Andrea Fraser
published in: Games, Fights, Collaborations. Das Spiel von Grenze und Überschreitung. Kunstraum der Universität Lüneburg (ed.), 1996
1993 saw a sudden rush of exhibitions not particularly well defined or
consistent except for the fact that they either called for artists to
generate new work for specific situations or showcased the results of
work undertaken in such a fashion. This form of artistic activity began,
very loosely and at first only for practical purposes, to be referred
to as a project; artists were being invited to "do a project for"
a particular exhibition. Sonsbeek in Arnheim; Unité, an exhibition
organized in the uninhabited half of a Le Corbusier public housing building
in Firminy; Kontext Kunst at the Neue Galerie in Graz; On taking a normal
situation, the exhibition for Antwerp '93 at the Museum van Hedendaagse
Kunst; Sculpture Chicago; and Viennese Story at the Wiener Secession consisted
entirely of "project-work", while the Whitney Biennial and the
Venice Biennial included a number of artists working in along similar
lines. At the same time, many of the artists participating in these exhibitions
also felt an increase in invitations to do individual projects with organizations.
In the fall of 1993, I began meeting with Michael Clegg, Mark Dion and
Julia Scher in New York to discuss the problems that we and artists we
knew encountered while participating in the exhibitions of the previous
year. These problems ranged from the very practical "problem of getting
paid" to experiences of censorship and concerns over the loss of
autonomy. In addition to being expected to undertake site-specific projects
for little or no fee, artists were routinely expected to design invitations,
posters, advertisements and catalogs, write catalog texts or prepare sections
of catalogs without compensation. Artists with policies not to undertake
projects without receiving a fee, were treated as "difficult"
and set against other artists in exhibitions. Sometimes artists were promised
fees, only to be told after the exhibition opened that those fees were
considered part of the project budgets and had already been used up in
production. Artists' budgets were suspended when their process oriented
projects took longer to complete than the duration of the temporary exhibitions
they were commissioned for. Artists returned to exhibition sites a few
weeks after the opening to find that their works were not maintained,
not functioning, or even had been removed. Or, at the end of exhibitions,
curators de-installed projects without consulting the artist, effectively
destroying them. Or at the end of exhibitions, organizations refused to
return de-installed materials. Artists undertook transitory projects to
find out after the shows came down that they had no rights to the documentation
produced by the organizations (or had to pay for access to it). Or, after
clearly stating research requirements and critical orientation in the
proposal, projects were canceled midway when the material became too sensitive
or difficult. Or, curators claimed the right to review and edit material
prior to presentation.
In addition to these specific experiences, there was a general problem:
at the end of a very active year of producing work for well publicized
and prestigious exhibitions, many of the artists participating found themselves
exhausted and in debt. The institutional and critical support of which
so many exhibitions should be evidence not only did not translate into
material or even adequate practical support, but in many ways functioned
to limit such support. It was as if many of us were being expected to
work in two jobs: one for compensation, the other on a voluntary basis.
The work – both in the sense of labor and art products – we
did for the specific sites and situations defined by curators often either
could not be transferred to the art market or could so only at the expense
of seriously misrepresenting the project's principles. Sometimes this
was an intended effect of the nature of the projects themselves, particularly
when the projects functioned to develop a process with no material form.
Even when project results took a material form, the more specific the
work was to its site or situation – and, thus, the more successful
it was – the more of its meaning, relevance and interest would be
lost outside of the context for which it was produced.
While many of these problems obviously stemmed from a lack of material
support for project work, critical acceptance had created a demand for
projects by cultural organizations, that was clearly not only a demand
for particular individual artists. This demand provided project artists
with the prospect of a certain leverage and for the possibility of acting
collectively to use this leverage, to represent and safeguard our material
interests as well as our interest in fostering conditions conducive to
the development of what we believed was an important form of artistic
activity.
The artists meetings in the fall of 1993 produced a questionnaire on preferred
working conditions sent out to thirty-some artists who engage in project
work. Our intention was to create a data-base that would provide artists
with more confidence in making certain demands and which could also serve
as the foundation of a general contract to be developed by a larger group
we hoped to convene. At the same time, Helmut Draxler and I began to develop
our proposal for Services.
Services was conceived as an on-going project. Its manifestation at the
Kunstraum der Universität Lüneburg was to be the first of what
we hoped would be bi-annual meetings sponsored by different contemporary
art organizations. The meetings and its accompanying installation –
which we called a "working-group exhibition" – would be
the basis for a continuing forum at which artists and curators involved
with project work could develop a framework for their activities that
would integrate the practical and the theoretical, encompassing material
and political as well as artistic concerns. The documentation of historical
and contemporary activity collected to support these discussions, along
with videotapes of the meetings themselves, would grow into an easily
copied and distributed archive made available through the installations
accompanying the working-group discussions – all of which were to
contain photocopying machines – and afterward maintained by the various
sponsoring organizations. The installation would also circulate by itself
between working-group sessions and to organizations without the resources
to sponsor meetings. In addition, we hoped a bi-annual publication could
be generated containing summaries or edited transcripts of working-group
discussions along with presentations of the related historical material
collected for the installations.
After completing the proposal and confirming participants, Helmut Draxler
and I wrote up a working group program and invited participants to select
one session at which to make a short, informal presentation. These presentations
were not to be complete descriptions of projects, but were to focus on
the problems or solutions a particular project posed for the conditions
indicated by the session's topic. Participants were also asked to bring
documentation of projects they intended to discuss as contributions to
the installation. A few artists who were not able to participate –
Mark Dion, Group Material, Louise Lawler and Julia Scher – also contributed
material. Instead of complete documentation of particular projects we
requested specific materials: the letter of invitation or initial proposal;
the contract or letter of agreement; and summary documentation of the
project itself. The aim of this selection was to put the project in the
context of the relations under which it was undertaken, so as to be able
to consider how either those relations may have determined the development
of the project or, conversely, how the project influenced the relations
in which it was produced.
Like this contemporary material, the historical material collected in
the installation was oriented toward a re-integration of the issues and
strategies developed by artists with the conditions and relations of artistic
production. The historical material focused primarily on the activities
of the Art Workers Coalition (AWC) in New York between 1969 and 1973.
The AWC was probably the most significant post-war American attempt by
artists to collectively redefine both the material conditions of their
practices and its social function – particularly in terms of relations
to public and private art presenting organizations. Many of the policy
changes the AWC pressed museums for – free admission, equal representation
of artists, museum professionals and patrons on museum boards, royalties
paid to artists when their work is exhibited, and substantial representation
of minority artists in collections and exhibitions were never realized.
The AWC did however spur the development of community cultural centers,
artist-run exhibition spaces, and political and activist art practices
– particularly institutional critique. It also, through a resistance
to feminist issues, contributed to the emergence of an independent women's
art movement. Guidelines for museum presentation, contracts for commercial
art galleries and the re-sale of art work developed by the AWC were presented
as possible models for project contracts. The possible influence of the
AWC's demands on the emergence of the artist's fee – and thus on
the development of art practice as service provision – was also considered.
In addition to the material on the AWC, the historical portion of the
installation also included documentation of the conciliation of Hans Haacke's
1971 Guggenheim show; documentation of the groups Artists Meeting For
Cultural Change, Fashion Moda and Internationales Künstlergremium;
and texts and documentation of works by artists such as Michael Asher,
Christian Boltanski, Marcel Broodthaers, Daniel Buren and the Guerrilla
Art Action Group.
The working-group meetings and installation in Lüneburg were to function
as a model, not only for Services as an on-going project but also for
the role of exhibitions and art presenting organizations relative to project
based practices. In this sense, Services was motivated both by a critique
of exhibitions and symposia and by the project work itself for an alternative
to art organizations defined by their functions as exhibitors of art objects.
The problem which many artists engaged in project work are confronted
with when invited to participate in exhibitions is that many projects
do not exist as objects or as installations possible to reconstruct. Services
addressed this "problem" as a problem, not of projects, but
of exhibitions as such. To the extent that exhibitions demand objects
(or environments) to be encountered in a physical form, they marginalize
practices which are not production based. Given the fact that more and
more artists profess to be engaged in issue based work, there seems to
be an increasingly insupportable contradiction between the concerns of
artists and the objects they produce for display in art exhibition spaces.
What can art exhibition be if not an occasion to encounter works of art
in their physical or temporal form? While video tapes provided Services
with a temporal dimension that "justified" its existence as
an exhibition (rather than just a publication), our interest was in trying
to introduce a physical dimension which would revolve not around art objects
but around the social interactions the space would become a frame for.
The table around which the working-group met remained in the space for
people to use while reading and talking about the documentary material
they could take down from the pin-board walls. In this sense, we hoped
that the working group sessions and the video tapes of them would function
to initiate continuing discussions among those using the space during
the course of the installation.
From conception it was clear that Services would only be appropriate for
organizations established to serve artists and other art professionals
– cultural constituencies – and not for organizations addressing
themselves to the "general public". Introducing this distinction
as a consideration in artistic and curatorial activity was one of the
underlying premises of Services.
Most contemporary art exhibitions, regardless of their sponsoring organizations,
tend to conceive the function of purveying information about contemporary
artistic activity to a "general public" more or less as an end
in it itself. Beyond this level of information, the question of what,
specifically, particular artists or works can provide particular audiences
is rarely addressed. When it is addressed, it is often on a level of content
which misrecognizes the fact that the knowledge of contemporary art codes
required to apprehend that content is not distributed equally and may
not be a possession of the very people who are supposed to be served by
the work. Many of the artists and curators involved in Services try to
deal with this problem either by attempting to by-pass art sites and art
codes (along with art objects), or by addressing them reflexively, as
such – in either case, taking the site of the work rather as a means
to intervene in a range of social experiences of immediate relevance to
particular audiences. If these strategies become the mode of addressing
the "general audience" of such organizations as municipal museums
and public art commissions, or the specific communities accessible through
them, what of the cultural constituencies' institutions such as ICAs and
Kunstvereine are founded to serve? Services offered one response to this
question: turn the exhibition into a forum for addressing issues of immediate
practical concern to the art professionals and art students who constitute
the primary audience of cultural constituency organizations.
In proposing this function for cultural constituency organizations, Services
also, implicitly, constituted a critique of the group exhibition and the
public symposium as mechanisms through which such organizations attempt
to fulfill their mission. The misrecognition of specialized audiences
inherent in programs conceived as purveyors of information to a "general
public", effectively limits those programs to functioning as sites
of symbolic struggles among producers. To the extent that programming
is not determined by immediate concerns for particular audiences, that
"general public" is reduced to no more than adherents, subscribers
and investors that art professionals compete for in struggles for legitimacy
and prestige. Every public juxtaposition of individual artistic positions
on panels and in shows which invites viewers to compare, contrast and
judge artists against each other reinscribes artists and works in this
competitive structure, reducing them at the same time – regardless
of intended effects – to their formal or strategic differences.
What did Services accomplish? Re-reading the proposal, what appears most
obvious is what Services did not accomplish. Services did not result in
any particular resolutions on the practical problems encountered by artists
engaging in project work. Nor did it produce a general contract, a policy,
or an association which could lobby for the interests of project artists.
Services did not come to any conclusions on questions of the threat posed
to artistic autonomy by professionalization or by the construction of
cultural organizations as "clients". Nor did Services get to
the root of conflicts among artists, curators, cultural organizations
and audiences. Services was not, through the material collected for the
installation, able to provide a coherent history of the transformation
of relations among artists, curators and cultural organizations; of the
professionalization of curating; of the artists' fee or of the role particular
phenomena played in such developments. Finally, Services did not establish
the meaning or relevance of the concept of service provision for contemporary
artistic practice.
Were these the aims of Services? In a retrospect which maybe influenced
as much by revision as by reflection I would say they were not, at least,
the projects' primary goals. The goal of Services was finally much more
simple and in my mind fundamental; something which is, further, the condition
of the accomplishment of all these other aims. More than a forum for any
of the specific issues introduced in the proposal, Services was conceived
as a model for an alternative to what appeared to us to be the available
sites within the field of art. I would say now that the creation of such
an alternative is not external to the issues introduced in the proposal.
Rather, it is the condition for their accomplishment.
Above all, Services was a response to what I see as a very basic problem:
almost all of the available sites in the field of art, both physical and
discursive, are fundamentally oriented toward the production of belief
in the value of various forms of cultural production – artistic and
critical; that is, toward legitimation. One could say that all exhibitions,
whether in commercial or non-commercial spaces, construct their visitors
as potential collectors. More precisely, they construct their visitors
as people who will or will not invest their economic, cultural or social
capital in particular practices. Similarly, the addressees of art magazines
and symposia tend to be constructed as subscribers or potential subscribers,
not of publications or events, but to the positions taken by writers and
speakers. The point here is not to construct an opposition between promotion
and critique. The point is that there are almost no sites within the artistic
field in which producers address each other as producers according, not
to the intellectual or artistic positions they take on cultural issues,
but to the positions they occupy within a field of cultural production
as determined by the social conditions of that field and the social relations
which structure it. The absence of such sites has the effect, not only
of ensuring the atomization of producers in competitive struggles for
professional legitimacy, but also of limiting the development of a framework
in which the function and effect – not only the symbolic value –
of artistic practices can be evaluated.
In a certain way I would say that the fundamental ambition of Services
was to create a forum in which participating artists and curators, as
well as visitors to the installation, would reflect on project work specifically
– as well as art practice generally – not only in terms of symbolic
systems, thematized or formalized, but also in terms of the conditions
and relations which determine them and which they may resist or reproduce.
The practical problems which arise as a result of project work, and the
clear relation between those problems and the strategies of individual
works, created a basis for such reflection. And that reflection, in turn,
would be the condition of achieving a meaningful resolution of practical
problems.
It may seem obvious that any effort by artists and curators to resolve
their practical problems would require that they address each other as
producers according to the common practical problems they endeavor to
resolve. What may be less obvious is that many of those problems themselves
stem from, not the absence of such forums as such, but from the structure
which prevents them from developing the orientation of artistic sites
toward the function of legitimation. The reluctance of organizations to
provide adequate fees, for example, can be seen to stem from the fact
that most cultural institutions still see their role as being one of identifying,
publicizing and consecrating artistic tendencies – a service from
which artists should later profit, with the help of gallerists, through
the sale of thus legitimized work.
The project Services had two basic motivating circumstances. One was explicitly
stated in the proposal and dealt with in the working group discussions:
the practical and material problems encountered by artists engaged in
project work. The other was never explicitly stated but was, perhaps even
more fundamental, determining the form of the project as well as the material
collected for the installation: that is, the absence of sites within the
artistic field in which cultural producers address each other as producers.
Most of the aspects of the project introduced in the proposal may not
have been developed or accomplished. The historical material gathered
for the installation may have been inconclusive. The concept of Services
itself was never really even discussed. Yet despite all of these apparent
failings I would say the project was a success. It exists as a model for
a forum which is, I believe, the condition of possibility for the accomplishment
of these other aims. In retrospect I would say that this could only ever
have been its objective goal.
source: http://www.uni-lueneburg.de/fb3/kunst/kunstraum/texte/efraser.html