David Platzker, the former director of of Printed Matter who now runs Specific Object organized an great panel: Mitigating the Obvious Culture and the Search for Broader Humanity: Bridging the Gap between Us and Them. He spoke about the Art Spaces Archive Project which he started and is now housed at the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College. ASAP archives the history and the best practices of the Alternative Movement from 1950 to the present throughout the United States. It sounds like a great resource- too bad the focus is so narrow. It would be great to see it expanded.
Then Joshua Decter, Director of the Public Art Studies Program, USC Roski School of Fine Arts spoke. He let a series of images related to his talk run in the background “rather than be pedantic and parochial”. He spoke about issues of art in the public sphere and the split between a contemporary art world perspective and the municipal approach that we see as part of the administration of public art in many cities in North America. He then discussed the difference between a contemporary art context and a counter-culture context and how as someone coming out of an art world context he realized that you can participate in both contexts. How the artworld is wrapped up in the administration of public resistance- where all forms of transgressions are displayed within the avant- garde. He then argued for learning things on the ground, for socially responsible practices.
Finally I heard Edgar Arceneaux talk about his Watts Housing Project- an ongoing collaborative artwork in the shape of a neighborhood redevelopment Artist Residency Project. The plan is to renovate twenty houses around the historic Watts Towers with four propoerties per year to be done between 2013 and 2018. It is a very ambitious project- “the best way to buttress against the forces of gentrification is ownership.”
He discussed the difference between Resources- local residents and volunteers, Supporters- Hammer, USC, and LAXART, and Funders- Creative Capital.
His criteria for their selection process: make no false promises, limit their area, and begin the process with dialogue. Their goal is to get each arts organization to support a renovation and they need at least one advocate- a family, in order to begin the process.
