While in Chicago, Billy suggested that we visit the public library building. Being the stubborn pragmatist that I am, I wasn’t sure what his excitement about this was, seeing as we weren’t going to be in town long enough to check out books, but I went along for the ride.

After listening to a blues band play in the basement, and riding the escalators for a while, Billy recalled a talk that Marc Fischer gave last fall at PSU regarding the Temporary Services project wherein the group added 100 artist books to the library collection without alerting the librarians to their plans. TS adhered numbers on spines of the books, manila cardholders on the interior sleeves, and other Chicago Public Library stamps and markings in the appropriate locations. According to Marc, one of the librarians has begun to collect the books and store them in a special location somewhere in the library. We decided to go on a treasure hunt for the collection.

I started our search on the wrong foot by asking a woman on the Literature Floor whether or not she was aware of a collection of artist books being stored in the library. Our interaction was very similar to a Monty Python sketch, in that she immediately asked me whether I was talking about paintings or sculpture. When I told her that I was actually looking for books, artist books, repeatedly asked, “Paintings?” I tried a different tack and said that no, I was looking for books made by artists, and that the books were the art. She said, “You mean paintings. Or sculpture, maybe? …are you talking about literary arts?” This went on for a while, with her eventually stating that unless I was looking for the literary arts, I should go upstairs to the Fine Arts and Performance floor and ask there.

We were sent on a brief visit to special collections on the 9th floor,

back down to the Fine Arts section and finally were allowed behind the “Staff Only” doors into the Arts Reference room. In a file cabinet in a bottom corner, we found books containing books, books that were actually hats, pants and jackets, books made of salt and plaster, and a variety of other lovely treats. Next time you’re in Chicago, check this out!

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In addition to being really excited about InCubate, I was also pleased to discover that some friends of mine, Josh Ipple and Charlie Roderick of Hideous Beast were the current artists in residence, and that they were organizing an evening of Powerpoint presentations by an assortment of artist groups and people who run arts spaces in Chicago. It was almost as if they had curated the evening just for me – I spent last year geeking out on animated Powerpoint presentations and arts groups. I’ll post some pictures and short descriptions below.

Bonnie Fortune, a graduate student at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, started things off with heavy metal music (complete with high-volume amplifier), tie-dye graphics, flashing lightning bolts and images from books published in the 1960-70’s addressing large-scale ideological wars, energy crises, environmental devastation, and destructive global capitalism. These images were culled from an online library, The Library of Radiant Optimism that she is compiling with her husband (and Temporary Services collaborator) Brett Bloom on a website called letsremake.info.

Bryce Dwyer who runs the residency program at InCubate gave a much more linear and methodical presentation on how to run your own residency program. Just follow The Five Steps, and you’ll be set! (By the way, they’re looking for residents now here.)

Members of a gallery space called Green Lantern gave a talk on the trials and tribulations of the Kennedy Family over the years. I wasn’t sure how this fit in with what they do.

Linsey Caplice ran a presentation about her group, the Honor the Cheifbot Society’s suggested replacement for the current controversial University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign mascot, Chief Illiniwak. The proposed replacement, the Chiefbot, would be nine feet tall, made of cardboard, and shoot clouds of glitter from its head. The Society’s top three reasons why it’s a robot:

Here’s a link to the full presentation in case you’re interested. It doesn’t read in robot voice like the presentation I saw did, but it still rocks. Link.

Labels: collaboration

I’ve been doing a little online research into the Other Options exhibitions put together by InCubate, and have put together a compilation of a few links below.

Tanda Foundation – Tanda Foundation exists as a web 2.0 structure that allows the creative working class to donate money towards the collection of a monthly tanda, that is awarded to applicants based on votes. By donating money users get voting priviledges, however any user is allowed to apply. The money collected, number of votes, who voted, feedback on proposals are public and published dinamically and in web 2.0 format.

Joanna Spitzner Foundation
The Joanna Spitzner Foundation seeks to expand creative knowledge through its support of contemporary art and ongoing research in art, economics, and philanthropy. The Foundation gives small grants to artists that are funded by wages donated from work performed by Joanna. You can read a blog about her daily life on the job as an administrative assistant at Syracuse University here. (note – it reads much like a day in my life as an AA at PSU!)

ReTool
ReTool explores tactics that people employ to make ends meet in economically depressed cities. We are currently interviewing individuals involved in cottage industries; jitney services; yard sales; DIY culture; urban gardening; and work exchanges. We seek out all types of informal exchange – from tradesmen who swap a plumbing repair for an oil change, to the hawker scalping baseball tickets outside the stadium and the grandmother selling homemade pies at the church bazaar.

Forays
Forays is a low profile artist group based in the north of America, whose work focuses on the research and creation of open-source minor architectures and low-tech modifications of everyday infrastructure.

Hideous Beast

Just a couple of weeks ago, I visited an exciting and intelligent project space in Chicago called the Institute for Community Understanding Between Art and The Everyday, aka. InCubate. InCubate is run by a group of art history and arts administration students at the Arts Institute who are interested in exploring ways to “disengage with the traditional strategies governing today’s art market.” In addition to running the traveling exhibition Other Options, a residency program and an ingenious Sunday Soup granting program, they are also using wiki, mapping and TV documentation as part of their explorations.

Bryce, the InCubate staff on hand, gave me several pieces of reading material created by prior artists in residence including a “Sunday Soup” user guide (compiled by Hideous Beast) explaining how to create my own soup-oriented granting program, and a “Cold Call Friendly Phone Book” (compiled by Michael Bauer) listing the names, phone numbers and short descriptions about 41 artistic people living in Chicago who wouldn’t mind a phone call from an artistic stranger in need of entertainment/assistance/information.

On Sunday, I attended a dinner on Ross Island as part of Michael Hebberoy’s Corridor Project. From what I understand, Michael is interested in exploring 12 locations along the I-5 corridor over the next year. At each location a different artist will build a table, and dinner will be served.

Sunday ranged from hot to thunderstorms, rain to mist. We drank moonshine, walked on mudflats and watched an amazing sunset.

Other participants in the dinner have posted some pictures at the following location:

http://corridorproject.blogspot.com/

Check it out!

Labels: suddenly

Co-written and edited by the three current members of the art group Temporary Services, Group Work is a thorough investigation of groups of artists, activists and musicians in the form of interviews and short profiles. Temporary Services interviews the band The Ex, Pedro Bell from the band Funkadelic, AA Bronson from General Idea, ex-members of Political Art Documentation/Distribution, and current members of the groups Haha, Wochenklausur, and What, How and For Whom, asking questions specific to artists who work in groups. Each interview is prefaced by a brief introduction to the group’s history, major events and shows, and current status, and gives context on who is being interviewed and why.

This book provides unique insights into the workings of groups as it is conceived, planned, and orchestrated by a several people who have first-hand experience with the various misconceptions that the individual-centric art world holds towards groups and their practices. In addition to talking about past projects with the artists interviewed, Temporary Services’ questions center around: group formation, member roles, communication techniques, common misconceptions by art administrators in terms of compensation, recognition and travel, navigating conflict and negotiation, managing individual art practices in light of group membership, and membership changes, including how groups deal with the death of members.

As someone whose longest collaboration has spanned a mere four years, I found reading about several groups with more than a decade of work together deeply inspiring and encouraging. Many of the questions raised by Temporary Services evoked stories from groups similar to experiences I’ve had as a member of a group, such as having to explain and re-explain to arts administrators that the more outspoken member of the group isn’t the ‘leader,’ or that all of the members of our group are needed to perform a show and that we can’t just send one or two people. I also did a bit of thinking about ways that The MOST could possibly re-structure to give ourselves more flexibility by figuring out a way to open up to new members. Because we’ve taken on the letters of the word “MOST,” we’ve sort of limited ourselves to adding new people. It seems like a lot of the long-standing groups have found ways to add new people and allow other members to leave if they need to, or if they aren’t interested in a current project. I’ve always imagined my work with The MOST or Mostlandia as something that could last a lifetime, but it doesn’t seem like that should mean we have to all work on everything forever.

Labels: collaboration