As part of the reblog, I started breaking public art into themes, and explored works from that structure. It turned into a mini synopsis of the Guerilla Public Art course I taught at RISD this past spring.
Here are those posts extracted into one page. Still gotta do the last three:
Guerilla Public Art: Socially Mediated Interventions
I have just finished teaching a class called Guerilla Public Art: Socially Mediated Interventions, so in my next set of posts, I think I will go through some of the major themes with covered under the umbrella of Guerilla Public Art:
- Art as Adventure
- Art as Appropriation
- Art as Intervention
- Art as Blurring Reaility
- Art as Community
- Art as Creating Tools
- Art as Prank
- Art as Politics
- Art as Community Action
For the course I put together an excerpted and instigational Guerilla Reader, which will provide some additional fodder for the following posts.
1/9: ART AS ADVENTURE
Let’s have a quick look at participatory art as adventure through the lens of two artist groups: Parfyme and Gelitin.
PARFYME
In Parfyme’s Street Canoes, this group of Danes (and an American) used grappling hooks and tow cables to ply the streets of Queens by Street Canoe, pretending that the pavement was water, and they were some sort of viking.
In the Harbor Lab, they turned a parking lot into a studio/workshop/home (that’s my tent on the roof) to engage the public in rag-tag explorations of new potentials for the Copenhagen Harbor, including a floating museum, a series of weekend adventures in paddle-boats, and the creation of water-borne shelters, breakfast nooks, and reading corners along the harbor’s edge.
GELITIN
In True Love IV, Gelitin attempt to launch a home-made rocketship on a 25 year mission to venus and back to earth. “The mission’s objective was to investigate in the nature of love and return samples to earth to obtain knowledge about how humans could rebalance the different love-forces on earth.”
In Weltwunder (in between), Gelitin installed their piece in the Hannover Expo 2000 three meters under ground, visible only by diving into a pool and swimming underground.
My major questions as I analyse these works are:
- What tactics are being used?
- Who is having the adventure?
-Things to avoid, investigate in your own work?
I see the street canoe and rocket ship as works that use art to craft an adventure scenario for the artists themselves. The public experience these works as spectacle, not as participatory adventures. To be clear, I do not believe there is anything wrong with using the constructs and structures of art to create adventures for yourself – one of the most amazing things about the art world(s) is that they can provide a venue and mechanism for people to truly invent their own jobs and lives outside of any previously accepted realm.
But there is clearly a difference between the canoe/rocket works and the harbor/diving works in terms of particpation. In Parfyme’s harbor lab and Gelitin’s diving piece, the adventure is created for the participant. Like a computer program or immersive installation, a specific environment and set of rules are established, and then the public are able to experience their own adventures within those boundaries.
APPROPRIATION: RE-USE Today’s theme is Participatory Art as Appropriation. Since appropriation is such a frequently used tactic in art-making, I’m breaking it down further, into Appropriation as Re-use, Appropriation that Object-ifies, Symbolic Appropriation, Appropriation as a Tool, and Appropriation as Mis-use. APPROPRIATION: RE-USE
We’ll start with Rebar‘s PARKing Day, which turns a parking space into a PARKing space, relying on the public to feed the meter to keep the park running. It started as a single appropriation, and has become a nation wide movement.
Bureau de Mesarchitecture’s “Double Happiness.” Needs no description.
And my last entries for re-use come from Gelitin.
A backyard becomes a hot-tub (heated by a wood-burning stove) and the Hayward’s roof becomes a pond for boating.
So, with these appropriations that hinge on clever re-use of existing structures, we are also creating an adventure. And although these works are clearly site dependent, they are not specifically context-dependent, so they serve as instigations as well as appropriations. In other words, any yard can become a hot-tub, any billboard can become a swing-set, any parking space can become a park – so why not try it yourself! These are works meant to be copied, opening up the potential of the everyday for anyone.APPROPRIATION: OBJECTIFY
Another way to appropriate is to object-ify – as in: to make something into an object (with no negative body politics intended). Of course, when we speak of objectification in public or participatory art, we are talking about turning an event or group of people into an object. In Mark Tribe’s Port Huron Project, protest speeches from the New Left movement during the Vietnam War era were re-enacted in the site of the original speech, by actors resembling the original speakers.
Brody Condon framed an existing Live Action Role-Playing (LARP) within the context of a public art show – the Sonsbeek International public sculpture exhibition in the Netherlands.
“Set in a distant future where civilization as we know it had almost been lost, players from different worlds met deep in the holy forest and inhabited a 40 feet high tower “in character” for 3 days at a time while worshipping invented deities embodied by the other artworks of the exhibition.”
Like Duchamp, these works take an existing object (in this case an event), and change nothing about the original apart from changing its context from whatever it was to art. A game becomes a performance, a speech becomes an act.
What else does this do? What does turning someone else’s tactics into spectacle change? Might be helpful to look at Marjetica Potrc as you consider these questions…
APPROPRIATION : SYMBOLIC
In Declared Void, Carey Young appropriates a cube of space with the words: “BY ENTERING THE ZONE CREATED BY THIS DRAWING, AND FOR THE PERIOD YOU REMAIN THERE, YOU DECLARE AND AGREE THAT THE US CONSTITUTION WILL NOT APPLY TO YOU.”
Tue Greenfort’s Project for the New American Century places dilapidated type on an abandoned building on the defunct Governer’s Island as part of LMCC’s Swing Space program, framing a Right Wing think tank as a failed organization.
Both Greenfort’s and Young’s projects exist in an abstracted-from-the-everyday art context, and so really function as illustrations. What I find most exciting about these projects is their potential as instigations: imagine a nation-wide effort creating dilapidated New American Century offices, besmirching the think tank’s name… Imagine Cary Young’s delcared void anywhere other than a gallery. Even in a police station it would instigate something more than the quiet contemplation of a white cube.
I’m reminded of my favorite adage: “only as art can naked people cutting up dead animals and smearing their blood and guts on them be considered boring. And it is!”
APPROPRIATION AS A TOOL
‘Pamphleteer, aka “Little Brother,” is a propaganda robot which distributes subersive literature. Pamphleteer is designed to bypass the social conditioning that inhibits activists’ ability to distribute propaganda by capitalizing on the aesthetics of cuteness.’
In Guarana Power, Superflex appropriates the appropriated, creating a bottling company owned by the farmers of guarana, copying the marketing tactics and brand design on a major guarana-powered drink manufacturer.
In both of these projects, appropriation is used to create a tool. In this type of appropriation, we are starting to go against the grain of the thing being appropriated. We’ve moved from playful re-use to symbolic illustration to a warping of original intent to provide something tangible that can be utilized by other people.
APPROPRIATION AS MISUSE
Guy Ben Ner, Stealing Beauty is a sitcom/soap opera performed by his family in a series of IKEA stores, without permission.
Parfyme’s Tent Show turned the Nikolaj Kunstallen/ Copenhagen Contemporary Art Center into an artistic squat. Asked to “house” the Copenhagen Contemporary Art Center’s 30 year video collection, they invited 40 artists to build tents in the museum, and live in those tents during the show. One artist’s tent held a freegan kitchen, so we pretty much never had to leave the place.
In these works, appropriation starts to become outright abuse, but in the end, by taking control of an existing situation, technology, or place, it really creates new capabilities. At the openng of the show, the Copenhagen Art Center commented that while this idea had at first seemed very scary, in the end, they realized it was a model that had allowed them to house 40 artists in Copenhagen for less that the usual cost of one…
OK, back on theme: 3 of 9: PUBLIC/ PARTICIPATORY ART AS INVERVENTION
Krzysztof Wodiczko worked with homeless people to design the perfect homeless shopping cart.
Fritz Haeg worked with homeowners to turn their lawns into little farms.
Daniel Martinez blocked off a heavily trafficked section of Cornell University’s campus a la Paris 1968.
Steinbrenner-Dempf covered every advert on a street in Vienna with bright solid yellow.
Hewlett and Kinsley staged a series of tableaux along Sampsonia Way in Pittsburgh’s Northside in collaboration with Google Streetview.
Mary Coble posed statue-like on a street, inviting passers-by to mark her body with epithets they’d been called or heard used against others.
Enabling, blocking, manipulating, collaborating… In these works, as we move from appropriation to intervention, we really begin to see the artists take control of an existing situation. By creating machines, working directly with participants to create new uses, actively blocking participants daily habits, or inserting new elements, hurdles, or tasks into the everyday, there is a sense of working both with and against the participants.
BLURRING REALITY
“The Atlas Group was founded by Walid Raad as an imaginary foundation to research and document the contemporary history of Lebanon.”
“From 1975 until 1991, Dr. Fadl Fakhouri was in the habit of carrying two 8mm cameras with him wherever he went. With one camera he exposed a frame of film every time he thought the wars had come to an end. With the other camera he exposed a frame of film every time he came across a sign of a doctor’s or dentist’s office.”
They don’t seem to consider any of this art, but Improv Everywhere blur reality in playful ways on a regular basis. In The Moebius, they set up a simple scene in a coffee shop, that played out over and over again. You’ve probably heard about this on This American Life, but I think it’s worthwhile to consider in the context of participatory and guerrilla art as well.
I’ve mentioned Book a Muslim, but it’s good to revisit here. An service that actually exists, which still manages to blur reality.
So, to bring that all together, we’ve got a fictional person exploring actual events, a time loop inserted into unsuspecting everyday life, unauthorized bike lanes creating a wanted reality, an inflammatory construction site helping prevent an unwanted reality, and a needed but unconventional service that crosses social boundaries. There’s a guerrilla aspect to a lot of this work, implementing the reality you want or don’t want on an unsuspecting public. Some of these works provide a service with these interventions. And every time, there has to be an entry point of believability, so that we are blurring reality rather than sharing in a performance.
CREATING COMMUNITY
I’ll start by revisiting Wochen Klausur‘s Intercultural Intersections: “To show that nationality and ethnic background do not have to be the main characteristics that allow a group to form identity, WochenKlausur established three interest groups whose members differ in nationality but share interests, concerns or requirements.”
And then we’ll move to Alfredo Jaar‘s Skoghall Konsthall. Skoghall is a paper-mill town in Sweden. Konsthall means Art Center. Alfredo Jaar built an art center out of paper in the town of Skoghall, and held an opening featuring art works by Skoghall town residents. He then asked the townspeople to remove their works after the reception, and set fire to the building, pissing a lot of people off.
Several years later the town had raised enough funds to hire him to design a permanent Art Center. Essentially, he created a void the town didn’t know they had, by giving them an art center they didn’t think they wanted, and then taking it away.
Fallen Fruit maps fruit trees in public spaces and leads tours for urban foraging. They’ve done a nice job of finding gallery-ready derivatives of their participatory actions.
And we’ll finish with Michael Reynolds (“The Garbage Warrior“), who sold shares of a housing community for “less than a night out on the town,” but required residents to build their own homes, testing his aggressively sustainable architecture techniques.
The two major tactics for creating community in these participatory projects are giving something away, and uncovering common interests. From personal experience, I know that art based on the gift is most successful when there is reciprocation: when the receiver must give something in return, or prove some level of commitment. Requiring Skoghall to raise the funds for an art center makes the town more accountable and invested in the success of the project. Giving people the tool to gather fruit rather than simply giving them fruit forces them to work together and learn. And by making someone’s home their method of participation in a community, Michael Reynolds finds a practical, non-art anchor to pretty much guarantee committment and investment.
As participatory works operate outside of traditional art contexts, it becomes important to uncover reasons for working outside of art justifications. I’m not talking about making art “practical,” but of considering communities as participants rather than venues or materials. Or, if we think about it in sculptural terms, considering participants as materials with aspects and qualities that are integral to the structure being created from that material.
PROVIDING TOOLS
Allright, let’s get back on “theme” (which was, if you recall, Participatory Art) Now we’re focusing on works that provide tools to encourage specific kinds of actions by the participants themselves. SO: I’ve already mentioned Parfyme’s Yellow Ladders:
And you’ve probably seen Ji Lee’s speech bubbles around town:
Then there is TxtMob with Tad Hirsch and with the Institute for Applied Autonomy, which gives protestors a central message center through mobile phones:
Art Farm (of exploding TV infamy) made a whole series of instruction booklets to instigate new use of spaces, this one about mobile inflatables. They bring it down to the nitty gritty, including how budget a generator you can go before frying your equipment:
Recently Raumlabor‘s space-buster revisited ant farm’s booklet to bring inflatable spaces to the undersides of the bridges of NYC.
Reclaim the Streets (who I reblogged here) is another group that spurs action through instruction booklets and example:
Alfrdo Jaar‘s use of tools is more indirect. Here, he attached a switch in a homeless shelter to a vivid red light installed in the cupola of a landmark monument in Montreal. Whenever a homeless person decided to hit that switch, the city would see.
“If we learn to cross borders on stage, we may learn how to do so in larger social spheres.”
