Last Friday Creative Time held its 3rd annual Summit on socially engaged art, and then simultaneously opened a massive exhibition organized by chief curator Nato Thompson entitled Living as Form at the old Essex Street Market on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. What follows over the next few posts are some conversational questions about the events beginning with Nato:
Greg to Nato:: The Creative Time Summit and Living as Form exhibition are bold and inclusive projects staged at a moment when progressive culture in the United States has lost its sense of connection to any broader political or artistic momentum. And yet as much as the project is an experiment in temporary community building it also resembles an enormous Dickensian orphanage: a space in which heterogeneous practices converge like so many aesthetically abandoned heirs to a lineage of activist art they may not even recognize, let alone remember. At a time of failed institutions and neoliberal enterprise culture this orphanage is a place of refuge, and perhaps a space of new intimacies and relationships. At the same time, how do you envision the connectivity made possible between, say, a group such as Voina (WAR), along side of Rick Lowe, Temporary Services, the United Indian Health Services, or an art star like Francis Alÿs (to chose only some of the impressive groups and individuals we encountered this past Friday)? Are we in a position where we must pin our hopes on the orphanage, that is to say a hope that by bringing together these many actors in one space and time they will somehow, at some moment, spontaneously conjoin into a more concrete inter-connectivity of theory and practice?
Nato: Perhaps, as opposed to pinning our hopes on the orphanage, it is a chance to inspire folks to join the orphanage. And in so doing, to push the metaphor even further, the orphanage becomes the scale of the city and beyond. For it has been my experience over the last three years of doing the summits (and with each year having them become increasingly more geographic and disciplinarily disperse) as well as the last weekend in conversations with artists of multiple generations, that this array inspires new forms of actions and new possibilities for collective and isolated action. So it isn’t about pinning hopes so much as producing larger networks to act on them. It’s almost as though if we cast the net wide enough, we can gather the disaffected, disgruntled and aggressively searching members of a variety of disciplines to cohere.
That being said, I also feel these associations are long overdue. It is my humble opinion that many of these socially engaged cultural producers share many strategies because the conditions of spectacle necessitate a form of cultural production that adjusts for its radical encroachment into contemporary life. To be more clear, I suppose, it isn’t the summit or the exhibitions bringing these practices together, but the logical extension of cultural producers resisting capital that have found affinities across methodologies. An artist who works on housing like Rick Lowe doesn’t do so just because he thinks it is a novel form, but in fact because he realizes he cannot address symbolic culture in Houston’s Third Ward without simultaneously addressing and adjusting vast disparities in housing. The geographic must be worked on at the same time as the semiotic terrain. So, this basic equation should certainly also be found in the work of Decolonizing Architecture in Palestine whose assessment and investigation of the occupation is both a physical as well as symbolic interrogation. These registers are not manufactured but in fact, strategies developed to adjust for the material and political conditions of contemporary life.
As a last point, one must also acknowledge that this radical interdisciplinarity strategy is hardly new. Poetically enough, some of the groups presenting were born out of the legacy of ’68 when moving across disciplines was obvious because the political urgency exceeded the inherent disciplinary limits. Alternate Roots, it must be said, was founded by the same institution that trained Rosa Parks. In times of global resistance, these formal disciplinary categories fall away in the name of urgency. Lets hope that this movement reflects are a larger political resistance. My gut tells me it does.
Greg: And just one quick follow up Nato, as you know the Wall Street occupation emerged simultaneously with Living as Form and I see you and others involved in the art event made it a point to go down to Liberty Plaza and get directly involved in it. Perhaps its too soon to ask this, but do you see this as another link to the Summit and the exhibition, or as something more integral to their spirit, and therefore capable of playing a transformative role of some sort for social practice art going forwards?
Nato: I wouldn’t want to place too much emphasis on the spontaneous walk down to the occupation as frankly, it was the only reasonable thing to do. Participating in existing social movements is critical for anyone alive today let alone socially engaged artists. I mean, lets face it, having this occupation at the same time of the exhibition and summit was something that is hard to ignore. It has been an extremely poetic convergence and I am glad that even a hand full of folks have gathered down there and are now working to add what they can to the movement. That said, we could certainly use more help. If you are interested in joining the ranks down there, this is your invitation (I am speaking to the readers). Just walk down to Liberty Plaza, go to the info desk and ask how you can plug in. The more, the merrier.
