Alexis Clements is a fellow at the Cultural Strategies Initiative, an arts journalist, as well as a playwright and performer. Her articles and writings have appeared in Bitch Magazine, The Brooklyn Rail, The Guardian, Nature, and The L Magazine, among others. She is currently working on a book about the role and value of the arts in US. Learn more about her work on her website.
The NEA Four, now in residence at the New Museum, were denied National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) grants in 1990, after Congress passed a “decency clause.” How has arts funding changed in the past 20 years? Its current state would certainly “disabuse just about anyone of the idea that pursuing an artistic career in 21st-century America is a romantic enterprise.”
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In an email, a friend of mine mentioned a show taking place at the Kitchen next week: The Love Song of R. Buckminster Fuller, created by the filmmaker Sam Green, with live music by indie rockers Yo La Tengo. The subject matter seemed like solid geeky/arty fare, but what stood out to me in the event description was the phrase “live documentary,” in quotes. Given the subject matter and the indie music, the first thing to come to mind when guessing what that might mean were the live, touring shows created in the past couple of years by the public radio programs RadioLab and This American Life. Then again, it was being presented at the Kitchen, a venue that has a history of presenting fairly aggressive work spanning visual, performance, and literary arts.
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It’s hard to tell how many young Americans know the name John Dewey today. Those who attended New York City’s New School might know of him as a co-founder and one of the minds behind the progressive agenda that formed the intellectual and social foundation of the school’s early years. Others might recognize the name because of his most well-known work, as an early theorist and proponent of progressive education for students of all ages. And some might be aware of him as a thinker who, in some ways, was discussing post-modern ideas about a hundred years before post-modernism. For those to whom his name is very familiar, he is said to be one of the most, if not the most, influential American philosophers. But here I want to talk about one of his lesser-known works, Art as Experience, which brings together some of his larger political and philosophic ideas in a discussion of aesthetics and culture, and their role in a robust society.
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So far this year I’ve been to two different events that highlight different but related approaches to political organizing among artists here in New York. Just to clarify what I mean by organizing — literally bringing individual artists together into a larger community that can advocate for and create political change around some of the more pressing issues facing independent artists in the city (unstable housing, irregular employment, healthcare, etc), issues which many other groups in the city also face.
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This past weekend I joined the audience for the day of panel discussions at the Brooklyn Museum organized by The Feminist Art Project as part of the annual College Art Association Conference. I was only able to stay for the first three and a half panels, in a day that included five. But in those three and a half panels, a clear through-line started to emerge, at least from my perspective. That through-line involved the idea of creating collective histories, of asserting a history that complicates singular narratives, and that makes it clear that whole communities of differing experience and perspective participate in the making and supporting of the arts.
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Instead of writing a review or a recap of the shows I’ve seen or a critical essay about the tone of the APAP festivals in New York this year, I’m going to describe my night on Tuesday evening and some of what was going through my head during those hours. Because somehow, I think it might do a better job of capturing some the dynamics of this year’s festivals than analysis or plain description. I’m probably going to go on a bit too long and try to cover too much ground, but I am leading to a point, or two. So, you know. Do what you need to do. Take it with a grain of salt. Whatever.
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Many readers of Hyperallergic know about the art fairs that serve the visual arts community, which seem to expand and replicate themselves at an ever-increasing rate around the globe. But readers may not be aware of the corollary in the world of performance. Of course, a dance work or a work for the stage can’t be bought and sold in quite the same way, and certainly not for remotely the same price tag, as a Jeff Koons or an Agnes Martin. Yet, there is still a clear marketplace around contemporary performance works, even if most performers participating stand to profit very little from it. And one of the hubs of that marketplace is the annual conference in New York City of the Association of Performing Arts Presenters (APAP).
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A few times during her talk last week, historian and curator Yasmin Ramírez looked over at the copy of Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam War Era by Julia Bryan-Wilson sitting on the table in front of her. It wasn’t a look of love. Each time she referenced the book it was, at least in part, with a sense of frustration that despite being one of the only books devoted to the subject of the Art Workers’ Coalition (AWC), Bryan-Wilson largely left out the involvement of black and Puerto Rican artists, who played critical roles in the efforts of the group.
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At the brief question and answer period that followed the premiere of the new documentary TURNING, Antony Hegarty of Antony and the Johnsons, spoke briefly about the difficulty of understanding what a work of art means, even to those involved in making it.
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At some point, nearly two hours in, Marlene McCarty, one of the members of the AIDS activist group Gran Fury, an affinity group that was part of ACT-UP, reminded those gathered: “We were not making art.” The event was a panel discussion that took place at Columbia University on November 15, organized by Columbia’s School of the Arts, and was intended to draw on some of the themes present in the exhibition that just opened at the Institute for Contemporary Art (ICA) in Boston, This Will Have Been: Art, Love & Politics in the 1980s. The panel was comprised of ICA Boston curator Helen Molesworth and four members of the eleven-member collective that was Gran Fury: Avram Finkelstein, Tom Kalin, Marlene McCarty, and Robert Vazquez-Pacheco.
The question that prompted McCarty’s response was one of a handful that arose during the Q&A that followed the presentations by the panel. There was a similar tone to many of the questions that came up, the majority of which were something along the lines of: “How can we do what you did?” In addition to reminding those present that Gran Fury’s intention was never to make art, per se, McCarty added, “We were very brash about the fact that we were making propaganda.”
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