Resolving
another boundary between art & business....
Based on the idea
of creating its own franchise, apexart recently held a worldwide
open call for 250-word proposals
asking participants why the franchise should come to their town
and provide all of the support necessary to produce an exhibition.
We then invited over 250 jurors to judge this experiment and,
in the end, a proposal from Los Angeles stood out against the
456 others from 65 countries that
were submitted. (See below for exhibition details.)
BUILDING
THE ART FRANCHISE
In keeping with its topic, this text is being written on an
airplane.
The plane departed from Berlin, a city that has much
to say about the marketing of art in a time of globalization.
A good number of galleries from elsewhere in Europe and
the United States have opened satellites recently in
Germany's reunited capital. These galleries are every bit as
refined as their counterparts back home. Dozens of local
galleries have also opened, especially in East Berlin, and
they look as though they had been airlifted in from London
or New York. Once drab and gloomy neighborhoods are
dotted with sleek storefronts and courtyard pavilions, all
of
which speak the same architectural and organizational
language. Each one offers a marginally different take on
the prevailing gallery paradigm: large windows opening to
the street, polished floors, minimalist bookshelves, tastefully
exposed vestiges of industrial architecture not to mention
attractive assistants seated at communal desks, gazing into
Apple computers. You may feel you've seen it all before,
and you have.
This isn't Berlin's first brush with standardizing the visualarts
experience. The city's legendary art museums were the
historic archetypes for today's cultural franchises. Carbon
copies of the neo-classical piles on Museum Island popped
up after the late nineteen hundreds all over the world, from
Budapest to Singapore — emblems of national power and
prestige. Thanks in large part to German obsessions about
high culture, for about a century or so museums had to
look like Greek temples. These days, the art world's field
of
operations is wider, but the unifying forces are, if anything,
more powerful. Local and regional differences are swallowed
up in an international system that respects no
boundaries. It's a defining irony of the modern age: intense
individualization and localism going arm-in-arm with
homogenization and shared frames of reference. The larger
the art system becomes, the more countries and regions it
devours, the more uniform it feels wherever you go.
In today's art world, nomadic artists working in transplantable
styles rotate in and out of galleries and museums
that are increasingly detached from local concerns and
properly belong everywhere and therefore nowhere.
Collectors, writers, promoters and hangers-on form a
peripatetic herd around the artists. Cultural events that are
purposefully designed on a global scale, such as art fairs
and biennales, follow an even more rigid template, down
to the obligatory VIP cars and goodie bags. Participants
parachute in for three days, then the flash crowd disperses,
only to reassemble again at another point on the planet.
To accommodate this intercontinental fluidity and mobility,
standardization is required. The exteriors and interiors of
today's arts institutions, their logos and typefaces, their
publications and their advertisements, even the look and
comportment of their professional staffs, are so strikingly
similar as to suggest some kind of central governing
authority, ready to crack down on any deviation from the
mandated look and feel of 21st-century arts marketing.
The spore-like proliferation of kindred organizations has
given rise to a kind of supra-national museogallerysphere.
Modern branding and design strategies result in art institutions
that are recognized and experienced in much the same way
across the globe. Despite the brand-name architecture — or
because of it — the venues appear to be made up of the
same DNA. Judgments may differ about this uniformity, but
its causes are beyond dispute: economic globalization,
opening up of closed societies, cheap travel, and rapid
innovations in technology and communication. These
forces will outlast the current Great Recession. They will
continue to recast the parameters and dynamics of contemporary
art practice.
The X, Y, Z and U show offers a welcome opportunity
to reflect on these changes. It is the result of a miniature
Petri dish lab experiment in art franchising. The ground rules
were simple. apexart would mount an exhibition outside
its New York base—not unlike how the Guggenheim
Museum projects its authority worldwide. Contestants hoping
to make their next exhibition an apexart production — the
franchisees — submitted a 250-word proposal. An elaborate
"crowd sourcing" scheme was implemented to rid the
selection process of the biases and politics of the typical art
jury process. No less than 250 jurors submitted some 7,000
evaluations of 456 proposals from around the world
through a computer program that randomly sent jurors
anonymous project descriptions.
A proposal from Los Angeles, by The League of Imaginary
Scientists — "a group of interdisciplinary thinkers and
tinkerers who present ambitious participatory art events
with repurposed mechanics and scientific assertions" —
emerged as the winner (disclosure: I
was a judge). The group sought "affiliation and
guidance by apexart because A) we do not
have the know-how or funds to leap from independent
art collective to independent art
space, and B) the League was formed on a
street called Apex Avenue in Silverlake in 2006."
Thus the first apexart franchise exhibition
was born.
It bears noting that big-time mainstream franchising
doesn't really exist in the art world. Even the
Guggenheim, which has so often been compared to a
fast food chain, is a far cry from the numbing homogeneity
of mass consumer brands. And let's be clear:
we have yet to see a truly branded artist, i.e. someone
whose production has outlasted their lifetimes, as Dior's or Versace's
did. In the real world, franchising has brought
many good things to life and enabled the efflorescence of
a vast consumer market that — whatever you may think of
the particular strengths or weaknesses of Coca-Cola,
Chrysler, Starbucks and their mega-brand peers — feeds,
houses, employs, and entertains more people than any
socio-economic system in history. In the art world, of
course, many forces thought to be productive and reasonably
benign are sometimes examined for their perverse
and sinister effects. The current apexart show
stakes out a middle ground. apexart's L.A. outpost
offers a wry commentary about the franchising impulse, but it is
also a successful, albeit allegorical, demonstration of it. It
proves that franchising, like anything else, can be done well or
done poorly. It is a tool, not a moral stance.
© András Szántó
The
League of Imaginary Scientists is an art collective
whose work pairs the creative experimentation of the science
lab with free-floating and far-fetched ideas that are decidedly
not guided by science. For X, Y, Z and U, the League
has organized an exhibition with a series of related workshops
and interactions by artists and scientists who use creative
mapping in their work. X, Y, Z and U includes artists
and scientists who are not members of the League, but whose
practice also marries their creative practice to experimentation.
X, Y, Z and U is an exhibition and series of discussions
and workshops featuring the mapping projects of artists whose
creative practices resemble field research as well as scientists
who use DIY tactics and creative visualization to map
scientific information.
Interactive mapping is
tied to the fluxus, situationist
and psychogeography
movements.
The mapping projects
in X, Y, Z and U arise
from this history of
engagement through
collective creation and
individual experience.
The exhibition, hosted
at Outpost for Contemporary Art in Northeast Los Angeles,
celebrates individual citizens' experiences of their neighborhood.
As participants demarcate their personal paths, listen
to the sounds of the trees on their own streets, and scour
the area for bacteria, they write a subtext of local knowledge
and public interaction—the resulting mappings and
their narratives are created by Los Angeles.
X, Y, Z and U includes artists and scientists who construct
community-built narratives in collaboration with city
trekkers, citizens and their surroundings. Their experiments
and interventions break the divide between the sketchbook
and scientific inquiry, bending social narrative and creative
expression towards research. X, Y, Z and
U places laypeople
and children alongside experts and academics. The framework
for interaction is a bike ride, a guided hike, a craft
activity, or a street-based science experiment. By means of
an audio interface, needlepoint, or a pipette, viewer interaction
shapes the artworks.
Kim Abeles, in Signs of Life, maps the world through ecological
data mining. Through her own urban research, drawing
on her experience of the city, she pinpoints the green spots
in
gray Los Angeles. Her
topographical sculpture
maps all the trees in the
downtown area.
Kelly Jaclynn Andres
drives an Urban Habitat
Lab into neighborhoods
to give street-goers the
opportunity to listen to
trees. Her construction
and use of this solar
and human-powered
lab is part of the exhibition.
Traveling around
Highland Park with the
mobile lab, she will
connect individuals to
the often unheard subtext
of the city — the
ever-shrinking natural
environment.
Mackenzie Cowell and
Jason Bobe, of the scientist
team DIYbio, use urban environmental data in
BioWeatherMap, which involves citizen-based DNA collection.
Their instructables teach non-scientists how to map the
world's biology by collecting DNA samples in local environments,
with the resulting collective research disseminated at
bioweathermap.org.
Pyschogeographer Liz Kueneke compels community members
to create maps of their respective urban areas based on
what they think about their city, resulting in personal
thoughts elevated to the status of statistical science. Her
community mapping of Highland Park will take place by
citizens during the exhibition.
Andrea Polli and Chuck Varga map urban ecology with
Hello, Weather! At Outpost for Contemporary Art, they
will erect a weather station to connect individuals to their
local environments through "sonifications" and live weather
data. In an open workshop, Andrea Polli will cull viewer
experiences of weather to compile a personal almanac.
The artists and scientists in X, Y,
Z and U excavate the layers of a
city for the experiences of individual
citizens. This cacophony
of voices, which might overwhelm
the historian, is integral
to the artwork or scientific
undertakings on display and set
loose in the neighborhood. The
resulting work depends on
experiential data and, because
of the variability of personal
experience, is potentially infinite
in its form. For this reason,
finite results are not the creative
objective. These artists
and experimenters are not
merely propelled by curiosity; they are compelled to connect.
As part of the exhibition connecting Outpost for
Contemporary Art in Los Angeles to apexart in New York,
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