Whitehot Magazine | art21: Inside the Artists Studio | art21: 5 Questions for Contemporary Practice | Jeffery Skoller: “Do It Yourself Art Action Kit!”

He is NOT his Studio:  Looking at Greg Sholette

By Jon Fine jonfinearts.com

The term ‘Postmodernist’ should not be a dirty word, a description whose mere mention causes many an eye to roll. While its definition can be ambiguous, and stubbornly perplexing in its playful indeterminacy, it is occasionally the best description for a comprehensive body of work. The art of Greg Sholette, on display in his exhibition Selected Projects, is postmodernist, or, perhaps more accurately, ‘post-studio.’ His varied, complex work forcefully engages itself in conversation with the latter-half of twentieth-century critical theory. It conspicuously shrugs off any pretensions to ‘high art’ by synthesizing art practice with social commentary, sweeping past the barricades Modernism once established between art-making and life, injecting considered aesthetics into the quotidian. It denies the privileged autonomy, and subsequently, commoditization, of the ‘art-object’ and ‘author-artist.’ And, most importantly, it dismisses the imposition of a systemized aesthetics. Therefore, Sholette’s works, such as I am NOT my office and the Lower Manhattan Sign Project (executed by the group REPOhistory), are best analyzed through the comprehensive lens of established Postmodernist discourse.

In I am NOT my office, Sholette, like pop artists before him such as Roy Lichtenstein, utilizes the medium of ‘low-art’ at the core of his work. In this particular instance, Sholette crafts ‘action-figurines’ based of the “sub-cultures of amateur art-making,” which include sci-fi and action movies, comic books, website design and home video. I am NOT my office explores the potential relationships between the work of the trained ‘high’ art professional and the informal work of the amateur. Sholette contends that, despite its marginalization, the subcultural ‘dark-matter’ work of the amateur “maintains a symbiotic relationship with the (art) world that is both creative and economic.” “Sub-culture art” therefore exists in a state of semi-autonomy: it is both valid in its own right and as an essential supplement to the development of contemporary art.

Yet, to call I am NOT my office ‘pop’ would be disingenuous; the intrinsic commentary embodied by Sholette’s work moves beyond a simple flattening of the ‘high-low’ art distinction. Despite its revelatory status, pop art still adhered to academic tenets of composition and beauty, all of which was ‘channeled’ through the conduit of the professional artist. Artist and critic Mary Kelly, in her postmodern piece “Re-Viewing Modernist Criticism,” negated the so-called privilege of those artists uniquely ‘qualified’ to produce art deemed significant. She claimed that rigid adherence to any critical principle ignored the time-tested Kantian ideal that “genius is the mental disposition through which nature gives rule to art…no definite rule can be given for the products of genius, hence originality is its first property.” In this context, the media of I am NOT my office theoretically moves beyond the substance of ‘pop’ in its suggestion that so-called amateur art forms and artists, no less than professionals, can be sources of functional creative energy, originality, even genius. I am NOT my office champions unbridled self-expression, and gleefully eschews pop’s reliance on a set of trained aesthetics. It revels in its declaration that there is no monopoly on creative labor.

I am NOT my office also demonstrates an indebtedness to the postmodern ideal of ‘process,’ an idea that strict ‘objecthood’ need not be the sole determinate of a work’s finality. Robert Morris articulated this concept in the text, Notes on Sculpture 4: Beyond Objects, and in his ambitious project, Box with Sound, which included an audio recording of the artist working on the box-structure that would be identified as the “finished” product. Sholette employs a similar strategy, bringing literal art-practice to the forefront of the viewer’s consciousness. At the foundation of I am NOT my office is a questionnaire posed to office workers, asking them to describe ideal super-powers that could aid them in their professional life. From the results of these questionnaires, Sholette envisions and constructs his ‘meta-object’ figurines. These models are not displayed as free-standing, autonomous objects (final pieces); rather, they occupy space alongside comic-like ‘process collages.’ These ‘process collages’ reveal a step-by-step methodology that incorporates the literal text of the questionnaire alongside the pictorial development of its corresponding ‘meta-object.’ Process is emphasized over product, creative labor over ends. The finalized ‘meta-objects’ do not function, or engender meaning, as entities independent from the actual conditions from which they were produced. Instead, they exist, like the physical box in Morris’ Box with Sound, only as the ‘end’ of art-practice, a single element of the piece’s ‘text.’ The result is a work that rejects singular autonomy (as well as singular authorship). I am NOT my office reveals, in an intentionally low-art fashion, the oftentimes confusing and indeterminate segmentations of cooperative multi-tasking and responsibility.

In Sholette’s collaborative, public piece, the Lower Manhattan Sign Project, the artist continues his defiance of academic conventions. Like I am NOT my office, the Lower Manhattan Sign Project denies singular authorship and, subsequently, a fixed place in the history of culture; as a collective effort, it neutralizes the effect of Foucault’s ‘author-function,’ i.e. the categorization and limitation (individualization) of a work’s meaning as relegated by the context of its author. More importantly, however, the project utilizes the ‘textual reading’ of public space in place of a formal exhibition space. Why does this matter?

In essence, art forms are subjected to the mutability of social context and their relationship to other proximate works, or ‘texts’ (i.e. forms of cultural production which produce meaning). Under Modern considerations, as Mary Kelly again explains, the literal, unifying element between these otherwise independent works is the exhibition. The exhibition encompasses individual art-texts within a particular social framework, or context, and, through this ‘inter-textual network,’ produces significant meaning over and above the inherent. Like the Soviet film ideal of ‘intellectual montage’, one piece of art informs the meaning of the work hanging next to it by its sheer juxtaposition; the museum structure, with all of its cultural implications, affects the reading of all the texts it encompasses.

By moving the work outside the museum/exhibition, the area previously proscribed for ‘art-texts,’ Sholette confronts the question offered by Jeffrey Skoller, “In what ways do the meanings of social histories and issues change as they enter into the institutions of culture, from the museum to the university to the streets of a specific community?” In the instance of the Sign Project, the public space becomes the exhibition space and the arena of comparative discourse. Rather than engage other, proximate, literal texts in a discourse regulated by the formal exhibition, the signs organize their meaning in relation to the ‘text’ of the public environment, where a considerable intersection of variable and changing discourses occurs. Significance in the project is therefore not derived from a singular and established relation to other art ‘texts,’ but in its correlation with the surrounding historical, social and cultural ‘text’ of the community. As its surrounding environment changes, so too does its meaning.

Sholette is the feisty, contemporary, post-consumerist embodiment of the old constructivist slogan, “art into life, and life into art,” a Rodchenko for the twenty-first century (sans the socialist optimism). His work denies the prominence of the art-academic, the domineering status of the formal exhibition, and the Modernist maxims of armchair theorists. He subverts the cherished (capitalist) ideal of the self-sufficient art-object, creating socially-charged works whose elements are spatially, materially and pictorially fragmented and heterogeneous, yet textually inseparable. He exalts the amateur art-maker and the citizen participant as fundamental to creative action, artistic and political. And at every step of the way, Sholette resists a fixed identity, his work undercutting the systems of commoditization, celebrity and ownership that have come to dominate and define the still Modernist-dependent art market. Oftentimes playful, occasionally ambiguous and sometimes confusing in its indeterminacy, Sholette’s studio-independent work is (in)definitely postmodernist.

________________________________________

Whitehot Magazine

whitehot | May 2012: In Conversation with Gregory Sholette

Gregory Sholette with Brett Bloom’s 11 Million Person Tower, 2012. Courtesy of the artist and Queens Museum of Art.

 

For his project Fifteen Islands for Robert Moses (currently on view at the Queens Museum of Art), Gregory Sholette asked 15 artists, known for their work in social activism, to come up with an idea for an island that could be added to the panorama of New York City installed at the Queens Museum. The panorama is the largest scale model of a city in the world. It includes every building that exists in the five boroughs. It was commissioned by Robert Moses for the 1964 World’s Fair and took over 100 artists 3 years to build.

Fifteen Islands for Robert Moses includes projects by Hana Shams Ahmed, Brett Bloom, Larry Bogad, Marc Fischer, Aaron Gach/Center for Tactical Magic, Libertad Guerra, Dara Greenwald, Marisa Jahn, Karl Lorac/Themm!, Ann Messner, Ted Purves, Rasha Salti, Dread Scott and Jenny Polak, Jeffrey Skoller, and Nato Thompson. Models of these islands were built by Gregory Sholette and installed in the panorama. On view through May 20, 2012.

Gregory Sholette was a member of Political Art Documentation/Distribution (PAD/D: 1980-1988), and REPOhistory (1989-2000), both artist groups that were once active in organizing politically-inspired shows in New York. He is the author of Dark Matter: Art and Politics in the Age of Enterprise Culture (Pluto Press, 2011), a book that explores the role of the 99% of artists who do not live off sales of their work. He is also a member of The Institute for Wishful Thinking, an artist group started by Greg and Maureen Connor in 2008 with a group of then MFA students,

Patty Harris: Given Robert Moses’ legacy, his domineering, overarching plan for developing New York City and the public resistance to it, why is this show called 15 Islands for Robert Moses?

Gregory Sholette: I wanted to make a reference to the fact that Moses was the one who commissioned the panorama for the 1964 World’s Fair. I wanted to also, in a roundabout way, pay homage to the anonymous model-makers who constructed the original panorama. Thus the title is somewhat tongue-in-cheek, “Fifteen Islands for Robert Moses.

Harris: Why islands?

Sholette: I had a very perverse reason for this. I wanted to ask people who specifically were engaged with, or had written about, social-practice art to then come up with an island because, in my mind an island, or isolated landmass, is a direct metaphor for detachment and exactly the opposite of social engagement. There’s some perversity in that.

Harris: Along those same lines, if the fabric of city life is interdependent and social, what is the correlation between individual desires and how they shape the public experience of the city?

Sholette: They always do shape the fabric of the city. But desire doesn’t necessarily come from individuals; it’s often collectively produced. Part of it is a feedback mechanism between the city as a complex machine that generates pressure on the collective to have certain fantasies and materializations of the urban evironment. It’s also a place where that feedback mechanism can break down and create spaces for interesting, alternative zones of fantasy and possibility. I think one of the things that’s happened since I’ve been in New York since 1977 is that those little gaps and spots and undefined urban places have really closed down and sealed up thanks to the forces of gentrification, deregulation, privatization, and of course constant surveillance. They’ve been welded shut. In going back to the Fifteen Islands project, you might say I was trying to pry open that space and insert a different possible reading of the landscape of the city.

Ted Purves, Sillian Archipelago, 2012. Courtesy of the artist and Queens Museum of Art.

 

Harris: Do you think that the closure of those kinds of spaces of alternative possibilities has had an adverse effect on the social life of the city?

Sholette: I guess it would depend on where you were coming from. If you’re a real estate agent, banker, insurance person, I would say it has not had a negative effect. It’s actually had a beneficial effect to allow for the stabilization of all kinds of things. Crime has been reduced, etc. But it also means everything is much more regular and more typically middle-class. People raise their children here, they can go to school here, they jog in Central Park without worrying about tripping over junkies. All of those details have been beneficial to what we sometimes call FIRE – Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate industries, who dominate the politics of the city. If however you’re coming from a different perspective such as that of an artist, a musician, or perhaps an educator who wants to make people think critically, or are a person who lives in a part of the city that’s being gentrified, or someone who does community work for any number of constituencies at the small end of the political spectrum, those people looking at that situation might say no. The social life of the city is no longer as open to the idea of the commons. It’s actually been quite detrimental having these zones of possibility, fantasy, and even let’s call it resistance, closed down and sealed up.

Harris: There seems to be an element of utopia in this project. Do you think that individual ideas of utopia could combine to create a greater social experience for everyone?

Sholette: I’d like to think that that’s possible. I think that kind of speaks to what has been going on since the beginning of Arab Spring. As far back as the Green Revolution in Iran and then more recently in Tahrir Square in Egypt, and in Tunisia, and the resistance to Scott in Wisconsin, and up to Occupy Wall Street, I think that all of these have some of what you’re talking about. They tend to be individuated movements towards a kind of different future or possibility or utopian moment rather than being merged into one big idea of utopia. They retain individuality but are combined spatially rather than ideologically. I say this because it contrasts with early 20th Century Modernist ideas of utopian thinking in which you had to subscribe to a regime that called itself utopia. If you deviated too much, you really weren’t part of it. Here the deviation seems to be part of the moment. I think that’s quite interesting and quite unique. And perhaps some of that “diversity within unity” is also expressed by my project Fifteen Islands.

Harris: Do you think there is a fascination with a world in miniature in itself?

Sholette: It was Claude Leví-Strauss, the anthropologost, who said that he believed that miniaturization was at the very heart of all aesthetics. He made the point that when you look at a monument, you think at first, ‘Oh, it’s huge.’ Actually, in a sense, it is a kind of miniature version of some far grander thing like a boulder or entire mountain. I think it’s an interesting take.

Harris: How is this project related to your recent book, Dark Matter?

Sholette: It’s an interesting question. It does actually relate in several ways. The most important way for me is the kind of artistic practice that I think it represents is fairly off the radar screen of the mainstream artworld. It’s not really considered art. We’re now talking about the many unknown and invisible people who produce things like the panorama which is a professionally fabricated miniature model, perhaps the largest in the world, but it is nevertheless much closer to the kind of amateur diorama builder or scale-train enthusiast than it is to the world of painting and sculpture. I got my start after art school making a living in a model-making shop. I also ran a model-making shop for awhile in the Gowanus area. So the project draws on that set of skills but also my experience of working in an “artistic” mode located outside the parameters of “fine art.” More importantly there is also an enormous number of people in the world who do this kind of work purely for the love of creating miniature worlds. Sometimes the work they do is so profoundly skilled and interesting that it would stand up very well next to most of the things that you see in contemporary art galleries. That pretty much illustrates a part of my thesis which states that there is an enormous amount of creativity that takes place that the art world simply does not and cannot acknowledge. To acknowledge it would undermine its own privileged concept of artistic “value.” So you might say the model-making is an homage to this dark matter amateur productivity.

Rasha Salti, Palestine as Metaphor, 2012. Courtesy of the artist and Queens Museum of Art.

 

Harris: How is this project related to your work with The Institute for Wishful Thinking?

Sholette: Sure there is some relationship in so far as The Institute for Wishful Thinking asks people “What would you like?”, and “Can we fulfill your desires?” But Fifteen Islands really relates back more specifically to a project I did in 2005, or a little earlier, called I Am Not My Office. At the time there was an ad campaign by Microsoft saying, “I am my office,” with very hip looking young people. This was the catch line. The idea being that with Microsoft technology you can become a virtual office. I borrowed it and added ‘not.’ I asked a series of questions to a group of people some of whom were artists, others art historians, and some office workers with no art world connection. My question was this: If you could have any sort of superpower or prosthetic extension, that would allow you to fantasize while you’re at work about the things you really want to do, what would it be? Then I selected some of the answers and I fabricated models, kind of like action figures, and then exhibited this as an installation for the Smart Museum in Chicago. That’s really the origin of the concept behind Fifteen Islands for Robert Moses.

Harris: What do you think Robert Moses would think of your project?

Sholette: Not knowing his personality, I think he would ironically find it amusing. I’m guessing. Maybe a couple of pieces would hopefully rub him the wrong way politically. For example he might object to the “model” of an imaginary independent Palestine as envisioned by Rasha Salti in the form of speeding subway cars — both utopian and lonely at the same time — or Larry Bogad’s idea of Dunkin’ Island where bankers are publicly “waterboarded.” Because the works range from very humorous, frivolous and playful to more serious. Only if the islands were seriously considered for construction would he then probably find it quite impossible and upsetting. But of course, his master plan of New York City was once just a fantasy as well, so who knows?

Larry Bogad, Dunkin’ Island, 2012. Courtesy of the artist and Queens Museum of Art.

 

Patty Harris lives and works in Brookyn, New York.She has been showing in New York since the mid 80s, as well as internationally. Recent shows include Exit Art and PS122. She has written for various downtown publications.

________________________________________

art:21

Inside the Artist’s Studio | Gregory Sholette

May 27th, 2011

by Georgia Kotretsos

Gregory Sholette is a New York-based artist, writer, and founding member of Political Art Documentation/Distribution (PAD/D: 1980-1988), and REPOhistory (1989-2000). A graduate of The Cooper Union (BFA 1979), The University of California, San Diego (MFA 1995), and the Whitney Independent Studies Program in Critical Theory, his recent publications include Dark Matter: Art and Politics in an Age of Enterprise Culture (Pluto Press, 2011); Collectivism After Modernism: The Art of Social Imagination after 1945 (with Blake Stimson for University of Minnesota, 2007); and The Interventionists: A Users Manual for the Creative Disruption of Everyday Life (with Nato Thompson for MassMoCA/MIT Press, 2004, 2006, 2008), as well as a special issue of the journal Third Text, co-edited with theorist Gene Ray on the theme “Whither Tactical Media.”

Sholette recently completed the installation Mole Light: God Is Truth, Light His Shadow for Plato’s Cave, Brooklyn, New York, and the collaborative project, Imaginary Archive, at Enjoy Public Art Gallery in Wellington, New Zealand.

Sholette is Assistant Professor of Sculpture at Queens College, City University of New York (CUNY), a visiting faculty member at Harvard University, and teaches an annual seminar in theory and social practice for the CCC post-graduate research program at Geneva University of Art and Design.

Gregory Sholette speaks about “God Is Truth and Light His Shadow” at Plato’s Cave, NY, 2010

Being familiar with the angle of Sholette’s work, I picked up Dark Matter and read the Preface and Acknowledgments. Yet before I was done with page 1, I got up to sharpen a pencil. You want to give this book the appropriate attention; it will alert your conscious while enlightening you on the structure of our creative universe. Dark Matter is a metaphor for “amateur, informal, unofficial, autonomous, activist, non-institutional, self-organized practices – all work made and circulated in the shadows of the formal art world, some of which might be said to emulate cultural dark matter by rejecting art world demands of visibility, and much of which has no choice but to be invisible,” in Sholette’s words. The mechanics, tactics, and power of art activism and politicized practices are unveiled with direct references, drawing out the behind-the-scenes of the art world within today’s economic landscape.

It’s an honor to present Gregory Sholette to you today. Sharpen a pencil and pick up Dark Matter.

Georgia Kotretsos: Currently you’re involved with the self-declared artists-in-residence for the US government, the Institute for Wishful Thinking (IWT), which believes that the community of artists and designers possesses untapped creative and conceptual resources that could be applied to solving social problems. Please, tell us about your contribution specifically to this project and your latest work.

Gregory Sholette: In 2008, the noted Hungarian curator Dora Hegyi was seeking work for the 8^th Periferic art biennial in Iasi (pronounced “Yash”), Romania, that she was organizing around the theme of “Art as Gift.” Because of my writings on gift economies and informal art, she contacted me. I made her some homemade pizza. I told her about the book I was working on that would focus on the political economy of art, especially that vast amount of invisible labor and imagination that the art world is secretly dependent upon (more on this below). The next day, I contacted the artist Maureen Connor, who is my colleague at Queens College and within no time, Maureen proposed the IWT: an ersatz institute whose primary aim is to provide gifts – useful, secret, or fantastic gifts – directly to those invisible souls who labor behind the screen that separates the public exhibition from its managerial apparatus. Who are these people? Typically, they are young, recently graduated, or out of work artists, art historians, educators, and cultural administrators. And if we think of the screen or curtain as the legendary fourth wall in the theater, except that here it is a white-on-white sheetrock wall, then we are not supposed to notice that behind this partition lurks a shadowy species of creative dark matter. At one meeting, we compared this other realm to the Freudian libido and wondered what kind of fantasies of generosity it would call out for. In Iasi, our attempted emancipation led to unexpected outcomes, but first let me tell you a bit more about IWT.

In many ways, the IWT concept sprang naturally from the mutual interest both Maureen Connor and I share in what might be called the imaginative disruption of everyday life by both artists as well as non-artists. For example, Maureen’s earlier project, Personnel, investigated the “attitudes, needs, and desires” of office staff where she was invited to create an artwork. One manifestation of Personnel transformed the so-called “personal” space of cubicle workers into a boudoir, and another into a campsite. IWT also resonates with my work, in particular the 2002 installation I am NOT my Office, in which workaday fantasies from the practical – I want multitasking centipede limbs or arms like Shiva – to the maniacal – a flying ear that gathers information on office politics – [are rendered] into a series of drawings and “action figures.”

But the real evolution of IWT began when we invited several talented MFA students from Queens College to join us and brainstorm about how to satisfy the fantasies of people we had never met on the far eastern side of Romania. The upshot was to create a website where the Periferic 8 biennial staff could log on and type in the kind of gift they wanted us to fulfill. And there were three categories of potential gifts: 1) a practical gift, 2) a fantastic gift, and 3) a secret gift. Ultimately we brought as many fulfilled desires as we could transport to Iasi including: a modest library of books on art and theory; some photographic materials that were difficult to get in Romania; several felt sleep masks stitched together by agent Kirby as a kind of substitute for a work by Joseph Beuys that the Periferic organizers could not afford to borrow for display; an onsite gift of labor performed by agent Mahler that involved spackling and prepping exhibition walls; a song written and performed by agent Rubin which was gifted to a Periferic staff member who was secretly in love with someone; and finally a stuffed “Kermit.” But for a year, this gift request remained a puzzle to us. On the website someone from Iasi secretly asked for a Kermit. But what did it mean? Was Kermit Romanian slang perhaps? Or was it a reference to a certain green television character as we immediately assumed? Did people in the “Eastern Bloc” actually grow up watching Sesame Street? Since it was a “secret” request, we did not have the option of asking more. Instead, we collectively decided that fulfilling certain gifts gave us license to be imaginative, even a bit subversive. In response to the Kermit request, agent De Felice stitched together a batrachian sock puppet, carried it with her to Iasi for the opening, and after walking around the exhibition for about an hour, a Periferic staffer finally came over, accepted the gift, publicly embracing her desire a secret no longer.

To be fair, we also encountered a degree of skepticism from some of the artists in Romania. And not all of it was unjustified, at least on the surface. I do think in retrospect the idea of bringing “gifts” from the wealthy United States to the struggling economy of a former socialist nation seemed a bit cheeky. This was an insight we needed to have more discussion around, as agent Pavlou thoughtfully suggested at a later meeting. At the same time, few in Romania probably realized just how precarious our living circumstances are sometimes in a place like New York City, especially for recently graduated MFA students, like most of the members of IWT. Anyway, [here is a link] for more on this first IWT project in Iasi.

IWT produced its most recent project, entitled Artists in Residence for the US Government (self-declared) for Momenta Art, a not-for-profit space located in Brooklyn. The mission of this project was to “increase understanding of the art making process and how it can contribute to society as well as encourage policy makers and the general public to think of artists as potential partners in a variety of circumstances.” I suppose you could say that at a moment when actual governmental and social infrastructure has been decimated after thirty years of privatization, deregulation, and economic contraction at the public level, the IWT seeks to make transparent one of the last remaining sources of untapped collective value: the social imagination of those thousands upon thousands of academically trained artists and art students who constitute an invisible army of precarious, over-educated surplus laborers. Like a redundant missing mass, this shadowy creativity is brimming with the possibility of either radical change or precipitous regression. This ambiguity seems especially striking today in the icy grip of the aptly named “jobless recovery.” I will discuss this vibrant dark matter more below, but for now you asked me about my role in this latest project, Georgia, so let me finish here by saying that along with brainstorming ideas with IWT and helping with the physical installation at Momenta, I also introduced our group to THEMM.US, a hitherto unknown collective entity. And although politically unpolished and a bit ribald, their odd little sculptures and experimental thrash songs “for government agencies” were featured on one wall of the exhibition. Funny thing is I am even thinking about collaborating with them on some upcoming project.

The mission of the IWT is ongoing and we encourage new proposals (via our website) that we hope, wishfully as well as concretely, will develop into a new model of support for artists in which they are paid to consult with policymakers and elected officials.

Along with Maureen and myself, The Institute for Wishful Thinking consists of the artists (who are also Queens College graduates): Susan Kirby, Nathania Rubin, Andrea DeFelice, Matt Mahler, John Pavlou, Bibi Calderaro, and Tommy Mintz.

GK: Studying your case, I realized that you do not simply have a studio practice but you rather have an art life which consists of educating young minds, being a practicing artist, a writer, an administrator, an organizer, an initiator, a participator, an activist, and a thinker who looks forward, produces ideas, and generates knowledge. The North Pole is taken, so where do you and your elves operate from?

GS: I am my own “elf.” That is why I often work small, turning out only a few art projects a year. But you want to know what Geppetto’s little red workshop actually consist of? It’s a 5×12 extra room in my Inwood apartment, plus my MacBook Pro loaded with Photoshop. Seriously, I am not opposed to outsourcing the fabrication of artwork when its necessary, but I like making things myself, it’s a powerful anecdote to my research and critical writing, even though one is a direct extension of the other (at least to my mind). I have had assistance with a few projects however, and extensively so with my twin websites including from Andrea De Felice mentioned above, as well as Yue Zhang, William Thompson Harris, and the multi-talented Matthew Greco.

GK: If we were to visualize a pyramid where its tip is occupied by mainstream successful artists, does this mean that what’s right beneath the tip could all be dark matter? Do activists, struggling and failed artists, hobbyists, and amateurs all fall under one homogeneous enormous category or since art activism has continued to earn art historical ground, it’d be best to place it between mainstream artists and everybody else left in the art world?

GS: Thanks Georgia, this is a crucial question and I hope it is acceptable to ask people to read my new book, Dark Matter: Art and Politics in the Age of Enterprise Culture (Pluto Press, 2011), rather than only download my older essays about dark matter from the Internet. Of course I am plugging my own little capitalist endeavor here, but also significantly, the concept of dark matter or missing mass has evolved over the last ten years. Now when I use the term dark matter, it is meant to invoke two different registers at the same time: one abstract, the other very much concrete. But then thinking in contradictions is something I have learned above all from being an artist.

Dark matter is merely a metaphor, the best I could find, for describing something that has an effect on the mainstream cultural world, but is largely unseen by it. First, think of the art world as an economy with both symbolic and material dimensions. Within this economy, dark matter is both present and absent, detectable at one level, but lacking its own discourse, and therefore all but unnameable. However, (and here comes the contradictory bit), dark matter also describes something concrete, something that has measurable reality, something like the way an offsite archive of key documents adjudicates meaning from afar. So yes, you’re correct: this “missing matter” does includes the various informal activities you mention like amateur and hobby crafts and so forth. But it also incorporates what art historian Carol Duncan once described as the glut of artists who never reach visibility. This, Duncan insisted, was the “natural” condition of the art world. What I hope my research and writing begin to do is to intervene in this so-called natural economy by unsettling and possibly re-politicizing the realm of cultural production itself. Ok, that is grandiose. But what I am trying to get at is that like almost everything else today, art is the outcome of social production. And this fact is diametrically opposed to art’s mythology that revolves around the isolated artistic genius working alone in her studio. Most of us know this is a fallacy. Still, we allow the economy of the art world to divvy up this socially produced wealth like so much “real estate,” as if only a handful of gentry grew above an ever-shrinking commons. Whether this other collective productivity is visible or is hidden, or slides in between both those states of light and darkness, is less the point than to recognize that dark matter production runs through all of these institutions and discourses like a multitude of veins in a piece of marble. That is why the image of the pyramid is less useful or accurate for fully describing art’s political economy (even though admittedly, the towering needle with its broad base or long tail is still a powerful and intuitive representation of the unequal recognition most artists feel as they contemplate the mainstream cultural landscape and their assigned place within it). Therefore even before one begins to speak about “political art,” or “interventionism,” or “relational,” or “dialogical,” or “participatory,” or “philistine” aesthetics (to cite respectively: Lucy R. Lippard, Nato Thompson, Nicolas Bourriard, Grant Kester, Claire Bishop, or John Roberts and Dave Beech), one must first understand there is a political struggle at the level of production. Or as Zizek quipped, “It’s the political economy stupid!”

GK: What are your thoughts on the transition of dark matter from the streets, the web, and the wider periphery to the museum, the podium, and the establishment?

GS: In terms of the apparent recognition of a certain previously unacknowledged informal art, well, it’s just not the case that street art and home crafts have never been part of the art world. I would argue that such practices have always been not only present, but also influential on artists, but simply not named as such. What has happened in recent years is [that] this shadowy archive of heterogeneous messy sentimental everyday imagination is becoming inextricably more visible. For example, look at the incredible art world success of the Young British Artists in the 1990s. One can clearly see the YBAs directly borrowed from this realm of informal, vulgar, and street aesthetics, as if secretly recognizing that [this] invisible mass was on the rise. However, their response was to snip bits of dark matter off, incorporate this into their art, and tack it to the walls of the white cube. Over a decade later, with greater advances in bandwidth and Internet technology, but also an ever-increasing number of people claiming to be artists (see Chapter 5 of Dark Matter: “Glut, Overproduction, Redundancy!”), this other social production is more and more simply representing itself! I suspect we are on the verge of a kind of P2P art world that will run parallel to that of the one familiar to us now. Will this be a significant advance, politically speaking? Will the structural disequilibrium of culture be overturned and redistributed more equitably? In other words, will art world real estate – its assets and symbolic power — be transformed back into something of a commons (though I doubt it ever was that)? These are the critical questions my book seeks in the end to raise with regard to so-called dark matter. And all the while, I am very cautious. Cautious about the mainstream museums and art collectors who are interested in street art, cautious about the way certain corporate interests are salivating over the rise of consumers who produce their own creative content, aka Prosumers, and cautious about the new interest in “social practice” art. Recalling the way “political art” in the United States became a fleeting fashion in the art world of the late 1980s and early 1990s, my antennas of apprehensiveness are twitching madly these days. Let me just cite one quote from Wired magazine that I use at a crucial juncture in my new book:

Previous industrial ages were built on the backs of individuals, too, but in those days, labor was just that: labor. Workers were paid for their time, whether on a factory floor or in a cubicle. Today’s peer-production machine runs in a mostly nonmonetary economy. The currency is reputation, expression, karma, “whuffie,” or simply whim.

— Chris Anderson, editor of magazine Wired, “People Power Blogs, user reviews, photo-sharing—the peer production era has arrived,” Wired, July 2006.

What is invigorating therefore about this explosion of the shadow archive is that it is filled with potentially positive elements and processes like gift economies and P2P productivity. What is not good is that it is already being selectively filtered for incorporation into the values structure of capital. That is one place where a political struggle must be waged. But what is equally or perhaps even more of a concern in the short run is that what I am calling dark matter is also permeated with reactionary, regressive elements. The Tea Party or the Minutemen militias are but two examples. And no doubt there are versions of these anti-democratic tendencies even within our own artistic ranks.

GK: Asking you all the way from Greece, what does economic crisis produce? What have we learned from the past?

Syntagma Square, Athens, Greece, May 25th 2011: Taking the lead from Spain, thousands of people gathered at Syntagma square on Wednesday to protest against austerity measures, responding to a grassroots Facebook campaign. The crowd sings the Greek National Anthem.

GS: For us as artists and cultural workers, it comes down to developing a viable, democratic, counter-narrative that, bit-by-bit, gains descriptive power within the larger public discourse. That said, we first must begin here with us artists, and what we do, and how we create by gaining an understanding of the potential transformative power of this missing creative mass that we are talking about and that we also embody. We need to ask how to use this vibrant inert mass to intervene within the political economy of culture understood as an everyday form of production.

And that’s a wrap!

________________________________________

Artist, scholar, organizer, and professor, Gregory Sholette embodies multiple ways that artists can interrogate history, politics, and public discourse. Through his initial work with the group REPOhistory (1989-2000) (as in, “repossessing history”), he, along with other art groups and individuals of the 80s and early 90s, effectively drew attention to the artist as a social and political actor. Sholette’s collaborations with REPOhistory also presented art works as vehicles for addressing submerged socio-political histories, such as in the group’s Lower Manhattan Sign Project (1992-1993), in which they posted signs around Manhattan offering information about “the unknown or forgotten history of Manhattan below Chambers Street.” Sholette has also been an active participant in PAD/D (Political Art Documentation and Distribution [1980-1986]), an organization devoted to the publication and distribution of documents regarding the intersection of aesthetic politics and activism. Most recently Sholette has founded an archive for futures that “never happened” (The Imaginary Archive, 2010-present), and has been involved with The Institute for Wishful Thinking, an organization that attempts to harness the “untapped” potential of artists by soliciting proposals for projects which might effect governmental and social change.

Despite Sholette’s robust participation with other artists and activists and his tendency to only exhibit his own work in group shows, the works and projects he has produced independently of collaboration feedback vitally into a more collective practice (something he discusses at length below and in a previous “Inside the Artist’s Studio” feature). Meeting Sholette in person, I was struck by his interest in subjects ranging from the popular to the occult and counter-cultural. Sholette’s range of interests are brought to a focus in the book Dark Matter: Art and Politics in the Age of Enterprise Culture, in which he considers artworks that have fallen through the cracks of official art-historical discourse. Such works offer sites of (potential) resistance and autonomy inasmuch as they are not perceived as “art” proper and so remain liminal to the expropriative tendencies of cultural capital. Works by the “outside” artist, the craft artist, the hobbyist, the amateur, and the self-critical “drop-out” appear throughout Sholette’s book, offering examples, if not models, of what art can do guided by different values and habits.

After the work of the film-essayist Chris Marker or the literary theorist Walter Benjamin (two professed heroes of the artist), Sholette turns his attention to the abandoned and unattended, cultural products so prosaic that they would seem neither worthy of our critical attention, nor our powers of reappropriation. The stuff ripe for re-use in Sholette’s work one would hardly call “redemptive,” and yet something is redeemed through the artist’s taking them up—a potential to make legible things just below the attention, what becomes “dark matter” because the culture at large just doesn’t know where to put it. Through the use of action figures in particular, a preferred format of hobbyists, he addresses problems ranging from post-Fordist labor practices (i am NOT my office, 2002-2004) to representations of Italian Fascism (Deconstructing Mussolini, 2007) and the exploitation of child workers (Little Workers Collectibles).

Sholette’s dirty messianic approach also comes across in his appropriation of dioramas, window and museum displays, and souvenirs. Playing upon our familiarity with these 19^th century formats, Sholette moves fluidly between sentimentality and criticality, ironic abandon and the recognition that, as Walter Benjamin famously wrote (and Sholette quotes through a particular work of his citing the relationship between John D. Rockefeller’s founding of the New York MoMA and management of his public image after a mining disaster): “There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.” Moving within the flicker of “civilization” and “barbarism,” Sholette tells history slant, through the eyes of the losers, the unrecognized (and unrecognizeable), citing the places where anomalies and antagonisms crucial to history’s retelling “flash-up.”

Oriented by the Cold War era (as he recognizes below), Sholette’s analysis of barbarism and civilization deconstructs American exceptionalism in the post-war period, particularly the ways that American art and the management of its geopolitical interests intersect. In his video Return of the Atomic Ghosts (2005), for example, Sholette spoofs extraterrestrial cover-up documentaries in order to reveal another cover-up of the previous half-century: the US government’s involvement in countless foreign coups, assassinations, and occupations.

In his bas relief, Men Making History/Making War, Sholette draws attention to the US government’s use of Jackson Pollock and other Abstract Expressionists to wage culture war against Soviet communism. In yet another work, Preparing for War (1983), exhibited at the Brooklyn Naval Terminal just before the US invasion of Grenada, he questions links between avant-garde Modernist art and the causes and repercussions of World War I, reproducing works by Duchamp, Picasso, Brancusi, and others from the period preceding the “great war.” Preparing for War reflects on the connections between war, nation building, and avant-gardism (a military term before it was used to describe certain art attitudes and practices). In another work, Express Yourself (1993), Sholette bronzes his American Express card, placing it among other bronze reproductions of well-known Expressionist art works. The message is clear: art is no longer the privileged site of self-expression (if it ever was) during a cultural moment in which buying power and creative potential (expression) are equated.

Buffering the seriousness of his political and social commitments, and his unflinching belief that art can intervene effectively in public discourse (if only through its counter-cultural potential), is a sense of the weird and wondrous, a commons of the odd. One gets this sense from a recent photo-installation work, Mole Light: God is truth and light his shadow (2010), wherein one views a series of cartoon eyes accompanied by thought balloon with quotations from Plato, Marx, Courbet, Glenn Beck, Snow White’s Grumpy, and others. In another work, appropriating the format of 50s television and radio commercials, Sholette provides a “recipe” for real estate futures (Cooking Up Real Estate Futures for Lower Manhattan, 2006). Heating up a track of land in Iraq through continuous missile fire, one need only cut out the piece of land and transplant it to Manhattan. Few artists I know strike so boldly and lovingly at the heart of the American project, creating sites where the American obsession with novelty and consumerism can collide with its geopolitical realities.

1. What is your background as an artist and how does this background inform and motivate your practice?

Post-war America filled art schools with optimistic young artists like me: born in the middle of last Century from white, working class (but also home-owning) parents and taking seriously John F. Kennedy’s claim that the artists was “the last champion of the individual mind and sensibility against an intrusive society” [from a speech by President John F. Kennedy given at Amherst College on October 26, 1963]. I imagined a future in which labor and pleasure converged. Then came the political and economic trauma of the late 1970s and early 1980 –the years I really began to come of age while moving to New York City from Philadelphia– which was not so much an end to that spirit of hopefulness, as much as it was a re-grounding of expectations within an oppositional space out on the far periphery of the art world.

2. Do you feel there a need for the work that you are doing given the larger field of visual art and the ways that aesthetic practices may be able to shape public space, civic responsibility, and political action? Why or why not?

Work is a necessity. It defines us. I do not mean employment defines us, or your job defines us, or even “productive” work defines us (whatever that may be today). Rather simply the activity of being in the world requires us to exert a material force within it and sometimes against it (just as it in turn pushes against us). This definition of work of course includes both physical as well as mental capacity, and it could also mean refusing to be productive like the character Bartleby the Scrivener in Melville’s classic tale. Why? Because refusing to be productive is also a kind of activity that requires working at not working if you like. The young Marx put it most succinctly when he wrote that a human being only really works in the fullest sense of that word when free from the bridal of necessity. Being chained to the needs of the market economy is therefore the opposite of freedom.

This is where culture comes in. In the minds of most people the artist is the epitome of non-productive work. More than that, the artist also represents a kind of non-socialized work. She stands apart from the communal coil, traveling her own road, and that means the artist exists at the exact point of friction where the autonomous individual and the collective social need collide. At least this is the common character of the “artist”: a slightly or seriously anti-social human being. Most likely this sentiment leads to the always-present anxiety so many people (including those in the art world) express towards art that is produced collaboratively or collectively. My artistic labor consciously engages such acts of collaboration and collectivity. They become central to my production as an artist, and in fairness as a writer and teacher. I think some of these concerns are thrashed out in my new book Dark Matter: Art and Politics in the Age of Enterprise Culture (Pluto Press, 2011). But does that mean any of this work is politically responsible or socially necessary?

While that is a fair question, Thom, I think it tends to collapse the contradictions mentioned above, contradictions between work and non-work, individual and social that are inherent to cultural production. Maybe a different question to ask is what necessary role does the non-social, and the concretely material play within the emerging arena of community art and social practice art? To put it differently: how does one learn to embrace not only an agency that is socially generated, often the easy part of a project, but also the active or inert resistance of a specific urban space or history or historical archive? This material resistance sometimes can be constructive, giving us something to push against. At other times it can stand in stolid opposition to our intentions, no matter how good they appear to be. It is a question that I think needs to be addressed right now especially as these civically-inspired artistic practices gain purchase within the worlds of contemporary art and academia. (Neither are these contradictions absent from my own “work.”)

3. Are there other projects, people, and/or things that have inspired your work? Please describe.

• Moby Dick
• Wikileaks
• The poetry of Bertolt Brecht
• Chris Marker’s films Sans soleil and La jetée
• The dioramas at the American Museum of Natural History
• Martha Rosler’s videos, essays, and pedagogical texts
• Andrew Heminway’s treatise Artists on the Left
• Coleoptera (which make up 25% of all known life forms)
• J.P. Gorin’s docu-fictional cinema such as Routine Pleasures
• Weird new groups like themm.us
• Carol Duncan’s scholarship on museum semiotics
• Hans Haacke’s installations, public works, and critical research methodologies
• The Communist Manifesto

4. What have been your favorite projects to work on and why?

Certainly I am most proud of the work I did with REPOhistory in the 1990s, but especially the project CIRCULATION, whose concept I conceived of in 1995 and which the group realized in 2000. I am also very pleased with Mole Light: God is truth and light his shadow (2010), a site-specific installation I made for the unique exhibition space Plato’s Cave in Brooklyn.

Perhaps my all time favorite art “work” from the years past is Insurrection (1984) – a long, horizontal wall piece made with wax, latex, wood, plastic, paper, and a silkscreened text that measured 36″ x 106″ x 8″ inches. Insurrection was based on the writings of Ephram Squire who in 1849 was the Charge d’affaires for Central America under President Polk. The text describes Squire’s view that the non-white peoples and strange zoology of the region (now known as Nicaragua). He goes on to state that this odd flora and fauna will inevitably be superseded by the northern, animal and plant life (and its people will be supplanted by the “white race”). “Deus Vult – it is the will of god” he proclaims in the 19th Century language of Manifest Destiny. But in my piece, his words are gradually engulfed by a mat of foliage and flowers recreated using techniques I learned from a friend – Michael Anderson — an artist and exhibition technician who once worked on the dioramas at the American Museum of Natural History. The piece was made with assistance from Anderson and was exhibited as part of the Artists Call Against US Intervention in Central American in 1984

5. What projects would you like to work on in the future? In what directions do you imagine taking your work?

Right now, I am working on several new installations that combine conceptual and sculptural elements that grow out of and feed into my research on “Dark Matter.” All will be realized in collaboration with people I both like and admire:

Imaginary Archive is a collection of both real and fictional documents describing a future whose past did not exist (or a past whose present does not exist). The work takes the form of booklets, newspapers, small constructions, posters, some of which I created and others produced by a group of invited artists. Its first version was installed last June at Enjoy Public Art Gallery in Wellington, New Zealand (2010), and Imaginary Archive will continue as a second chapter this November at Gallery 126 in Galway, Ireland for the Tulca Arts Festival (2011).

The other project I am working on is Islands. It will open in February 2012 and is being made for the massive panorama of New York City at the Queens Museum of Art. Once again, this project will involve a group of collaborators, however this time I am interpreting their ideas, not asking them to make things. About ten people known for their critical writings about social practice art are being asked to imagine an island that appears unexpectedly off the shoals of New York City right after the ten-year anniversary of the 911 attacks. What kid of solitary land mass does someone concerned with social and political art envision? Will it be a communal space or more diffident, even private? I will be fabricating these visionary, scale-model islands and then have my collaborators pose with them before adding the islands (temporarily) to the QMA panorama.

Finally, I will also contribute to Temporary Services project for Creative Time’s Living As Form at the Essex Street Market in Manhattan in the Fall.

________________________________________

Click here to download the full essay in pdf format.

________________________________________