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Alternative art incubators: cultivating collaboration and innovation in Los Angeles public art practices
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Alternative art incubators: cultivating collaboration and innovation in Los Angeles public art practices
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ALTERNATIVE ART INCUBATORS: CULTIVATING COLLABORATION AND INNOVATION IN LOS ANGELES PUBLIC ART PRACTICES by Nicole Gordillo A Thesis Presented to the FACULTY OF THE USC, ROSKI SCHOOL OF FINE ARTS UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree MASTER OF PUBLIC ART STUDIES May 2008 Copyright 2008 Nicole Gordillo ii DEDICATION I would like to dedicate this manuscript as well as all accomplishments surpassed during the course of my graduate studies to my parents, Janice and Gilbert Gordillo. Whether it was tap or jazz classes, visual arts courses, or performing Shakespeare on stage in a London theatre house, they were always my biggest fans. Their unrelenting support has given me the confidence to explore and to strive for all my dreams. Thank you, Mom and Dad. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am grateful to many for their love and encouragement, critical commentaries, and practical wisdom, which lead me down the right path and gave me the confidence to keep moving forward and bring this manuscript to completion. Thank you, first, to my family for sustaining me with spirited support throughout the duration of my studies. In immeasurable ways, my mother, primary editor and supporter, has influenced me with her knowledge and strength. Her guidance in my life is a priceless gift that I continually cherish. I am grateful to my brother for being a loyal fan and always cheering me on, and my father who not only loved me unconditionally but whose continual belief in me gave me the assurance that I can do anything I set my mind to. I miss you, Daddy. I would like to extend special thanks to my primary advisor, Susan Gray, who not only acted as an insightful resource and guide but as a strong advocate for my visions and ideas. Her time and energy in the process was an invaluable contribution to the work. Thank you also to the rest of the congenial and supportive faculty and staff at USC. I would like to thank in particular Caryl Levy for her nurturing influence, Ferdinand Lewis for championing my writing, and Corbett Barklie for her assistance on the subject. Thank you to the artists, critics, arts administrators and teachers, who shared their advice, insights and experience during the course of my writing. I am grateful for my colleagues, whose remarkable persistence provided me with inspiration and my friends for the countless laughs and moments of inexplicable joy when I needed it most. Lastly, I am grateful to my dog, Chloe for her inestimable friendship and for helping me keep all things in proper perspective. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Dedication ii Acknowledgments iii Table of Contents iv List of Figures vi Abstract vii Chapter 1: Introduction 1 Chapter 1 Endnotes 7 Chapter 2: Innovation In Public Art Background: Paradigm Shifts 8 Art, The Public, And Public Domain 11 Multidisciplinary, Collaborative And Experimental Practices 13 Fresh Perspectives 16 Chapter 2 Endnotes 18 Chapter 3: The Los Angeles Arts Ecology Los Angeles Perspectives: Freeways, Films, Faith, And Failures 20 A Decentralized Art World 25 Sprawling Landscapes 27 Arts Economy 28 The Future Of Public Art In Los Angeles 29 Chapter 3 Endnotes 32 Chapter 4: Alternative Spaces History: Stemming From Past Practices 34 Changed Operational Environments And Future Possibilities 37 Chapter 4 Endnotes 40 Chapter 5: Art Incubators History: The Marriage Of Business And Art 41 Adaptation vs. Adoption: The Range Of Different Models 42 Chapter 5 Endnotes 45 Chapter 6: Los Angeles-Based Case Studies Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE) 46 18 th Street Arts Center 53 LA><ART 63 Chapter 6 Endnotes 70 v Chapter 7: A Hybrid Approach: Alternative Arts Incubators Conclusions 71 A Blended Model: Alternative Arts Incubators 77 Chapter 7 Endnotes 79 Bibliography 80 Appendix A: Figures 84 vi LIST OF FIGURES A.1. Alexander Calder, Four Arches, 1974 84 A.2. Alexander Calder, Four Arches, 1974 84 A.3. Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison, California Wash: 85 A Memorial, Terrazzo Mapping of Storm Drain System. A.4. Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison, California Wash: 85 A Memorial, Bronze Animals. A.5. Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions 85 A.6. Store Front Window of Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions 86 A.7. Karaoke Ice Truck 86 A.8. Karaoke Ice Truck 87 A.9. 18 th Street Arts Center, Entrance 87 A.10. 18 th Street Arts Center, Mural 88 A.11. Freedom of Expression National Monument, Foley Square, NYC, 2004. 88 A.12. LA><ART Front of Building 89 A.13. LA><ART Entrance of Building 89 A. 14. Installation of Freeway Wall Extractions. 90 A. 15. Installation of Freeway Wall Extractions. 90 A. 16. Opening event of Freeway Wall Extractions. 91 vii ABSTRACT This manuscript will examine how the creation and production of innovative public art in Los Angeles (LA) might be cultivated through the concept of an “Alternative Arts Incubator” that blends the collaboration, experimentation and multi-disciplined practice of alternative spaces with the strategic paradigm for sustainability and artist exposure at the core of arts incubators. The research methodology includes an analysis of three LA-based non-profit arts organizations: LACE, 18 th Street Arts Center, and LA><ART. A comprehensive exploration of public art is contextually grounded by critics Miwon Kwon and Claire Bishop and a detailed dissection and examination of the complex and provocative arts ecology of LA is viewed through the lens of critic Mike Davis. From these analyses, a new approach with the capacity to foster and support inventive and vibrantly active public art practices is proposed. 1 Chapter 1: INTRODUCTION Thesis Statement How might the production and presentation of collaborative and innovative public art in Los Angeles be fostered by the hybrid structure of an Alternative Arts Incubator? In an attempt to answer this question, it is necessary to first examine its component parts and provide contextual grounding to the discussion. The analysis will begin with an exploration and definition of significant terms that are salient to the overall inquiry. By clarifying critical terms such as “alternative spaces,” “public” and “public domain” as well as such elusive terminology as “innovative public art” and “alternative arts incubator,” the concept and possibility of such an organizational structure within the Los Angeles arts ecology will be explored. Through a comprehensive examination of these particular terms, the description of the Los Angeles (LA) arts ecology, as well as an investigation of the missions, practices, and works of three different Los Angeles-based arts organizations, a new approach towards organizational structures will be proposed and illuminated; an approach that has the capacity to cultivate inventive public art practices of significance. As a point of departure, the public art trajectory outlined by critic Miwon Kwon in her lectures and book, One Place After Another; Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity, will be reviewed to better understand the paradigm shifts in public art discourse that have led to more participatory and collaborative practices. This socially engaged public art which now requires intelligence, imagination, and risk-taking to rethink practices of the past including past conventions of participation will be discussed through the perspectives of artists and critics such as artist Suzanne Lacy who applies the 2 term “new genre public art,” and critic Arlene Raven who identifies this shift as “art in the public interest.” Additionally, the provocative questions recently raised by London- based critic, Claire Bishop in her 2006 article, “The Social Turn: Collaboration and its Discontents,” will be examined to reveal the possibilities of true innovation within public art. Innovative public art encompasses more than the idea of an artistic endeavor that has been executed with the intention of being accessible by a specific populace. Whether it is temporary or permanent, acquired through public or private funding, or sited on public or private property, this art incorporates multiple collaborations, is multifaceted and experimental in nature, and is constantly evolving to engage its audiences and offer new ways of thinking about social conventions. This art, which creates dialogue, emerges from the subjective interrelationships that unfold complex multi-layers of pleasure, visibility, engagement, and the conventions of social interaction while still maintaining an aesthetic impact. 1 The organizations that will be investigated display a range of tactics and structural procedures for sustainability and production of cultural works within the Los Angeles arts ecosystem. Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), begun in the late 1970s, and 18 th Street Arts Center, initiated in the early 1990s, have both subsisted through a wildly changing economic and social environments; in contrast, LA><ART, a fairly new player in the field, opened its doors with a mandate for flexibility and a willingness to modify. Both L.A.C.E and 18 th Street began as loosely structured artist-run collaboratives and quickly evolved into more institutional structures while LA><ART appears to fit the typical gallery archetype with a head curator, yet paradoxically embraces a unique 3 dialogic inclusivity by operating on a project-basis determined by a consensus of artists, arts professionals, and individuals vested in the organization. The research methodology applied to the investigation will include a comprehensive examination of the practices, policies, missions and works of the mentioned organizations as well as interviews with their directors. While the three organizations are individually unique, there are several linkages that bind them and make them appropriate case studies for this discussion. In one aspect or another, each delves into creating connections and relationships between disciplines, differing communities, art and its audiences. They are each committed to acting as a catalyst for artistic practices that foster dialogue and interaction and in the process are expanding the established boundaries between art, community, and culture. In essence, they are fostering the cross- fertilization of ideas through collaboration, experimentation and multidisciplinary practices, thus enriching the soil of public art and regenerating the seeds for the growth of innovative work. There are undoubtedly other organizations or agencies throughout the country such as Creative Time and Public Art Fund in New York City that have been exceptionally well received for their production and support of innovative, socially engaging and interactive public art works; however, they have been largely omitted from the discussion for several reasons. First, there is already a great deal of literature on these larger, well-established public art agencies (See Creative Time: The Book: 33 Years of Public Art in New York, 2007 and Plop: Recent Projects of the Public Art Fund, 2005 as well as countless articles and publications by and about these two organizations). Second, these organizations exist because of funding streams that are not available in Los 4 Angeles. For example, as a line item on the New York City budget for many years, Creative Time was committed to completing a designated number of projects for the city each year. The government’s support largely contributed to the organization’s growth and success. Today, this type of support is much more competitive and limited for non-profit art organizations in Los Angeles. Third, the LA arts ecology is influenced by a separate set of demographic, geographic, economic, and social factors that are exclusive to the locale and inherently affect the production and organization of cultural assembly. The distinct character and logic of the city calls for alternative and region-specific methods for generating and disseminating collaborative and innovative public art. By peering through the lens of cultural critic Mike Davis’s detailed dissection and examination of Los Angeles in City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles, a clear picture of the current arts ecology will be exposed. The discussion has been confined to the county of Los Angeles primarily because, as revealed by Davis in his book, it is the immensely complex and provocative urban domain, complimented by a unique arts and cultural ecology, that lends itself to limitless possibilities. The persistently sprawling landscape of LA offers inexhaustible opportunities for artists to engage with diverse publics and create and situate both hard and ephemeral public artworks. “With its continuing success of LA-based art programs at CalArts, Art Center, [Otis College of Art and Design], and UCLA as well as a growing gallery scene stretching from blue-chip to artist-run spaces, Los Angeles as an art center continues to thrive, producing increasingly successful generations of artists.” 2 These artists come from all walks of life with differing ethnic, religious, class, and experiential backgrounds. They are well versed in the wide array of art making and carry with them an arsenal of 5 practices including performance, installation, video, sculpture, site-related practice, photography, painting and drawing. Yet the region’s wide assortment of emerging and established artists is confronted with limited resources and spaces for conceptualization, fabrication, and dissemination of innovative works. Due to changed operating environments in the arts, diminishing private and public arts funding for the state of California, as well as increased competition within the nonprofit arts sector in Los Angeles, there is a critical necessity for the discussion of new policy paradigms and business models for arts and cultural organizations. A thorough analysis of the 2006 report entitled Arts in the Balance: Arts Funding in Los Angeles County 1998-2005 from the Southern California Grantmakers and UCLA’s Center for Civil Society will reveal that the current conditions of Los Angeles are complex; yet the challenges can be turned into opportunities if investments and policies are shaped strategically and imaginatively while organizations become more aware of the key trends and explore alternative structures as well as procedures for the production and presentation of today’s more comprehensive and highly communicative cultural works. Through an analysis of these organizations and an in-depth view of more contemporary approaches, this investigation intends to uncover a design that engages a broader range of audiences through public works that are both artistically and critically invigorating. The alternative arts incubator model is a concept that addresses many of the issues that the Los Angeles arts and cultural sector currently face. The model is constructed to act as a bridge between innovative creativity, resources and support. By blending some of the key elements of alternative spaces with the strategic paradigms for self-sufficiency and the one-stop-shop construct that exist at the core of arts incubators, 6 one possible response towards generating and supporting more vibrantly active and culturally engaged public art practices will be offered. 7 Chapter 1: Endnotes 1 Claire Bishop, “The Social Turn: Collaboration and its Discontents,” Artforum International 44, no. 6 (2006): 185. 2 Chris Kraus, Jan Tumlir, and Jane McFadden, LA Artland: Contemporary Art From Los Angeles (Los Angeles: Black Dog Publishing, 2005) Back cover. Otis College of Art and Design has made a significant impact on the Los Angeles arts environment and has been included by the author. 8 CHAPTER 2: INNOVATION IN PUBLIC ART Public Art is about the free field – the play – of clear vision. The point is not just to produce another thing for people to admire, but to create an opportunity – a situation – that enables viewers to look back at the world with renewed perspectives and clear angles of vision. This image embraces the instrumentality, intimacy, and criticality of public art. Public life cannot be decreed; it has to be constantly reinvented. Meaning is not missing in action; it is made through the constructive, collaborative process called “the public.” Sometimes overlooked, often misread, public art is a sign of life. 1 Background: Paradigm Shifts When the term Public Art was first coined in the 1960s, it primarily referred to the four Ms: Murals, Monuments, Memorials, and Mimes. 2 Now far from this classification, the course of the roughly 40-year history of modern public art in the United States has flowed through shifts in theory and practice, the field continually reassessing and reshaping its strategies for creating site-specific art within the public realm. In her critical history, One Place After Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity, Miwon Kwon provides her interpretation of the three distinct paradigms that can be identified with the movement of public art discourse from aesthetic to design to social issues. The first she defines as the “art-in-public-places” model, which dominated the field from the mid 1960s to the mid 1970s. These works were usually “modernist abstract sculptures that were often enlarged replicas of works normally found in museums and galleries…In and of themselves, they had no distinctive qualities to render them “public” except perhaps their size and scale.” 3 Although these works existed in the public realm, they were void of real investigations of what it means to be “public,” completely ignoring the urban, civic, and cultural implications of the word. This kind of work was later termed as “plop art,” or a 9 random artwork plunked down in a relatively visible site without consideration for the place or people in the site. The “cannon in the park,” as artist and critic Judy Baca calls it, exemplified the idea that public art needs to be dumbed-down, “relatively generalized, detachable from politics and pain” in order to be accepted by the masses. 4 This became the norm in public art and appeared on many plazas throughout the major cities of the United States up until the late 1970s. An example in Los Angeles of this type of public work is Alexander Calder’s “Four Arches” (1974) (see fig. A.1), which can be described as a bright red agglomeration of biomorphic shapes in steel plunked down in the plaza of the Security Pacific Tower on Bunker Hill in Downtown L.A. These works were meant to be “gifts” from government entities, such as the Community Redevelopment Agency (CRA) and the Art-in-Public-Places program (1967) of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), to the unsophisticated public. It was as though the general public, who had been thus far deprived of exposure to “high” culture, was now benefiting from the presence of “high” art. Superior artists and the government with the help of art experts were to be the providers of these perceived educational and elevating experiences. It soon became clear that this approach to public art was both ineffectual and incongruous. Without much hesitation the field evolved and began to embrace a broader definition of the term that took into consideration the surrounding architecture and/or environment. This shift, predicated on the desire of many artists and public art agencies to reconcile the division between art and utility, is identified by Kwon as the “art-as- public-spaces” approach. Based on functionality, this second paradigm is typified by design-oriented urban sculptures which function as street furniture, architectural constructions, or landscaped environments. 5 10 With the emergence of the NEA’s Livable Cities Program (1977) and the notion of “site-specific” art -- works that are designed for or deal with the environment in which they are placed -- came multidisciplinary collaborations, inventive initiatives and a diverse array of artists moving out of the studio or gallery and into the public realm. Expanding their options for the delivery of creative expression, artists began to consider the context for their work. 6 As artists began to share equal responsibilities with architects and urban planners in making design decisions about public spaces, a process embedded in a functional ethos was adopted that prioritized public art’s use value over its aesthetic value, or measured its aesthetic value over its use value. 7 The practice had moved away from authoritative modes of “experts” selecting and placing art in the public realm to a more democratic mode of communication based on a collaborative design team model that attempted to render public art more accessible, accountable, and relevant by reductively and broadly equating physical utility with social benefit. Kwon states that “The art-as-public-spaces program is predicated on the belief that with the artist’s humanizing effect, the sense of alienation and disaffection engendered by the inhuman urban landscape of modern architecture could be rectified.” 8 Although this approach, still employed by many Percent for Art programs at local and state levels, is collaborative, it is also a predictable, process- driven, utilitarian approach that primarily focuses on the integration of art into public spaces as decorative or ornamental accompaniments. Examples of this type of work would be the common terrazzo maps of rivers set into the floors of airports, bronze images of historical wildlife, or the animal paw prints sandblasted into sidewalks (see figs. A.3, A.4). In his Key Speaker Address at the 2002 Americans for the Arts Public Art 11 Conference, artist Tad Savinar stated that these works produced by public artists and administrators across the country are becoming “off-the-rack solutions akin to a Starbuckification of the field” as opposed to “unique expressions that explore the human condition or enhance our understanding of a unique place.” 9 Further, Kwon claims that “this thinks of the subject or viewer of public art as a body that requires physical support, not as complex cultural subjects.” 10 As the field shifted into what Kwon defines as the third paradigm in public art, the idea of a harmonious space was translated into a harmonious unified community. The “art-in-the-public-interest” model, named as such by critic Arlene Raven and most cogently theorized by practitioner Suzanne Lacy under the heading of “new genre public art,” is distinguished for foregrounding social issues and political activism, and/or engaging “community” collaborations. According to curator Mary Jane Jacob, “the trajectory of modern public art movement is that as public art shifted from monumental objects to physical or conceptual site specific projects to audience specific concerns, that is, work made in response to those who occupy a given site, it moved from an aesthetic function to a design function to a social function.” 11 Art, The Public, And Public Domain This evolution occurred in accordance with shifts in perspective of what constitutes the art, the public, and a properly functioning public domain. In his book, Art Worlds, the distinguished sociologist, Howard Becker defines art by the shared conventions and the collective activities that constitute the production of art, rather than by the artwork itself. 12 By allowing others to contribute and engage we are opening the doors of communication, broadening the realm in which we share conventions and 12 collective activities, consequently making connections between individualized understandings of what does and does not constitute art. The French socialist, Pierre Bourdieu claims “a work of art has meaning and interest only for someone who possesses the cultural competence, that is, the code, into which it is encoded… A beholder who lacks the specific code feels lost in a chaos of sounds and rhythms, colors and lines, without rhyme or reason.” 13 A public artwork can arguably have more meaning and interest for its public if they are included in the conversation as is done in the art-in-the- public-interest model. Art that is developed out of a dialectic process that involves education, accessibility, advocacy, and collaboration and fully engages its environment both physical and conceptual has the potential to be more publicly effective than an isolated piece that does not consider all of the complicated notions of site-specificity. In addition to the complexities that exist in the definition of art, there is the question of what constitutes a “public.” Critic Patricia Phillips states “There seems to be an implicit assumption that everybody knows what ‘public’ means, and concerns turn to more observable, more easily calculable issues.” 14 Yet, public art has an obligation to firstly partake in an in-depth investigation of who its public is. Questions regarding geography, race, ethnicity, class, history, modes of communication, and flows of mobilization all need to be asked. “Is public a qualifying description of place, ownership, or access? Is it a subject, or a characteristic of the particular audience? Does it explain the intentions of the artist or the interests of the audience?” 15 It is an assemblage of all of the data and it needs to consider all of the complex and potent variables that it must accept and can express. Phillips states that “in spite of the many signs of retreat and withdrawal, most people remain in need of and even desirous of an invigorated, active 13 idea of public. But what the contemporary polis will be is inconclusive.” 16 The rigorous investigation of “public,” in both practice and theory, is an inevitable and ever changing part of public art. When asking who the “public” is, the associated question of what comprises a public domain is sure to follow. In the book, The Search of New Public Domain, Maarten A Hajer states that: Public domain centers around experiencing cultural mobility: for the opportunity to see things differently, the presentation of new perspectives, as much as the conformation with one’s own timeworn patterns. Being coerced to conform does not tally with this perspective of a properly functioning public domain. Being challenged to relate to others does. 17 This notion of a public domain asserts that it is something that can be created and molded. To define it as a “place where an exchange between different social groups is possible and also actually occurs” allows for flexibility. 18 Public domain is not necessarily defined by spatial boundaries or specific locations, but instead constitutes a set of experiences that occur within a location. Lacy claims that “what exists in the space between the words public and art is an unknown relationship between artist and audience, a relationship that may itself become the artwork.” 19 Multidisciplinary, Collaborative And Experimental Practices In order to create these spaces or experiences of true “public domain,” today’s public artists need to engage in multidisciplinary, collaborative and experimental practices. As a result of the Internet and other communication technologies, there is a wider and more democratic distribution of artistic modes and a proliferation of ways to participate in cultural activities. User-generated media such as weblogs, videos, photographs, and music have also blurred the lines between producers and consumers of 14 art. In a moment when “art, craft, design, new technologies, and a robust do-it-yourself culture energetically coexist and opportunistically overlap,” public art needs to also be permitted to incorporate multiple disciplines if it wants to connect to highly globalized audiences. 20 Monolithic definitions of art and audience are no longer pertinent and the ingrained practices of distinguishing between high art and low art, fine art from craft and public art from collectible art, are beginning to fade in today’s art world and in contemporary culture. A multidisciplinary public art practice also entails dialogue on urban conditions, civic life, and cultural and social change. There are many levels on which public art must operate in partnership and collaboration is inherent in its innovative practices. In today’s experience-economy, audience involvement is more crucial than ever before. Yet the collaborative nature of community-based art or socially engaged art does not necessarily constitute a focus on oppositionality as a foundational character of community. Kwon asserts that public art discourse needs to move away from “community defined in relation to an other with strict separation between self and other, towards a more relational or contingent relationship with other.” She points out that “cultural and social identity is neither singular nor stagnant. Any individual can belong to, or identify with, multiple ethnic, cultural or social subgroups.” The danger for more socially engaged public art lies in attempting to create “community” out of discrete, often marginalized, social groups and reducing the community to one-dimensional, sometimes stereotypical, descriptions rather than exposing the complexities of their formation and social positioning. 21 Ultimately, public art is obligated to engage, challenge, and consult the public for or with whom it is made. While it is necessary to produce a more creative and 15 participatory social fabric it is also crucial to discuss, analyze, and compare such work critically as art. The mere fact of being collaborative, participatory, and/or interactive, is not enough to guarantee the significance of a work or claim it as innovative. In an interview about her controversial essay, “The Social Turn: Collaboration and its Discontents,” critic Claire Bishop raises an interesting point about socially engaged art practices: It is more important to observe how it addresses – and intervenes in – the dominant conventions and relations of its time. If we look at the proliferation of collaborative art practices today, it seems that many no longer have the oppositional and anti-authoritarian punch they had in the late 1960s and 1970s – when radical theatre, community arts and critical pedagogy emerged in opposition to dominant modes of social control. Today participation is used by business as a tool for improving efficiency and workforce morale; it is all-pervasive in the mass media in the form of reality television; and it is a privileged medium for government funding agencies seeking to create the impression of social inclusion. Collaborative practices need to take this knot of conventions on board if they are to have critical bite. 22 Rather then simply viewing collaborative practices in terms of their ameliorative practices, Bishop argues that the public artists and their participants should also question the very terms of these ameliorative assumptions. Opposing formulaic and predictable modes of creation, public artists and administrators need to move away from placing greater emphasis on the participants’ creativity in collaborative work and begin to rethink the conventions of participation. This will undoubtedly require “intelligence and imagination and risk and pleasure and generosity, both from the artists and the participants.” 23 And lastly, for any inventive work to be created, there needs to be room for experimentation. Without employing new and untried mediums and methods, the field 16 will not keep up with its audiences. The public art sector in general needs to factor in a space for failure, which is intrinsic to experimentation. The notion of experimentation does not only apply to the conception and creation of artworks but also to the public. Artists must be willing and daring enough to ask hard and poignant questions of their audiences. Phillips states “public art requires a commitment to experimentation – to the belief that public art and public life are not fixed.” 24 If public artists were permitted the liberty to test new approaches to art-making, to incorporate hybridized practices and collaboration to address the contradictory pull between autonomy and social intervention and reflect on this autonomy both in the structure of the work and in the conditions of its reception, advancement within the field would undoubtedly be infinite. 25 Fresh Perspectives Patricia Phillips argues, “public art has been too often applied as a modest antidote or a grand solution, rather than perceived as a forum for investigation, articulation, and constructive reappraisal.” 26 New trends in the field of public art have begun to reshape the thinking about the public sphere, emphasizing modes of communication over the resulting site of communication. This has resulted in a gradual shift in thinking about the function of art as a form of publicity or communication and cultural ideology. 27 As artists are participating in increasingly hybridized practices and are developing ideas about the diverse and strategic sites for art required to engage different audiences, the sector supporting these evolving practices and ideas needs to amend its thinking and practices accordingly. Innovation in public art will involve an incorporation of varied fields and disciplines, offer opportunities for exploration, and will be woven into the cultural fabric as a way to create greater connectedness without 17 sacrificing the aesthetic significance. The public art agencies and organizations in Los Angeles need to consider policies and structures that support and/or offer the space for those more inclusive and decentralized democratic modes of art production. 18 Chapter 2: Endnotes 1 Patricia C. Phillips, “Public Constructions,” in Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art (Seattle Washington: Bay Press, 1995), 70. 2 Jack Becker, “Public Art's Cultural Evolution,” Community Arts Network, http://www.communityarts.net/readingroom/archivefiles/2002/02/public_arts_cul.php. 3 Miwon Kwon, One Place After Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2002) 60. 4 Lucy R. Lippard, The Lure of the Local: A Sense of Place in a multicentered society (New York: The New Press, 1997), 278. 5 Kwon, One Place After Another, 56-99. 6 Becker, “Public Art's Cultural Evolution.” 7 Ibid, 69. 8 Miwon Kwon, “Miwon Kwon: Public Art and Urban Identities” Lecture at the Photography Institute, June 7, 1998, http://www.thephotographyinstitute.org/journals/1998/miwon_kwon.html. 9 Tad Savinar, Key Speaker Address: Fresh perspectives, Americans for the Arts Public Conference, Nashville, Tennessee, June 6, 2002. 10 Ibid. 11 Ibid. 12 Howard S. Becker, Art Worlds (University of California Press,1984),1-39. 13 Pierre Bourdieu, “Introduction,” in Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 2. 14 Patricia C. Phillips, “Temporality and Public Art,” Art Journal 48, no. 4 (Winter 1989) 331. 15 Suzanne Lacy, Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art (Seattle, Wash.: Bay Press, 1995), 20. 16 Ibid, 20. 17 Marten A Hajer, In Search of New Public Domain: Analysis and Strategy (Rotterdam: Nay Publishers, 2001), 116. 18 Ibid, 11. 19 Lacy, Mapping the Terrain, 20. 20 Patricia C. Phillips, “The Exquisite and Urgent Importance of Art,” Art Journal, no.1 Spring (2007). 21 Kwon, “Miwon Kwon: Public Art and Urban Identities.” 19 22 Jennifer Roche, “Socially Engaged Art, Critics and Discontents: An Interview with Claire Bishop,” Community Arts Network, July 2006, http://www.communityarts.net/readingroom/archivefiles/2006/07/socially_engage.php. 23 Ibid. 24 Phillips, “Temporality and Public Art,” 332. 25 Ibid. 26 Phillips, “Temporality and Public Art,” 331. 27 Miwon Kwon, “Public Art as Publicity,” in Simon Sheikh, ed. In the Place of the Public Sphere? On the establishment of publics and counter-publics (Berlin: b_books, 2005). 20 CHAPTER 3: LOS ANGELES ARTS ECOLOGY Los Angeles Perspectives: Freeways, Films, Faith, and Failures Often dismissed as a quick sound bite in the trajectory of artistic production, the city of Los Angeles has been consistently teased and overlooked by mainstream American urban culture. Dubbed numerous nicknames such as La La Land and Tinsel Town and wittily described as “100 suburbs in search of a city,” its only cohesiveness has been said to exist in its mass system of freeways. Located on the margins of the North American continent, Los Angeles has been sold as a megalopolis of rampant urban sprawl, inconsequential architecture, endless freeways, palm trees, surf and smog. For many decades narratives of the city have compared it to other metropolitan cities such as Chicago or New York and have often rendered much of what happens in Los Angeles as “merely illustrative, a series of quirky set pieces, even staged performances.” 1 But perhaps this City of Angels is defying this definition of the ideal city with its fixed core and its dependent rings and is instead creating a new urban landscape out of its decentralization or multiple urban cores, and is in turn becoming a unique space for arts and cultural production. As public art was first defined by the four Ms: Murals, Monuments, Memorials, and Mimes, Los Angeles can be characterized by the four Fs: Freeways, Films, Faith and Failures. Rejecting the disdain of traditional critics and criterion of comparability with ‘classical’ urban spaces, design historian, Reyner Banham, claims in Los Angeles: The Architecture of the Four Ecologies, that the city’s “polymorphous landscapes and architectures were given ‘comprehensible unity’ by the freeway grid in a metropolis that spoke the ‘language of movement, not monument.’” 2 As opposed to the skyscrapers in 21 cities like New York and Chicago, urban planning of Los Angeles in the twentieth- century is best represented by the freeway-building era that provided an unstoppable impetus to decentralization. The concept of a centralized urban core was quickly bypassed as freeways extended further outward, fostering commercial and industrial expansion and the growth of peripheral suburbs. Driven by the movement of mass freeway systems, the lateral evolution of Los Angeles alleviated the substantial traffic congestion that had existed in downtown during the mid-1920s. Prior to that, downtown had been the major destination for all routine shopping and business needs and had become a highly restricted and confining core with vehicular congestion, jostling crowds, street noise, and crime. The concept of “zoning” in land use planning, which originated in Los Angeles, was utilized to encourage office and retail stores to locate elsewhere, thus limiting the further impact on the city’s core. As decentralization of major retail stores and office development continued at an accelerated pace, Los Angeles transitioned into a city of many cities. In his book, City Center to Regional Mall: Architecture, the Automobile, and Retailing in Los Angeles, 1920-1950, professor of American Civilization at George Washington University Richard Longstreth, reveals how the creation of regional shopping centers on the urban periphery after World War II coupled with the popularity of the automobile “lay in the forefront of business dispersal, that pioneered new locations as well as locational techniques subsequently used for other, more diverse forms of business development.” These large concentrations of offices, stores and other businesses far removed from the traditional urban core, profoundly affected both the shape of LA and the routine patterns of social interaction. 3 Longstreth states: 22 Large new retail complexes were the first to challenge the hegemony of downtown functions, attracting a sizable share of the public away from the core on a regular basis. While retail decentralization took many forms, the key component was the regional shopping center, which was planned to operate as a unified business entity and provide an alternative to major established marketplaces, including downtown…Correlating the study of place with that of retail development is important if the circumstances under which Los Angeles served as an incubator for new ideas in the field are to be understood.” 4 The movement from residence to places of employment, shopping, and social interaction changed from a linear focus to a progression in multiple directions, crisscrossing the continually extending metropolitan region of Los Angeles. The fact that the “region functioned as a crucible for innovative approaches to retail development” is critical to understanding the rise of Los Angeles as a major metropolis defined by endless stretches of freeway. 5 Even though the city is often rebuked for its traffic and congestion due to ‘anti-urban’ development, the freeway system that unites the numerous isolated cores “contributed to the recasting of metropolitan form rather than to its destruction.” 6 Coinciding with an identity of Los Angeles based on its massive freeway system is the notion of film and the industry, dreams and visions that are encapsulated in its production and distribution. The film industry came to LA in the early twentieth century with the opening of the first movie theatre in 1902 and the establishment of Hollywood’s first film studio in 1911. Feature-length movies were shot, the now famous “Hollywood” sign was erected, and the city’s growing reputation as “Tinseltown” added yet another dream for newcomers to pursue by going west. 7 The lure of Hollywood glitz and glamour has brought millions to the city since the first films in the early days of cinema. From becoming the next American Idol to the sale of a hit movie script, swarms of talent in all mediums of art, from all over the world have 23 moved to LA to follow dreams of being a part of the manufacturing of fantasy. In his book, The Rise of the Creative Class, social scientist Richard Florida proposes that a new or emergent class made up of knowledgeable workers, intellectuals and various types of artists is the ascendant economic force which he calls the “creative class” that is restructuring the economic, social and demographic constructs of U.S. cities into more complex hierarchies where creative ethos are increasingly dominant. 8 Los Angeles’ entertainment industry is a prime example of how the creative class and it’s diversified fields have shaped and redefined the way Angelinos work, play and build social networks. The entertainment industry contributes an estimated $30 billion annually, or about 7 percent, to the economy of Los Angeles County according to Jack Kyser, chief economist for the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corp. 9 Show business is also one of the main driving forces for the tourist economy. An estimated 58.6 million visitors per year come to LA, many for the Hollywood starlight, taking photos outside Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, counting the stars embedded in the sidewalk along the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and spending a day at Universal Studios Theme Park. The entertainment industry is not only a part of Los Angeles’ image and allure but is also a large part of its economic, social and demographic makeup. Along with the bright lights and glamour of Hollywood comes an element of faith in one’s dreams of success. The increasing numbers of people who move to Los Angeles to follow goals of making it big in the star-studded city naturally have to hold onto their faith in order to continue hitting the pavement in search of jobs. The relation that faith has to the city is additionally rooted in beliefs of divinity and human destiny. 24 Scientology, the body of beliefs and related practices initially created by American speculative fiction author, L. Ron Hubbard has made its home in the City of Angels, while Charles Manson began building his commune-like community by acting as a distant fringe member of the LA music industry. The New Age or Self-Spiritualization movement of the late twentieth century and contemporary Western culture characterized by an eclectic and individual approach to spiritual exploration has become wildly popular in LA, creating a endless number of novelty stores selling wooden Buddhas, self-help books based in Taoism and Daoism, and CD’s of “new age music.” A sense of faith and commitment to a belief, person, or institution sustains many Angelinos and contributes to their perseverance and the continued drive to reach for dreams of what could be. In tabloids and news articles across the world Los Angeles is sold as the city of fame and fortune and with that idealized image comes a high level of failure, and spectacular failure at that. Because actors go on countless auditions, and studio executives continually turn down producers and writers, failure is a natural part of the entertainment business. This “failure” actually promotes innovation as creative people explore new ways of producing and distributing their work. The motto is to pick yourself up and get back in the game with a new and improved angle. Yet, in addition to a productive amount of failure there is the more outlandish and excessive spectacular failure that has more recently become a staple of Los Angeles. From the dramatic accounts of Britney Spears and Lindsey Lohan to the media attention on athletes such as Kobe Bryant the failures as well as the superficial nature of LA’s famous is continually magnified and glorified by the media. 25 In his work, The Society of Spectacle, theorist Guy Debord traces the development of modern society in which authentic social life has been replaced with its representation. Debord argues that advanced capitalism, mass media, and contemporary consumer culture have all contributed to de-evolution of social life as “the decline of being into having, and having into merely appearing.” 10 Los Angeles can be viewed as the epitome of Debord’s society of spectacle due to its development into an active culture obsessed with representational experiences. As the home to so many ‘pseudo events,’ La La Land has become the Mecca of gossip, fantasy and idealized life-styles. This is all the more justification for creating a space in which Los Angeles artists are able to engage in ‘real’ connections with each other, their audiences and communities within the city. A Decentralized Art World In his 1990 text, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future of Los Angeles, Mike Davis provocatively illuminates the numerous ways in which the city of Los Angeles developed in relationship to the plethora of landscape narratives or mythologies. He claims the “ultimate world-historical significance – and oddity – of Los Angeles is that it has come to play the double role of utopia and dystopia for advanced capitalism.” 11 Davis delineates the evolution of building practices, and the means by which architectural practices have contributed to the continued lateral expansion of the city and the dissemination of public space. Yet, in the newly written prologue added to the text in 2006, Davis asks, “Who has anticipated, or adjusted to, the scale of change in Southern California over the past fifteen years?” While socially polarized pockets have rapidly increased, one possible thread for reconnection of these exclusive enclaves within the expanding metropolis is inclusive, decentralized democratic modes of public art. 26 The art world that has found itself in Los Angeles –“the most expansive metropolitan area in the world, home of the Hollywood dream and the NASA space probes” – is simply a product of that expansion. 12 It is a difficult task to map the arts ecology of the city due to its emphasis on multi-centralization and its growth of discrete locales that function as multi-cultural and poly-ethnic collectives of human subjectivity, desire, and artistic production. In an attempt to trace specific trajectories between artists living and working in Los Angeles from the 1960s to today, art historian Jane McFadden states that: In the 1950s followers of art might move between Ferus Gallery in midtown and the Pasadena Museum. In 2005, they must travel from Santa Monica to Eagle Rock with multiple stops in between and beyond. Practices found in these sites range across media and subject, high and low, serious and playful. Similarly, the historical coordinates of this artworld are fluid, encouraging synchronic as well as diachronic dialogues. Indeed there is no one place in Los Angeles to find the artworld, and the writing of a history of this place immediately produces difficulties as well. Many of the stories have been told and retold, lists have been made and remade, yet comprehensive coverage remains appropriately elusive. 13 Even so, this indefinable city has claimed its stake within the context of both the elite and the less recognized alternative art worlds. “As it emerged in the postwar decades as an elsewhere to New York, Los Angeles’ dislocation from the center of the artworld allowed innovative practices that were out of place in the critical categories stemming from the east.” 14 This disassociation allowed LA artists to explore and create new avenues for production and presentation outside of the typical artworld paradigms. In addition, the numerous arts education programs have produced a density of emerging artists who exhibit cultivated artistic practices rooted in critical discourse. These generations of students have been encouraged to question the boundaries of the 27 institutions from which they graduated – “in particular, where art belongs and to whom.” 15 Sprawling Landscapes The expansion of this elusive Los Angeles art world has coincided with a blending and sprawl of physical and social boundaries. 16 With over a hundred different spoken languages, the population is one of the most diverse in the world and occupies a geography that encompasses numerous natural landscapes, from towering mountains divided by roaring lakes, to expansive desert plains, spanning over 4,061 square miles. 17 Additionally, an agglomeration of urbanized areas has quickly developed around Los Angeles County and is commonly referred to as the “Greater Los Angeles Area.” This massive region includes five counties, more than 100 distinct municipalities, and more people than most individual states in the U.S. Los Angeles is considered a “global city” whereby the linkages that bind it have direct and tangible effects on global affairs through more than just socio-economic means, but also through art and culture as well. Davis states, “there has also existed in California an idiosyncratic welding of subcultures and a body of small but curious prophetic art,” whose influence, if not always direct, is at least a product of its vast influences. 18 With countless inspirations Los Angeles is destined to continue to be a leader and pioneer of groundbreaking artistic production. Yet there are demographic, economic, technological, and social factors that are challenging the growth and prosperity of the arts sector in Los Angeles. To continue a trajectory of innovation and forward progression within nonprofit arts organizations, which are only one of many elements in Los Angeles’ complex system of arts and 28 culture, there needs to be an increased consideration and renegotiation of modes of creation, delivery and public consumption of artistic content and experiences. Arts Economy A 2006 report entitled Arts in the Balance: Arts Funding in Los Angeles County 1998-2005 from the Southern California Grantmakers and UCLA’s Center for Civil Society claims that neither the stagnating government funding nor the existing network of private art donors will be able to support or carry the Los Angeles arts economy to a healthy and balanced future. The report found that the nonprofit arts economy in Los Angeles County favors larger arts institutions over small to midsized organizations. Organizations with an annual budget of $800,000 or less rely disproportionately on government grants that have become consistently fewer every year. At the same time, a survey of 51 private foundations revealed that 91% of granted money went to organizations or arts institutions with operating budgets of more than $800,000. 19 The report reveals that the revenue structure of L.A. arts nonprofits, in the aggregate, differs from the national average and is lower across all levels of government including local, state, and federal than other cities. “Public arts support amounts to about 1% of nonprofit arts expenditures, a share well below the national average of 10%.” 20 And although governmental funding for the arts is embarrassingly low in the state of California, the city of Los Angeles has an incredibly lucrative and for the most part, untapped resource in the burgeoning entertainment industry that is its economic lifeline. The author of the report proposes that arts organizations need to forge better alliances with the for-profit world, particularly the multi-billion dollar entertainment industry while making their own operations more business like. Arts nonprofits “need a 29 new business model” and “greater emphasis on…. generating entrepreneurship” the report says. 21 The report regards the film industry as “an untapped resource – a local economic machine that takes from the arts community but doesn’t give back.” 22 Coinciding with significant fluctuations of arts funding for both organizations and individual artists is a 20% expansion of the nonprofit arts sector between 2001 and 2004/2005. 23 With over 800 nonprofit arts groups, the relatively high expansion rate is inconsistent with its financial support. 24 Within the surfeit of existing nonprofit arts groups there are only a small number that have modified their operational procedures and have taken the time to reconsider and truly understand their traditional audiences or potential new markets. In addition, there are an even fewer number of new organizations that have risen in response to the shifting environment, very few of which support innovation in public art practices. The Future Of Public Art In Los Angeles In Los Angeles County there are twelve public art programs. The Department of Cultural Affairs Public Art Program, the Community Redevelopment Agency, LA Metro Art and all of the Civic Art Programs within the unincorporated cities of Beverly Hills, Burbank, Culver City, Glendale, Manhattan Beach, Pasadena, Santa Monica, West Hollywood as well as Los Angeles operate under the traditional percent for art model. Suggesting that these agencies are manipulated by the political clout of developers, Davis claims that many of the on-site public art works implemented by the percent for art model are used to inflate property values. He states: The Community Development Agency’s vaunted ‘cultural tax’ of one percent on new development – intended to promote ‘the integration of the arts into all aspects of the built environment’ – has largely functioned as a sleight-of- 30 hand subsidy to Downtown developers, whose expenditures on monumental kinetic forms, sullen pastel plinths, and fascist steel cubes, are partially recompensed by reduced landless or advantageous density transfers. 25 Whether or not these government initiatives are entirely fabricated and perpetuated by real-estate capitalists or not, they are indeed influenced by circumstances outside of the art world. Because of the typical government restrictions, these programs are limited in their approaches to the production and presentation of public art. The job is therefore left to non-governmental organizations, typically non-profit, to maneuver themselves in such a way that they are able to support and cultivate innovation within the field. It is critical that these organizations maintain their flexibility and strength to further produce significant works within the public domain. While becoming more business-savvy in search of stability and self-sufficiency, it is also important for small to mid-sized public art organizations to cultivate new networks of donors that are willing to support innovative practices while placing artistic distinction and educational value ahead of box office results. 26 Cora Mirikitani, who is the Executive Director of the Center for Cultural Innovation (CCI), a Los Angeles nonprofit devoted to incubating artists and arts organizations towards greater self- sufficiency and business autonomy sees the report as “a needed springboard toward new ideas – especially… toward a greater willingness on the part of arts executives and board members to draw on the know-how and connections of the artists they work with.” 27 Mirikitani believes that artists have already bridged the gap between the arts sector and the entertainment industry by dancing between the commercial and nonprofit worlds. They do this while “maintaining their values and quality and point of view,” and she suggests that the nonprofit arts should follow their lead. 28 It is with new insight and a willingness to 31 venture into new territories that the nonprofit public arts sector will survive and continue to capitalize upon the endless creative resources that Los Angeles has to offer and work towards creating a stronger network of support for and production of art work within the public realm. 32 Chapter 3: Endnotes 1 Michael J. Dear, H. Eric Schockman, and Greg Hise, Rethinking Los Angeles, (Los Angeles: Sage Publications Inc, 1996) 1. 2 Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles, (New York: Verso, 1990), 73. 3 Richard Longstreth, City Center to regional Mall: Architecture, the Automobile, and Retailing in Los Angeles, 1920-1950, (Cambridge Massachussetts: MIT Press, 1997), Introduction. 4 Ibid, xiv-xv. 5 The regional shopping center will be later related to the idea of, and concepts behind arts incubators. 6 Ibid, xvi. 7 Cities of the World, Los Angeles History, February 12, 2008, http://www.city-data.com/world-cities/Los- Angeles-History.html 8 Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community, and Everyday Life, (New York: Perseus Books Group, 2002) 1-67. 9 Michael Cieply, “Writers Say Strike to Start Monday,” The New York Times, November 2, 2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/02/business/media/02cnd- hollywood.html?_r=2&hp&oref=slogin&oref=slogin. 10 Guy Debord, Préface a la quatrième édition italienne de "La société du spectacle" (published by Editions Champ Libre, Paris, February 1979), 17. 11 Mike Davis, City of Quartz, 18. 12 Jane MacFadden, “Los Angeles: Then and Now, Here and There,” in LA Artland: Contemporary Art from Los Angeles (Los Angeles: Black Dog Publishing, 2005), 56. 13 Ibid. 14 Ibid. 15 Ibid. 16 According to the U.S. Census Bureau, Los Angeles County has grown from an estimated population of 8.8 million residents in 1990 to 9.9 million in 2006. 17 “State and County Quickfacts,” U.S. Census Bureau, http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/06/06037.html. 18 Davis, City of Quartz, 65. 19 Helmut Anheier, Arts in the Balance: Arts Funding in Los Angeles County 1998-2005, (Southern California Grantmakers, 2006) http://www.socalgrantmakers.org. 20 Ibid. 33 21 Ibid, 75. 22 Ibid. 23 Helmut Anheier, Arts in the Balance. 24 Mike Boehm, “Nonprofit Arts Face the Music,” Los Angeles Times, December 6, 2006, 1. 25 Davis, City of Quartz, 76. 26 Ibid. 27 Ibid, 2. 28 Ibid. 34 CHAPTER 4: ALTERNATIVE SPACES History: Stemming From Past Practices Alternative spaces and their practices are by no means a novel concept. As far back as the beginning of the 19 th century, artists have sought autonomy in their work, support for experimental contemporary cultural production, and have challenged the conventions of traditional galleries and museums. The French Salons of the early 19 th century consisted of literary, philosophical and artistic gatherings and created what Jurgen Habermas claims was the “bourgeois public sphere,” or the space in which private people came together as a public to discuss societal issues and through that discussion influence political action. 1 The 1920s artistic and literary movement, Dadaism, flouted conventional aesthetic and cultural values by producing works in the public marked by nonsense, travesty, and incongruity while the Surrealist cultural movement during the same time featured the element of surprise and unexpected juxtapositions to shock viewers into being more sensitive and receptive to the world. Similarly, movements such as artist Allan Kaprow’s Happenings from the 1950s to the 1970s were unique events or performances staged in public places that were shaped by participating audiences and were devoted to the examination of everyday behaviors and habits in a way nearly indistinguishable from ordinary life. 2 These earlier movements lay the groundwork for popular culture and its attempt to integrate art and life. Stemming from this trajectory of alternative modes of artistic production and echoing the artist-activist groups of the late 1950s and 1960s, the artist-run organizations, termed “Alternative Spaces,” blossomed nationwide during the seventies and early eighties. The spaces were primarily concerned with a more inclusive and less 35 commercial system. The emphasis was placed on non-aesthetic practices such as site- specific sculpture, conceptual art, temporary installations, public works, performances, video film, and models that were often spontaneous, improvisational, open-ended and collaborative. Attacking boundaries, these artists drew on ideas from vanguard forms, but they added a developed sensibility about audience, social strategy, and effectiveness that was unique to visual art at the time. 3 It soon became apparent that these novel approaches to art production required new types of organizations and venues to support them. By offering a counterproposal to the typical museum or gallery programming, providing challenging and varied artistic forms, and intensely questioning artistic practices while employing unique participatory discourse, these alternative spaces first began quite informally. One of the first alternative spaces was 112 Greene Street founded by artist Jeffery Lew, who showed neighbors and colleagues works in a “very raw and somewhat dilapidated street-level loft.” 4 Many alternative spaces perceived themselves as being forever contemporary, as they were unburdened by the preservation or collection of works. Radically distinct from the museum and operating independently of the art market, these organizations were entirely artists-sensitive, and eventually began paying artists for exhibitions. Many of the spaces that emerged, primarily in New York and Los Angeles, were aimed at giving new or less established artists an opportunity to publicly present their work. An increasing number of young artists were emerging onto the scene and competition for the attentions of a relatively fixed number of commercial galleries was intensified. This was particularly true in Los Angeles where there was a significant lack of exhibition possibilities, Los Angeles County Museum of Art being the only 36 institutional option following the closing of the Pasadena Museum. The alternative space offered a public forum for these emerging artists where they could receive a critical response from both their peers and the larger art world without the pressure of a consumer’s market. These practices mirrored that of the earlier French Salons. In addition, larger institutions, such as museums and grand performance spaces, were “suffering financial strains that led them to concentrate on popular ‘box-office’ shows rather than on uncertain introductions.” 5 These large institutions shied away from the new mediums of art and the unpredictability of site-specific and situation-oriented works. Many of the contemporary art practices were conceptually based and revolved around institutional critique and were often “deliberately trying to escape the esthetic and social effects” of the museum context. 6 As critic Lucy Lippard has cogently summarized, in the late 1960s and early 1970s most artists’ groups and independent activists focused their critiques on established museums, with direct protests for artists’ rights, more diverse representation within collections, and politically engaged museums. 7 In addition a theorization of the parameters of art and its institutions was occurring via artists’ installations, exhibitions, and interventions within the public realm. All of these new developments forged a divide between institutional frameworks and the newly formalized, more public art practices. The alternative space also rose out of a landscape created upon specific cultural and political views. For centuries the perceived role of the artist in society had been one of a disenfranchised, passive and victimized pawn in a game of object-oriented commerce. The alternative space was a way for a diversified range of artists to regain their place in an industry that had conveniently marginalized them. It was a way to 37 develop and inspire a rhetoric of self-determination, consensual decision-making, and participatory democracy within a microcosm of the art world that spawned from the political struggles of the day. The way for artists to address the oppression, whether it was based on ethnic, political, economic, or social issues, was to create autonomous, effective artist-centered and artist-controlled organizations. 8 It was this combination of the social and political atmosphere and the aesthetic shift away from object-based art that both happened simultaneously and influenced each other that became identified with alternative spaces. Artists had the opportunity to experiment and take full authority over their work while risking outright failure. The audience was given the opportunity to act as a collaborator and was involved in the spontaneous and immediate work. Art moved away from the spatial confines of a gallery or museum. An example of this move can be seen in writer Nancy Drew’s recollection of the city of Los Angeles as the “set,” for artistic display: “Chris Burden laid down on La Cienega Boulevard; Kim Jones cruised Venice Beach encrusted with twigs and mud; ASCO ‘signed’ the County Museum with graffiti.” 9 Changed Operational Environments And Future Possibilities Yet, because these organizations were not interested in selling work (like commercial galleries) or in assembling permanent collections (like museums) and were largely dependant on state funding or the NEA, their heyday was short lived. As the economic environment changed and annual NEA support for alternative spaces dropped, it became more and more difficult for these pockets of creativity to survive. The Culture Wars brought even greater difficulties. In the past decade, the notion that arts and cultural organizations need to locate and develop alternative streams of earned income has gained 38 currency among administrators, funders, and members of the arts and culture sector. Only a handful of alternative spaces were willing to review their programming and organizational structures and change with the evolving environment. Nevertheless, these exploratory spaces can be the fertile ground for critical discourse regarding the growth of innovative practices in public art. Their core traits of collaboration within multiple disciplines as well as with audience members, experimentation, dialogue and focus on intervening in social, political and economic realms, would be advantageous for public art organizations to adopt. An example of a noted public artist that rose out of this climate and has since evolved with the field and redefined himself as a multi-media artist is Vito Acconci. In order to facilitate the combined functions and practices that his art necessitates, Acconci has developed a studio space that adopts a business-like approach to artistic production and distribution. Beginning his career as a poet, Acconci transformed himself in the late 1960s into a performance, photography, and video artist who used his own body as the subject. As the public art field shifted into a more discursive and audience-aware practice, Acconci began inviting viewers to partake in his creations of public space in the form of shelters, furniture and signs. Sustaining his drive, the artist has formed his own studio-like factory that runs on a business model more akin to the way architectural offices are organized. The Acconci Studio in New York is a hybrid form that combines aspects of a typical gallery, artist studio, and a laboratory for multidisciplinary art practices, that concentrates on integrating public and private space through architecture and landscape design. 10 Public art organizations need to consider or reconsider such approaches to sustainability 39 and flexibility in order to maintain a relevant stance in today’s ever-changing cultural and artistic climate. The ongoing project of meeting the needs of artists and the value of the artists’ organizations that have developed are critical to the art world as an ecosystem. The withering away of these alternative spaces has contributed to the limiting of a range of artistic visions intersecting with audiences and has impaired the prospects of a vast number of emerging artists who might develop their skills at such art-making laboratories. There has not been a surge of innovative practices or public art production since. The dwindling of small-to mid-sized organizations that serve artists and arts organization by providing spaces to engage, collaborate, exchange and grow has an effect on the entire field. 40 Chapter 4: Endnotes 1 Jurgen Habermas (German (1962) English Translation 1989). The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Cambridge Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 30. 2 Allan Kaprow recounts his version of that history by stating that the artists “appropriated the real environment and not the studio, garbage and not fine prints and marble. They incorporated technologies that hadn’t been used in art. They incorporated behavior, the weather, ecology, and political issues. In short, the dialogue moved from knowing more and more about what art was to wondering about what life was, the meaning of life.” Suzanne Lacy, Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art (Seattle, Wash.: Bay Press, 1995), 26. 3 Lacy, Mapping the Terrain, pg. 20. 4 Phil Patton, “Other Voices, Other Rooms: The Rise of the Alternative Space,” Art in America 4, no. 21 (July 1977): 80. 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid. 7 Lucy R. Lippard, “Biting the Hand: Artists and Museums in New York since 1969,” in Ault, 79-120. 8 Renny Pritikin, “Historic Issues of Artists Organizations,” in LACE 10 yrs. Documented (Los Angeles: Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, 1988), 14. 9 Nancy Drew, “L.A.'s Space Age,” in LACE 10 yrs. Documented (Los Angeles: Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, 1988), 9. 10 “Acconci Studio,” http://www.acconci.com. 41 CHAPTER 5: ART INCUBATORS History: The Marriage Of Business And Art Business incubation within the for-profit sector has proven to be a resourceful way to catalyze the process of starting and growing new ventures. The concept has been applied to many industries, providing entrepreneurs with the expertise, networks and tools needed to attain goals. The National Business Incubation Association (NBIA) offers the following definition of the “incubation” process: Incubators nurture young firms, helping them to survive and grow during the start-up period when they are most vulnerable. Incubators provide hands-on management assistance, access to financing and orchestrated exposure to critical business or technical support services. Most also offer entrepreneurial firms shared office services, access to equipment, flexible leases and expandable space – all under one roof. 1 Many state and local governments operating under the auspices of non-profit entities, have implemented this particular business model to increase employment rates and tax revenues and in turn create economic development. As the American arts economy shifted in the late 80s, nonprofit arts organizations, who were struggling to be born, survive, and thrive in the dismal atmosphere, began to reexamine and reform their approach. In order to succeed, the arts and cultural service organizations embarked on the application of various strategies and tactics of cooperation to help insure the future of the field. Such tactics of innovative economizing achieved by sharing facility cost and contracting out excess capacity to other nonprofits was the first step to improving facilities. The concept of business incubation for the arts was first put into practice in 1987 by a Chicago-based consulting firm whose clients included emerging arts groups and a 42 small cadre of arts administration and faculty development professionals. Since the pioneer arts incubator, Arts Bridge in Chicago, numerous arts incubators have been established as private nonprofits, initiatives in community development plans, extensions of city cultural affairs departments, and programs in affiliation with universities or colleges. 2 Adaptation vs. Adoption: The Range Of Different Models Based on the business incubator model, an arts incubator can be either a facility, policy, or combination of both that creates a nurturing environment for emerging artists, arts groups, and arts-related businesses by offering low-cost or subsidized space and services. Space can include inexpensive office, performance, exhibition, studio and/or rehearsal space while services may include technical support and business development. By helping to grow and/or stabilize these young creative ventures, arts incubators can graduate successful artists and organizations back into the neighborhood, helping to build a critical mass for creative culture within the surrounding public realm. With facility- based arts incubator models, there is the opportunity to provide direct cultural and economic benefits to their local community by including visual and performing arts venues or spaces for activities that cultivate dialogue and interaction between artists and the public. Arts incubators can and have taken on many different forms in response to available resources and the needs of the constituents they serve. There is truly no set model that can be adopted. Instead, arts incubators must adapt and devise organizational standards and approaches that fit the particular arts ecology in which they operate. How the organization identifies funding, screens clients, designs programming or offers 43 industry assistance or support varies from one arts incubator to another. The range of nonprofit organizational structures that function as incubators for the arts is vast and uniquely specific to their particular locale. The diversity of arts incubators across the country demonstrates the malleability of such an organizational structure. For example, Arlington County Virginia Arts Incubator is a policy-oriented program operated through the department of cultural affairs. The Arlington Incubator has “transformed a lackluster arts program focused on serving the needs of a few participants into a dynamic, nationally recognized arts-funding model that serves the county’s diverse population.” 3 By utilizing non-cash government resources and facilities all over the county including theatres, galleries, and studios along with technical and administrative assistance in areas such as lighting design, costume design and marketing, the incubator has attracted first-rate artists to the area, reinvigorating the local arts community. Conversely, Flashpoint in Washington DC is a facility that provides services and training for cultural organizations and artists to help strengthen their management capacity and offers exhibition and performance spaces, enabling the arts groups to focus on their artistic goals and expand their visibility. The incubator is centrally located in the heart of DC and includes a contemporary art gallery, a 75-seat theatre lab, a dance studio, office space and workstations, shared office equipment and meeting space, and a wide range of specialized management services all within the same complex. An arts incubator may be operated by an arts council or government agency or remain independent. Some only serve arts organizations and others incubate both individual artists and arts groups. A few are offices within larger arts organizations and 44 others have transformed historical buildings into creative laboratories. Several models are even tied to a city’s tourism industry or are a part of a regional cultural arts strategy. However unique the design, arts incubators are a smart way for aggregating resources, sharing space and infrastructure, fostering collaboration and experimentation, and improving the work and lives of artists. All of the elements involved have undoubtedly existed prior to the term “arts incubator.” Yet the combination of aspects such as physical co-location of artists and arts groups focused on organizational and artistic maturation, shared resources, extended technical assistance, focus on exposure, and an emphasis on collaboration is what heralds a new ideal in organizational structure that can be recognized as an arts incubator and productively applied to public art organizations. Similar to the regional shopping center, which became the primary thrust of commercial development in Los Angeles during the 1950s, the arts incubator operates as a unified business entity for the artist. The idea of a one-stop-shop where public artists can obtain both the resources and support they need all in one location would be a valuable resource, particularly in the decentralized and expansive city of Los Angeles. Artists can then take the practices and knowledge gained to enhance their art and exposure of it while developing new and inventive modes of distribution and expansion of true public domains throughout the city. 45 Chapter 5: Endnotes 1 Bob Reiss, Low Risk, High Reward: Starting and Growing Your Business with Minimal Risk (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000), 76. 2 Ellen Gerl, Joy Miller Upton, and Meredith Erlewine, Incubating the Arts: Establishing a Program to Help Artists and Arts Organizations Become Viable Businesses (National Business Incubation Association, 2000). 3 Arlington Arts, “The Arts Incubator Story,” Arts Incubator, Arlington Arts, http://www.arlingtonarts.org/arts_incubator/incubatorstory.htm 46 CHAPTER 6: LOS ANGELES-BASED CASE STUDIES In the context of these historical and temporal movements are three productive platforms for exchange and public art distribution that have and are reflecting this move toward “arts incubator” within the Los Angeles arts landscape. These three small to mid-sized arts organizations employ different approaches to foster innovative work and create space and support, whether it be physical or virtual, monetarily or motivationally, for collaboration, exchange and experimentation of artists. Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE) (See fig. A.5, A.6.) Mission Statement - 2008 LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions) encourages people and projects working across diverse creative forms to interrogate the boundaries of culture and artistic practice. LACE exhibitions, performances, screenings, dialogues and other public forums strive to inspire the public imagination and to expand interactions between art and audience. Located in the heart of Hollywood, LACE contributes to the activation of Los Angeles' urban landscape and champions art's ability to engage with the timely issues that shape local and global life. 1 Positioned on Hollywood’s provocative and historic Hollywood Boulevard, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions or “LACE” is a non-profit arts organization that has managed to subsist for the past three decades. Throughout its 30 years of involvement and contributions to the Los Angeles arts and cultural environment, LACE has positioned itself as a receptive and malleable player in the field of public art. The mission statement of LACE has changed over the years since the organization’s inception. This is because the aims of the organization have evolved with the cultural, political, and artistic landscape and have adapted to the needs and desires of artists and their audiences. 47 LACE was originally developed as an alternative space or “artist-run organization.” Created out of a need to express, a desire to connect and a necessity to exchange ideas, LACE adopted an artist-centered approach that informed every aspect of its operations. Though, the organization is no longer the alternative space it was in its early years, it has still maintained a focus on developing an ideal institution committed to risk-taking and providing a dynamic space for unfettered artistic expression. As programs such as the Los Angeles County Comprehensive Employment Training Act (CETA) 2 were discontinued in the early 90s and Congressional opposition arose in response to certain NEA-supported projects, the organization was forced to shift its funding sources in order to survive. The establishment has endured these massive challenges in arts funding, an ever-changing Los Angeles economy, and the uniquely different perspectives and approaches of varying directors. LACE has managed to survive because of its commitment to artists and their needs and its willingness to evolve and adapt to both its physical and conceptual surroundings. Working under an umbrella of collaboration and experimentation, LACE has been capable of promoting new branches of art born out of the innovative approach of interdisciplinary practices. Since LACE settled in Hollywood, it has established partnerships with businesses and organizations that focus on community enhancement through the arts as well as the development of Los Angeles as a vibrant cultural center for the arts. From working with outreach programs that involve the homeless to implementing international residency exchange programs with talented curatorial teams throughout its history, LACE has attempted to explore and understand the complex roles of art, craft, design, architecture and community in contemporary society and possibly reveal links between them. 48 Today’s LACE LACE works collectively with artists and serves as a laboratory for creative expression. The result is work that challenges traditional assumptions about art and the exhibition-making process, pushes the envelope in terms of engaging with its audience, and in some ways, “de-mystifies” the creative process itself. This quote was found on the back of a poster insert promoting a project Christof Buchel completed at LACE in October of 2003. The artist was a participant in LACE’s international residency program and the installation marked his first exhibition in Los Angeles. The Swiss conceptual artist “creates hyper-realistic environments. These fictitious yet highly believable environments - rooms within rooms - are carefully constructed so that the institutional framework of the art museum and all reference to the gallery context are removed.” 3 In an interview with LACE’s current director, Carol Stakenas, this particular project was discussed as a way to exemplify how the organization enables artists to completely transform the artistic experience. Buchel’s installation at LACE was a commentary on past and present military agendas and involved an intensive restructuring of the gallery space into series of adjacent rooms and doors, dropped ceilings and hidden replicas of missiles, bombs and other military equipment. Stakenas recalls that the artist “boarded up the façade of the space,” and in a way “turned LACE itself into a public art project.” 4 She comments on this audacious choice by the then director, Irene Tsatsos, to typify the direction towards a more socially engaging public art practice that she envisions for the organization. An artist herself, Stakenas comes from an art history pedagogy. Even so, she states that “having an exclusive studio-based practice that then finds its primary contact 49 with the world through a traditional exhibition context, was just never really central to what [she] was interested in.” 5 In 1994, Stakenas became the office manager of the New York based public art organization Creative Time. Stakenas worked with the organization for ten years, contributing to and helping shape its focus of fostering artists who ignite the public’s imagination, initiate dynamic dialogue across disciplines and communities, and explore ideas that shape society. In the interview, Stakenas notes that because of Creative Time’s mission to move outside a traditional exhibition model and seek alternative situations for art to engage the public, the organization was more equipped to survive the adverse public funding environment of the 90s. Because arts organizations typically do not have a 365-day visibility, it is often difficult to maintain a large gallery space without substantial funding resources. Even though Creative Time has an administrative hub, its primary focus is on temporary projects within the public sphere. Seeking funding for particular projects rather then administrative infrastructure, allows the organization to ebb and flow with the rise and fall of public funding. It is the knowledge gained by working within this artistic environment that Carol Stakenas brought to LACE when she became its director in 2006. Even though the Los Angeles arts community is very different than it was during LACE’s beginning, Stakenas believes that she is beginning to echo similar instincts that initial director Mark Pally had in the late 70s. She states that there is “a trend now of people doing more socially intensive works, thinking about art in a broader continuum that is not exclusively within the classic white box paradigm.” She acknowledges that organizations and artists are becoming more interested in not just events but public 50 projects that build social connection and currency. In her work with LACE she is investigating how the organization can begin to support this emerging field. 6 “I am really interested in seeing LACE being able to create a blended model… I don’t want our physical infrastructure here to grow because I know that if we got more spaces to do more shows and galleries… there’s only so much time and energy available.” She is in a dynamic process of negotiation and consideration of what might be the proper size for LACE: “What’s the right scale that can meaningfully serve the community here and grow our capacity to do more temporary public projects?” Rather then increasing physical space, Stakenas is interested in enhancing the organization’s social capital as a way to implement the types of public artwork that she is interested in: “It is my ability to meet and plan with city officials and the county board of supervisors, as well as business stake holders in any given community, as well as artists, as well as the kinds of individual patrons that want to champion this kind of work.” 7 Stakenas is focused on building the organization’s public standing by not only connecting with artists and providing them with the facilities and a means to create, but also exploring different strategies of distribution and intervention to involve a broader spectrum of audiences. “I’m really happy to offer those kinds of opportunities because more than anything, it means that we could do more without having a big staff - serve more people because we make our home a home for them.” LACE is in the process of building strong collaborations and getting more “partner-oriented.” 8 One public art project that clearly exemplifies Stakenas approach to collaboration was Karaoke Ice which was an “ice cream truck transformed into a mobile karaoke unit, driven by a squirrel cub with a penchant for cheap magic deployed to spark spontaneous 51 interaction” between pedestrians across Los Angeles County 9 (see 5.2). The project was developed out of ideas about play and the importance of shared experiences as a transformative act for culture and community. A trio of artists, Nancy Nowacek, Katie Salen, and Marina Zurkow, conceived, designed, and produced the interactive performance public work in collaboration with students and graduates of the San Jose State Cadre Laboratory for New Media (see fig. A.7, A.8). LACE played the role of host in introducing Karaoke Ice to Los Angeles. Stakenas organized a workshop at LACE for the artists to share ideas and engage a specific public. This included a discussion on possible sites to take the karaoke truck. Ideas for public places, songs and activities were exchanged. The workshop which brought artists, arts professionals and community members together proved “illuminating for the artists,” and the participants as well. 10 In addition, Stakenas conducted a site-analysis with the artists, taking them to different areas in the city at different times of the day so that they could harness the flow of people, objects, and technology within those spaces. Stakenas also introduced the artist team to local organizational leaders to enhance visibility of the project and its creators. With Karaoke Ice, LACE assisted the artists in reaching multiple audiences by providing alternative approaches to collaboration and in turn developing greater exposure. Miwon Kwon stresses the need for collaborative and community-based public art to imagine alternative possibilities of togetherness and collective action that extend beyond the isolation of a single point of commonality to define community – whether a generic trait, a set of social concerns, or a geographic territory. She affirms that thinking 52 about these alternatives requires a major re-conceptualization of the “community” and that perhaps there is no such thing as a total consolidation, wholeness, and unity in an individual, a collective social body like the “community,” or an institution or discipline. 11 Karaoke Ice, did not attempt to invoke a platform for an idealized community, rather through the means of playful investigation, engaged a broad range of audiences and allowed for self-expression. LACE along with the project’s creators left the idea of a common identity for Los Angeles behind as they drove down the streets, alleyways, and parking lots of the city trailing behind them the faint chimes of an ice cream truck. By expounding on ideas of hybridism, collaboration, and cross-fertilization among fields, disciplines, and the commercial and political worlds, Stakenas hopes to develop an organization that can act as a bridge towards cultural advancement. She is most interested in “growing the social kind of network, building [LACE’s] reputation and integrity, and being able to serve both artists and the city.” 12 Stakenas believes that it is the nature of the social capital and social infrastructure of organizations like Creative Time in New York that have made them so successful. She hopes to augment these types of collaborations to create greater communication and visibility for the organization and cultivate dynamic public artworks that punctuate the Los Angeles landscape and promote change in the process. 53 18 th Street Arts Center (See figs. A.9, A.10.) Mission Statement - 2008 18th Street Arts Center is a nonprofit residential arts center in Santa Monica that supports artists and organizations dedicated to issues of community and diversity in contemporary society. In its curatorial decision-making process, 18th Street seeks artists who demonstrate social consciousness and spiritual awareness in a well-developed art making practice. We emphasize artists who are emerging to mid-career in their development, manifest the spectrum of approaches to contemporary ideas and reflect the diverse population of Los Angeles. 18th Street Arts Center aspires to be an artist-friendly gathering place, providing a physical center in a city characterized by its de-centralization. 13 18 th Street Arts Center, originally called 18 th Street Arts Complex, in Santa Monica grew out of the interest and focus of the alternative art review, High Performance Magazine, founded by Linda Frye Burnham. Based in Los Angeles, High Performance ran as a quarterly from 1977 to 1997 and at the time was the only magazine devoted exclusively to performance art, defined then as live performance created by visual artists. 14 The magazine, which acted as a public forum for fertile critical discourse, was published by artist Susanna Bixby Dakin under the auspices of a nonprofit called Astro Artz. High Performance and Astro Artz had been operating out of a downtown Los Angeles warehouse loft and subletting portions of the space to artists who were doing the work that the publications were writing about. The desire to create a more collaborative, multi-disciplined and intercultural milieu for artists who were experimenting with newly conceptualized art forms coupled with changes in the downtown Los Angeles environment and leasing issues led the magazine to search for a new location. It was at this point that Susanna Dakin decided to purchase a 1.25 acre piece of property in Santa 54 Monica, a “sub-city” of Los Angeles that had recently acquired an arts commission and was becoming a vibrant and progressive arts environment. This incongruent medley of five separate buildings later became 18 th Street Arts Complex. The organization grew with programming, effective leadership and the financial support of the city of Santa Monica. Collaboratives were formed and new organizations were born out of the incubating environment. Eventually the original founders moved on and new directors took over. Nevertheless, the organization has maintained Burnham and Dakin’s original concept of “an intergenerational, intercultural, multidisciplinary beehive, as diverse as possible.” 15 In 2003, the Complex changed its name to 18 th Street Arts Center, “to reflect the ways in which the organization had provided a central focus for arts organizations and artists in West Los Angeles County.” The organization, which has fostered diversity in the arts, states that throughout their tenure they have “featured many of Los Angeles’ most interesting emerging and mid-career artists at crucial points when such recognition made a real difference in their careers.” With a roster that includes such well-known public artists as Judy Baca, Lita Albuquerque, and Barbara T. Smith, it appears as though 18 th Street Arts Center is not overstating their significance in the field. 16 Today’s 18 th Street Arts Center Through 18 th Street’s exhibitions, workshops, and community festivals, the organization encourages and supports the creation of cutting-edge contemporary art, and fosters collaboration and interaction between artists and arts organizations locally, nationally and internationally. The curatorial focus of 18 th Street has remained constant throughout the last fifteen years, with a unique mandate to concentrate on encouraging the careers of emerging and under-represented mid- career artists.” 17 55 The organization has always concentrated on nurturing artists and arts organizations that are creating diverse community-based artworks that engage the public in interesting and inventive ways. There are four different programs that weave through the organization and contribute to the way in which it strategically implements its mission and acts as a catalyst for the production and presentation of innovative work. Through these programs, 18 th Street promotes collaboration, community engagement, experimentation and assists with sustainability and exposure for mid-career and emerging artists and arts organizations. The Presenting Program is a gallery exhibition program that takes place in two different on-site spaces. Eight times per year, 18 th Street invites both established and emerging curators to propose shows that are then facilitated by the organization. The program is an opportunity for 18 th Street to develop a constantly changing exhibition space by engaging artists within the Los Angeles arts community that do not have studios in the center. Further fostering artistic exchange, the organization encourages the curators to craft exhibitions that incorporate the work of multiple artists. Executive Director, Jan Williamson, states that “there is a dialogic process that brings those artists together, thinking about how their work relates or doesn’t relate, trying to foster scholarly or intellectual dialogue around their work as opposed to, ‘Oh, here’s a show in this community gallery.’” This simple request of curators promotes cooperation between those involved, and in turn, produces more diversified and unique exhibitions. 18 Another series administered by the center is the Arts Education Program which gives artists the tools to teach curriculum-based arts education classes within California school districts. The artists are trained to incorporate both visual and performance art 56 with current pedagogical standards. Because of the dearth of arts education in the California public school system, there are a limited number of programs that teach the blending of art with standard curriculum like math and science. Because the program is so inclusive and artist-sensitive, many of the artists that are trained are taught through a collaborative means that helps them design curriculum that is multi-faceted and multi- disciplinary. As a result many graduates of the program have gone on to be hired by arts education programs such as The Heart Project, PS1 and PS arts. 18 th Street has a roster of 75 artists whom they have instructed on the integration of these two standards. This knowledge has contributed to the artist’s ability to sustain his/her practice by supplementing artistic work with part-time jobs in California schools. 18 th Street’s International Exchange Program is one of the few exchange programs in Los Angeles. Three artist studios are devoted to individuals who are invited from other countries to live and work in Los Angeles for a period of one to six months. The organization has hosted artists from two-dozen countries and the influence of this program is immeasurable. 19 Not only are the artists afforded the opportunity to learn and work in another country, expanding their wealth of artistic production, but they also gain the opportunity to interact, exchange, and collaborate with local artists and communities. This not only benefits the international artist but also the greater arts community of Los Angeles. The Residency Program at 18 th Street Arts Center is the aspect of the center that is the most similar to a typical arts incubator. The organization provides subsidized living and workspace for artists and arts organizations as well as free administrative and marketing consulting services. Services include an office equipment co-op and 57 community resources exchange in which residents contribute a service or resource, meeting facilities, and professional development consultations for artists and multi-tenant nonprofits. The LA-based artists and organizations are afforded the opportunity to participate in programs and events which bring them and their work closer to public. “The combined benefits of the Residency Program help residents put more of their financial resources and time towards their art practice while working in a stimulating and supportive environment.” 20 The accomplished public artist John Malpede has been in residence at the center since April of 2007. With a career that spans 35 years, 62 year-old Malpede doesn’t identify himself solely as a public artist even though much of his work is rooted in socio- political issues and usually involves differing publics, environments, and lived experiences. At the late age of 27, Malpede, who had been a philosophy student, “stepped onto” the art scene in New York City. In an interview with the artist he states “art is a lot about confusing the categories and I think the most exciting thing was, when I was living in New York in the 70s, that there was so much fluidity, with dancers doing paintings and painters doing dance.” 21 As a director, actor, writer, and teacher he has glided between disciplines throughout his career, collaborating with dancers, poets, videographers, painters and architects to create works that engage communities and offer insight into the social issues of the time. Malpede first came to Los Angeles for research on the performance aspect of the collaborative public art project by architect Laurie Hawkinson, visual artist Erika Rothenberg, and himself entitled “Freedom of Expression National Monument.” The enormous red microphone enticed visitors to the Battery Park City Landfill to “voice 58 their thoughts, poetry, grievances, and hopes” across the Hudson River, “providing a public forum for dialogue on the dynamics of free speech, power and powerlessness, and a multiplicity of social and cultural concerns” 22 (see 5.4). “Freedom” was a part of Art on The Beach, an annual program presented by Creative Time that ran from 1978 to 1985 on the city landfill during lengthy litigations over development on the river front property (see fig. A.11). “Olympic Update: Homelessness in Los Angeles” was developed and performed as part of the Freedom project in 1984 and marked the beginning of Malpede’s involvement with poverty issues and his subsequent relocation to Los Angeles in 1985. With the help of the then active California Arts Council, he founded the Los Angeles Poverty Department (LAPD), a community theatre comprised primarily of homeless and formerly homeless people living on Los Angeles’ Skid Row which he continues to direct today. When asked about Los Angeles in an interview, Malpede stated that, “he likes the infiniteness of the city.” Because the city is considerably younger then east coast cities such as New York, “there is more opportunity because there is less opportunity.” Malpede believes that “things are not so well defined [in Los Angeles], and there is more open space for opportunities.” 23 That was his initial reason for moving to the city. Malpede feels that 18 th Street functions very organically as a place for social and artistic networking. Artists living and working at the center share resources and opportunities and there is a natural exchange of ideas. He asserts that “an artist can spend all day trying to reach people via email and on the telephone,” but at 18 th Street they often run into the person who they are trying to reach and “do two weeks worth of business in a minute. In some ways it’s like being in a small town. You can actually have 59 face-to-face contact with people, which is even faster then the Internet.” 24 The collaborations that are formed extend far beyond the center. For example, an Australian artist who was in the exchange program last summer worked with Malpede in filming some of the work of LAPD. Artist Suzanne Lacy who is running her public art program for Otis College of Art and Design out of a studio space at the center has brainstormed with Malpede on several occasions and is even connecting some of her students with the artist’s current public project. For Malpede, “a walk through the parking lot [at 18 th Street] can solve a lot of [his] problems.” 25 At the moment, Malpede is preparing for the production of a collaborative show in Paris involving 35 residents of the commune Gennevilliers in the northwest suburbs of Paris and 5 performers from LAPD. Upon his return, he will begin working on a public art project in Downtown entitled “The Skid Row History Museum” funded by the Community Redevelopment Agency (CRA). Rather than works housed in a single building, the “museum” will occupy all of Skid Row and will consist of permanent public artworks placed in the landscape which reflect significant individuals and moments in the history of that area as well as the changing socio-economic contours of Downtown. The Skid Row History Museum will be a deeply collaborative and inventive project in terms of community-building and public participation. A certain amount of tolerance and openness to the process will be inherent since most of the individuals involved are members of the Skid Row community and therefore live both transient and marginalized lives. The project hopes to act as an open vehicle for art making and is warranted for an honest representation of the city’s past, present and future. 60 18 th Street Arts Center provides Malpede with affordable housing as well as a working environment, which fosters multiple collaborations and sparks new ideas. It contributes to his passion and drive allowing him to daringly go beyond the typical percent-for-art models of public art and create works that tell real, rather than idealized stories. The resources and invaluable interactions at the center help support his work as an artist both financially and creatively. The nonprofit currently maintains a board of directors and a full-time staff of five people, four of whom are program administrators and one who is a facility administrator. The budget of 18 th Street Arts Center ranges from $700,000 and $800,000 annually. Approximately 50% of that income is derived from the rental income of the property and the other 50% from donations and grants that are applied to the four programs run by the center. 18 th Street Arts Center is currently in the process of planning for the design and building of a new 80,000 square foot arts facility that will incorporate 30-60 affordable artist live/work studios as well as various kinds of presentation, workshop and office space for emerging and established arts organizations. 18 th Street is also examining the possibilities of including a café, blue-screen special effects room, sound recording room, and screening room. 26 The new facility which is being designed by the award-winning architecture, engineering and interior design firm, Pugh + Scarpa, will be a three-fold expansion and redevelopment of the current campus. Fitting into the mission of 18 th Street, Pugh + Scarpa architects “encourage a culture of ingenuity and exploration,” and strive to “create environments that stimulate their occupants and leave lasting 61 impressions.” 27 The funding source for the public artist component of the initial facility planning stage is the California Cultural and Historical Endowment. Additionally, 18 th Street has been conducting a regional survey of artists and arts organizations to discover exactly what it is they need to better maintain and sustain their creative process in the city of Los Angeles. The online survey will be used by the organization to better understand the needs of artists and organizations in order to incorporate those elements in the development plans. This resource should also prove to be extremely valuable in the future for arts administrators, artists, organizations, and funding sources seeking ways in which to assist local artists. In an interview with Executive Director Jan Williamson, she reveals the three important assets of the organization that make it a historically unique entity within Los Angeles: “We have a community of artists who are local, national and international and that is our most precious asset. Then we have this amazing piece of land in an incredibly arts friendly city by the ocean in California [Santa Monica] which is a very creative environment and we have a twenty-year history of supporting programs and artists.” 28 Wanting to continue to serve the Los Angeles arts community, 18 th Street went through a number of strategic planning processes while reviewing possibilities for renovation of the five-building campus which has been failing due to age and is no longer functioning well for the innovative work of 21 st century artists. Rather than selling the property and moving the organization elsewhere, the administrative staff and board decided on the most forward thinking approach: to simply rebuild on the same site. The recent public artist(s) selection process for the redevelopment of 18 th Street revealed what is truly important to the organization and how it intends to improve upon 62 its contribution to the arts ecology in Los Angeles. Most importantly, 18 th Street was looking for a public artist or artist team that was “process oriented” rather then object- based, and would be willing to explore alternatives of public art production while engaging with the entire community that makes up 18 th Street including artists and audiences. The architects, board members, city public art planners and staff that sat on the panel all mentioned that they were seeking an artist or artistic team that was innovative, experiential, collaborative, flexible, and who would produce “cutting edge work.” The center’s quest is for a public artist who intends to co-create a public work that is representative of the organization and mirrors the fundamentals that the center has encouraged and championed for the past 16 years. In the past, 18 th Street Arts Center has leaned toward community-involved collaborative practices that tend to operate in what Claire Bishop terms a “socially ameliorative tradition.” 29 Yet as the organization has grown and with its new plans for expansion, it appears as though the focus has shifted toward innovation in public art – the possible achievement of making dialogue a medium or the significance of dematerializing a project into social process. 30 63 LA><ART (See fig. A.12, A.13.) Mission Statement - 2008 Responding to Los Angeles’ cultural climate, LA><ART questions given contexts for the exhibition of contemporary art, architecture and design. With a renewed vision for the potential of independent art spaces, LA><ART provides a center for interdisciplinary discussion and interaction and for the production and exhibition of new exploratory work. LA><ART offers a space for provocation, dialogue and confrontation by practices on the ground in Los Angeles and abroad. LA><ART is a hub for artists based on flexibility, transition, spontaneity and change. The space responds to an urgency, an obligation to provide an accessible exhibition space for contemporary artists, architects and designers. 31 Founded in 2005, LA><ART (pronounced L-A-X Art – the first three letters stand for “Los Angeles exhibitions” – is a new nonprofit contemporary art organization that acts as a hub for the creation and presentation of innovative art by Los Angeles artists. Positioned on La Cienega Boulevard in Culver City’s quickly expanding downtown arts district, LA><ART collaborates with local artists to implement full-scale installations, video and sound works, painting, photography, architectural exhibitions and other creative endeavors both within the operating gallery space and outside in the public realm. The 1,800-square-foot exhibition space had been a sealed and unusable building prior to local architect and professor Peter Zellner’s in- kind donation of architectural services. With a $50,000 budget, Zellner transformed the space into two large gallery spaces, an entry and office area of which any and all parts are used for shows, public gatherings, lectures and screenings. 32 The organization began as a joint effort developed out of the concerns and needs of selected patrons, artists, architects, and other influential players along with the visions of curator and professor Lauri Firstenberg who is its Director of Curating and sits on the board. The initiative was inspired in part by Deep River, a now-defunct artist-run space 64 that was located in downtown in the 90s, as well as the concept of experimentation, diversity and dialogue in contemporary arts practice that was at the core of alternative spaces in the1970s. Firstenberg, who studied art history at Berkley and Harvard, has held curatorial positions within organizations and institutions that span a wide array of structures. From working as an assistant on the Whitney Biennale to serving as head curator of Artist Space, one of the pioneering alternative spaces that rose out of New York, she has gained a wealth of knowledge about curatorial systems and alternative organizational structures as well as artist’s needs. Rather than working within the limitations of a major institution, Firstenberg has always been interested in building particular relationships with artists that she works with through her independent curatorial work. When asked about her earlier work she says it was: “a very specific relationship between artists and the contexts and the exhibitions that we were working on in terms of intersection of art practice and politics... working with and outside of larger institutions and really a kind of social and political approach to a selection of artists and curation, was always an interesting aspect of the work that we did.” 33 Artist Space had evolved both temporally and contextually from its original 1972 manifesto of being a completely artists-run organization devoted to the production of works outside the commercial world. Yet, at the time that Firstenberg began working at Artist Space, the organization’s mission, like many older nonprofits, was “literally emblazoned on the wall” and what Firstenberg did was help the organization rethink itself, re-evaluate its function and respond to the current climate. “What is interesting is in this process of responding to new ideas, young curators, and experimentation, 65 sometimes one has to kind of gesture to the past but also get over the past and really look to the future.” 34 That is exactly what Firstenberg is attempting to do with LA><ART. “What I learned at Artist Space and what I loved about it was the freedom, the scale, the interest in risk and experimentation and being able to respond to artists’ projects in a spontaneous fashion,” says Firstenberg. “So I wanted to recreate or rethink, in Los Angeles, what would be a viable model for an independent, modestly-scaled non-profit space.” As part of her research in the field, Firstenberg inserted herself in a number of nonprofits that supported independent curators such as the MAK Center for Art and Architecture, LACE, and Redcat (Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theatre). She investigated the success and failures of these spaces, “ideologically, practically, fiscally and ethically.” In addition to working within these Los Angeles institutions, she also interviewed what she says were hundreds of artists, writers, curators, and patrons to comprise a collective first-person perspective of the L.A. arts landscape and its reasons for the lack of history and density of support for small-scale organizations. Firstenberg also examined what was already happening artistically within Los Angeles and how other organizations were responding. She investigated other “sister organizations” to discover what works were being produced and which artists were being represented by both large and small institutions. Searching to fill the gaps or areas of weakness, she then took this information, her experiential knowledge, and excitement about the potential of what a new model might be and established LA><ART. 35 The organization is purposefully designed with limited administrative overhead and most of the funding goes into the programming. LA><ART mainly works with a 66 mix of independent curators, both emerging and established, to enhance the diversity that shapes the programming. Focused on commissioning new work from emerging or under- represented artists, Firstenberg says that the organization’s “scale is modest but its ambitions are large in terms of how we can produce and perform for our collaborating artists, and I think one thing that’s very important in terms of our model and our thinking is that we’re an organization that serves artists while also giving autonomy to artists.” 36 This concept of supporting autonomy gracefully blends both the liberation and freedom of alternative spaces with the nurturing aspects of an arts incubator. In addition to offering artists the space to explore and assess experimental practices both physically and conceptually, LA><ART also brings a heightened level of visibility and public exposure for each particular project. During this process relationships are formed between varieties of individuals which lead to the development of future comprehensive works that further foster greater innovation within the field. For emerging artists the experience is one that they can learn from and carry with them: knowledge of collaborative practices and the necessary steps that need to be taken to gain the publicity they seek for their work. An important way in which the organization is closing the gap between art and the public is through supporting an eclectic array of public art projects. These have included Joel Tauber’s “Sick Amour” project that included a “guerilla gardening campaign” to save a sycamore from urban blight and Ruben Ochoa’s photorealistic mural entitled “Freeway Wall Extractions” which gave the illusion to commuters on the Interstate10 freeway that portions of the wall had been blown out (see fig. A.14, A.15). LA><ART’s public projects are not only daring and thought- provoking but they innately involve the 67 collaboration of many different resources and individuals. Whether it is city officials, maintenance workers, printers, fabricators, professors, or artists, the projects could not exist without the teamwork and collaboration of multiple persons with particular sets of expertise. Ruben Ochoa’s project, “Freeway Wall Extractions,” truly exemplifies the types of innovative public art projects that LA><ART is helping to produce. The essence of traditional muralist art in Los Angeles stems from a deeply rooted intent to create art that appeals to the public at large in the hope of unveiling specific social and political issues that surround the city while fostering a sense of identity and pride in ones culture and community. With the “Extractions” project, Ochoa strayed from traditional materials used in muralist art and instead employed a less intrusive technique of adhering photographic wallpaper to the freeway wall. Ochoa conceptually linked his project to issues of transgression and the Mexican border. He also attempted to deconstruct how Los Angelinos think of the freeway system and the way it delineates neighborhoods and divides communities. A diverse group of people assisted Ochoa at the opening reception of the project on November 19, 2006. Held at the East L.A. intersection of Morengo and Soto, this engaging community outreach event both educated and sparked conversation around the project. The smell of the taco truck and the sounds of salsa-infused hip-hop music drew an assorted crowd out of their cars. From art aficionados to students, volunteers in CalTrans vests, orange and peanut vendors and neighborhood locals, the scene was diverse and vibrantly active. The event included a double decker bus that offered local tours and a drive-by view of the installation. The opening celebration was as much a part 68 of the public project as the artwork itself and in its execution managed to create a properly functioning public domain in which questions of class, culture and art collided (see fig. A.16). “All of our exhibitions and all of our projects are complemented by a program,” says Firstenberg. The public projects supported by LA><ART are attempting to bring contemporary art outside of the gallery space and the ambitions are to use the physical space as “a center, a hub for activity,” that then “proliferates art activity throughout the city and expands arts audiences.” There is a sense of intimacy that the space exudes, a comforting environment for artists’ talks, curator’s talks, and open discussions around any of the art being produced. 37 Firstenberg admits that she, along with all the other patrons, advisors and board members, is learning as the organization takes shape. Since the public works are usually site-specific and mostly innovative, it is a first for everyone involved. “What one should desire and expect and how one should proceed or should work and even what an organization could offer artists,” are just a few of the constant questions asked by LA><ART. 38 An amalgam, LA><ART is not a traditional artist-run space nor is it a fixed curatorial space. Firstenberg asserts, “It is a collaboration between artists, curators and patrons. It is basically the community getting behind an idea and hoping to manifest this idea.” The bonds that are formed and the connections that exist within the organization are what keep it afloat. “One way that we are able to function and one way I believe that we will be able to sustain ourselves is that we are basically creating a new generation of patronage,” says Firstenberg. 39 LA><ART is not relying on the same private funders that 69 other organizations are. Because the work attracts both the younger generation as well as individuals outside of the art world, the patrons come from many different circumstances. Not strapped by the taxonomies of museums or commercial galleries, LA><ART is able to ebb and flow with its environment and help facilitate the production and presentation of works that reflect and respond to today’s complex world. 70 Chapter 6: Endnotes 1 “Volunteer with LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions) - Los Angeles, CA,” http://www.volunteermatch.org/orgs/org66772.html. 2 CETA was a United States Federal law enacted in 1973 to train workers and provide them with jobs in the public service. The Act was intended to be an extension of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) program form the 1930s. Full time jobs were provided for a period of 12 to 24 months in public agencies or private not for profit organizations. CETA was designed to decentralize control of federally controlled job training programs, giving more power to the individual state governments. The Act ended in 1982. 3 “Christoph Buchel,” LACE Archives, December 29, 2003, http://www.lacearchives.org/ArtistSearcher.php. 4 Carol Stakenas, Recorded Interview with Author, December 10, 2007. 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid. 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid. 9 “Project Overview,” Karaoke Ice, http://karaokeice.com/ice_pages/information.html 10 Stakenas, December 10, 2007. 11 Miwon Kwon, One Place After Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2002) 153-155. 12 Ibid. 13 18 th Street Arts Center, “Mission + History,” 18th Street Arts, http://www.18thstreet.org/missionhistory.html. 14 Linda Frye Burnham, “"High Performance," Performance Art, and Me,” The Drama Review: TDR 30, no. 1 (Spring 1986). 15 18 th Street Arts Center, “Mission + History.” 16 Ibid. 17 Ibid. 18 Jan Williamson, Recorded Interview with Author, December 4, 2007. 19 Countries include Australia, Austria, Cameroon, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Cuba, France, Finland, Germany, Indonesia, Ireland, Israel, Japan, Mexico, Nigeria, Pakistan, Portland, South Korea, Sudan, Sweden, Taiwan, Thailand, and the United Kingdom. 18 th Street Arts Center, “Mission + History,” 18th Street Arts. 71 20 18 th Street Arts Center, “Artists in Residency,” 18th Street Arts Center, http://www.18thstreet.org/resident_artists.html. 21 John Malpede, Recorded Interview with Author, February 16, 2008. 22 Erika Rothenberg, “Freedom of Expression National Monument,” Public Art, http://erikarothenberg.com/pubproj/freedom.shtml. 23 John Malpede, February 16, 2008. 24 Ibid. 25 Ibid. 26 18 th Street Arts Center, “Rebuilding,” 18th Street Arts Center, http://www.18thstreet.org/rebuilding.html. 27 Pugh + Scarpa, “Profile + History,” Pugh + Scarpa, http://www.pugh-scarpa.com/profile/history. 28 Williamson, December 4, 2007. 29 Claire Bishop, “The Social Turn: Collaboration and its Discontents,” Artforum International 44, no. 6 (2006): 181. 30 Ibid. 31 “About - LA><ART,” LA><ART, http://www.laxart.org/contemporary/about. 32 S.L., “Arts Incubator, Meet busy Thoroughfare,” Architectual Record 194, no. 5 (May 2006): 47. 33 Lauri Firstenberg, Recorded Interview with Author, January 11, 2008. 34 Ibid. 35 Ibid. 36 Ibid. 37 Ibid. 38 Ibid. 39 Ibid. 72 CHAPTER 7: A HYBRID APPROACH: ALTERNATIVE ARTS INCUBATORS Conclusions “Innovation in public art” is an illusive phrase which at times seems an impossibility. Involving countless variables including the autonomous visions and ambitions of an artist or artistic team, the policies and protocols of government agencies, the differing opinions and views of the public and the history and current conditions of a locale, public art is in itself a highly complex and interwoven practice that can appear to be a leap of faith. Nonetheless, it has been achieved and we are reminded so when we come across those works that stimulate and ignite our imaginations, stir our emotions and remind us of art’s remarkable capability to communicate universal truths about our own world as well as the world of others. Although there is no tried and true means by which to reach such a seemingly unattainable feat, certain conclusions can be drawn from past procedures and systems of support that focus and strengthen the organizations that foster public artists and cultivate innovative practices to leave lasting marks on our society. After a careful review of the three case studies as well as the shifts and trends within the field and the LA arts ecology, the most effective approaches to public art in Los Angeles can be identified. These conclusions will tease out aspects of both alternative spaces and arts incubators that prove, within the context of the cases analyzed, to be successful in fostering the production and presentation of stimulating public artworks in Los Angeles. Today’s most effective model will encourage the following fundamentals: collaboration and a commitment to community, multidisciplinary practices, experimentation, and a dedication to being receptive and malleable. 73 As the boundaries become increasingly blurred between nonprofit and commercial, amateur and professional, structured and informal arts, we see that those perceived boundaries and distinctions are no longer productive. In a world were audiences, artists, schools, and communities are much more fluid in their expression and experience of arts and culture, it has become more important than ever to understand the whole, as well as its parts. It is critical for today’s nonprofit public art organizations to focus on more thoughtful connections of that segment to its larger system. 1 There is no other place like Los Angeles where this intersection of practices, communities, and ideas are more prevalent. Organizations need to provide the space and means for artists and artist teams to collaborate in order to create innovative work. This collaboration should include connections between artists as well as other aspects of a community such as arts advocates, board or staff, economic development, recreation, urban planning, zoning, private sector partners, or any local resource available to forge the strategic alliances necessary to implement innovative public art. Much of LA><ART’s success can be attributed to the connection the organization has made with other resources untapped by preexisting nonprofits. 18 th Street Arts center has enforced a strong collaborative aspect through its multiple artist exhibitions, workshops, and Arts Education Program, while its strength lies in what artist John Malpede claims is “an organic social network.” By gathering an eclectic group of local, national and international art practitioners, and allowing them to work and live in the same space, the organization is fostering natural intersections that typically lead creative individuals to collaborations on a range of projects that extend far beyond the center’s property. Similarly, today’s LACE has noticed the trend of artists who are producing more socially 74 intensive works and have begun to think in a broader continuum, not exclusive to the white box paradigm, as artists at LACE did in its earlier days. Supporting public projects like Karaoke Ice that are based on collaborative modes of artistic production and involve a range of individuals is the direction Stakenas is heading with LACE. This sense of collaboration also needs to be extended to the greater public without the notion of singularity or identification of distinct communities. Miwon Kwon raises questions about how we as a society think about community. She refers to how the word has been used with the mindset of exclusivity, whether it refers to high-income housing co-ops or to low-income ethnic clusters. Why should we encourage public art that is essentially confirming the identity of a group of people as separate? In today’s world, organizations need to regard community as distributed and fluid as opposed to segmented and rigid. One of the most significant results of the communications boom of the last 20 years has been the proliferation of distributed social networks. Innovation in public art will focus more on projects that allow new communities to form and re-form, and to extend rather than remain introspective and isolated. Due to its limitlessness and multiple pockets of social, economic, and creative differences, Los Angeles is an environment that should be open to wider and more expansive views of what the idea of “community” entails. The fluid and protean nature of Los Angeles lends itself to flexibility and interdisciplinary modes of production. 18 th Street Arts Center’s residency program includes artists from all backgrounds and disciplines and organizations creating everything from interactive websites to body-sensitive performance art pieces all under one roof. As these artists interact, new relationships are formed and through them novel 75 approaches to creative production and public distribution. Likewise, many of the exhibitions or public works that have come out of LACE have included varying ideas of art involving everything from dance to painting, and mapping installations to karaoke singing. Within its venue LA><ART resides in a more elitist art historical pedagogy with a primary focus on the visual arts. Innovation is seen more clearly through the public works that the organization has chosen to champion which have demonstrated a wide use of artistic practices based in fields ranging from science and botany to classical mural techniques transformed by new techniques of printing and adhesion. While artistic creation is flourishing, the institutionalized nonprofit arts and cultural sector is struggling to maintain its edge. Young artists coming out of school look at television, film, video games, and the Internet differently than older generations. Organizational models need to reflect and cater to the vast networks and communication technologies that are available and being utilized by these younger artists. Because the world is rapidly changing and modes of artistic production are becoming more and more hybridized, a multidisciplinary standard needs to be supported by organizations that serve the artistic community. All of the organizations discussed herein incorporated room for experimentation in artistic practices. Without many of the restrictions or limitations that typically accompany large institutions or commercial settings LACE, 18 th Street Arts Center and LA><ART have been able to foster the type of creativity that arises out of a climate of experimentation. Many of the projects and works that have come out of these entities were the first of their kind. Without the support and space provided by these organizations, many of the more inventive creations might not have ever been realized. 76 As a fairly new organization, it is hard to determine whether LA><ART’s funding sources will be as open to experimentation as LACE and 18 th Street. Perhaps it will be this rich financial resource of private funding that will allow for experimentation and the failure that inherently accompanies it. LACE, 18 th Street Arts Center, and LA><ART all exhibited a willingness to evolve and amend certain practices or structures according to the needs of the art community. In the midst of changing locations and new leadership, LACE was able to reform its structure and expand its audience because it was not dedicated to a fixed model. 18 th Street is currently responding to the needs of its artists and the community with the building of its new facility. And LA><ART has, in only two years of operation, learned from its mistakes and has modified its operation and who is involved in the dialogue that it initiates. Public art organizations need to pay close attention to shifts in artist’s needs, funding mechanisms, and the greater public to alter inflexible systems and devise new and more appropriate programs and practices that are reflective of the evolving landscape. In addition, because Los Angeles consists of diverse communities and differing economic, social, and cultural pockets, organizations focused on public art dissemination need to be sufficiently malleable to respond and relate to these vastly unique and conflicting enclaves within the context that is Los Angeles. The production and presentation of engaging and inclusive public art in South Central L.A. will look and feel completely different than that developed for Beverly Hills. Without a mandate of ebb and flow, the other aspects that cultivate innovation in public art such as collaboration, experimentation and multidisciplinary practices, would not be attainable or embraced. 77 A Blended Model: Alternative Arts Incubators Mirroring Mike Davis’ description of Los Angeles as both utopia and dystopia, the alternative arts incubator would reflect both place and non-place. It is a concept, a script not yet filmed, full of both possibility and countless rewrites. Like the city itself, the alternative arts incubator is a palimpsest of images and dreams bleeding one into the other in hopes of fueling innovation – the brain-flexing, rule-bending process of creating radically new ways of seeing and experiencing the world around us. This hybrid organizational structure blends the collaborative, highly experimental, and multimedia practice that was born out of the 1970s arts landscape with the strategic paradigms for sustainability and exposure that exist at the core of many arts incubators. The concept incorporates the wily and flexible nature of alternative spaces with the idea of a facility- based arts incubator that aggregates resources for artists and acts as a central location for the needs of Los Angeles-based artists entering the vast field of public art. Naturally most nonprofits combine private and public monies to survive and this model would be no different. The uniqueness of this notion comes in the way in which the model applies its financial resources in an attempt to contribute to the wonderment of this City of Angels. In this model, resources received from multiple agencies and entities would be aggregated into a larger whole. This would result in a greater impact of currently limited resources on the field and the Los Angeles community. Whereas smaller individual grants for a discipline typically have been distributed for a particular project or event, these singular grants could be pooled to support a more diverse range of artists to produce multi-disciplinary experiences for the public. In turn, these events would reach larger masses, creating greater visibility for public art and its artists. 78 By creating an environment that promotes multi-disciplinary works, a wider variety of individuals in the community are attracted to participate. In addition to the current arts patrons and enthusiasts, this model would entice new groups of people who might not attend more traditional performances or exhibitions occurring in museum spaces or conventional institutions. This more inclusive model, interacting with multiple communities, can broaden the range of arts patrons and potentially create a positive impact on funding for public art. Ultimately acting as a hub and a center for the decentralized urban landscape, the incubator is a place where artists and individuals from all disciplines can come together, meet, dialogue, exchange and grow. It is a place that nurtures and feeds both the autonomy of individual artists as well as the collaboration of multiple artistic impulses. A properly functioning public domain, the organization would exist on principles of fluid space, openness, neutrality and collectivity where shared differences are embraced and a cohabitation of diverse groups and practices is fostered. It would act as a springboard that could propel artists back out into the city to activate nodes of opportunity or plant seeds of innovation where possible voids exist. 79 Chapter 7: Endnotes 1 Andrew Taylor, Renegotiation: An Overview of U.S. Arts Industry Insights, 2003-20072007 80 BIBLIOGRAPHY 18 th Street Arts Center. 18th Street Arts. http://www.18thstreet.org/missionhistory.html. Anheier, Helmut K., Eve Garrow, Marcus Lam, David B. Howard, and Jocelyn Guihama. Arts in the Balance: Arts Funding in Los Angeles County: 1998-2005, UCLA Center for Civil Society and Southern California Grantmakers, 2006. Arlington Arts, “The Arts Incubator Story,” Arts Incubator, Arlington Arts. http://www.arlingtonarts.org/arts_incubator/incubatorstory.htm Arthur, Nicole and Arlington County Cultural Affairs Division. “Hatching Art: Creating a Vital Arts Presence in Your Community.” Americans for the Arts Monographs 1, no. 4 (1997): 1-12. http://www.americansforthearts.org/ Becker, Howard S. Art Worlds. University of California Press,1984. Becker, Jack. “Public Art's Cultural Evolution,” Community Arts Network, http://www.communityarts.net/readingroom/archivefiles/2002/02/public_arts_cul. php. Bishop, Claire. “The Social Turn: Collaboration and its Discontents,” Artforum International 44, no. 6 (2006): 185. Boehm, Mike. “Nonprofit Arts Face the Music,” Los Angeles Times, December 6, 2006. Borrup, Tom. The Creative Community Builder’s Handbook: How to Transform Communities Using Local Assets, Arts, and Culture. Saint Paul Minnesota: Fieldstone Alliance, 2006. Bourdieu, Pierre. “Introduction,” in Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984. Burnham, Linda Frye. "High Performance," Performance Art, and Me,” The Drama Review: TDR 30, no. 1 (Spring 1986). Cieply, Michael. “Writers Say Strike to Start Monday,” The New York Times, November 2, 2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/02/business/media/02cnd- hollywood.html?_r=2&hp&oref=slogin&oref=slogin Cities of the World, Los Angeles History, February 12, 2008. http://www.city- data.com/world-cities/Los-Angeles-History.html. Davis, Mike. City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles. New York: Verso, 1990. 81 Dear, Michael J., H. Eric Schockman, and Greg Hise. Rethinking Los Angeles. Los Angeles: Sage Publications Inc, 1996. Debord, Guy. Préface a la quatrième édition italienne de "La société du spectacle," Paris: Editions Champ Libre, 1979. Drew, Nancy. “L.A.'s Space Age,” in LACE 10 yrs. Documented. Los Angeles: Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, 1988. Florida, Richard. Cities and the Creative Class. New York: Routledge, 2005. ____. The Rise of the Creative Class: And How it’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life. New York: Basic Books, 2002. Gerl, Ellen, Joy MillerUpton, and Meredith Erlewine. Incubating the Arts: Establishing a program to Help Artists and Arts Organizations Become Viable Businesses. Athens: NBIA Publications, 2000. Goldstein, Barbara. Public Art By The Book. Seattle Washington: University of Washington Press, 2005. Habermas, Jurgen (German (1962) English Translation 1989). The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Cambridge Massachusetts: The MIT Press. Hajer, Maarten and Arnold Reijndorp. In Search of New Public Domain: Analysis and Strategy. Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 2001. Kahn, Mary. “An Introduction to Arts Incubators.” Americans for the Arts Monographs 3, no. 4 (1995): 1-16. http://www.americanforthearts.org Karaoke Ice, “Project Overview,” Karaoke Ice, http://karaokeice.com/ice_pages/information.html Kraus, Chris, Jan Tumlir, and Jane McFadden, LA Artland: Contemporary Art From Los Angeles. Los Angeles: Black Dog Publishing, 2005. Kwon, Miwon. “Miwon Kwon: Public Art and Urban Identities,” Lecture at the Photography Institute, June 7, 1998, http://www.thephotographyinstitute.org/journals/1998/miwon_kwon.html. _____. One Place After Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2002. 82 _____. “Public Art as Publicity,” in Simon Sheikh, ed. In the Place of the Public Sphere? On the establishment of publics and counter-publics. Berlin: b_books, 2005. LACE, “Volunteer with LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions) - Los Angeles, CA,” http://www.volunteermatch.org/orgs/org66772.html. LACE, “Christoph Buchel,” LACE Archives, December 29, 2003, http://www.lacearchives.org/ArtistSearcher.php. Lacy, Suzanne. Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art. Seattle, Wash.: Bay Press, 1995. LA><ART, “About - LA><ART,” LA><ART, http://www.laxart.org/contemporary/about Lippard, Lucy R. “Biting the Hand: Artists and Museums in New York since 1969,” in Ault, 79-120. ______. The Lure of the Local: A Sense of Place In A Multicentered Society (New York: The New Press, 1997), 278. Longstreth, Richard. City Center to regional Mall: Architecture, the Automobile, and Retailing in Los Angeles, 1920-1950. Cambridge Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1997. MacFadden, Jane. “Los Angeles: Then and Now, Here and There,” in LA Artland: Contemporary Art from Los Angeles. Los Angeles: Black Dog Publishing, 2005. McCarthy, Kevin F., Elizabeth H. Ondaatje, Laura Zakaras, and Brooks Arthur. Gifts of the Muse: Reframing the Debate About the Benefits of the Arts. Santa Monica: RAND Corporation, 2004. McCarthy, Kevin F., Elizabeth Heneghan Ondaatje, Jennifer L. Novak, Arts and Culture in the Metropolis: Strategies for Sustainability, RAND, 2007. http://www.rand.org/pubs/monographs/MG4771 Myers, Holly. “Making Art A Team Sport.” Los Angeles Times, September 30, 2007, Calendar sec. F. Patton, Phil. “Other Voices, Other Rooms: The Rise of the Alternative Space.” Art in America, 4, no. 21 (July 1977): 80-89. Phillips, Patricia C. “In This Issue: The Exquisite and Urgent Importance of Art,” Art Journal, no. Spring (2007). 83 ______. “Public Constructions,” in Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art. Seattle Washington: Bay Press, 1995. ______. “Temporality and Public Art,” Art Journal 48, no. 4 (Winter 1989) 331-335. Pritikin, Renny. “Historic Issues of Artists Organizations,” in LACE 10 yrs. Documented. Los Angeles: Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, 1988. Pugh + Scarpa, “Profile + History,” Pugh + Scarpa, http://www.pugh- scarpa.com/profile/history. Reiss, Alvin H. “Arts Incubators Help Local Groups to Grow and Develop Their Potential.” Fund Raising Management 28, no. 12 (1998): 20-23. Reiss, Bob. Low Risk, High Reward: Starting and Growing Your Business with Minimal Risk. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000. Roche, Jennifer. “Socially Engaged Art, Critics and Discontents: An Interview with Claire Bishop,” Community Arts Network, July 2006, http://www.communityarts.net/readingroom/archivefiles/2006/07/socially_engage .php. Rosewall, Ellen. “Community Assessment and Response: Answering the Arts Building Boom.” Journal of Arts Management, Law, and Society 36, no. 3 (2006): 213- 225. Erika Rothenberg, “Freedom of Expression National Monument,” Public Art, http://erikarothenberg.com/pubproj/freedom.shtml. Savinar, Tad. “Fresh perspectives,” Americans for the Arts Public Conference, Nashville, Tennessee, June 6, 2002. S.L. “Arts Incubator, Meet Busy Thoroughfare.” Architectural Record 194, no. 5 (2006): 47. Taylor, Andrew. Renegotiation: An Overview of U.S. Arts Industry Insights, 2003-2007. U.S. Census Bureau. “State and County Quickfacts,” U.S. Census Bureau, http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/06/06037.html Vitto, Acconci. “Acconci Studio,” http://www.acconci.com. 84 Appendix A: Figures Fig. A.1: Four Arches, Alexander Calder, 1974. 45’H. 333 S. Hope Street. Photo by author, 2008. Fig. A.2: Four Arches, Alexander Calder, 1974. 45’H. 333 S. Hope Street. Photo by author, 2008. 85 Fig. A.3 and A.4. California Wash: A Memorial, by Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison. Mapping of storm drain system and bronze images of animals that once prevail on the site. Photos by author, 2008. Fig. A. 5. Front of LACE. Photo by author, 2008. 86 Fig. A.6. Store Front of LACE with collective project by Camilo Ontiveros and Felipe Zuniga, titled “El Cubo,” 2008. Photo by author, 2008. Fig. A.7. Lucci, the Truck and Remedios the squirrel cub on the Karaoke Ice Tour, 2007. Photo courtesy of LACE. 87 Fig. A.8. Karaoke Ice Tour, 2007. Photo courtesy of LACE. Fig. A.9. 18 th Arts Center, Santa Monica. Photo by author, 2008. 88 Fig. A.10. 18 th Arts Center, Santa Monica. Photo by author, 2008. Fig. A.11. Freedom of Expression National Monument, Foley Square, NYC, 2004. A public art project by Erika Rothenberg in collaboration with Lauri Hawkinson, architect and John Malpede, performance artist. Photo courtesy of John Malpede. 89 Fig. A.12. LA><ART, Culver City. Wall painting by Daniel J. Martinez. Photo by author, 2008. A.13. LA><ART, Culver City. Wall painting by Brian Bress. Photo by author, 2008. 90 Fig. A.14. Installation of Freeway Wall Extractions, by Ruben Ochoa. Photo by author, 2008. Fig. A.15. Installation of Freeway Wall Extractions, by Ruben Ochoa. Photo by author, 2008. 91 Fig. A.16. Opening event of Freeway Wall Extractions. Photo by author, 2008.
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Gordillo, Nicole
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Core Title
Alternative art incubators: cultivating collaboration and innovation in Los Angeles public art practices
School
School of Fine Arts
Degree
Master of Public Art Studies
Degree Program
Public Art Studies
Publication Date
05/04/2008
Defense Date
04/01/2008
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University of Southern California
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Tag
18th Street Arts Center,alternative,Claire Bishop,collaboration,cultivate,incubator,innovation,LA><ART,Los Angeles,Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions,Mike Davis,Miwon Kwon,OAI-PMH Harvest,public art
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Los Angeles County
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English
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Gray, Susan (
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https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m1221
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18th Street Arts Center
alternative
Claire Bishop
collaboration
cultivate
incubator
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LA><ART
Mike Davis
Miwon Kwon
public art