Each year, from mid-summer to early fall, the arts converge in Scotland’s capital city.  The Edinburgh International Festival and the Edinburgh Festival Fringe are well-known venues for the performing arts.  The Edinburgh Festivals have expanded to include art forms such as film, jazz and blues, storytelling, and books.  The visual arts is no exception in having its own festival platform.  Taking place throughout August and the first week of September, the Edinburgh Art Festival is Scotland’s largest annual festival of visual art.  Daily Serving brings our readers some of its highlights.

The Edinburgh Art Festival annually commissions new works of art and partners with the local art community to provide a strong exhibitions program throughout the city.  The 2010 EAF presents commissions of new work by artists Martin Creed, Richard Wright and collaborative partners Kim Coleman and Jenny Hogarth.  Coleman and Hogarth’s Staged, which concluded August 15th, was produced by the Collective Gallery and situated at the City Observatory on Carlton Hill.  The artists turned the space into a multi-channel video installation described by the EAF Guide as both a ‘digital camera obscura’ and ‘a mise-en-scène’ for the city.  Capitalizing upon the theatrical emphasis of the Edinburgh Festivals, the artists included visitors in their work by projecting live CCTV footage along with pre-recorded filmic images of Edinburgh.

The 2010 EAF also commissioned intervention and performance works to take place throughout its run.  Among them is Ross Christie’s Mobile Art Market.  His environmentally friendly cycle-powered market stall travels around Edinburgh, offering up affordable prints, multiples, books and fanzines created by local artists.

Martin Creed: Down Over Up

The Fruitmarket Gallery presents new and recent work by 2001 Turner Prize winning British artist Martin Creed in Down Over Up.  Down Over Up – an evocative title – is inspired by the artist’s commission to refurbish the Scotsman Steps.  Creed notes the strong use of repetition in his work, which is for him a comfortable means of approaching our chaotic world and creating some semblance of regularity.  The exhibition’s strong thematic emphasis upon repetitive, incremental changes allows one to see differences where things might have otherwise appeared to be the same.

Down Over Up is centered upon the concept of ’stacking and progression in size, height and tone’.  The exhibition features work where Creed has stacked or piled planks, chairs, tables, boxes, or legos.  The artist also uses paint and ink to explore the theme.  Creed’s new commission within the gallery transforms the central staircase into a synthesizer and is one of the conceptual highlights of the exhibition.  Ascending and descending the staircase causes notes on a scale to sound – making visitors’ movements through the gallery take on heightened participatory purpose as they both enact and complete the work

The Scotsman Steps Commission. Artist's impression of EAF commission for the Scotsman Steps, curated by the Fruitmarket Gallery and supported by the Scottish Government's Edinburgh Festivals Expo Fund. Photo: Courtesy the Artist.

Down Over Up aptly references Creed’s permanent public work commission to refurbish Edinburgh’s Scotsman Steps.  The Steps, which take their name from the newspaper whose headquarters they were built to serve in 1904, are located by the Fruitmarket Gallery, connecting East Market Street and North Bridge in Edinburgh’s uniquely elevated Old Town.  The city seeks to give the Steps new life through the commission, as they have fallen out of favor due to disrepair and association with crime.  While the work has not been completed, Creed plans to resurface each step with contrasting marbles sourced from around the world.  The materials will not only infuse the Scotsman Steps with visual interest and a sense of permanence, but will also inject it with global character.

Martin Creed: Down Over Up will be on view at the Fruitmarket Gallery through 31 October 2010.

Richard Wright: The Stairwell Project

Richard Wright, The Stairwells Project, An EAF Commission in the Dean Gallery, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. Supported by the Scottish Government's Edinburgh Festivals Expo Fund. Photo: Angela Catlin.

2009 Turner Prize winner Richard Wright presents Stairwell Project, a new permanent work at the Dean Gallery.  The Dean Gallery, a part of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art since the 1990s, was designed by Thomas Hamilton as the Dean Orphan Hospital in 1831.  The Gallery’s staircases are among the building’s most prominent features and provide an expansive, architecturally unique background for Wright’s work.  Known for his ephemeral, wall-based painting, Wright brings this character to the Dean Gallery’s western staircase – placing the tradition of stairwell painting within the modern art gallery and presenting it in a new way.

Wright hand-painted The Stairwell Project in a physically and mentally demanding process that took four weeks to complete.  Inspired by the honeysuckle design of the original ceiling moldings in the stairwell, Wright designed an organic, abstracted flower shape.  He chose to paint solely in black – a color which points to the building’s melancholic history.  The flower motif is repeated in varying ways several thousand times throughout the stairwell.  The organic nature of the shape notably has the effect of introducing curved lines to a space that is solidly geometric.  Yet, the shape’s simplicity and its neutral color do not overpower.  Instead, the carefully varied size, orientation and placement of each flower subtly emphasizes the stairwell’s architecture and the abundance of light let in by the large windows.

Hito Steyerl:  In Free Fall

Hito Steyerl, still from In Free Fall. Photo: Courtesy the Artist.

The Collective Gallery presents In Free Fall, featuring new and recent work by artist and theorist Hito Steyerl.  Berlin-based Steyerl works in visual essay or film essay similar to artists such as Ursula Biemann.  This nascent documentary-influenced approach features a montage of appropriated and new footage, interviews and voice-over narrative.  Unlike traditional media, film essays facilitate the analysis of global complexities.  Through the shared language of images and information, Steyerl closely examines the economic networks which define our existence.

In Free Fall – Steyerl’s first solo exhibition in Scotland – presents Journal No. 1 in addition to three related works that include After the Crash, Before the Crash and Crash (a new commission).   The Crash works address the global economic downturn by focusing on an airplane junkyard located in the visually bare California desert - revealing cycles of capitalism as seen through the evolution of commodity.  The airplane, which facilitates global mobility, is a recognizable symbol of globalization and reveals a larger story.  As the Collective asserts, these works present ‘an anatomy of crashes both fictional and real’, revealing ‘unexpected connections between economy, violence and spectacle’.

In Free Fall concludes at the Collective Gallery on 19 September.

Julie Roberts: Child

Julie Roberts, Staying Together (2010), oil on linen. Collection of Mr. Pontus Bonnier, Sweden. Courtesy of Andrehn-Schiptjenko, Stockholm.

University of Edinburgh’s Talbot Rice Gallery presents Julie Roberts: Child – featuring new work by the artist.  Julie Roberts, a painter based in England, is concerned with the means through which ‘our social experience is given shape’.  In the past, Roberts has often chosen to paint the overtly sinister, drawing her to crime scenes and medical instruments.  Child – a thematic departure – focuses on gender roles, domestic environments, familial portraiture, school rooms and domestic labor situated in mid-twentieth century Britain.  As with past work, her new subject matter is underpinned by extensive research.  This allows Roberts to accurately present an entirely different, decidedly austere approach to childhood in a time period complicated by a great displacement of children into orphanages and foster homes.

While Roberts focuses on historic approaches to childhood and the family network, there is no sentimentality involved.  In works such as Staying Together or Meat and Two Veg, Roberts makes once familiar family scenes and portraiture both strange and unrecognizable.  Carefully constructed, unnatural stiffness is tempered by realism.  At the same time, historic subject matter is stylized and set against characteristic patterned backgrounds and wallpaper.  Roberts’ both stylized and informed approach to her subject matter combine to highlight ways in which society has changed over time.

Julie Roberts: Child remains at the Talbot Rice Gallery through 25 September.

life.turns.

life.turns. Uploaded submission.

life.turns. a film made by thousands of people, one frame at a time, is part of the 2010 Edinburgh Art Festival.  Blipfoto, an online photo journal and social networking community, was commissioned by New Media Scotland’s Alt-w Fund to create an animated film using thousands of photos uploaded by participants. People were invited to submit photographs posed in any of 8 specified stances that represent the progressive movements of walking.  Blipfoto then presented these still images in a rapid succession giving the illusion of thousands of people walking – working together to complete one another’s gait.  The resulting animated film revives the Victorian zoetrope in a new way for the digital world and presents a celebration of everyday life in all its diversity.

life.turns. was completed and presented at Inspace in Edinburgh on 26 August.  The film can be viewed online at Blipfoto.

Rise of Rebellion: DailyServing’s latest week-long series

Today, Bean Gilsdorf looks at some of the artists that have broken the art world’s mold in her latest article Rebellion, Four Ways, as a continuation of our week-long series Rise of Rebellion.

Not long ago I had a conversation with a fellow artist.  “I’m thirty years old,” she said, “and I’ve never really rebelled.”  We talked about what rebellion means; it turns out that while I was imagining the traditional route of sex/drugs/rock-n-roll, she had something tamer in mind: “I was thinking about not bathing for a while.”  I admit that I laughed out loud.

She and I were both thinking about social nonconformity in general, yet there are forms of revolt more specific to art and its milieu.  True rebellion is a personal action, a stance to take against the machination of a system whether overt or hidden.  When people talk about “the art world” they refer specifically to the capitalist market-driven system of exchange that takes place in the slim area of overlap between makers, dealers, and buyers.  It’s a system of production and consumption like many others that relies on indoctrination, social pressure, and buy-in to a set of assumptions.  In order to succeed in this world artists must play the game and follow the rules—all very insidious in a field that is purported to be about freedom and expression.  Winners learn to play well and are rewarded for running within the confines of the maze and pressing the lever at the end. But the “art world” is not art, and never should the two be confused.  Below are some of the tacit rules of the art world and the iconoclasts who break them.  Consider this food for thought.

Paul Chan, The laws are my whores (2009). Suite of nine drawings, charcoal on paper, 39.5 x 27.5 inches each.

Paul Chan, Oh why so serious? (2008). Plastic and electronics, computer keyboard, 3.25 x 18.5 x 8 inches.

Paul Chan, Waiting for Godot (2007). Performance view, South Ward, New Orleans.

1.) Make all your work recognizable.  A body of work is consistent and easily identified.

You’re a brand, and if you want to sell you need to make your brand instantly recognizable—just like a Louis Vuitton handbag or an Apple computer.  Tell that to Paul Chan, the 37 year-old auteur of videos, sculpture, drawings, paintings, light projections, computer fonts, and the co-stager of five site-specific performances of “Waiting for Godot” in post-Katrina New Orleans.  There is no “recognizable” here, no direct sense of continuity from show to show or even piece to piece; if you didn’t read the wall label you might not know who made the work.  There is only a joy of making; freedom of expression, indeed.

Cady Noland, SLA #4 (1990). Silkscreen on aluminum, edition 4/4, 78 3/8 x 60 5/8 x 3/8 inches.

2.) Promote your brand incessantly: lectures, residencies, studio visits, and visiting-professor gigs will help you advance.

It’s true that for most artists there is a social context to the work: after all, if no one knows what you make, how will they know if they like it or not?  But is it true that one must exploit every connection, every opportunity, every possible avenue for social growth to create a career in the arts?  Ask Cady Noland…oh, but you can’t.  The reclusive artist won’t answer your email and won’t work with you if you she doesn’t trust you. Despite her many successes, Noland dropped out of the art world; self-promotion is not a game that she plays.  In a 1994 review of Noland’s work, critic David Bussel wrote with keen prescience, “Anyone can be made into a hero or villain because minor celebrity is just another disposable object of mass consumption.”  Despite Noland’s reticence to engage with the public, her work continues to be in demand.

Dana Schutz, Blind Foot Massage (2009). Oil and acrylic on canvas, 36.25 x 34 inches.

3.) Hit the big time: get rich, develop a waiting list, and hire a cadre of laborers to keep up with the demand.

(Bonus points if your laborers live in “developing” countries and you make this part of your schtick.)  This is the model proposed by Andy Warhol and adopted by Jeff Koons.  Some, like Kehinde Wiley and Takeshi Murakami, even make it an overt part of their practice to manage a hive of workers.  In the overheated atmosphere of the art world, it’s easy to think that the artist who doesn’t meet the production quota dictated by collectors is a species of failure.  It is said that Dana Schutz makes all her own paintings (unconfirmed by her gallery at the time of this publication), waiting list be damned.  For an artist of her stature to do so is a very passionate and hopeful gesture, proof that rebellion isn’t always some kind of adolescent sneer: sometimes it’s just sticking to one’s principles.

Marina Abramović, The Artist is Present, (2010). Performance at MOMA, New York.

4.) Be famous, get old, drop out.

You’ve got enough money, and maybe university tenure.  This is the time to take it easy: make work that just repeats your best years ad nauseum, or even stop working altogether.  Disproving this are John Baldessari and Marina Abramović, who continue to work hard and push beyond previous limits.  Baldessari is 79 years old; in the last five years he designed the exhibition Magritte and Contemporary Art, had strong new work at his show at Sprüth Magers (Berlin) earlier this year, and currently has a long-overdue retrospective, Pure Beauty, at LACMA.  Abramović, now 64, describes herself as “the grandmother of performance art.”  Performing The Artist is Present this past spring at MOMA, she asserted the right and privilege of the artist to continue to explore her own work, to mine it and delve ever-deeper into unknown territory.  This is the benefit of utilizing a lifetime of knowledge, growth, and experience to make innovative art.  May we all be so blessed.

L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast
A weekly column by Catherine Wagley

M. Blash, Reel Image, "Go Forth" Commercial for Levi's, 2009.

In the spot filmmaker M. Blash created for Levi’s Jeans in 2009, Walt Whitman’s voice is like the Pied Piper’s pipe. “Come my tan-faced children, Follow well in order, get your weapons ready,” recites Whitman, played by an actor (an earlier Levi’s spot purportedly featured an actual recording of the poet). As he says this, the faces of slim, young, beautiful people turn or lean forward like they’ve been summoned; one woman with windswept blond hair and rosy cheeks looks as though she’s bracing herself for a fight. He continues:

Have you your pistols? have you your sharp-edged axes?
Pioneers! O pioneers!

For we cannot tarry here,
We must march my darlings, we must bear the brunt of danger.

The young people begin to move, running through fields, scaling rocks and weaving through forests. Dusk approaches, and the “youthful sinewy races” converge, their silhouettes gliding across the screen in front of a still-blue sky. “So impatient, full of action, full of manly pride and friendship,” says Whitman. “Plain I see you Western youths, see you tramping with the foremost.” There are fire works and shirtless dancing as it darkens, and the young bodies come together like the members of a euphoric hippie commune. “Have the elder races halted?” Whitman asks. “Do they droop and end their lesson, wearied over there beyond the seas? All the past we leave behind.”

Ryan McGinley, known for his wispily androgynous photographs of young creatives, shot the accompanying Levi’s print campaign. I see one particular image, a black and white photograph of two twenty-something boys embracing a horse, each time I walk to the bakery in my largely Salvadoran neighborhood. It hangs on the inside wall of a mini bus shelter and, often, aging men and women who speak to each other only in Spanish sit in front of it.  Other times, my favorite panhandler, a tall, disheveled man who tells me baked goods are bad for me in hopes that I will give my money to him instead, lurks around McGinley’s sign. I don’t know what marketing strategy or loophole led this image  to this particular street, but the eerie, utopic youth culture that McGinley presents hangs right in the midst of the very people it excludes.

Ryan McGinley, "Tracy (Dripping)," 2009.

Anything utopic needs exclusivity, since creating an ideal community means shedding what doesn’t fit the ideal. Utopic ideals also need to be slippery; they can be imagined and represented but never attained, and that’s what makes them attractive.

Ryan McGinley understands utopia better than most. He’s a 21st Century artist who still has muses, and he’s mused these muses into scenarios and settings in which they withdraw from the world and exclusively invest in each other. In 2002, when he became the youngest artist to have a museum show at the Whitney, his photographs purportedly depicted an edgy, brash youth underground in New York but they did so in a way that was so romanticized and ephemeral that they felt like they’d flown in from an alternate universe. His images of Dash Snow the tagger-turned-art-star are especially compelling. Dash lived hard, fast and grittily, which made him muse-worthy but it’s not necessarily the hardness and grit that McGinley chose to present. “I love the idea of graffiti,” he told Ana Finel Honigman in 2003. “But I am not really excited by its esthetics. . . . I love the idea of a kid writing his name hundreds of thousands of times, over and over and over because he feels he needs to.” The Dash that McGinley presented over and over again had an immense, unbridled need for community. He existed above the surface of himself, drawing people to him with his hovering openness. “So impatient, full of action, full of manly pride and friendship.”

Ryan McGinley, photograph of Dash Snow

When journalist Ariel Levy shadowed McGinley and Dash Snow in 2007, she described the intimacy of their clique: “There is a physicality between these guys, in their photos and in life, that you usually only see among little kids.” Like most utopic fantasies McGinley creates, including those for Levi’s, adult inhibitions totally dissipate in his portrayals of Dash. All that matters is to constantly stay in motion and to move toward a collective future, bringing along the people who are young and beautiful. It’s never clear where that future is or what it represents.

“Pioneers! O pioneers!” wrote Walt Whitman in 1855. “Fresh and strong the world we seize.”

“Heroin, oh heroin, oh heroin,”  wrote McGinley for Vice Magazine in 2009, the year Dash died. “Taken the lives of so many great artists. Taken so many of my friends’ lives.” McGinley continued, remembering Dash’s “unconscious moving hand. He would be sitting there smoking cigarettes, writing his tag in the air.” It’s this weird collision of hopefulness, tragedy, beauty and listlessness that I think of now when I walk past the bus stop and see the two boys with their horse in the Levi’s “Go Forth!” ad that hangs where it doesn’t belong.

On the north-west corner of Trafalger Square in London lies a structure simply coined the Fourth Plinth. Originally designed in 1841 by Sir Charles Barry, the massive pedestal was intended to display an equestrian statue, but the sculpture was never finished due to a lack of funds. Since the late nineties, the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts has commissioned several sculptural works for the Fourth Plinth including works from Marc Quinn to Rachel Whiteread.

Last summer, British artist Antony Gormley was also invited to complete a project utilizing the Fourth Plinth. Instead of creating a static sculptural form to sit elevated on a pedestal before the city, the artist took a risky move to randomly invite 2,400 people to occupy the structure for a period of one hour, twenty four hours a day for a total of 100 days. Titled One & Other, the pieced allowed each person that inhabited the plinth to become the work of art,  leveling any hierarchy that defines who should be represented in a work of art. Each attendee occupied the structure alone, but was allowed to do anything they like for the hour, providing that it is legal in the UK.

For a brief period, participants could address the world at large and speak to any issue that is of concern to them.  Certainly a momentary equality of voice doesn’t exactly elicit the illusions of grandeur that are usually associated with political or societal utopias, but the ability to speak openly to an audience about an idea or issue that you are invested in without consequence is certainly the first step to identifying a common ideal. To further extend the impact and reach of each participants voice, every minute of the 100 day project was streamed live over the internet and then archived for indefinite public access.

However, Gormley’s work isn’t just interested in the idea of or struggle for utopia in relation to society, politics or even a specific place. Most often the work quietly references the notion of balance and harmony as a state of being. Gormley’s training in archaeology, anthropology and art history at Cambridge University, mixed with years of practice with Buddhist meditation in India and Sri Lanka has positioned him in a unique place to express the experience of inner balance to a greater audience though the language of visual art. When describing the material usage for the majority of his figurative sculptures, the artist will state air as a fundamental material. This is because Gormley is as interested in the inner ’space’ of his forms as he is the ‘outer space’ that the form itself occupies.

For his first US public art project, the artist is presenting Event Horizon, a current project that includes 31 life-sized figures cast in iron and bronze modeled form the artist’s own body and now populate Madison Square Park and rooftops throughout New York’s Flatiron District. In an area that is vibrant, hectic and anything but still and quiet, these forms serve as a reminder of the balance and utopia that can be obtained inwardly even in the most chaotic of locations. However, this reminder often happens in an abrupt and oddly irritating way. In a recent interview with the New York Times, the artist addressed this notion stating, “You could almost say the insertion of the sculpture is like the insertion of acupuncture needles within a collective body. And seeing how the body as a whole reacts to the presence of this irritation is very much the point.”

Today we continue our week-long series, Summer of Utopia, through the work of artists Rosa Casado and Mike Brookes. Spanish performance artist, Rosa Casado and British visual artist, Mike Brookes initiated a long-term collaboration in 2000 focusing on performative engagements in social spaces,  informed by seminal works addressing utopian ideals of social equality,  self-organization and ecological sustainability.

Paradise 2 - the incessant sound of a falling tree; Photo by Rafael Gavalle; Courtesy of Rosa Casado

In Paradise 2 – the incessant sound of a falling tree, Casado recites a text based on Jorge Furtado’s Ilha das Flores, a film examining humanity within capitalism. Reflecting on her ability to holiday in Mali having “profited” from work, Casado deftly draws diagrams of her voyage on the ground. Her gestures are interspersed with deliberate consuming of chocolate trees from a chocolate island, each eaten tree activating a sound that creates a loop. She narrates and draws out the voyage taken by Ibrahima Boyé, from Senegal where he was unable to make “sufficient profit” and travels to Spain for work. Though alike in intellect and core physical characteristics, Casado’s journey is one of a tourist, while Boyé’s is that of an immigrant. In an era where consumption and profits form progress, a sense heightened by the rhythmical percussion sound increasing in beats as the trees are eaten by the end of the 40-minute performance, how do we consider our desires and value of human dignity?

Some Things Happen All At Once; Photo by Mike Brookes; Courtesy of Rosa Casado

Similarly, Some things happen all at once comprises an installation typifying a community within a 45 minute durational set, represented through 150 ice trees, 60 ice houses and an ice church on the ground. A reading drawing on writings of architect, Buckminster Fuller and scientist, Philip Ball, muses on the extraordinary ways earth maintains the balance of energy exchange and humankind’s capacities to develop survival strategies. As the audience’s heat hastens the ice melting, attempts are made to sustain the village through a bicycle powering a cooling system. The balance between hot and cold senses, and solid and liquid visual properties display the inter-dependence of humans and nature. Against the possible fate of the earth as a heat reservoir, the interventions to foster sustainability provoke thought on the realities of human presence, action, and negligence.

One thing leads to another; Photo by Mike Brookes; Courtesy of Rosa Casado

Human interventions as a critical part of systems takes precedence in One thing leads to another, a durational piece involving the movement of 50 small toys forwards. Visitors become agents of change, articulating the game’s rules and deciding how the game progresses. This action varied across contexts. In June 2008 in Polverigi, it was developed through the streets of the town. In October 2009 in Singapore, participants developed a game which expounded personal meanings of progress in workshops, culminating in a public presentation where visitors played the games, opening discourse and making visible assumptions of social rules and progress.

Casado and Brookes do not pronounce an all-encompassing utopian vision and acknowledge decay and destruction as inevitable scientific processes. Yet, a palpable utopian quality at the core of their works rests in the belief in the human conscience which, when activated, enables meaningful action.

Casado trained in ballet, studied physics at the University of Madrid and theatre at Istituto d’Arte Scenica. Brookes is a Creative Wales Award Recipient 2007 and a Creative Research Fellow at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth. Paradise 2 will be presented on 26 September 2010 at Teatre Municipal de l’Escorxador, Lleida, Spain. A new work, Just a little bit of history repeating exploring how a place acquires meaning through time will feature at the b-side multimedia arts festival, Weymouth and Portland, Dorset, UK which runs from 17 to 26 September 2010 and at Festival BAD in Bilbao, Spain in October 2010.

Today, DailyServing continues our 7-day summer series, Summer of Utopia, where we investigate seven different artists who either employ or interrupt ideas of utopia. Full disclosure: Ted Purves was the first person I met at the California College of the Arts and—despite the fact that I don’t work in relational aesthetics—one of the reasons I decided to apply to their graduate program.  He is the editor of the seminal book What We Want Is Free and founder of the country’s first MFA in Social Practice. Last week he took some time to discuss utopia, democracy, morality, and the success of the projects he creates with his partner Susanne Cockrell.

Ted Purves and Susanne Cockrell, Temescal Amity Works (July 2004-January 2007).

Bean Gilsdorf: I listened to your interview at Bad At Sports and you said, “I’m not a utopian in any way” and that intrigued me.  Tell me how you’re not a utopian, working in social practice.

Ted Purves: Let’s think about what the utopian project is: generally, to design a coherent social system that satisfies all basic needs.  Thomas More created this very intense class structure, and utopia saw to the needs of the upper and middle classes.  It’s really horrifying, utopia, because it’s the idea of agreement about what a perfect society is.  We don’t live in times of agreement or tribal identity or singular religious identity. We live in a situation of disagreement and negotiation.  I’m much more interested in the notion of democracy rather than the notion of utopia, because it allows for the possibility of negotiation and change and alteration.  Democracy is about the peaceful negotiation of disagreement.

BG: Has that come up in your work, like the Temescal Amity Works, that feeling of negotiating disagreement?  Where has that come in for you guys?

TP: I wouldn’t say that we’ve actively looked at disagreement in our projects.  We’ve been working from another starting point: the position of economies in people’s lives and how exchange functions.  Even though we tend to think of ourselves as living in this highly capitalist market economy, we actually live within several different economic systems all at the same time.  Getting paid and going shopping is participating in a larger capital economy, but giving a friend a lift to the store is a different, casual kind of economy.  Not all of our relationships are of cliency and payment.  We are interested in the way people are negotiating between competing or overlapping economies within their own lives, and creating a way to see that there are different ways to view your own personal economy.  For instance, the projects about sharing fruit were about getting people to think about latent caloric energy that’s growing in the neighborhood, free of charge, at the same time that people are going out to stores to maintain their bodily lives.  It’s getting people to see that we’re living in one system where we’re working to get money to buy calories when, yet, there’s another production of calories that’s going on…

BG: …aside from that, parallel with that…

Ted Purves and Susanne Cockrell, Temescal Amity Works (July 2004-January 2007).

TP: …yeah, right under our noses, that’s not being used.  And how do you create a project that illuminates this other kind of economy?  One project I admire is The Blue House project.  It’s a really interesting counter-utopian project because it’s about creating a space for unplanning, a space for ongoing negotiation and debate in a highly planned suburb—even though the idea of that suburb wasn’t necessarily to be a utopia.  I think there is a utopian interest in most kinds of civic planning because they are based on the idea that there is a perfect fix or a mostly-perfect decision to make about how you apportion resources, how you set up where people are going to live, what people need, and what’s going to make them happy.

BG: There seems to be a kind of benevolence that underlies a lot of these projects, and I wonder if you guys think about that explicitly in your work.  Does morality enter into this at all?

TP: I don’t know if morality does because from our “negotiation-and-disagreement” mindset, morality is another sort of thing that is always going to be disparate among people, so it’s always going to be a negotiated space.  We’re interested in working with the public and in public spaces to learn what people think and how people perceive public space around them.  We start a lot of these because we don’t know everything about a situation and we’re curious about it, and we are interested in creating opportunities for research and dialogue with people.

BG: So you start with a question?

TP: Exactly. Temescal Amity Works started with questions: What is the history of the neighborhood that so many fruit trees were planted here?  How do we negotiate the idea of the developed economy of the neighborhood?  And that’s given way to a larger set of questions that we’re thinking about: how does the social imagination continue to drive people’s decisions, beliefs, lifestyle choices?  What kinds of social imaginaries regarding the rural inhabit the minds of people in cities?

Ted Purves and Susanne Cockrell, Lemon Everlasting Backyard Battery, San Jose Institute for Contemporary Art (2008).

BG: When do you feel a project is successful?  What makes you go home and high-five each other at the end of the day?

TP: I feel like a project is successful if we have had substantive encounters with people, if we have created spaces where a kind of exchange—whether it’s family history, or talking about why something should or shouldn’t be in an art museum, or sometimes it’s just swapping recipes—some form of animated or engaged dialogue comes out, or some sort of story emerges.  It means we learn something, a story can be brought forward from that, that’s when things are successful.  Another high-five moment comes when there is something compelling to look at.  A lot of times when you see a social practice show, it’s either a room full of crap to read, or it looks like a place where they had a party and you didn’t get to go.  I’ve been to a lot of those, and they’re not satisfying!  You either wish they had just printed a book you could take home and read in your own chair—because it’s not very comfortable to sit in a museum—or you wish that you’d been at the party.  When we did Lemon Everlasting Backyard Battery we had hundreds of jars of lemons on this table, and it was beautiful.

BG: It sounds like bringing aesthetics back into it is important.

TP: Yes, certainly when there’s a material expectation for it to be art.  [Lemon Everlasting] was great for us, because it got to be beautiful-looking, but it also got to do something; two things were happening in the same space.  It occupied the institution and it challenged the institution in ways that were playful, functional and aesthetically critical.  Aesthetics are important.  Obviously some artists don’t think this way.  They can just go in and do straight up exercises, and by the rules of the game that’s art too, but for us there’s got to be something else, a twist, a different way of seeing.  We’re working in public space, so we need to challenge public expectations, a kind of weirdness, wrongness, whatever that might be.

BG: Do you think of projects as iterative?  Would you want to restage that project, or do something similar someplace else?  Or have the questions been answered and now you can move on to other questions that have been formed by the outcome?

TP: That’s a great question.  I think it depends from project to project.  I would definitely say that you never answer all the questions.  The new thing we’ve been working on is this ongoing newspaper project, The Meadow Network.  We structured it in a specific way because a thing like Temescal Amity Works was such a Herculean effort that you don’t want to do it again!  We created TMN so that there was an option to have a repeatable form that could grow on itself, so that we wouldn’t have to reinvent an entire project every single time…  That only half answers the question: I think it is good to have some projects or programs that are sort of open-ended but able to be temporarily concluded, because some questions don’t go away.

Opening Thursday, May 6th, We have as much time as it takes is the final thesis exhibition of the Curatorial Practice program at California College of the Arts in San Francisco. The following interview was conducted for the exhibition catalog between curators Nicole Cromartie and Courtney Dailey and two members of Red76. It is the first in a series of interviews to be published at Daily Serving with artists from the exhibition. The catalog is available as a free downloadable pdf at www.wattis.org/whamtait.

Red76 is a multi-artist collective founded in Portland, Oregon, in 2000. The project they conceived for We have as much time as it takes was executed mainly by two of its members, Sam Gould and Gabriel Saloman. Counter-Culture as Pedagogy: Pop-Up Book Academy is a yearlong series of events that take place in a variety of venues. The latest edition of The Journal of Radical Shimming, available for free in the gallery, includes interviews and a counterculture index created for this exhibition. It will accompany the project’s next iteration at the Walker Art Center this summer. Learn more at www.red76.com.

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