Greg to Abby (Abigail Satinsky of InCUBATE):
Living as Form presented so many models of micro-organizing activity that I was sometimes overwhelmed when trying to understand how successful they actually were in day-to-day terms. So I wonder, as someone seriously invested in the concept of self-funded cultural activity with the group InCUBATE that you co-founded in Chicago, or through the ongoing Sunday Soup granting project and its expanding network, what did you come away with from New York’s Lower East Side, were there activities you did not know about, projects that add to your understanding of sustainable culture, organizations whose form will live on in your own theory and practice in the future?
Abby to Greg: I was particularly excited at this year’s summit by the inclusion of nonprofits that are doing visionary cultural and political work to be speaking alongside artists and activists, especially Appalshop, Alternate ROOTS and Women on Waves. When we began InCUBATE, one of our guiding principles was to interrogate the non-profit model for the visual arts, to see if it was really the way to collaborate and support politically or socially-engaged artists. We also wanted to bring out the creativity that administrators and cultural workers of all stripes bring to their organizing practices, and value that kind of contribution to the arts. It’s evident that the questions of accountability to communities or sustainability in the long-term is radically different between an artist practice and an organizational one and those should not be conflated. But to see how an artist such as Laurie Jo Reynolds from Tamms Year Ten approaches working with issues in the prison-industrial complex, affecting policy in tandem with advocacy groups and many communities, as a form of “legislative art” and then Appalshop, which has a forty year history in Appalachia, KY, doing a documentary project like Thousand Kites, a richer understanding of cultural activism emerges. Or that Women on Waves, collaborated with Atelier van Lieshout to design their vessel and were featured in the Venice Biennial, and now serve thousands of women around the world to have access to healthy abortions. When you hear the actual work these people do, the authority of the art-world to legitimate this practice as “Art” is thrown into question and becomes a secondary concern. As someone who now mainly works at a nonprofit and centers most of my creative energy producing projects through an organizational framework rather than as a collaborative artist, I see the language I use to describe my new practice as being different, but not the guiding principles. For me to understand the relevance of the projects in Living as Form, it seems necessary to place all these forms in dialogue, unpack their differences, see their blurry boundaries, and where unexpectedly, they may be alike.
Greg follows up with Abby: Do you see the Wall Street occupation and its spirit of consensual agency as something that might positively influence the creation of the kind of inter-art dialogue you hope to see emerge, and if so how?
Abby: I have just been a bystander to the process that is happening down there so i can’t really say that i know what eventual influence it will have. but I do see a group of people that are committed, willing to withstand ridicule from the press and casual observers, and are being conscientious about building a mindful community down there. i don’t think its necessary that their message is clear, they are building relationships that will develop over time which to me seems like a transformative process for its participants. i feel thankful to witness their attempts at a direct democracy. and most inspiring, the arts & culture working group seem like they’re having fun.
