What We Want Is Free, Second Edition , livre ebook

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219 pages

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This revised edition of What We Want Is Free examines a twenty-year history of artistic productions that both model and occupy the various forms of exchange within contemporary society. From shops, gifts, and dinner parties to contract labor and petty theft, contemporary artists have used a variety of methods that both connect participants to tangible goods and services and, at the same time, offer critiques of and alternatives to global capitalism and other forms of social interaction. Examples of these various projects include the creation of free commuter bus lines and medicinal plant gardens, the distribution of such services as free housework or computer programming, and the production of community media projects such as free commuter newspapers and democratic low-wattage radio stations.

Like the first edition, the second edition includes a detailed survey of artists' projects from around the globe, as well as critical essays and artists' texts that explore the underlying social history and contemporary issues that further inform our reading of these works. This new edition also features a new introduction and additional chapters on the relation of exchange practices to democracy, the commons, object-oriented philosophy, and an examination of the impact of ongoing globalization on the economics of artists' projects. It also features a significantly expanded scope for the project histories, including work from the past decade and a new section dedicated to artist-initiated organizations and innovative models for new institutions.

Candies in Endless Supply: From Generosity to Critical Exchange
Ted Purves

No Longer Normal: The Landscape of Critical Exchange
Ted Purves and Shane Aslan Selzer

I. From Markets to Lobbies: Consideration of Objects, Exchanges, and Value

Sure, everyone might be an artist… but only one artist gets to be the guy who says that everyone else is an artist
Bill Arning

Exchange—The “Other” Social Sculpture
Francis McIlveen

Lunch Hour: Art, Community, Administrated Space and Unproductive Activity
Kate Fowle and Lars Bang Larsen

Blows Against the Empire
Ted Purves

How Do You Pin a Wave Upon the Sand?: An Interview with Cesare Pietroiusti
Shane Aslan Selzer

The Object of Exchange
Matthew Rana

How Free is Free? Property, Markets, and the Aestheics(s) of the Common(s)
Ignacio Valero

II. The Handbook for Critical Exchanges in Recent Art

Part One: Artists’ Projects

Introductory Remarks
Ted Purves

Project Histories
Edited by Ted Purves and Shane Aslan Selzer, with Jacob Wick

Part Two: Structures and Institutions

Introductory Remarks
Shane Aslan Selzer

Overviews of Institutions and Structures
Edited by Ted Purves and Shane Aslan Selzer, with Jacob Wick

Part Three: Coda, or what remains

Thing—City—Story: Trajectories of Urban Ephermera
Elyse Mallouk

III. Actors and Audiences: Generosity and Social Aesthetics in Praxis

The Arts, Generosity, and Politics
Peter Coyote

Four Projects
Jörgen Svensson

Reciprocal Generosity
Mary Jane Jacob

A Given
Ben Kinmont

A Call for Sociality
Jeanne van Heeswijk

Contributors
Index

Sujets

Película fotográfica

History of art

Visual culture

Conceptualism

Film

Informations

Publié par	State University of New York Press
Date de parution	01 juillet 2014
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781438453156
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,1698€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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what we want is free
what we want is free
CRITICAL EXCHANGES IN RECENT ART
SECOND EDITION
EDITED BY TED PURVES AND SHANE ASLAN SELZER

STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK PRESS
Original cover concept by Nancy Nowacek, © 2013
Unless noted, all images appear courtesy of the artists
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2014 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu
Production by Jenn Bennett Marketing by Kate McDonnell
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
What we want is free : critical exchanges in recent art / edited by Ted Purves and Shane Aslan Selzer. — Second Edition.
pages cm Revised and expanded edition of What we want is free: generosity and exchange in recent art. 2005. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4384-5313-2 (hardcover : alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-4384-5314-9 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Generosity in art. 2. Social exchange. 3. Interactive art. 4. Artists and community. I. Purves, Ted, 1964– II. Selzer, Shane Aslan, 1977– N8217.G43W48 2014 306.4 7—dc23
2013044074
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Candies in Endless Supply: From Generosity to Critical Exchange
Ted Purves
No Longer Normal: Critical Exchanges in the Landscape of Art
Ted Purves and Shane Aslan Selzer
I. From Markets to Lobbies CONSIDERATIONS OF OBJECTS, EXCHANGES, AND VALUE
Sure, everyone might be an artist … but only one artist gets to be the guy who says that everyone else is an artist
Bill Arning
Exchange—The “Other” Social Sculpture
Francis McIlveen
Lunch Hour: Art, Community, Administrated Space and Unproductive Activity
Kate Fowle and Lars Bang Larsen
Blows Against the Empire
Ted Purves
How Do You Pin a Wave Upon the Sand?: An Interview with Cesare Pietroiusti
Shane Aslan Selzer
The Object of Exchange
Matthew Rana
How Free Is Free?: Property, Markets, and the Aesthetic(s) of the Common(s)
Ignacio Valero
II. The Handbook for Critical Exchanges in Recent Art
Part One: Artists’ Projects
Introductory Remarks
Ted Purves
Project Histories
Edited by Ted Purves and Shane Aslan Selzer, with Jacob Wick
Part Two: Structures and Institutions
Introductory Remarks
Shane Aslan Selzer
Overviews of Institutions and Structures
Edited by Ted Purves and Shane Aslan Selzer, with Jacob Wick
Part Three: Coda, or What Remains
Thing—City—Story: Trajectories of Urban Ephemera
Elyse Mallouk
III. Actors and Audiences GENEROSITY AND SOCIAL AESTHETICS IN PRAXIS
The Arts, Generosity, and Politics
Peter Coyote
Four Projects
Jörgen Svensson
Reciprocal Generosity
Mary Jane Jacob
A Given
Ben Kinmont
A Call for Sociality
Jeanne van Heeswijk
Contributors
Index
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The second edition of this book feels like a continuing conversation among friends. We are deeply grateful to all of the artists, curators, and writers involved in the first book who set in motion a conversation that we are still deeply engaged with. The research for the second book began with a call for recommendations that went out to a handful of curators and artists. We are deeply thankful to Michelle Grabner, Greg Scholette, Bisi Silva, Caroline Woolard, Mabel Wilson, Kianga Ford, Heide Fasnacht, Kalia Brooks, Sarah Robayo-Sheridan, Elizabeth Thomas, Kate Fowle and Oksana Chepelyk. for the outpouring of relevant projects this call generated.
Institutions are crucial partners for arts research, and we would like to offer special thank you to California College of the Arts for supporting this book’s development from the first symposium in 2002, through their continued gift of research grants, including the Chalsty Fellowship for Aesthetics, granted in 2006. We also are grateful to Parsons, The New School for Design for hosting a roundtable panel in 2011 that addressed ideas of collaboration and exchange between artists and institutions. The resulting dialogue allowed us to more fully flesh out the criteria for the final selection of projects that we chose to include in the book. We want to extend our gratitude to the panelists, Caroline Woolard, Kianga Ford, Hen-Gil Han, Athena Robles and Anna Stein.
We are especially thankful to our new contributors; Matthew Rana, Ignacio Valero, and Elyse Mallouk, as well as to Peter Coyote who allowed us to print the keynote lecture he delivered at the first Generosity Symposium at CCA in 2002. As makers ourselves, we are in debt to Jacob Wick for his sharp research and editorial assistance and to Nancy Nowacek for designing the book cover just because she really cares.
If this book is a conversation among friends; then it is decidedly a book dedicated to our families, both given, chosen, real and imagined. Major thanks are due to James Peltz of SUNY Press, who has edited and managed this book in its various forms for well over a decade. We could not have finished the book without Susanne Cockrell’s thoughtful readings of the chapters in progress as well as Oliver’s inquisitive social energy and Sekou’s wide-eyed arrival. You are all the reason we are doing this work.
CANDIES IN ENDLESS SUPPLY
FROM GENEROSITY TO CRITICAL EXCHANGE
Ted Purves
Why return to a book? Why make it again, when it might be just as simple to start out fresh? How can we still talk about art under the banner of “free,” in terms of generosity and gifts, when the last decade has thrown enough hardballs to dislodge such utopian thoughts from our wary, critical minds? These questions have been continually on my mind throughout the last year, as I have endeavored to transform a book originally published in 2005— What We Want is Free: Generosity and Exchange in Recent Art —to the current edition that you are reading now, which now bears a new subtitle, Critical Exchanges in Recent Art , and welcomes a second editor, Shane Aslan Selzer. The first edition came directly from a symposium, projects series, and graduate practicum, which I organized at California College of the Arts. This second edition, however, comes neither from a symposium nor a class, but draws instead upon ten years of observations within the field of contemporary art, as well as ongoing engagements with curating, writing, and producing projects within it.
When I was approached to make a revised edition, there were many good reasons to undertake the project. The research for the initial book was largely undertaken in the 1990s, and the symposium was developed in early 2001. All of the projects that were presented at the symposium and researched for the book took place in what now seems to be a different world, before 9/11 and the ensuing decade of ongoing war in the Middle East, before the advent of Web 2.0 and the rise of social media, before the collapse of the financial markets in 2008 and the continuing global recession. To build an editorial view, as the original book did, on ideas of alternative exchange or gift economies was timely then, as it provided at least a theoretical alternative to the emergent globalized capitalism that encompassed the world at the end of the Cold War. However, this focus, from the vantage point of 2010, was beginning to seem a bit rose-tinted.
By returning to a book, however, rather than writing a new book, one assumes something of a responsibility for the earlier material. Any book, after all, has a history and a path that it has made in the world. Making a second edition, then, should be seen as an opportunity to refine and continue that path, rather than raze it from existence and go in a different direction. However, many of the recent artists’ projects that emerged in our research contained a markedly different tone, one that was not entirely generous. They had sharper edges and markedly different tactics. Given this, when we surveyed the majority of the material in the first edition, we reached the conclusion that while much of it was still relevant, it was very much in need of a new editorial lens. This lens would not only provide a larger context by which this material could be understood, it would also create a framework through which it could be aligned with the newer artists’ projects, and grow to include the contemporary social theory that we had been researching.
The new lens that emerged considered the “critical exchanges” within a given project, and it connects the underlying methodologies of projects done since 2003 with the works that were considered in the prior edition. Confrontational generosity, the possibilities of detournement through the tactical use of gifts, or the democratic gesture of redistributing your own privileges as an artist to an audience or community—all of these can be read in light of critical exchange. This lens also builds on work that has occupied both Shane and myself for the last decade in our individual scholarship. For Shane, this has been research into ideas of criticality and failure both in the studio and in the