melissa miller - critical...
TRANSCRIPT
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MELISSAMILLER
The Possible @ BAM/PFA: Artistic Production and Museum Programming in the Experience Society
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In the spring of 2014 I enrolled in an elective in the
graduate Fine Arts department at California College of the Arts
titled “Making the Museum.” The course, nominally focused on
museum-based practices of art, particularly institutional critique,
promised the unique opportunity to participate in an exhibition
at the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAM/
PFA) called The Possible. Over a span of ten weeks, the class
convened at the museum to discuss texts and to develop projects.
The BAM/PFA press release describes The Possible
as “an experimental exhibition that reconceives the museum as
a site for creative convergence.”1 Guest curator and Oakland-
based artist David Wilson invited over one hundred artists to
participate in The Possible as well as a group of area facilitators to
oversee each of the studio spaces. During the exhibition, several
of the museum’s galleries, including the largest ground-level
gallery (gallery B), were converted into studio spaces. Guest
artists were invited to lead workshops, to work in new and
familiar mediums, and to collaboratively produce and learn. A
textile studio was fitted with looms for weaving and natural dye
processes, including a custom-designed indigo vat with locally
sourced indigo pigment. A publication studio contained copy
machines for DIY zine production, Risographs for fast artist
multiples, bookbinding tools, and materials for relief printing.
A ceramic studio was filled with clay, tools, and glazes, while
kilns were set up on the balcony outside. The centerpiece of
gallery B was Fritz Haeg’s Domestic Integrities (2012–ongoing),
a crocheted rug made of donated textiles from the locations it
visits that grows as it travels (fig. 1). Upstairs in gallery two was a
multisensory library comprising texts collected by participating
artists as well as print and sound archives and research from
natural perfumists. Gallery three contained a custom-designed
display structure to exhibit finished works selected from the
workspaces. On the next landing, a recording studio was set up.
Lastly, gallery four housed the audiovisual and performance
collective The Something.2 The exhibition was extended into the
garden surrounding the museum with the inclusion of a “physical
activities studio” and outdoor showers designed by artist Drew
Bennett.3
Despite the diversity of media, practices, and
participatory events on offer within the loose boundaries of the
show, my classmates and I, students in CCA’s Master of Fine
Arts Studio Practice and Social Practice programs, experienced
only the slightest connection with the tools and materials laid
1
“The Possible,” UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, accessed October 21, 2014, http://bampfa.berkeley.edu/exhibition/possible.
2
“Making the Museum” was co-taught by Shaun O’Dell and Maria Porges. O’Dell’s status as a member of The Something enabled the class to access the exhibition.
3
The Possible’s structure is reflective of Wilson’s Ribbons project, a practice in which he repeatedly visits locations, primarily in Northern California, and organizes gatherings based on these trips. After in-depth exploration and contemplation of the landscape, including watercolor and drawn studies created en plein air, Wilson organizes an event at the location, inviting guests by distributing hand-drawn maps and printed materials. According to his website, Ribbons “draw[s] together a wide net of artists, performers, filmmakers, chefs, and artisans, into situation-based collaborative relationships.” This interdisciplinary grouping of makers and crafters, combined with the events’ often off-the-grid settings, provides Ribbons events with a utopian and collective feel, somewhat nostalgically referring to Cali-fornia’s commune movement of the 1960s.
FIGURE 1.
Participants add to Fritz Haeg’s Domestic Integrities (2012–ongoing) during The Possible. (“March 6, 2014,” submitted to The Possible Process anonymously, http://process.the-possible.org/post/78758525246.)
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out.4 Admittedly, some members of the group work in mostly
dematerialized forms, although other members conceptualize
their practices through the lineage of craft. Nonetheless, this
disconnect suggests that The Possible’s studios diverged from
notions of contemporary art as conceptualized and reinforced
in institutions of higher education like CCA. What proved to
be most frustrating about The Possible was not the handicraft
aesthetic, but the apparent lack of conceptual rigor; neither
statements nor claims—political, historical, or otherwise—
emerged along with the work produced throughout the studios.
The anti-object, process-focused ethos of the organizer and
involved practitioners resulted in a steady flow of tests and
experiments but never any conclusions. The historically resonant
themes of “utopia” and “collective” were implied by the show’s
collaborative structure and title—The Possible—though never
stated directly in exhibition materials or by the organizers in
interviews. In particular, the show suggested ties to movements
in California’s past, namely the communal experiments of
the 1960s, in which reigned a decentered, anything-goes
atmosphere.5 Beyond the regional precedents of Bay Area
counterculture, the show also drew on broader experiments of
the early twentieth century, particularly the Soviet avant-garde
and the Bauhaus, whether consciously or not.6
The Possible’s location within BAM/PFA, which is an
extension of the University of California system and is one of the
nation’s largest university art museums, compromised its ability
to embody the politics associated with the historical collectivities
it seemed to reenact. The total aestheticization of the studios
contributed to the sense that a commodified image of community
had replaced the political potential of collaboration. The lack of
fine-tuning and neglect of historical and political precedent were
not the only problems I identified during my participation in the
exhibition; they were just the criticisms easiest to articulate.
Amorphous both in structure and content, The
Possible provided little to push back against conceptually. This
lack of specificity stems in part from the show’s designation
as “experimental.” BAM/PFA Director Lawrence Rinder has
spoken of it as a means to discover the possibilities of museum
programming. Although The Possible sounds optimistic, the
title also suggests that the show could potentially fail. This
potential failure stems from the process of experimentation itself.
What possible forms BAM/PFA’s programming may take in the
future is yet to be determined, but in all probability, not every
4
Further, our relationship to The Possible was affected by our status as students, as opposed to participating artists. In addition to having to pay tuition fees, we also felt relegated to a category of lower-ranked participants by Wilson and other artists on occasion. Combined with the fact that the course took a critical stance toward the institution and, by extension, the exhibition, these factors contributed to my searching appraisal of the show, as it did for my peers.
5
For an impressive account of this aspect of California’s past, see Iain Boal et al., eds., West of Eden: Communes and Utopia in Northern California, Original edition (Oakland: PM Press, 2012).
6
Though outside the scope of my study, Hal Foster’s work on the reoccurrence of contin-gent, utopian, and readymade models in art bears mention. See Hal Foster, “Who’s Afraid of the Neo-Avant-Garde?” in The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1996), 1–33.
test conducted as part of The Possible will reappear in future
exhibitions at BAM/PFA. Instead, only parts of the experiment
will be implemented into ongoing programming. Thus, the name
resonates with the speculative nature of the project and the goal
as outlined by Rinder. The name also highlights the function of
the exhibition itself: to see what is possible for contemporary art
museum curation and to question the limits of experiential and
participatory programming.7
This essay attempts to answer questions that
emerged from my direct participation in The Possible, through
a materialist analysis of the objects produced during the
exhibition, as well as a consideration of systems of display
deployed there. This project, then, examines how contemporary
conditions of artistic production and dissemination, reflecting
the conditions of a wider consumer culture in our “experience
society,” nevertheless emerged amid the so-called radical opening
of the museum to play, improvisation, and visitor participation.8
Employing art historian and curator Dorothea von Hantelmann’s
conception of the experience society, I reflect broadly on the
conditions of advanced market societies, which allow experience,
once held as the site of emancipatory agency, to become one more
commodity. I then propose The Possible as a case study of such
tendencies and question the labor systems established by the
structure of the show. Inasmuch as The Possible forecasts the type
of programming BAM/PFA will be implementing in the future,
it has implications not only for San Francisco Bay Area artists
and curators, but also for local museum visitors. Exhibitions like
The Possible require audience participation and are often used to
satisfy education and engagement requirements, presenting art in
a hands-on, pedagogical frame.9
An examination into how museums are currently
internally and publically conceived informs my research. Much
has been written critiquing the traditional museum model
as complicit in the production of capitalist subjectivity, but I
question whether new museum programming leaves behind
the values associated with older exhibition models.10 In the
current moment museums are re-imagining themselves as
participatory, experiential, and egalitarian.11 These changes have
been interpreted as an expansion of the museum’s educational
responsibility and as an opening of the institution to a wider
public. Drawing on the work of von Hantelmann, I maintain that
The Possible was reflective of changes in wider consumer culture,
or the experience society, in which objects have been replaced
7
In an interview, Wilson noted that many of the things that happened in the museum during The Possible might not have been allowed if the museum had not been scheduled to close shortly after The Possible ended. The Possi-ble was not the final exhibition before the closure of BAM/PFA’s Bancroft building, but the imminent closure, he suggests, seemed to expand the “possibilities” of the exhibition and contribute to its spirit. Specifically, concerns about the use of dyes, glazes, and inks inside the museum were less of an issue because the space would house just one more exhibition after The Possible closed.
8
Dorothea von Hantelmann, “The Experiential Turn,” in On Performativity, ed. Elizabeth Carpenter, vol. 1 of Living Collections Cata-logue (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 2014), http://www.walkerart.org/collections/publi-cations/performativity/experiential-turn.
9
The participatory and experimental nature of The Possible is symptomatic of the continued infantilization of the perceived museum audience; art museums are targeting both the young and the young at heart more and more in their programming.
10
See Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (London; New York: Routledge, 1995).
11
See Robert Atkins, The Art of Participation: 1950–Now (San Francisco: Thames & Hudson, 2008).
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by experiences as the most valuable commodities.12 While at
first glance The Possible may have seemed to represent a revival
of 1960s political energy, in its collective, neo-hippie aesthetic,
this essay endeavors to demonstrate how the exhibition in fact
perpetuated a set of values tied to Western capitalist societies.
During The Possible, BAM/PFA’s gallery 3 was
dedicated to a display unit built by artist Alexander Kori
Girard (fig. 2), which throughout the course of the exhibition
slowly accumulated objects being produced in the galleries
above and below. The inclusion of a gallery dedicated to
traditional conventions of museum display in a show dedicated
to experiential and process-based art practices raises several
questions about the status of the objects displayed there. If
creative value was found in artistic production during The
Possible, what function do the objects that come from these
processes serve? Are they artworks? Or are they simply artifacts
from a process that should be considered the real work of art?
The status of the art object has been in question
since the late 1960s when Minimalism, Conceptualism, and
other movements gave rise to artistic practices that had become
deskilled.13 The stainless steel cubes of minimalist artists, for
example, required machine fabrication skills more familiar to the
assembly line than to art making. Many minimalist artists hired
fabricators to make their work. Since that era, contemporary
artists have become increasingly focused on conceptual practices
that either do not require fine art training or valorize blank
reproduction or purposefully low production values.
The deskilling of art goes hand-in-hand with the
decreased importance of the art object. Without the specialized
set of artistic skills and training that had been associated with
art since the Renaissance, the physical art object lost some of the
value previously made implicit through its link to the masterful
artist’s hand. Conceptual artists of the late 1960s and 1970s
utilized dematerialized art practices and the devaluation of the
object in part as a stance against capitalism and the art market.
The value that could be found in artistic practices shifted from
the art object as a commodity to the creative value located
in the process of production, the circumstance of the work’s
conception, or the context of its display, especially in practices
associated with institutional critique.14 But it eventually became
apparent that even dematerialized practices that did not result
in traditional art objects could still become commodified and
12
Von Hantelmann, “The Experiential Turn.”
13
See also Ian Burn, “The ’Sixties: Crisis and Aftermath (or the Memoirs of an Ex-Con-ceptual Artist),” in Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology, eds. Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2000), 392–408. It can be argued that Dada represented a similar instance of deskilled artistic production that questioned the status of the art object, but Dada’s relevance was renewed during the 1950s and 1960s and began to impact mainstream artistic practices then.
14
Ibid.
FIGURE 2.
The pedestal built for The Possible by Alexander Kori Girard. (Photo: Terri Loewenthal, “The Possible,” http://blog.terriloewenthal.com/tag/the-possible.)
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FIGURE 3.
David Wilson adds to the pedestal in gallery three. (Photo: @jay, “#thepossible,” http://instagram.com/p/oErSF3v217/.)
subsumed into the ever-changing landscape of the art market and
advanced capitalism.15
The changing status of the art object and the
deskilling of artistic labor mirror shifts in wider consumer
culture over the same period. Following German sociologist
Gerhard Schulze, who proposes that the shift toward experiential
art forms corresponds to economic transformations in Western
societies in his book Die Erlebnisgesellschaft (The Experience
Society), von Hantelmann suggests that the object, both in art
and wider consumer culture, has lost some of the significance
it once had in bourgeois societies.16 In bourgeois societies a
person’s selection of material objects or products is not driven by
necessity and does not prioritize purpose or utility. Instead, when
it comes to purchasing goods, our primary selection criteria have
become increasingly aesthetic. According to von Hantelmann, in
the “post-bourgeois” society or the experience society, aesthetic
choices and selections are no longer tied to objects themselves.17
The experience society is defined by the fact that the object has
been replaced by experience and the lifestyles specific objects
connote as the most valuable commodity. In art this could
be evidenced in the fact that the aesthetic nature of art is no
longer tied to its objectness, but increasingly is derived from its
experiential quality.18
The shift away from utilitarian objects to
increasingly aestheticized products and experiences in the
market has swayed our goods and services economy toward a
heavy emphasis on services. Furthermore, this trend toward
services in the wider market has been paralleled by artistic
practice. Over the past twenty-five years more and more artists
have been commissioned to perform, lead public programs,
or facilitate participatory projects, in addition to displaying
documentation of projects, such as videos, maps, or diagrams,
in place of a central one-off object. It has become increasingly
understood that successful businesses not only create desirable
products but also create experiences around their products or
sell experience itself.19 Artists are increasingly pressured to use
similar methods to stay relevant and desirable in the art world.
In addition, value, in both art and the broader culture, is not just
created by producing an experience around objects. Instead, the
act of production now has the potential to become an experience
in itself.
In her essay “On the Socio-Economic Role of the
Art Exhibition,” von Hantelmann argues that the traditional
15
See Andrea Fraser, “From the Critique of Institutions to an Institution of Critique,” Artforum 44 (September 2005): 278–83.
16
In addition to Gerhard Schulze, The Experi-ence Society (London: SAGE Publications Ltd, 2008), see B. Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore, The Experience Economy, Updated Edition (Boston: Harvard Business Review Press, 2011).
17
Von Hantelmann, “The Experiential Turn.”
18
Ibid.
19
William Deresiewicz, “The Death of the Artist—and the Birth of the Creative Entrepreneur,” The Atlantic, December 28, 2014, http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/01/the-death-of-the-artist-and-the-birth-of-the-creative-entrepre-neur/383497/.
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exhibition format itself is tied to a set of values that are
fundamental to Western market societies. These values include
the production and circulation of objects as products, the
focus on a linear notion of time as related to progress, and the
prioritization of the individual.20
In the experience society, as the experience of the
viewer becomes the actual object of the exhibition, one can
argue audiences continue to perform this ritual in participatory
and collaborative exhibition models. While von Hantelmann’s
critiques are specifically leveraged against the nineteenth- and
early twentieth-century model of the museum exhibition, still
in use by institutions like the Metropolitan Museum of Art,
her concluding thoughts of the essay suggest that as long as
the structure of the art exhibition performs the values listed
above, the museum will remain a site to ritually perform
capitalist subjectivity.21 But she leaves the reader with lingering
questions: What will this ritual look like in our rapidly changing
experience societies? How will shifts in artistic production and
in the wider consumer culture affect museum exhibitions and
programming? The Possible provides us with a case study for
answering these important questions as it reflects both shifts in
artistic practice and the exhibition format itself. Because The
Possible was presented as a revolutionary exhibition in its content
and structure, the focus on collaboration and participation may
have disguised the perpetuation of these values. I argue that the
new exhibition models employed in The Possible merely repackage
these values, including the production and circulation of the
object, a need for progress or growth, and the prioritization of
the individual, in ways that mirror changes in wider consumer
culture.
The Possible’s embodiment of the major capitalist
values outlined by von Hantelmann can all be located within
gallery three and the custom-designed pedestal, built to display
finished works from the exhibition. Every Wednesday, Wilson
and a team of preparators would select objects from all the
studios to display on the pedestal as emblematic of the work
being done in the exhibition (fig. 3). As gallery three began to
accumulate objects, an eclectic mix of works were juxtaposed
and a leveling between the pieces took place. Although the
works were not chronologically labeled, the process of amassing
the collection embodied the need for progress or growth. For
participants or repeated visitors, the pedestal became the place
to visualize the progress of the exhibition, although no real
20
Dorothea von Hantelmann, “On the Socio-Economic Role of the Art Exhibition,” in Cornerstones, eds. Juan A. Gaitán, Nicolaus Schafhausen, and Monika Szewczyk (Rotter-dam: Witte de With Publishers, 2011), 266–77.
21
Von Hantelmann, “On the Socio-Economic Role of the Art Exhibition,” 277.
production goal was ever established. In an interview, Wilson
indicated that he had a real interest in seeing the results of
the work being done in the studios and hoped that the more
traditional opportunity to show work within the museum would
encourage artists to leave their pieces at BAM/PFA for the
duration of the exhibition.22 The alternative, he said, would have
been a summer camp model where participants would work in
the studios and take their creations home with them at the end
of the day. But Wilson needed a way to measure the success of
the exhibition. In addition, the inclusion of the pedestal arguably
acted as a reward or incentive system to keep artists in process
and working, a central draw for audiences of the show.
In gallery 3 it is easy to see how The Possible valued
the production and circulation of objects, despite the focus on
production and process staged in the studios. For the most part
the objects displayed on the pedestal exist purely for the reason
that they could be made—as experiments—and not necessarily
because an artist was compelled to create them out of a larger
conceptual practice. In our experience society, where experience
has replaced the object as the most demanded commodity,
the growing collection of artifacts displayed in gallery 3 also
reiterated the extent to which the staging of production and
process replaced objects in the rest of the exhibition. In this
sense, The Possible embodied the first capitalist value outlined by
von Hantelmann in two ways: literally through the production
and circulation of objects, and more abstractly by turning
production and process into an object for consumption itself.
But the collection of works displayed on the pedestal
also brings up a set of questions around the idea of authorship—
and by extension labor—that complicate The Possible’s seemingly
engaging and collaborative structure. The author of each piece
displayed on the pedestal would be unknown to a viewer unless
they witnessed its construction. In a few cases, familiarity
with an artist may provide a clue into the maker, although no
information about the practice of the artists being displayed or
the artists themselves was provided, as would be typical for a
museum display’s educational purpose. This could be seen as a
totally democratic system, with no hierarchy being established
among objects by reputable artists and the work produced by
visiting children. Yet the works that ended up on the pedestal
were selected from hundreds, if not thousands, of objects that
were produced in the galleries. The ostensibly random selections
are still reflective of Wilson’s personal taste, despite his attempt
22
David Wilson, interview by the author, Oakland, California, July 16, 2014.
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to produce a sample of the work being created in the show.
Moreover, because no identifying information was provided as
to the maker of objects displayed on the pedestal, everything
created during The Possible was ultimately presented to the public
as “authored” by Wilson.
Although Wilson’s title during The Possible was
“guest curator,” Wilson is an artist who considers his practice
to include facilitating collaboration between other creative
individuals. The distinction between curating and facilitating
may seem trivial. Yet, in the case of The Possible, despite his title
of “curator,” Wilson also performed his normal role as facilitator,
perhaps preventing the participating (read: exhibiting) artists
from being recognized as the artists of the show. It is not
common that the curator of an exhibition is also the publically
recognized artist responsible for the work in the show.23 The
structure staged by The Possible has precedents, especially in
the Bay Area where these seemingly collaborative and collective
projects have particular popularity in part because of our unique
and continued regional nostalgia for the 1960s. For example,
Stephanie Syjuco’s Shadowshop at the San Francisco Museum
of Modern Art, in which Syjuco created a gift shop to sell artist
multiples and unique objects created by a group of local artists,
created similar relationships between a “head” artist and a set of
participating artists.24 The artists were able to keep the proceeds
from the sale of their works, but the project was marketed
as Syjuco’s, raising similar questions brought to light by The
Possible about the relationship between an authorial genius and a
producing collective.
The structure employed by both The Possible and
Shadowshop is directly tied to “crowdsourcing,” a concept that
came out of Silicon Valley’s once imagined-to-be-democratic
Web 2.0, but which has since been instrumentalized by global
capitalism.25 When websites like Facebook and YouTube
appeared in the early 2000s, they offered users “free” platforms
to generate material and to form communities. But it is now
understood that uploaded content and user activity is turned
into data that these websites sell to marketing and advertising
companies. In this system of exchange, users are not customers;
they are both the producers and the product for sale.26 Notably,
the term crowdsourcing was actually coined as a play on the word
“outsourcing,” which describes companies’ practice of moving
their labor to other, generally cheaper markets.27 The Possible,
then, should be considered not collaborative but crowdsourced.
23
See Fraser, “From the Critique of Institutions to an Institution of Critique.” In practices of institutional critique, the artist-organized curatorial project is more common.
24
“SFMOMA | Shadowshop,” San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, accessed March 19, 2015, http://www.sfmoma.org/exhib_events/events/series/1337. In exhibitions like The Possible and Shadowshop, participating artists are aware of their positioning within the projects to varying degrees. Some artists even take their complicated authorial status as the departure point for the creation of the works they produce for the project.
25
Ted Purves and Shane Aslan Selzer, eds., What We Want Is Free: Critical Exchanges in Recent Art, second edition (New York: SUNY Press, 2014). 14.
26
Ibid., 15.
27
Ibid., 17.
FIGURE 4.
Wall text for The Possible. (Photo: Terri Loewenthal, “The Possible,” http://blog.terriloewenthal.com/tag/the-possible.)
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FIGURE 5.
Participating artists listed in The Possible’s wall text. (Photo: Terri Loewenthal, “The Possible,” http://blog.terriloewenthal.com/tag/the-possible.)
In addition to the exhibition’s labor, the catalogue, as well as
an online blog created to collect documentation of The Possible,
employed crowdsourcing techniques.28 They, like the wider
exhibition itself, relied on the free labor of the participants in
order to forego the cost of printing an exhibition catalogue or
hiring a documenting photographer. Exhibitions that rely on
crowdsourcing as the labor structure do so because the labor
is cheaper; the host institutions offer opportunity or exposure
instead of monetary compensation in exchange for the work.
In the case of The Possible this system of labor distribution was
disguised by a utopian and collective ethos and aesthetic that
overlay the entire exhibition.
In addition to ensuring, perhaps unconsciously, that
the work produced in the exhibition would look like his own
work, Wilson also reinforced the hierarchy of creativity through
his decision to handwrite all wall text and labels directly onto
the wall in Sharpie pen. The images of The Possible’s wall text
(figs. 4, 5) illustrate the style of all of the didactic materials
produced to support the show.29 Wilson’s handwriting imbues the
exhibition with a relaxed, egalitarian feel. The choice to write
every participant’s name in a constellation of node-like circles
avoids the traditional hierarchical structure associated with lists,
instead visually suggesting a network or community. By foregoing
printed and mounted text or cut vinyl, the institutionalized
feel given to most wall text also disappears. Secondly, Wilson’s
imperfect handwriting extends the exhibition’s do-it-yourself
ethos, whose roots are found in the punk scene’s rejection
of mass production and culture. There is even an element of
occupation inherent to the action of writing directly on the
walls. The handwriting can be viewed in relation to graffiti,
suggesting that the artists have taken over the museum rather
than have been invited and approved by the institution. In many
ways the use of Wilson’s handwriting helps to accomplish the
utopian and revolutionary spirit that Rinder hoped to create
through The Possible. But Wilson has said that while Ribbons
events use public space, their goal is not to claim public space.30
The prolonged inhabiting of a contested area has never been the
point of Wilson’s work. Far from performing a set of politics,
the handwritten text is purely aesthetic and contributes to the
shadowing of all participating artists under Wilson’s ultimate
authorship.
By writing an artist’s name on the wall, Wilson
gives credit to the participating artists for their contributions to
28
A Tumblr page (http://www.the-possible.org), which allowed participants to upload photos directly to the site, was set up as an archive of The Possible. Images uploaded to social media platforms with the hashtag #ThePos-sible also became linked to the site.
29
Figure 4 shows the curatorial statement, while figure 5 focuses on the names of the artists who were initially invited to participate in the show. Not all of the artists whose names are on the wall actually participated in the show in the end. Some noted that the studios established for The Possible were not conducive to their own practices. It is also unclear as to whether the wall accumulated more names as regular participants became involved with the studios.
30
Wilson, interview by the author, Oakland, California.
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the show. But visually, a viewer first and foremost sees “Wilson”
signaled by his scrawl. This is especially true for viewers familiar
with Wilson’s previous works that use handwritten invitations
and hand-drawn maps to direct participants to the sites of
Ribbons gatherings. By labeling Wilson as a guest curator, a
false sense of autonomy is imparted to the area facilitators and
participating artists, when in reality Wilson was unable to
forego the organizing role he normally occupies during Ribbons
gatherings. In this sense The Possible could be interpreted not as a
group exhibition but simply as an extended Ribbons gathering, in
which case Wilson is both the curator and the artist on display.
In this complicated hierarchy, what roles do the area
facilitators, the group of artists selected to essentially run the
studios, play in The Possible? Area facilitator of the publication
studio, Luca Antonucci, provided the museum’s workshop with
his personal printing equipment and supplies. The BAM/PFA may
have provided space for artists to congregate, but the fact that
Antonucci had to donate his own equipment, as did other area
facilitators, creates considerable liability for already precarious
professional artists. According to Antonucci, much of his time
was spent repairing and troubleshooting machines receiving
heavy use throughout the exhibition.31 Antonucci was told he
would be sharing his knowledge of book arts and printing with
other artists, but instead he ended up performing the role of
the shop tech. In an interview, he noted that instead of helping
artists see what was “possible” with the medium, as the title
of the exhibition suggested, artists generally only contacted
him when there was a problem with a machine, setting up a
strained relationship from the beginning of his interactions with
frustrated artists.32
Most of the area facilitators were given a $2,000
stipend to set up their areas of the museum, which Antonucci
says he “blew through in labor in the first two weeks” of the
four-month exhibition.33 While Antonucci continued to operate
his commercial business, Colpa Press, from inside the museum,
much of the work Antonucci did for The Possible, including
reprinting thousands of prints from the four-month exhibition to
be included in the collection of prints sold as the catalogue, was
unpaid. Antonucci noted that printing The Possible’s catalogue
is the only project at that scale that he has not been paid for.
But when it comes to critiquing the labor structure inherent to
The Possible, it is not just a question of whether artists were paid
enough.
31
Luca Antonucci, interview by the author, San Francisco, January 21, 2015.
32
Ibid.
33
Ibid.
There are many theories for determining the value of
labor in the art world and for proper methods of compensation. On
the one hand, there is a camp dedicated to wage compensation, and
its major proponents include the collective Working Artists and the
Greater Economy, W.A.G.E., as well as artist Andrea Fraser, who has
written about artists that perform or facilitate projects as providing a
service, suggesting that they should be paid as would be typical in a
goods and services market.34 Proponents of this model, however, do
not escape the capitalist system and assign value to artists’ work based
on the market system. Others have hope of setting up alternative
economies for their work to circulate within. Another group might
suggest there is value in exposure and opportunity, although this
group also sits firmly within the capitalist model. The idea that one
show leads to another in the art world has for a long time been argued
as a form of compensation in its own right. But Wilson’s artistic
governance over The Possible prevents most of the area facilitators and
participating artists from even being able to leverage the exhibition in
this way. Additionally, because The Possible was open to anyone and
everyone, the inclusion of the exhibition on an artist’s CV has little
significance. Participants of The Possible became more like interns
or volunteers who executed choreographed performance pieces, for
example, rather than exhibiting artists.
So, while The Possible was presented as a collaborative
and collective experiment, mimicking back-to-the-land and
communal experiments of the Bay Area’s utopian past, the
exhibition’s structure actually embodied a set of capitalist values
while simultaneously exploiting labor in the same way that other
sectors of the capitalist market do. The aestheticization of political
representations associated with historical social movements is not
the same as reviving and embodying a set of politics. Admittedly, the
ability to embody a set of countercultural politics within a cultural
institution like the museum becomes extremely hard to negotiate.
Because the museum and traditional exhibition models grew out
of the cultural conditions of Western market societies, negating
those values through traditional structures becomes extremely
challenging. I encourage productive skepticism and continued
questioning from curators and artists as well as the general
public about what is actually being taught or staged in museums.
Contemporary artists must be mindful of the ways their work
operates within the larger scheme. It is not enough to present a set of
politics; we must struggle to find ways to embody them. Whether it
is possible to do so within an institution like the museum is still yet
to be determined.
34
“Mission,” W.A.G.E., accessed January 19, 2015, http://www.wageforwork.com/about/2/mission; Andrea Fraser, “How to Provide an Artistic Service: An Introduction” (The Depot, Vienna, 1994), http://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/fraser1.pdf.