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Re: Minnesota Mediocre: An exhibition of self satisfied Art and Craft
Posted:
Mar 30, 2003 4:34 PM
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Hi Everyone,
Sorry for posting this later than I hoped. I am sure you can all relate to trying to fit two lives in one. Without further ado…
I wanted to put a few things out for everyone as part of my response to the editing profiles issues, questions of insiderism, and the effort to transform public institutions. mnartists.org is an interesting, important, and timely project for the arts community. I want to start with a few basic bits of information.
First, mnartists.org grew out The McKnight Foundation’s intention to positively impact the economic well being of the arts community, i.e. making it easier for artists to live their lives as artists.
Second, The McKnight Foundation partnered with Walker Art Center’s New Media Initiatives. This is an interesting group. They both a curatorial department and an active creative group, making multimedia based art. There are not a marketing group, a service organization, or purely a technology group, they are an art-making and presenting entity.
Third, the arts community are in the midst extremely difficult times. We are in the midst of a fight for public funding. Programs and organizations are disappearing. Even more frightening, as Chris Osgood from Springboard for the Arts and the State Arts Board reminded me recently, is that we have not begun to see the impact of the massive losses in private foundation resources. Chris mentioned that the foundation cycle is about three years long, i.e. the losses suffered in the recent past will influence funding for at least the next three years. The extensive infrastructure in Minnesota that supports the arts will be transforming over the next few years.
The first two points are essential to understand what mnartists.org is and how it is grown. This project is a partnership between The McKnight Fonudation and Walker Art Center, specifically New Media Initiatives. I mentioned in the Dialogue forum that I am approaching my work as an art project. But, I am not the only one. From its inception, mnartists.org has been an art project. Yes, mnartists.org is providing practical communications tools to artists, venue for presenting work, and opportunities for networking, socializing and engaging their art practice, but this mnartists.org at its heart is art.
There is an interview with Steve Dietz, curator of New Media, on the site where he discusses New Media and mnartists.org. There are a couple of interesting points.
"AK: How does mnartists.org relate to the other Web projects you work on?
SD: One of the significant things about the network is the two-way nature of the communication it makes possible. What's been important to me about mnartists is its self-organizing potential . . .
AK: Ideally-- like the Web has been . . .
SD: That organizations like Walker and McKnight can help in the process, but that mnartists creates itself by the interaction of its participants..."
Read the full article at http://www.mnartists.org/article.do?rid=14227. I think this statement is significant for everyone using mnartists.org. This project is being facilitated by a collaboration between McKnight and WAC, but the girth of it is created in and by the arts community.
I want to note a couple of things here. First, mnartists.org staff don’t know what this project will look like yet. It is dependent on who participates and how they participate. Second, this statement points to the organic development of the project. We are not trying to present the community with complete resource or service up front. We are trying to initiate movement in the community through providing an opportunity for ongoing interaction online, i.e. an online hub for the arts community across the state. The end will hopefully be people working in the arts doing their/our work more insightfully, effectively, efficiently, and cohesively.
This bit about facilitating movement is near and dear to me. Two primary questions for me as a movement artist are "What is movement?" and "How is movement relevant in today’s world?" My response to the first question is movement is the transformation of relationships. These transformations can take many forms whether it is limited to human physicality or manifests itself in conversation, writing, image creation, how organizations and/or institutions interact with each other, etc… My role in this project is to facilitate movement within the community that ultimately leads to the increased value and compensation of art and artists in our communities. It is an attempt to find answers to the second question.
One of the answers that is ringing loud and clear is the need for an increased value by society at large of art and artists. Just as important though, there needs to be a more appropriate ways to value the arts. There is a need in the arts community for a cultural movement. We need to engage our communities and leaders in the realm of belief and values. The tricky part of this is that we live in a society that values individualism and tangible, material things as much as anything. So, we are presented with the dilemma or translating the importance of the arts as a social endeavor and what are often intangible, yet absolutely knowable, practices and experiences and into terms of dollars and numbers of people. There are many examples of projects that succeed in doing this. Yet, as artists and people who engage in the arts we understand that the long term impact of single moments and images often cannot be translated into such terms nor assigned numeric values.
Part of the insight and importance of mnartists.org is that we are simultaneously making art, demonstrating the tangible value of art making practices, and providing much needed tools and services to a group of people. Second, we are exploring the myriad possibilities for the relationships between funders and the manifestation of projects. Third, we are venue for the arts community to meet and do their work while creating a venue for people all over the world to learn about, appreciate, and support the arts in Minnesota.
Now onto the situation in Minnesota… As a community we are in the unenviable position of preparing ourselves for bad situation that is getting worse in terms of arts funding. It is imperative that we find ways to preserve essential resources and make sure we position ourselves to continue the health of the arts during this time and afterwards. Last, week I was at one of the State Arts Board’s town hall meetings. There was plenty of infighting between the Majors and smaller organizations. Yet, there was a pervasive sense that the arts are essential to our communities and that we need to cooperate to ensure the health of the Arts. How this happens is for us as a community to determine.
As it pertains to mnartists.org, the situation of scarce resources and the complexity of developing a project on an ongoing basis so that it can continue to be flexible, relevant, and effective for its intended audience is greatly benefited by your sensitivity to the context in which mnartists.org exists as you work with us to make this project happen. Raising the issue of the role of the administrator as well as community standards for discourse is important and now is the appropriate moment to address those questions. Lauren, yes, it is a balancing act, but one we purposefully created and happy to work with.
All right, that is enough for now and this is a first draft. So, please let this stuff sit for a minute and respond. I can continue the conversation and the work of enriching the Minnesota arts community and all of your art making practices with you in a week.
Colin
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I'm still chuckling about it. And a classic retort about art censorship from Coyote! Oh you guys are going to love the found sound audio clip I'm going to post as soon as I figure out how to plug a tape player into this computer.