While she certainly claimed authorship of this work in the art world, she also moved into other, really much larger worlds, where her aesthetic interests coexisted alongside those of others. Lacy’s training in zoology, psychology, dance, visual art, and community organizing provided her with skills and concepts to perform in a rapidly shifting social milieu. She moved between science and art, between ideas and enacted forms, and between adaptive behavior and resisting actions. Hers is a “both/and” approach, in which she attempts to be present in several arenas simultaneously.

Lacy has shown an enduring commitment to using art in public to inform people about issues of common concern and to affect policy. I suggest that the “spaces between” in her art provide openings that might be transformative for selves that are permeable and multiple. Diana Fuss noted in 1991, “The problem, of course, with the inside/outside rhetoric, if it remains undeconstructed, is that such polemics disguise the fact that most of us are both inside and outside at the same time.” We perform, moving between art and life, built space and human flesh. This “betweenness” creates tension, at once dynamic and troubling. To enact these relationships in reality, on the ground so to speak, is especially difficult given the separation from, indeed denial of, our bodies. Lacy’s art has embraced the body, deepened into spirit, and enhanced bodily wisdom with strategic, intelligent analyses of politics. Her international career has demonstrated the power, problems, and possibilities of art between the spaces of our diverse lives, as she has attempted to create structures that might give shape to a nonsexist, multiracial democracy.

The University of Minnesota Press Web site offers a Q&A with author Sharon Irish: http://www.upress.umn.edu/covers/Irish_from_blog.html

Sharon Irish holds a joint appointment in the School of Architecture and the Community Informatics Initiative/Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois, Urbana–Champaign. She is the author of Cass Gilbert, Architect: Modern Traditionalist.

Original CAN/API publication: April 2010

Above copied from: http://www.communityarts.net/readingroom/archivefiles/2010/04/book_excerpt_su.php

Do It Yourself, Ken Friedman

MAY 7, 2009

To be is to do – Heidegger
To do is to be – Sartre
Do be do be do – Sinatra
Do it yourself – Paik

Sometime around 1960 or so, a popular graffito examined the states of being and doing, attributing the answers to two great philosophers and a musician. Nam June Paik went one better when he wrote, “Read music: do it yourself.”,1

This was the essential element of a new poetic economy.

The idea of music was one crucial element of doing it you, and the concept of the event was at its heart. The tradition of the event was an idea that emerged from the musical philosophy of composer Henry Cowell. Cowell proposed an approach to composing based on breaking the activity of sound into minimal, basic elements. John Cage, who had studied with Cowell, introduced the term to the composers and artists who took his courses in new musical composition at the New School for Social Research in the late 1950s. Both Cage and social theorist Theodore Adorno used the term “event,”2 to speak of music in an ontological sense as a form of work performed in time and realized as time unfolds.

In the early 1960s, this circle of artists and composers adapted the idea of the event to describe terse, minimal instructions exemplified in the work of George Brecht, Yoko Ono, and La Monte Young.3

Events began as a way to explore music composition and performative works. The musical origin of events gave rise to the custom of using the term “score” for the concise, verbal instructions used to notate events. Scores transmit instructions that allow a performer to realize an event work in the same way that a music score transmits instructions that enable performers to realize a musical work. While the concept of events began in music, it soon migrated to visual art and intermedia. It took hold there to develop as significant intermedia from in its own right.

The musical origin of events means that realizing or performing the score brings the event into final embodied existence. As with music, anyone may perform the score. Like all kinds of music, a score opens possibility that anyone can adopt a piece in the “do-it-yourself” tradition, realizing the work, interpreting it, and bringing it to life. One need not be an artist, composer, or musician to do so. It is not even necessary to be a professional practitioner of the arts.

The quality of events is “musicality,” the fact that anyone may realize work from a score. This distinguishes events from performance art, most painting, some forms of improvisational music, and any art forms that we only see as authentic when an author-creator realizes them. On one hand, we have a conception of compose performer as both the creator of the work and the locus of artistic energy. On the other, the artist or composer of an event creates it relinquishing performance and interpretation to an individual who can do it in his or her own way.

The concept of the event in art, music and intermedia has many meanings and nuances. An event can exist in at least four forms: as idea, as score, as process, and as artifact. The realized even is typically visible in five kinds of artifact: behavioral artifacts as sound. In many cases, an event may exist in more that one form, leaving a wake with several kinds of artifacts.

From a musical origin, events moved into performance, intermedia, and other domains. Some of us who worked with events developed a form of artistic practice in which events constituted instructions for the realization of social situations and even physical artifacts.

Whatever form of realization events may take, event scores tend to be compressed and minimal. They engage such ideas as intermedia, playfulness, simplicity, implicativeness, exemplativism, specificity, and presence in time, as well as musicality. Many event scores emerge from life situations. We can realize them in everyday situations as well as in performance, emphasizing the unity of art and life.

Doing it Yourself: Communities of Practice and Folk Traditions

The fluid nature of events transmitted through concise verbal instructions made them easy to describe and develop. This gave rise to a form of artistic and musical practice in which artists shared concepts in an emerging laboratory.

The practices that typify events resemble the social processes that develop and transmit ideas in other kinds of productive communities. One is the “community of practice” that typifies a guild or profession. One is the cultural community that generates a folk tradition with memory practices and transmission practices of folklore.

The concept of community of practice took shape in information science, design studies, and knowledge management. The term “communities of practice” is new, but the concept is ancient, rooted in the way that ancient and medieval craft guilds generate and transmit knowledge.67

Folklorist and Fluxus artist Bengt af Klintberg emphasizes the similarities between the events tradition and fold traditions as “simple pieces filled with energy and humor, pieces without any personal stylistic features, pieces that could be transmitted orally just like folklore and performed by everyone who wanted to.”8 9 It is here that the unity of art and life remains unbroken in the folk culture of traditional societies.
The parlor game tradition was similar enough to events that Something Else Press published a classic nineteenth century collection of games by reprinting William Brisbane Dick’s 1897 anthology, Dick’s One Hundred Amusements.10 This is also true of the relation between folk traditions and events, as Klinberg notes in his 1993 article on Fluxus games and folklore. 11

Games arise from, reflect, and generate community as well as competition. The English word “game” goes back to Old Swedish, old Norse, and Old High German words meaning “game, sport, merriment, joy, glee.” These, in turn, trace their roots to a Gothic word meaning “participation, communion.” Far beyond the element of competition, games bind communities together, and an important aspect of the concept of a game is the concept of rule-bound competition among members of a commonality.

Communities of practice generate rich cycles of interaction within groups that shape cultures through behavior, enactment, and shared social patterns. Despite many projects and systems that mirrored the functions and structures of formal organizations, networks of artists advocating the “do-it-yourself” ethos never functioned as formal organizations with a prescribed structure, rules or explicitly enrolled members. Nevertheless, they did work in an ongoing community of artists, composers, and designers. Some of these have now worked together for nearly half a century in different but overlapping theorists describe as organized culture and organizational learning. Many of the cultural practices of this community coalesced around the shared work of the event. They Did It Themselves

In the early 1960s, a rich series of performance concerts emerged with the New York Audiovisual Group and Yoko Ono’s loft on Chambers Street in York City. Performers or conductors chose the program using an approach anchored in classical music tradition. This it became the traditional way of organizing event concerts. It remains the most common way of creating and performing events.

George Maciunas created boxed editions of many important suites of event scores. George Brecht’s Water Yam was the Magna Carta of boxed event structures. Several artists also realized editions of their own pieces. The best know and most influential of these was Yoko Ono’s Grapefruit, a milestone in the evolution of conceptual art and performance art, and without doubt the best known and most widely distributed publication in this genre. A number of us followed Yoko’s example in creating our own editions of scores. Dick Higgins, Bengt af Klintberg, Milan Knixak and all took this path. Like Grapefruit was, these compilations were later expanded and issued by other publication that developed an interest in the work.



The difficulty of the do-it-yourself aesthetic is the problem of modern society. To speak of a “do-it-yourself” aesthetic implies a society where individuals have time for play, and a society where those who play have time- time for engagement and delight, time for accomplishment and mastery.

The allocation for time and resources- the ability to make a living while having the ability to ear enough to buy time- depends very much on the society we live in and it depends on the resources of the world around us. Because time and livelihood are linked, it also involves such social goods as education, health care, and insurance. While theses issues range far beyond the scope of a short note on the do-it-yourself aesthetic, they are vital to resolving the issues that the do-it-yourself ethos bring to light.

The Problem of Poetic Economics

At the start of this note, I mentioned the notation of poetic economy at the heart of the do-it-yourself ethos. This poetic economy centered on three crucial issues.

The first crucial issues were that everyone could make art and music. This entailed a radical democratization or at least a radical reconception of art and music away from standard markets to new models of exchange.

The second crucial issue was recognition of the arts from a context of consumer culture and passive reception to an active culture of engagement.

The third crucial issue was a transformation of society from the two great materialist cultures of predatory capitalism and command-and-control communism to something different. The nature of what those difference might be differs according to the approach or visionary impulses of earth, artist, composer, or designer active in proposing or theorizing a do-it-yourself approach. In nearly every case, however, it was clear that people recognized the difficulty in adopting a do-it-yourself ethos in the general context of the current economies. This was the case in the 1950s and 1960s. it remains a problem to this day.

To understand what happened to the concept of doing-it-yourself, it will help to step away from events to examine the work of Robert Filliou, an artist who studied economics at the University of California Los Angeles before going on to work as an oil economist for the United Nations. Later, he became an artist as one step in his slow transformation toward Buddhism. Toward the end of his career in economics and early in his art career, Filliou lost interest – or hope- in standard approaches to knowledge and knowledge production of an increasingly technocratic society. He wrote a manifesto offering an alternative.

Filliou’s manifesto effective declares social science, natural science, and he humanities obsolete. Instead, he approaches knowledge and knowledge production from what seems to be an optimistic perspective anchored in art.

Filliou himself addressed this problem in his manifest, “A Proposition, a Problem, a Danger, and Hunch.” He wrote,
“A refusal to be colonized culturally by a self-styled race of specialists in painting, sculpture, poetry, music, etc…, this is what ‘la revolte des Mediocres’ is about. With wonderful results in modern art, so far. Tomorrow could everybody revolt? How? Investigate.

“A problem, the one and only, but massive: money, which creating does not necessarily create.”

“A danger: soon, and for thousands and thousands of years, the only right granted to individuals may be that of saying ‘yes, sir’. So that the memory of art (as freedom) is not lost, its age-old institutions can be put in simple, easily learned esoteric mathematical formulae, of the type a/b = c/d (for instance, if a is taken as hand, b as foot, d as table, hand over head can equal foot on table for purposes of recognition and passive resistance. Study the problem. Call the study: Theory and Practice of A/B”

“A hunch: works can be created as fast as the conceiving brain, You say aloud ‘blue,’ blue paint, or light, appears on canvas, etc… This is already done to light rooms and open doors. Eventually no more handicraft: Winged Art, like winged imagination. Alone or with others work this out, this further illustrating the 1962 action-manifesto l’Autrisme, during the performance of which performers ask one another, then each member of the audience.

What are you doing?
What are you thinking?

And, whatever the answer, add:

Do something else.
Think something else” 12

Considering the developments of the past half century, it is no longer as clear as it once seemed that the situation is as hopeless as Filliou believed it to be. The history of the past fifty years gives as much evidence for home as for despair.

One thing is clear: artists have not solved the problems Filliou addressed. Since no one else seems to have solved these problems, either, inviting artists to make an effort were technocrats had failed was not a bad idea. Nevertheless, this involves a second difficulty,

the problem of an art world that is as inappropriate to large-scale social creativity as the financial markets or military markets that Filliou saw as the threat.

Robert Filliou used the terms art and artist in a different way that the normative art world does. However, he used the normative art world as the forum of his ideas. In return, the art world seized on Filliou’s work, mediating his ideas in a narrow channel rather than a larger world of public discourse in open conversation.

As a result, the specialists who dominate the normative art took control of Filliou’s work, colonizing it and adapting it to the art markets. This included the “self-styled race of specialists in painting, sculpture, poetry, music, etc.”13 This race of specialists includes the critics, curators, dealers, directors, and collectors that control the economy of buying and selling art, and these specialists dominate the attention economy for thinking about it. In this world, Filliou’s proposition made little difference.

This short note is no place to address the broad range of issues embedded in Filliou’s manifesto. The situation now – as then – is that resolving these issues is difficult. The difficulties are not Filliou’s fault. Rather, these difficulties are embedded in a series of challenges we are only coming to understand. These challenges lie at the heart of the do-it-yourself concept.

The idea of a poetical economics emerged during an era of contest, inquiry, and debate that affected all research fields and most fields of professional practice. People like Nam Jun Paik, Robert Filliou, George Maciunas, and Dick Higgins understood this. They sought ways to link thought to productive inaction.
Attempting this through art suggested a new kind of research. It also suggested what Dick Higgins called “an art that clucks and fills our guts.” 14

The grand irony of Filliou’s work is that the art world transformed him from a public thinker into an artist, a transformation that limited and constrained his influence.

As a thinker, Filliou opposed the notion of art as a new form of specialization, subject to the control of dealers, critics, collectors, and highly specialized institutions that serve them. Filliou the thinker worked in the productive border zone between art and public life.

In contrast, Filliou the artist worked in the art world, and his ideas were ultimately constrained by mercantile interests. This was not Filliou’s fault. Much like specialists and technocrats in any field, the specialists who manage art world institutions also have a difficult time understanding and working with the productive poetic economies that emerge in the border zone.

Research in economies turned out to be far more productive in this dimension that Filliou realized. It is interesting to reflect on the work of economists who considered the problem in different ways. One stream of this work began in the 1940s when Australian economist Colin Clark laid the foundation for work that Daniel Bell would explore in his discussion of post-industrial society. Others also addressed these issues in terms of patterns and flows in trade, information, and communications. The Canadian economist Harold Innes exemplified this approach. Innis was Marshall McLuhan’s predecessor and mentor. McLuhan in his turn influence Paik and Higgins. The economist Fritz Machup was another case in point. The work of these economists helped give birth to a slowly evolving public conversation that is open to all, generating political dialogue in the larger arena of analysis, critique, and proposition.

Today, some of these ideas are bearing fruit to make a difference. Such distinguished economists as Marty Sen. Joseph Stiglitz, Muhammed Yunus, or Paul Krugman, as well as thinkers and scholars such as Thomas Friedman. Their work does not address the challenge of the do-it-yourself those, but it does address the challenges of creating a world with the preconditions of general prosperity and education that allows to each of us the opportunity for a “do-it-yourself” approach to art and music. The work of some thinkers, such as sociologist or Richard Sennet moves toward a robust understanding of what it means to do it yourself: locating the issues of time and mastery in the context of contemporary capitalism. Sennett asks what it would be like to show a world in which we do things well of their own sake. We see this as well in the culture of the Amish and the other plain people that prefer making things to buying them, locating craft industry in local communities with anchors in tradition.

The vision of do-it-yourself culture takes art out of commercial markets. At least it takes them out of the large-scale commercial art market of the circuit comprised of biannual exhibitions, art fairs, advertising-driven magazines, and auctions. It maintains a market of sorts, but that market resembles the agora of ancient Greek democracies. This is the city market where citizens assemble to talk as well as trade. The agora is a small-scale market, large enough for the needs of the city, but small by contemporary standards, but sufficient to the needs of the citizens, the people that inhibit a community.

It is here that the craft artisans sell the products of their workshops. Artists come here to sell the artifacts they make, though in this context, one can hardly label them artists as we use the term today. Philosophers and rectors come here to talk and trade ideas. Merchants buy and sell them.

The agora, of course, does not represent an ideal world. For all their greatness, the ancient Greek democracies would not resemble democracies today: if the citizen had time for philosophy and rhetoric, it was often because a slave worked his fields and household. While the Greek landowner did not think of farming as an agribusiness with an eye to maximizing profit, neither did he care much if others starved. The agora and the people

who built were embedded in a time and place, as all markets and all people are embedded in their times. Nevertheless, the thought of a different kind of art market to the market of today’s art world offers room for revision.

Progenitors of the do-it-yourself ethos proposed several systems over the years to develop new markets in art. George Maciunas developed an industrial system of multiples of Fluxus. The multiples contained event scores, games, puzzles and projects by Fluxus artists enabling any individual who owned a Fluxbox to perform or activated the work. George sold the boxes as low unit prices, much as music publishers sell sheet music or game producers sell games. Dick Higgins published scores, projects, and intermedia instructions in books that he manufactured for the general book market, selling them at standard book prices. I tried several systems, including a system that allowed art buyers to set their own prices. I also developed several kinds of exchange systems and flow systems designed to remove the flow of art from the constraints of specialists. Yet another time, I explored the possibility of registering my scores with the Norwegian music rights organization, Tono, so that people could perform work or construct objects for a modest royalty payment. None of these systems worked as we hoped, though we learned something from each experiment.

Neither did these systems or proposals actually resolve the challenges of doing it yourself.

What can we do to shape a world that has room for the do-it-yourself ethos? I have some ideas, but that’s a conversation for another day.

About the Author

Ken Friedman is Professor of Design Theory and Strategy and Dean of the Faculty of Design at Swinburne University of Technology.

Friedman is also an artist and designer who had his first solo exhibition in New York in 1966. For over 40 years, he has been active in the international experimental laboratory for art, design and architecture known as Fluxus, working with closely with such artists and composers as George Maciunas, Dick Higgins, and Nam June Paik. His work is respected in major museums and galleries around the world, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Tate Modern in London, and Stadtsgalerie Stuttgart.



1 Nam June Paik, quoted in Owen Smith. 1998. Fluxus: The Histtory of an Attituede. Sand Diego, CA: Sandiego State University Press, p. 63.

2 Julia Robinson 2002, “ The Brechtian Event Score: A Structure in Fluxus.” Performance Research, vol. 7, no 3. p. 122.

3 Dick Higgins. 1997. Modernism since Postmodernism Essays on Intermedia. San Diego: San Diego State University Press. pp. 163 –164. See also: Higgins Dick 1998. “Fluxus: Theory and Reception” The Fluxus Reader, Ken Friedman, editor Christopher West Sussex Academy Edition, pp, 217 – 236.

4 Ken Friedman. 1991 “The Belgrade Text.” Ballade, No. 1, 1991, Oslo: Universitesforlaget, 52-57; Friedman, Ken, 2002. “Working with Event Scores: A Personal History.” In Performance Research: On Fluxus, Ric Allsopp, ken Friendman, and Owen Smith, editors, Performance Research, 124-128; Ken Friedman, 2002. “52 Events. A Participatory Artwork.” PDC 2002. Proceedings of the Participatory Design Conference, Malmo, Sweden, 23-25 June 2002. Thomas Binder. Judith Gregory, and Ina Wagner, editors. Palo A lot, California. Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility, 396-400.

5 Friedman, Ken. 1998. “Fluxus and Company.” The Fluxus Reader. Ken Friedman, editor. Chichester, West Sussex: Academy Editions, pp. 244-251.

6 For the development and transmission of knowledge within guilds, see ken Friedman. 1997. “Design Science and Design Education. “The College of Complexity.” Peter McGrory, editor. Helsinki: University of Art and Design, Helsinki UIAH, pp. 55, 61-63’ For more guild training see also: Catharina Bloomberg. 1994. The Heart of the Warrior. Sandgate, Kent: The Japan Library; David Lowrly. 1985. Autumn Lighting. Boston: Shambhala Publications, Inc.: Miyamoto Musashi. 1982. The Book of Five Rings. (With Family Traditions on the Art of War by Yagya Munenori.) Translated by Thomas Cleary. Boston and London: Shambhala.

7 For more on the concept of communities of practice, see Etienne Wegner. 1998. Communities of practice. Learning, meaning, and identity. Cambridge University Press; Etienne Wenger, Richard McDermott, and William Snyder. 2002. Cultivating communities of practice. A guide to managing knowledge. Harvard Business School Press; Jean Lave and Etienne Wegner. 1991. Situated learning, Legitimate peripheral participation. Cambridge University Press. For more on organizational learning and knowledge management, see Ken Friedman and Johan Olaisen. 1999. “Knowledge Management,” Underveis til frdmttiden, Kunnskapsledelse I teori og praksis. Ken Friedman and Johan Olaisen, eds. Oslo: Fagbokforlaget, 14- 29; Ikukiro Nokaka and Hirotaka Takeuchi. 1995. The knowledge-creating company: how Japanese companies create the dynamics of innovation. New York Oxford University Press; Meinolf Dierkes, Ariane Bertthoine Antal, John Child, and Ikujiro Nonaka. 2001. Handbook of Organizattional Learning and Knowledge, Oxforn: Oxford University Press.

8 Bengt at Klintberg, quoted in Sellem, Jean. 1991. “The Fluxus Outpost in Sweden. An Interview with Bengt af Klintbert.” Lund Art Press, vol. 2, no. 2, p. 69; see also Bengt af Klintberg . 1993. “Fluxus Games and Contemporary Folklore: On the Non- Individual Character of Fluxus Art.” Konsthistorisk Tidskrift LXII:2, 1993, 115-125; Bengt af Klintberg. 2006. Svensk Fluxus/Swedish Fluxus. Stockholm: Ronnells Antikvariat.

9 For more on traditional folk games and activities, see: Richard Chase. 1956. American Folk Tales and Songs, and Other Examples of English-American Tradition as Preserved in the Appalachian Mountains and Elsewhere in the United States. New York: New American Library World Literature; Richard Chase, 1967. Singing Games and Playparty Games, New York: Dover.

10 Dick, William Brisbane. 1967. Dick’s 100 Amusements. One Hundred Amusements For Evening Parties, Picnics, And Social Gatherings. New York: Something Else Press. Many games in this collection bore a striking resemblance to event scores and Fluxus activities.

11 Klintberg, “Fluxus Games and Contemporary Folklore.”

12 Filliou, Robert. 1966. “A Proposition, a Problem, a Danger and a Hunch.” Manifestoes. New York: Something Else Press. p. 16: reprinted 1971 in Art Folio, [ Religious Arts Guild Circular/Packet: 2.] Ken Friedman editor. Boston: Religious Arts Guild; reprinted 2004 in Manifestoes. New York: Ubu Classiscs, p.16 [Free copy of the Something Else Press Great Bear Pamphlet in PDF format.) URL:
http://www.ubu.com/historical/gb/index/html
Date Accessed 2009 April 28.

13 Filliou, in Manifestoes. p.16.

14 Higgins, Dick. 1966. “A Something Else Manifesto.” Manifestoes. New York: Something Else Press, p.21; reprinted 2004 in Manifestoes. New York: Ubu Classics, p.21. [Free copy of the Something Else Press Great Bear Pamphlet in PDF format.) URL: http;//www.ubu.com/historical/gb/index.html
Date Accessed 2009 April 28.

15 While I tried all the other proposals, I never moved forward on this proposal because it would have worked in a way different to my plans. Tono is like ASCAP and BMI in North America. Rather than allowing everyone to perform works simply, the system requires payment from all, with no leeway for schools, museums, or non-profit organizations.

above copied from: http://www.liino.com/?p=830

Between the Diaspora and the Crinoline: An Interview with Bonnie Sherk, Linda Frye Burnham

Bonnie Sherk was the founding Director/President of Crossroads Community (The Farm) in San Francisco, 1974-1980. The Farm, located beneath a freeway interchange in the heart of the city, served as a series of community gathering spaces: a farmhouse with earthy, funky and elegant environments; a theater and rehearsal space for different art forms; a school without walls; a library; a darkroom; a pre-school; unusual gardens—all providing an indoor/outdoor environment "for humans and other animals." At the time of this interview, excerpted here, Sherk had just resigned as director of The Farm and was moving on to plans for more site-specific environments in the world of everyday life. —Eds.

Between the abstract and the meadow hurls the chaos.
Between the Diaspora and the crinoline sits the poem.

—Bonnie Sherk

Linda Frye Burnham: I guess one of the things everybody knows about The Farm is that it's a farm in the middle of a bunch of freeways. How did you find the site for it?

Bonnie Sherk: Well, there were several things that led me to this site. One thing has to do with when I was a child of about the age of six. There was this recurring dream that I had, that I loved to conjure up. It was the image of large, monolithic, technological, clanging forms. Inside of them would be growing a fragile flower, just a single flower. It was this incredible contrast that was very much a part of me, and I was fascinated by this image. I would literally conjure it up at night, and dream it. I don't know where it came from.

As an adult this kind of imagery was very normal for me to be working with. I was always aware of it. I was also very conscious of these buildings that were alongside this same freeway interchange, because I lived not too far from there. As I would drive by, I would see these buildings in the area. It was a very magical, mysterious place and always caught my attention.

During the period of late '73 and '74 I was interested in creating a public cafe environment. I was looking for a space where different kinds of artists and also nonartists could come together and break down some of the mythologies and prejudices between different genres, styles and cultural forms. All of this had to be connected with other species—plants and animals. It was very much a feeling that I had, a need to make things whole, to create situations through analogy. I was also working as The Waitress as a performance piece and a job. While I was looking for this space, at the restaurant, I met a musician who was interested in political theater. We started talking, and we both knew about this place, and decided to rent it. His name was Jack Wickert.

I felt that it was very important to create The Farm as a vehicle for connecting physical and conceptual fragments, for bringing together people of all ages from different economic and cultural backgrounds, people of different colors, and then people in relation to other species. The Farm was the product and process of hundreds of people. It emanated as part of a collective unconscious—a partial solution to urban and cultural error—some of which was specific to the site.

LFB: So you really had this grand design from the very beginning?

BS: Absolutely. You can look at the drawings that I made in 1974. The first proposal for The Farm was a drawing that I made, which shows the land (6.5 acres in all). Another element is that the buildings I had always looked at [during previous site-specific performance works] were adjacent to this four-and-a-half acre cement plaza, which had been the site of the Borden's Dairy Building. This —in relationship to the cluster of buildings, the freeway, the space in the middle of the freeway, which was about to be landscaped, and the four surrounding neighborhoods—was perfect to connect. The land fragments were owned by the city, state and private sources. The city-owned land was under the jurisdiction of several agencies. It was a true collage of spaces. It was also at the convergence of three hidden creeks, a magnet site of invisible energy. The timing was superb and The Farm was on its way.

I knew how to deal with the logistics of the project because of my work with the Portable Parks. At the time I did the Portable Parks, in 1970, I spent three months setting up the piece. It was a rehearsal for The Farm, because, with the Portable Parks, it was necessary for me to deal with certain established systems, communicate with them, and convince them of the rightness of the work. With The Farm, of course, the scale was much larger, but it didn't scare me because I had a sense of how to proceed and be effective.

I first contacted the Trust for Public Land, which was a fairly new organization, and was in the business of acquiring open space land for public use. I saw Huey Johnson, who's now the Secretary of Resources for the State of California. At that time he was President of the Trust. I brought the idea to him, the full plan, and he was fascinated with it, and so the TPL helped with the project. After two-and-a-half years of our work, the city did acquire the land. The land is currently being developed as a park with a rural feeling.

The creation of The Farm was an enormous series of simultaneous actions, which required hard work by many. On one level, I thought of it as a performance piece, but it was the performance of "Being." I was the "Administrator," "Politician," "Strategist," "Teacher," "Cook," "Designer," "Gardener," etc. In a sense, everyone who participated was a performer.

LFB: Can you describe The Farm as it was when it began? How many buildings. . . ?

BS: When it began it was completely barren. There was this four-and-a-half acre concrete plaza and a parking lot. There were these very dilapidated buildings with broken windows, boarded over and full of junk. The freeway interchange had just opened. In fact, part of the conception of the piece had to do with the unveiling of the interchange and the availability of public money. The city had just voted for there to be a fund for the acquisition of open space. Things were in synch. In a sense, it was very easy for certain aspects of The Farm to emerge as a concept because it was the right time. But it took incredible work and organization. Twenty-four hours a day was insufficient.

In many ways, some of the difficulties of The Farm had to do with the fact that it was also ahead of its time. In terms of concept, I was very interested, and still am interested, in creating works that relate simultaneously on many levels. For example, The Farm, to a large group, was merely a community center, where animals and plants and people could be together, with each art activity separate. I saw the total integration as a new art form: a triptych (human/plant/animal) within the context of a counter-pointed diptych (farm/freeway: technological/non-mechanized), etc. But it also exists on metaphoric and symbolic levels. Of course, most things do. Years earlier, I had done experiments and works with very common objects, and I noticed that the most common object often was the most mysterious.

LFB: Describe the different elements that went into The Farm and were part of it.

BS: I was very interested in framing life and creating a frame for the diversity as well as the similarities. Toward the end of my tenure at The Farm, I was developing mechanisms (programs) and environments that would extend the multicultural diversity of the neighborhoods to an international level. Structurally, I saw possibilities by using analogous cultural forms and creating whole experiences—actions connected to a place. I was even negotiating with Japanese businessmen to bring a 300-year-old Japanese farmhouse to the site.

LFB: Was it last year that you decided to resign as President and Conceptual Director of The Farm?

BS: In October of '80 I left The Farm after almost seven years, because I felt that it was time for me to move on and develop some new projects. One thing I've learned about myself is that I'm not a maintenance person; I'm an initiator. From the beginning I made a vow to myself to stay at The Farm as long as it was interesting and fulfilling and to leave when it no longer satisfied me—that's what I did.

I was beginning to get bogged down and bored with a lot of the demands of running this institution. There were bureaucratic structures that were not allowing for certain kinds of things that I wanted to happen. There was also a lack of money. I felt held back and had an incredible desire to travel and experience movement. I felt that it would also be better for The Farm to grow on its own terms without me. It was a major "letting go," and I felt very good about it. It also coincided with an exhibition in London that Lucy Lippard had invited me to participate in, and I created a piece called A Triptych Within a Triptych Within a Triptych Within the Context of a Counterpointed Diptych (Technological, Non-mechanized, Etc.). A very catchy title.

LFB: You can whistle it on the way home.

BS: It had to do with the theory and practice of art as a tool for cultural transformation and human survival. The theory has to do with using art as a mechanism for creating whole systems—experiential situations for cultural change. For the installation I created a preface and three exhibits, two of which, Exhibits A and B, demonstrated different kinds of art. Exhibit A was a documentation of The Farm. Exhibit B was a piece which had an indoor landscape with a table of accoutrements and incorporated the Queen's Park across the street as viewed through binoculars. It had many elements which were personal as well as symbolic, including "food for mice" and "food for thought." Exhibit C, which related to the practice of creating and experiencing art, was my letter of resignation from The Farm, with my right and left brain cards indicating my respective roles as President and Conceptual Director.

The practice was stated: "Between the abstract and the meadow hurls the chaos. / Between the Diaspora and the crinoline sits the poem." In many ways this piece was my completion piece for The Farm, and an analysis of my work for the past ten years, as well as being a thing in itself.

This interview originally appeared in High Performance magazine, Fall 1981.

Original CAN/API publication: September 2002

Above copied from: http://www.communityarts.net/readingroom/archivefiles/2002/09/between_the_dia.php

Intermedia Arts: Bringing Many Voices to the Table, Tom Borrup

This essay is aprt of a much longer essay titled The Administration of Cultural Democracy: Three Experiments which can be found at the following address: http://www.communityarts.net/readingroom/archivefiles/2003/09/administration.php

Intermedia Arts building in Minneapolis. View slideshow of additional images. Photo by Tom Borrup
Intermedia Arts is a multidisciplinary arts center in Minneapolis that is at the same time community-based and an advocate for artists. This is to say that it embraces a wide range of forms, styles and levels of craftsmanship by people of all ages in the surrounding neighborhoods and, at the same time, provides professional development, peer review, competitive fellowships and project commissions to artists from across the state.

While this unusual construct seems antithetical to some, cultural democracy, as Bau Graves points out, "demands, a both/and analysis, rather than either/or."

In much the same way the Center for Cultural Exchange balances traditional practices with the crossing of cultures and innovation, Intermedia Arts' dynamic combination advances artists' work while being "by-and-for the community." Professional artists are part of the community and considered leaders in the communities with whom Intermedia Arts forms partnerships. Partnerships with artists are essentially the same as those with schools, social-action organizations or any other community-based entity. At the same time, professional artists are not considered the only ones whose creative self-expression has value.

From the time Intermedia Arts was incorporated as a video access and training center in 1973, it straddled two worlds. Known until 1986 as University Community Video, for much of that time it relied on the dual support and participation of students at the University of Minnesota and activists and artists in the community.

I arrived in 1980 with my interests in and commitment to creativity and social change, and was attracted to the relatively young organization's strong reputation in social-documentary production and community-activist focus. Just like Wing Luke Museum's Ron Chew, I described my professional training and background as being in journalism and community organizing.

From its beginnings, Intermedia Arts served as the convener of communitywide dialogue, a dialogue both about culture and about issues of pressing concern to people in the community. Its 1970s origins as an activist video center saw its members or participants learning to take out a camera to express their views on a social/political condition or injustice, and, in doing so, to spark civic dialogue and social change. Through its 30 years and the many changes at Intermedia Arts during my tenure, the organization remained committed to participatory cultural practices and to dialogue driven by creative self-expression.

Intermedia Arts' mission, rearticulated in 1993, is "to serve as a catalyst that builds understanding among people through art." Squarely focused on an activist social agenda with art as the vehicle, the mission is true to its origins in the community video movement.

Expanding the Seats and the Table

The practice of engaging a large number of "guest" or "adjunct" curators grew out of the organization's desire in the 1980s to expand its discipline base from that of a media-arts organization to that of a multidisciplinary arts center.

To mark the transition from University Community Video to Intermedia Arts in 1986, it took on four discipline-specific curators on a contractual basis, each charged with devising a season and writing NEA and other grants in their respective areas of media, visual art, new music and performance art. This construct served the organization well for half a dozen years as it achieved credibility in different artistic disciplines among artists, audiences and funders, and as it developed internal capacity for presenting and exhibiting various art forms.

By the early 1990s, Intermedia Arts grew more complex. It encompassed a wider range of programs, especially in youth, education and artist services, and at the same time was focusing efforts on building relationships with more diverse audiences. From successes and failures with many community groups and artists I learned that more meaningful connections with specific audiences came from meaningful connections with artists who were members of – and leaders within – the different communities. New works of art created around themes or issues of concern to specific communities, and involving people within those communities, built even deeper relationships.

Much like the Center for Cultural Exchange, Intermedia also concluded that culturally appropriate formats and styles of presentation were required for the experience to be as true and meaningful as possible and for members of the respective communities to be comfortable participating. To put an Aztec Danza group on a formal stage might be more comfortable for middle- and upper-class white audiences, and it could be a way to sell tickets. However, its out of the context of community life and it would not represent the role these artist-activists play in their own community's cultural setting.

A successful 1992 series produced with the Native Arts Circle in a leased downtown loft space taught me valuable lessons. A packed house for the presentation of three traditional and contemporary American Indian musical performers included a vibrant mix of Natives, whites and blacks. An important discussion followed the event when some Intermedia Arts staff complained about the noisy kids who came and went, whispered and giggled throughout the performances. Partners helped us understand that kids are welcomed at cultural events in the Native community and their behavior is part of the experience. White audiences, intolerant of children's behavior, generally exclude them from many cultural events and then wonder why new generations won't adopt their traditions. This opened my eyes on a number of levels, not the least of which is that welcoming kids, and their less than subtle behaviors, is a good thing. Uptight white audiences will just have to deal with it.

A Catalyst for and a Critic of Change

In 1994, Intermedia Arts moved from the leased downtown loft space and the converted church that served as its headquarters since 1978, a building adjacent to the University of Minnesota campus, and provided at no cost by the university. It purchased and relocated to a converted auto-repair shop in a dynamic, culturally and economically diverse south Minneapolis neighborhood, an area known for decades as a stronghold of artists and social-change activists.

A successful $1.5-million fundraising campaign gave the organization a well-designed, 10,000-square-foot, flexible arts and community center. It includes galleries, a social space with a kitchen, 125-seat theater, office, classroom, working spaces and a semi-boxed-in outdoor area behind the building for parking and events.

Lyndale Avenue, on which Intermedia purchased the building, now looks like a page out of Richard Florida's "Rise of the Creative Class." During the decade since the purchase, the street evolved into a two-mile bohemian strip. It's anchored at one end by the Walker Art Center/Guthrie Theater complex, and moves south into commercial and residential neighborhoods.

When Intermedia Arts relocated there, it was a mixed area of light industry, retail and residential. One could count a couple dozen auto-related repair and supply businesses, electrical, plumbing and roofing contractors and woodworking shops. Less than 10 years later, all are gone save two auto-repair shops. One vacant store front has converted twice, first to a cyber café and then to a tapas and wine bar.

The two-mile strip now includes a dozen espresso cafés, over a dozen ethnic restaurants, three or four yoga/martial-arts studios, a huge upscale food co-op, a dozen new- and used-clothing stores, a dozen hair salons and the usual assortment of pet, tea, bicycle, art framing, photo-copy, graphic design, vitamin and hydroponic gardening shops. Besides Intermedia Arts, the two-mile stretch is now home to half a dozen other nonprofit arts organizations. Less than a block either side of Lyndale Avenue are 20 more arts groups, largely housed in a seven-story converted office building owned by the nonprofit developer Artspace Projects, and more bars, cafes, restaurants and shops. Upscale housing developments are now rising on blocks previously occupied by parking lots and industrial supply yards.

The eagerly awaited 2000 census confirmed that the population on the east side of Lyndale Avenue had increased dramatically in diversity (comprising no majority group), and at the same time an upper-income, 90+ percent white majority remained virtually unchanged on the west side of the street. Housing values had risen for several straight years at a rate faster than any other neighborhood in the City.

These rapidly changing neighborhoods, and the myriad gentrification issues arising through that process, became one of the focal points for Intermedia Arts programming and topics for sometimes heated civic dialogue.

A multiyear program supported by numerous local and national foundations put artists to work as catalysts to build relationships between youth, seniors, growing Latino, African and Asian immigrant communities, and urban planning and development entities. Supplemented by an Animating Democracy Initiative grant through Americans for the Arts, Intermedia Arts tackled issues of gentrification and displacement through art projects that asked the diverse residents the question: What makes you feel safe in your community?

Possibly the largest continuous audience attraction at Intermedia Arts – and certainly the biggest publicity attraction – are the 320-feet of exterior walls designated for graffiti artists. A 24-hour stream of mostly young people could be observed perusing the walls that faced the parking and back lots. These exterior gallery visitors brought and used cameras, sketch pads, markers or spray cans to document or explore their own aesthetics, or to leave behind their signature. The front and visible end of the building facing Lyndale Avenue included three discreet surfaces on which spray can murals were commissioned and rotated annually. Walls on the side and rear were a bit more free-form, some rotating twice annually, some repainted almost daily.

Early to embrace all the elements of the Hip Hop culture, Intermedia Arts endured years of criticism from police, a few pro-gentrification public officials and a handful of neighborhood real-estate speculators – ironically the very people benefiting from Intermedia Arts' presence. The problematic work with the graffiti walls may have been Intermedia Arts' most risky but ultimately successful foray into the complex practice of cultural democracy and arts-based civic dialogue.

My publicly defended stance in support of sanctioned areas for this aerosol art form cost me a mayoral appointment to the City Arts Commission in 2000. After a four-year battle over graffiti played out in the media had all but faded, the pro-gentrification city councilmember, who happened to represent Intermedia Arts' district, renewed her attacks on my support of Hip Hop art. The mayor was forced to withdraw my appointment for fear of being cast as soft on graffiti taggers as an election year approached.

Weaving Diverse Strands

"Culture," writes Roadside Theater director Dudley Cocke (in Vega and Greene's "Appalachia, Democracy and Cultural Equity"), "carries a peoples' profound expression of their self-hood. Only when people can meet as equals, without the threat of domination, can they risk their art and culture. Cultural equity, then, is integral to democracy and the making of an American people from our many diverse strands."

In order to have at the table more and more of the many voices in the community, Intermedia Arts experimented with an expanded rotating slate of "curators." For instance, bringing the Native American community to the table required partnerships with Native cultural and community groups, with Native artists, and with a Native "curator." Creating a GLBT film festival required engaging a queer-identified filmmaker who had a demonstrated passion for bringing new queer-made media to queer and non-queer audiences alike. Intermedia Arts' origins in the media arts, and the vision of the artist as a community leader or "animator," made this approach second nature.

While Intermedia Arts regularly worked with specific ethnic communities in assembling arts presentations or programs, the mix was typically more complex. Being a multidisciplinary center as well as a multicultural one, required curatorial constructs that could engage artists in one or more medium around a theme, or that could bring a group of social-issue-based organizations together with artists making new work addressing the topic. It was still important to maintain relationships through programming and through artists with specific communities, yet it was the recombinant or new creative activity that was most in keeping with Intermedia Arts mission, and what I found most satisfying in the work

Different from the Center for Cultural Exchange, Intermedia Arts focuses primarily on local artists, and on the creation of new work, with presentation a necessary part of the process but not an end. Intermedia Arts is often a beginning point, or a stop along the way, for artists developing or testing new work. Bau Graves' ethnomusicology orientation attracts him to recreating authentic experiences that ground citizens in their cultural identity and be shared with others. My satisfaction came more in fostering new cross-cultural artist and community relationships that result in new creative work and new common ground on which people can act together in both a social and a civic context.

Keeping a trim core staff while finding the right expertise and community connections to pull off its wide-ranging mandate was best addressed by building on the eclectic range – and sometimes significant number – of independent contractors to take the helm of projects. And, sometimes they used formal or informal committees to guide a project.

One recurring guest curator proposed a series of activities around gender in 1997 named "The Genders That Be." Her process was one that set a standard and was emulated for years to come. Identifying as a butch lesbian herself, she was well connected in the GLBT community. The advisory group she assembled took on the assignment with vigor. A remarkably diverse group of community activists and transgendered committee participants took on many roles that included shaping the series' concept, building connections with various subculture and "mainstream" organizations, making arrangements for speakers, bringing food to receptions and contributing materials for the resource room built into the gallery. One group member was a cross-dressing Sears salesman from the suburbs, who dutifully showed up for meetings and later brought his wife to programs.

The ambitious seven-week series included a photography exhibition, paintings by local artists, a film series, several local performance artists, a well-known performer from the West Coast and a series of panel discussions. It relied on a strong coalition of community organizations and volunteers to raise money and pull together the programs. Audiences were strong and consistent, press coverage was extensive and surprisingly positive. The St. Paul daily newspaper, in addition to a feature story, devoted considerable space to a listing of educational resources, Web sites, books and service organizations for those wanting to know more or needing assistance.

The fact that an established arts center would fully embrace and celebrate the creativity of a culture often discriminated against, or at best shoved aside, built relationships that will last a long time. The sensitive and respectful process used by the guest curator was an inspirational model.

Building on the Network of "Curators"

The Genders That Be curator was one of the many Intermedia Arts relied upon to build relationships and bring specific technical or aesthetic experience to the table. These are individuals Malcolm Gladwell, in "The Tipping Point," would call "connectors."

Bau Graves, in his "Cultural Democracy" manuscript, writes, "Culture advances because of the dedication of the handful of individuals who care enough to make it happen. They know lots of people… (and) organizing their fellows is built into their nature. Every community has a core group of participators whose level of dedication is extremely high. They are the motivators who sustain community over the long haul."

Developing this network of curators was also a way to broaden and deepen the capacity of the community – the various communities – over the long term to develop and implement cultural programs, democratizing the role of programmer, much like the work of the Center for Cultural Exchange.

As an audience-development strategy, connectors and people Gladwell calls "mavens," bring people to cultural experiences they might not otherwise venture to. Mavens are trend-setters, people with wide social circles who are relied upon for advice and recommendations pertaining to restaurants, films, museums or other cultural activities.

Intermedia Arts' programming-development and management strategy was based on building a wide network of these connectors and mavens, essentially having them on contract to pull together events and programs that they have a passionate interest in and to invite their social circles to partake.

Each of these independent contractors brought their expertise in art and cultural forms and connections within their communities, and they generally had an agenda of creating change, making an impact in their own or the broader community. They came to Intermedia Arts with project proposals of their invention, or they were contacted and recruited to carry out projects developed by staff or advisory committees.

As this approach began to evolve, I found it necessary to get this group of people together and organized an annual day-long meeting of the entire slate of adjunct curators with key staff. In the early 1990s this included about a dozen people, mostly artists with large and small, ongoing and intermittent "curator" contracts. The meeting was called the "programming summit" and had several purposes. On the practical level, it was a way of roughing out an annual schedule across all programs and disciplines. It was also intended to help find and forge synergies and internal partnerships. The gathering presented opportunities for new ideas to bubble up, and served as the beginning of curatorial-skill development or capacity building for this growing roster of adjunct curators.

In the mid-'90s, as the new building was completed, program planning was gearing up. Fueled by a multiyear Wallace Readers' Digest Fund grant, I invited a broader group to the table, under the name "Food & Dreams." Its participants were treated to a buffet meal before open-ended "what would you like to see" conversations. Its members included neighborhood and social-issue activists, partner organizations, artists and adjunct curators, all with an eye toward diverse cultural inclusion. I had learned much earlier that honoring people's presence and ideas by providing food was essential, as well as another opportunity, through an eclectic menu, to share in a cultural experience.

In an approach slightly different from the Center for Cultural Exchange, Intermedia Arts was more issue-focused in consulting its community, asking questions about social issues and concerns – and looking for metaphors that could be transformed into multidisciplinary art series.

One series resulting from those conversations inspired by a similar program coordinated in Chicago by an artist there, came to be known alternately as "Red and Black" and "Fry Bread and Chitlins." It was conceived as a prolonged program to explore the dynamic 500-year relationship between Native Americans and African Americans, and their many cultural connections. (It's estimated that at least 80 percent of African Americans whose ancestors were brought to America as slaves have some Native American heritage, in spite of the fact that 400 years of documented public policy to prevent alliances between the two peoples.)

A series of educational and "bonding" partnership meetings continued over nearly a three-year period, before and during two seasons of public programs that were presented. Most events included food and ritual, a cultural sharing, extended to all comers. Work was shared in visual art, dance, music and spoken word. A number of cross-cultural artist projects resulted from relationships formed by the process.

The Food & Dreams planning group was put on hold after three years primarily because it was generating too many good ideas, and the organization's staff and programming capacity was being overtaxed.

Making Sense of Complexity

By 2002, I counted 39 independent contractors in various capacities on Intermedia Arts' roster. They were most often artists, sometimes teachers, parents, community organizers or all of the above. They were not employees expected to adapt to and work within an institutional culture. They had various communication styles and ways of relating to their tasks, including deadlines.

An adjunct curator, for example, would be engaged to coordinate a presentation of work by students from three nearby elementary schools, all of which had worked with Intermedia Arts to host artist residencies in various media and various grade levels. The curator had to interface on the one end with teachers, school administration, parents and kids. On the other she had to work with Intermedia Arts staff to design the format of the exhibition, schedule musical and spoken-word events in the theater, and plan a parent/teacher/community reception. In addition to the education staff, this included working with personnel in marketing, production, exhibition and sometimes development.

At the same time, the number of organizations with which Intermedia Arts partnered – and planned to partner on one of many programs and events – during an 18-month planning widow, was nearly double the number of curators -- over 60. Partners included social-service, environmental, advocacy, education or other arts organizations. Sometimes their staffs also served as the adjunct curator on a project. This was a way to begin to expand the thinking and capacity within those groups to work with the arts as a vehicle to advance a social agenda, and it was a way to secure a resource commitment from the partner group.

Education, artist support and community programs were sometimes interwoven. Events might include an exhibition, a series of adult or youth workshops, public performances (indoor or out), receptions or parties. Each of these contractors would be required to work with half a dozen Intermedia Arts staff in producing, in the aggregate, a constant stream of programs, often seven days a week. In fact, with meetings of teachers or other community leaders beginning at 7 a.m., and performances or rehearsals sometimes going past midnight, the building was abuzz 18 or more hours a day.

The organization struggled with making sense of the way it administratively structured its programs, as definitions were a moving target. Clusters labeled Presenting, Education or Artist Support were often arbitrary (yet necessary for budgeting, staff responsibility, grantwriting, promotion, etc.). Most of the so-called education and artist-support programs had presentational aspects, which sometimes comprised their primary identity; the presenting programs had elements stressing education and artist/community partnerships, which sometimes required the lion's share of resources or time. Lines were pretty soft between program categories.

As a community arts center and incubator of new work, Intermedia Arts chose not to construct a "mainstage" series or season so as not to privilege some work over others, indicating it was of higher caliber or somehow superior. This is an important value in cultural democracy, yet antithetical to the notion that cultural institutions are arbiters of quality. Mixing work by students with that of emerging artists, with commissioned or relatively high-budget work by accomplished artists, with work by members of cultural groups who don't typically put their creative work in a space defined for art was, to say the least, messy. Or was it a picture of cultural democracy in action?

As we evolved into this way of working during more than a decade, structures and systems emerged to prepare the guest curators and the staff for what to expect. Contracts were signed with specific deliverables and schedules. So-called "pre-production" and "production" meetings were held with each contractor and key staff members around each presentation or event.

However, with so many cooks in the kitchen, so many different recipes in the works, and such a relentless pace of activity, chaos was constantly poised to break out.

While trying to achieve some level of consistency in what audiences encountered, a careful dance was always performed to keep staff from telling curators and partners, "This is how we do things here," instead leaning towards "How would you like to do this?" The important challenge was to allow each program or event to find its own voice relative to the culture from which it was emanating.

Taking All Creative Expression Seriously

An enormous creative explosion was underway at Intermedia Arts in spaces defined as galleries and a theater, not to mention the outside walls or spaces around the building. Staff, board, neighbors, funders and peers who were traditionally trained in the arts didn't always consider all of it appropriate. It was difficult for the public – and sometimes even staff – to appreciate.

Attempts to "administer" cultural democracy had no end of frustrations and challenges. The crush of time, money and the demands of connecting with audiences and funders was ever present. Confronting marketing experts or funders who expected a singular curatorial voice or "brand identity" from the organization was rarely satisfying. They couldn't get their hands around the eclectic mix, or what they sometimes perceived as "lack of leadership."

Orienting staff members to see their roles as both teachers and learners was also a challenge. A theater production manager wanting his work to reflect professionalism and high standards felt thwarted by artists and curators whose experience varied widely, but who also had different values and concerns about how work was presented. And, yes, cultural philosophies aside, there were adjunct curators who simply lacked presentational skills or any concern for presentational style, leaving some audiences confused or unsatisfied. Finding the time and temperament for this internal dialogue and learning process was challenging, but was very much the next level to be addressed in building more capacity among the growing ranks of participants and leaders in advancing cultural democracy.

Understanding an arts center that is a place to help artists develop skills and create work is commonplace. Smaller arts organizations are pigeon-holed to serve artists or find their niche in presenting high-quality work in a limited cultural framework in dance, visual art, music, performance art or media. Community arts organizations are pigeon-holed as places to train kids and adult amateurs, and where resulting work is not taken seriously. Beginning to comprehend a professional arts organization's role as that of a cultural incubator, a place for all the community's voices and a training ground for all levels of cultural workers is very hard for most people in the arts.

As an unusual hybrid, fostering the diverse forms and styles of voices found in its urban neighborhood, Intermedia Arts was foremost trying to nurture a healthy, creative, and interactive community by taking everyone's creative expression seriously and by engaging in community concerns as an active institutional citizen.


Tom Borrup is a community activist, writer and consultant based in Minneapolis. He was executive director of Intermedia Arts from 1980 to 2003, and now works as a consultant to arts organizations, foundations and public agencies in several cities around the U.S.

Original CAN/API publication: September 2003

above copied from: http://www.communityarts.net/readingroom/archivefiles/2003/09/intermedia_arts.php