Introduction
I consider myself as an acute observer driven to learn more, and through the process of learning, I am motivated to make changes to the best of my capacity. My experience as a professional glass artist taught me to be acutely aware of the role an artist assumes on the gaffer’s chair. It is from this vantage point that one sees the human psyche and the individual ego at play, all very much like a dance between individuals that are forced together for better or worse. I liken the role of the gaffer to that of a hyphen. The gaffer is the joining force between creativity (the idea/inspiration) and a finished product, indicating the combined meaning of the process required to make anything out of hot glass. On a deeper level, the gaffer is the mediator between personality (individual ego) and trust. It is from this experience as a gaffer that I envision establishing an agency called “As Is” that will act in the same manner, a link between creative thought and tangible outcome.
“As Is” is an agency retaining ownership of ideas, strategies and tactics conceived by myself, artist Michael Fox. My ideas and projects become commoditized intellectual property that are either copyrighted or trademarked, and shared freely.[1] The types of projects will vary and not be limited to installations and events only. They will be designed for site-specific locations.
“As Is” aims to facilitate the potential symbiotic relationship between creativity and the general public. Art and creativity exists within a particular hierarchy within society, maintaining certain exclusivity. I aim to broaden the understanding and appreciation of creative culture, by generating a synergy between artists, supporters and the general public.
Projects administered by “As Is” will, furthermore, give artists new opportunities to develop in a more progressive manner, removing them from the constraining paradigms that have come to define the contemporary art milieu. “As Is” seeks to create opportunity with as little inventory as possible. In other words, it deals with goods and services much like conventional industries; however, it replaces money with opportunity for artistic endeavors. Opportunities and ideas become the commodity, which the artist implements under the directive of the agency.
The name of the agency - “As Is” - is an index, signifying the paradox between the straightforwardness of creating a consortium of talent that work together for the purpose of creating intercultural dialogue and exchange through art, and the complexity in the actual implementation of such an endeavor. The complexity revolves around the eventual question of financial support; but culture does not need to be feed with money, per se; but rather through distribution of and sharing ideas.[2] The success of each project will result from an asset-based approach to connecting art with community development.
This thesis is ultimately about my objectives for establishing the agency. The approach is art historical, in order to present a backdrop of the influences behind the many other programs that exist today, which operate with similar frameworks and objectives that “As Is” will. I believe it is also important to go deeper into the trajectory, since it is obvious that what we do today has roots that go further back. Contemporary art belongs to a stream of questions and experiments undertaken by thinkers, poets and investigators, and so we are able to come to understand the significance of our own work today. As Joseph Beuys once said when speaking about influences on his conception of art, there is a need to "protect the flame."[3]
The paper will be divided into three sections. The first section lays the objectives and context for establishing “As Is.” By considering the definition of art and culture, and the problems that occur with it’s meaning, a more solid understanding of both terms, as well as Bourdieu´s cultural capital, is realized. In the second part, I will present four artists, which I believe have been masters of creating ideas and transforming the notion of a creative, conceptual thought into an art form itself: Andy Warhol, Sol LeWitt, Edward Kienholz, Joseph Beuys. I will then talk about contemporary artists whom I believe have successfully managed to administer their own careers.
In the third part, I will discuss some of the agencies that exist today, which successfully facilitate artists and public art projects. Looking back at the Public Works of Arts Projects (PWAP) and the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), both of which laid the foundations for many of the programs in progress today, I will examine some of the opportunities these two institutions successfully gained or missed altogether. Was decentralization a key element in the accomplishment of the PWAP and how has financial hegemony marred the objectives and agendas of the NEA? Finally, I will conclude this thesis with the basic structure of “As Is.” Descriptions of individual projects already being planned by the agency are included in an appendix.
The bottom line
“As Is” will function against the traditional frameworks of other agencies, moving potentiality into the future and creating opportunity for others to carry on what the agency starts. In general, “As Is” intends to serve as a sponsor and catalyst for innovative approaches to urban revitalization, arts promotion, and community growth. The input and assistance of the surrounding community has the potential to create a grassroots evolution ensuring that vision, curriculum, and facilities are unique and uniquely beneficial to the locality, in which each project takes shape.
The concept of generating public support for the arts is nothing new. There already exist scores of not-for-profit agencies that support creative industries.[4] What sets “As Is” apart from the rest is it is globalized, meaning not belonging to one place – city or country. “As Is” is both ubiquitous and itinerant. The concept recalls the notion that home is inside the self, and inside the other. It is also based on my own experiences of having lived in various places in North America and abroad, which has shaped my cultural scripts. The potential for multilateral relations with creative industries is at the heart of the agency’s mandate.
“As Is” wants to open dialogue to generate the freedom necessary to facilitate an eventual change in the way art is made, studied, and critiqued. Funding for each project will come from local/ national sources, eliminating any potential asphyxiation that might occur with donors that might not agree to work unilaterally with certain places.
There is great potential in engaging in an education, in which giving away of ideas falls under the aegis of the relationship established among the idea, the artist and ultimately, the community. By focusing on the context of the project, rather than pure outcome, the relationships established between the various players involved will be stronger and more effective in planning, organization and execution. The potential involved with this practice far outweighs the risk and renders the experience worthwhile.
Objectives: so what do art and culture mean anyway?
I believe that today art struggles with its history, conservation, and communication. In the last three centuries, display, consumption and identity have been the basis of the tenuous definition of art. The result is an exhausting surplus of trajectories and epistemological classifications. Creativity is without doubt influenced by social demarcation and of cultural self-definition. Since the Enlightenment, the use of cultural goods was essential as a means for marking and defining the social system.[5] Culture is another term lacking a tangible definition, and which has evolved in use in everyday language; as well, the definition of culture varies even further between disciplines.[6]
Since Pierre Bourdieu discussed the terminology and context of culture capital, the term has come into common usage.[7] Cultural Capital is by definition an asset that provides value to the overall economic worth.[8] Therefore, the “shares” involved in cultural capital are the amount of cultural significance at any given moment, measured by the amount of either physical quantities or a combination of elements. The result is a current of consumable services or ideas for future usages.
Cultural Capital can be either tangible or intangible.[9] The former describes among other things architecture (new and heritage) and applied arts (painting, glass, archaeology); while the latter denotes ideas and collective values. There is a risk of cultural decay if investment in cultural capital is neglected.
Putting it into context
There has been an effort to deconstruct the established norms on art and culture. This is particularly evident during the last thirty years, when artists successfully began to break down the norms that defined creativity andaesthetics. Moving away from traditional frameworks in art and the art industry is not a new concept, either. The origins for these complaints began to sound off by artists such as Adolf F. Reinhardt (known as “Ad”; December 24, 1913 – August 30, 1967), one of the founding members of the American Abstract Artists movement. In Reinhardt´s opinion, the way to break the chains of the burdening commercial aspect of art was through academia: “I tried to oppose the academic to the market place. I think in the future I see mainly the university academy as the proper place for the artist because the market place is insane.”[10] He also recognized the saturation of having too many artists associated with art schools. Reinhardt rightfully observed that this resulted in only a limited number of artists actually being able to make a living out of their craft.
What Reinhardt also saw was the groundbreaking moment that followed the publication of Arthur Danto´s article entitled “The Artworld” in 1964.[11] Museums, art centers and galleries collectively influenced the transmission of art to include a wider public, including a general audience; and art schools, rather than focusing on the master to student role, became a part of the new artworld establishment.[12]
By the late 1970´s a flood of international art schools opened, structurally organized to include galleries, residencies, research and public relations departments. As Thierry de Duve reminds us, the seeds were already planted at the end of the nineteenth century.[13] Citing Manet as an example, de Duve shows us that it was the public approval, and acceptance by the salon painters that eventually gave him legitimization. He goes on to cite Marcel Duchamp, whose implication that anyone can be an artist and anything a work of art, as the catalyst for the eruption of conceptualism and the contemporary art world as we know it today.
There was also a shift in artist’s attitudes towards the limitation of specialization, and out of this, some art school began to allow students to create multidisciplinary degrees.[14] Joseph Beuys, who founded the Free International University (more below) in 1982, wrote the following:
The specialist’s insulated point of view places the arts and other kinds of work in sharp opposition, whereas it is crucial that the structural, formal, and thematic problems of the various work process should be constantly compared to one another… The division of the disciplines for the training of experts, with no substantial comparative method, reinforces the idea that only specialists can contribute to the basic structures of society: economics, politics, law structure, etc.”[15]
Another shift in the academic structure was the hierarchy between artist/teacher and students. Beuy’s Free International University (FIU; discussed in more detail below), established in 1972, followed this new model by eliminating administrative titles and allowing the University to “function as a model of democracy.”[16] Tuition free, the FIU intended to bridge people and the economy; meaning creativity is part and parcel to the economy in that it is capital. The university was set up to be a fixed platform to promote this concept, inviting anyone who wanted to participate to shape the creative milieu free of the restrictions of predetermined boundaries that had come to define the art world.
A little earlier than the FIU, the Artist Placement Group (APG), an artist run collective founded in 1966 by John Latham and Barbara Steveni, succeeded in breaking the structures of the artist milieu. The APG “favored the notion that artists could have a positive effect on industry through inherent creativity and their relative ignorance of its conventions.“[17] The concept behind the APG, which was conceived during a period when conceptualism and dematerialization were avant-garde, was to assign an artist to a job for a business or governmental agency for a short period of time. Seeing the position of the artist being marginalized, it was an occasion to take the artist outside of institutions, in order that the boundaries of what would signify visual art became analogous to the creation of manufactured commodities.
Corresponding with dematerialization, so too the artists were redefined as “engaging in the social field to effect change.”[18] There was a shift in the task of making art, to making decisions about the creation in a non-art environment. The Artist Placement Group encouraged artists to take control of their social function.[19] In other words, the APG wanted to blur the boundaries between art and public, that desire and work were the conceptual objects of group participation.
Today, the artists have a new role within the configuration of the art world: they must be somewhat business savvy, especially with so many having received academic degrees. The role of the artist in a solo creative endeavor is also becoming obsolete. Just as the APG predicted three decades ago, the business aspect is equivalent to the production of the art itself, with the artist having to take ownership of his or her own career in order to survive.
Academia and industry are as essential to an artist as once was a prolific collector and a good critic. Even though, as mentioned above, art in higher education is somewhat conventionalized.[20] But, to remain ignorant to the availability of education is not an excuse. Recently, a new group called the Bruce High Quality Foundation (BHQF) started up a learning scheme that they call the BHQFU. Their definition of what they do is:
…a university, a space for higher education and research, a community of scholars; an expansion of the BHQF practice to include more participants (that's where U come in); and a "fuck you" to the hegemony of critical solemnity and market-mediocre despair.[21]
Fashioning education as a “manipulative metaphor,”[22] the ingenious principle behind BHQFU is accessibility of learning for free, as a reaction to the unreasonable costs for graduate studies in the arts and humanities. This is an important shift, which although has only recently started, is going to dramatically alter who becomes an artist.
In conclusion, nowadays the artist has to look beyond the philosophical rhetoric taught in universities and act as entrepreneurs, since there is nothing that will ultimately support them in the system called life after graduation. On the other hand, there is a danger that artists will lose the ability to self-reflect on their creativity, something that is taught (one hopes!) in art schools. This involves the ability to generate one’s own questions about one’s work, a confidence that shields an artist from outside pressures and opinions, and of course, making art because of its marketability. Public artist and professor at Cooper Union, Dennis Adams says “artists today are serving tea with every artwork; every project is a platform for social space.”[23] The artists of the 21st century are in a completely different space than their mentors were thirty years ago. Politics, economics and culture are now very much involved with one another, changing the dynamics completely. Without meaning to be too pessimistic, the future is at once exciting and yet very bleak…
Artists as an architect of ideas
An architect of ideas sketches the blue print for a concept using a language to represent the actual process. The idea is a model that is not necessarily three-dimensional or material, and constructed in a way that is read, observed and recognized in intention. The post-Abstract Expressionist period saw a movement towards the manufacturing and promotion of idea rather than product; or better yet, the idea became the product - a concept tableau. The blue print behind the individual concepts were conceptual but nevertheless natural. If Duchamp advocated found objects, nearly a century later, artists endorsed their scheme behind a work of art to be the actual art itself.
A 180° turn in train of thought took-off when Andy Warhol (August 6, 1928-February 22, 1987) began to market his art as a – basic - commodity. Warhol picked up on the Duchampian notion of removing an object, in this case, commercial product, out of its context and displaying it as an art. He was also able to transform himself into a highly sought-after commodity.
The 1964 exhibition The American Supermarket is considered the first time the general public was invited into the debate about art and non-art.[24] However, mass-produced commodities were only a fraction of the artist’s approach to his career. When he founded “The Factory,” Warhol’s market strategy was to surround himself with whomever was considered avant guard.[25] As strategic as the Renaissance artist was, Warhol secured commissions for portraits that became as expressive of his artistic genre, as the Campbell’s Soup cans and Brillo Box from The American Supermarket. On the potential of an artist as an entrepreneur, Warhol said, “Making money is art, and working is art and good business is the best art.”[26] When examining the multifarious projects the artist undertook, it is clear that Warhol understood the direction the art world was turning to; artists had the opportunity to drive manage their careers with their own agenda.
Sol LeWitt (September 9, 1928 - April 8, 2007), pioneering in the minimalist movement of the 1960´s, is another example of an artist who constructed his own conceptual scaffolding around the understanding of his work. LeWitt worked with various medias and played with geometric forms to create what he called “structures;”[27] but also focused on conceptualizing art by stressing the idea behind a work of art and its relationship to the finished product.[28] He aimed at addressing the dominance of thoughts over the finished product. LeWitt actually broke new ground with these notions that an idea is the most essential element behind an artwork. The artist said the following on the subject of an idea: [29]
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LeWitt’s conceptions on artwork paved the way for artists, such as Koons and Hirst – both discussed below – whose ideas are the main commodity, since they are not actually responsible for the production.
Edward Kienholz (October 23, 1927 – June 10, 1994) is considered the master of self-presentation, establishing performance and installation work as a formative media in the repertoire of contemporary art. Kienholz who collaborated with his wife on the majority of his projects referred to his works, which revolved around assemblages of environmental products, as tableaux.[30] Kienholz acted in the opposite direction of LeWitt. If LeWitt´s idea was the groundwork of an
[1] Not in the monetary sense of the word, rather willingly or readily.
[2] Anna Somers Cocks, “Don’t call her the bag lady: Miuccia Prada on conceptual fakes, Italy’s cultural backwardness and what she plans to do with her own arts centre,” The Art Newspaper, Web 02.01.2010, http://www.theartnewspaper.com/articles/Don-t-call-her-the-bag-lady/18567
[3] Joseph Beuys, What Is Art?: Conversations With Joseph Beuys. (Sussex: Clairview Books, 2004), see introduction
[4] To list every non-for-profit or NGO which supports the arts is not relevant to the context of this thesis.
[5] Pierre Bourdieu and Randal Johnson. The Field of Cultural Production. (New York: Columbia Universtity Press, 1993), p. 170 f
[6] The etymology of the word culture refers to the cultivation of land, and in the sixteenth century, the word came to denote someone with a cultivated mind or intellectual. It was also used in reference with art. Now days, the word carries a broader meaning to include intellectual and spiritual evolution, as well as an entire way of life in civilization. See: Throsby, David. Economics and Culture. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 3
[7] Throsby, p. 49: Bourdieu stated that “most of the properties of cultural capital can be deduced from the fact that, in its fundamental state, it is linked to the body and presupposes embodiment.” Throsby links Bourdieu´s definition of cultural capital to be similar to human capital in economics. See also Bourdieu, p. 244
[8] Ibid, p. 46
[9] Ibid, p. 46
[10]Ad Reinhardt, Art as Art: The Selected Writings by Ad Reinhardt, edited by Barbara Rose, Web, 10.29.2009, www.lichtensteiger.de/reinhardt.html
[11] Thierry de Duve, “An Ethics: Putting Aesthetic Transmission in its Proper Place in the Art World,” Art School (Propositions for the 21st Century). Steven Henry Madoff, ed. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009), p. 17; see also Ibid, p. 20: “Danto was the first to acknowledge receipt of the message [of Duchamp, and the 1917 “Urinal,”] as a philosopher. In the wake of his article, various institutional theories of art saw the light of day (though it should be said in passing that Danto’s not one of them), all supposedly made necessary by extreme cases like Duchamp´s readymades or Warhol´s Brillo boxes.” See Arthur Danto, “The Artworld,” Journal of Philosophy 61 (1964), pp. 571-584
[12] de Duve (2009), p. 17
[13] Ibid, p. 19
[14]Among others, the Institute for Artistic Culture in Moscow, Bauhaus in Weimar, Nova Scotia College of Arts in Halifax, California Institute of the Arts in Los Angeles, Free International University, Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. See Charles Esche, “Include Me Out: Helping Artists to Undo the Art World,” Art School (Propositions for the 21st Century). Steven Henry Madoff ed. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009), pp. 102-112
[15] Ibid, p. 107
[16]Ibid, p. 109
[17] Web, 10.22.2009, http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/context_is_half_the_work; Artist Placement Group was later renamed O+I in 1989.
[18] John Latham. Report Of A Surveyor (London: Tate Gallery, 1986), p. 59; see also: Barbara Steveni, “Will Art Influence History?” 'And' Journal of Art, No.9 (1986), p. 18.
[19] Steveni, p. 18
[20] Howard Singerman, “Issues & Commentary: Art Schools: A Group Critique,“ Art in America 95 no5 (May 2007), pp.99-109: quoting Mercedes Matter, founder of the New York Studio School, who in 1965 asked the question “what is wrong with US art schools,” Singerman believes her question is still valid. As there are more than 200 MFA programs nationally, “… it is possible for a student to go through art school and gain an acute perception of what is going on, a fairly intelligent grasp if the situation and yet… in old fashion language, he will never learn to draw.”
[21] Bruce High Quality Foundation University, Web, 10.28.2009, www.bhqfu.org
[22] Ibid, Web, 10.28.2009
[23] Dennis Adams et. al. “Conversation,” Art School (Propositions for the 21st Century). Steven Henry Madoff, ed. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009), p. 267
[24] Tony Scherman and David Dalton. Pop: The Genius of Andy Warhol (New York: HarperCollins, 2009): The American Supermarket was held at the Bianchini Gallery in New York City. The showroom was set up to mimic a store and sold anything from food stuffs to posters.
[25] Ibid, p. 74: Warhol coined the term “15 minutes of fame”
[26] Andy Warhol. The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again. (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975)
[27] James Meyer, S. Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001); see also Sol LeWitt. Structures, 1962-1993. Museum of Modern Art (Oxford: Museum of Modern Art, 1993)
[28] Meyer, Ibid, p. 82
[29]Sol LeWitt, “Sentences on Conceptual,” Art, 0-9 (New York) 1969
[30]Ernst Kris and Otto Kurz, Legend, Myth, and Magic in the Image of the Artist. (New York: Yale University Press, 1979); see also Damon Willick, „Good Morning, My Name is Ed Kienholtz,“ X-TRA Contemporary Art Quaterly, Web, 10.30.2009, www.x-traonline.org/past_articles.php?articleID=48