Institutional Space/Public Space

Papers erupted from a filing cabinet geyser, office chairs splayed like victims of a massacre, crumpled up pages of art books formed a pyramid in the corner of the room aping a Felix Gonzalez-Torres piece. Landline phones dangling from the ceiling, caught in the xerox copied feedback of a webcam examining its own reflection. The detritus of the ISSUE Project Room office was thrust into the spotlight.

We ponder trash to understand what must be discarded to be ourselves. Our second program took the recently vacated ISSUE Project Room office in the East Village in Manhattan as its venue. We reflected on how in our previous program the office had become a simulated experience, more akin to stage design than a material place. The ISSUE Project Room office was vacated in preparation for the organization’s move to an office within the 22 Boerum Theater. In this way, it represented the reality of organizations throughout Manhattan relocating their day to day operations. We sought to demystify the organizing of shows through emphasizing the space in which ISSUE’s staff labored to realize various experimental music performances.

Within arts nonprofits, labor is a touchy subject. Tax returns for ISSUE Project Room state that executive compensation over the past five years represents between 15-20% of the organization’s total expenses. Executive Director Zev Greenfield’s salary grew from an initial hiring rate of $99,126 in 2016 to $147,548 in 2022. Nonprofits are notorious for strenuous working conditions where the importance of the mission justifies long hours and low compensation. The zine “The Politics of CUM: Mission Drift and the Nonprofit Industrial Complex” describes how “nonprofits tend to mimic for profits” in the pursuit of increased offerings and programs to appease funders and board members at the expense of working conditions for staff.

Our experience as fellows cannot speak to the labor conditions at ISSUE Project Room, but we did observe the crunch surrounding programming where the small staff are consistently expected to fulfill multiple roles to ensure the success of the show. As contract employees, we were paid $3000 to be split between the two of us. We constantly bounced ideas off each other to try to imagine the best possible shows, often finding our passion compelled us to work longer and harder in the absense of further compensation. We encountered conflict ranging from dismissiveness to disrespect, with tensions often running high as the day of the show approached. The curatorial fellowship is intended to inject new creative visions into the organizations, yet we encountered restrictions presented as creative constraints. As freelancers, executing our curation meant accepting the discomfort of the workplace.

In the ISSUE office the day of our second program, this disenchantment was momentarily suspended as we watched ambient experimentalist More Eaze and noise pop musician Cal Fish enliven the space. Both created evolving soundscapes that mystified the mundane surroundings. The show spiraled out from the office, with each performer following up their office space set with a second set in Tompkins Square Park. We pushed our generator and speaker down the cracked East Village sidewalks under the auburn haze of forest fire skies. Staging performances in different locations sought to connect the office to the surrounding neighborhood, to reflect on urban change as an unfinished process in motion. Echoes of the Tompkins Square Riots, of the hardcore raves, of the squatter punk festivals–echoes of echoes lost in the chords of more eaze’s pedal steel and the static of Cal’s radios.

We wanted Mari and Cal to perform in public without permission. We craved a space for experimental artistry amongst the rising rents and disappearing spaces of the lower east side. We made a claim to public space for creative expression, the same claim that rings out everytime someone performs in Tompkins Square Park.

We were still dreaming, uncertain of who would hear our echo.

Institutional Needs

I always thought of working with an art institution like ISSUE Project Room as a great honor. Maybe it was my time in the university craving the compliments of my professors, or my experience in the music scene seeking the respect of my peers, or my eight years in competitive debate vying for the win–past patterns conditioning my happiness on the recognition of others. With time, I’ve realized the desire for recognition is a trap. It allows external structures to determine your self-worth, empowering others to demand you compromise your vision or values in order to gain their approval. Understanding your worth through the recognition of others gives your power away.

At the same time, of course you crave recognition. It confers opportunities, money, connections, prestige; it offers a pathway to the life you imagine for yourself. This promise is the trap. The longing for the life you imagined for yourself wielded to discipline you. The institution needs you to give up your values. The institution values you as a temporary creative intervention, an option ready to be replaced when more bankable alternatives come along.

Standing in 22 Boerum Place before the soundcheck at the 2023 ISSUE Project Room Gala on October 11th, I knew these things but I hadn’t felt them. Art and criticism allow this ironic distance where you can identify institutional problems without totally accepting how entangled with the institution you are. The Gala made the reality felt.

We’d been asked by Zev to deliver the land acknowledgement at the Gala. After contemplating how to do a land acknowledgement that went beyond white guilt and settler apologies, we landed on a performative intervention. Consisting of a series of chains made from fabric with QR codes linking to Native American advocacy organizations, the land acknowledgement strived to give tangible action to gala participants to support existing indigenous people in the United States. Each attendee would break off a link of the chain to take home in hopes that they would use their significant financial resources to support Native American organizations. This performance was accompanied by spoken text stressing the present tense of colonialism and including the line, “The occupation of indigenous lands in the United States, Canada, Australia, and Palestine involves ongoing, daily acts of violence against Native People.”

Upon seeing our script during the soundcheck, Zev first suggested and then demanded the reference to the occupation of Palestine by the Israeli Apartheid government be removed. Alice and I were struck by the moral failure of this request. Faced with growing calls for the violent elimination of the Palestinian people both in Israel and in the United States, we felt the land acknowledgement carried a moral duty to connect these two settler colonies. But the purpose of a land acknowledgement at a gala is not to meaningfully reflect on the role of settler art institutions within the daily reproduction of colonial violence. Instead, it serves as a barometer of progressiveness to signal to donors a liberal political impulse within the organization.

Zev’s request reflects the history of Euro-American liberalism wherein the appearance of tolerance masks structural violence against indigenous, Black, and Brown people. The demand to remove the reference to Palestine constructs the Palestinians as underserving of concern, a necessary casualty in the quest to raise funds from donors who might be too squeamish to support an arts organization opposing Israel’s genocide of the Palestinian people. Zev stressed to us that the gala is a festive affair and bringing the subject up would cause divisions—the subtext: references to Palestine would lose ISSUE Project Room money.

Presented with the demand, we considered our options through seeking counsel from some of the artists present at the gala. Opinions varied: a liberal humanist stressed the emotional distress Jewish patrons of the gala were currently experiencing follow Hamas’s attacks on Israeli military and civilian centers; an anarchist poet reflected on the inherent moral bankruptcy of arts institutions, but warned that a statement would not constitute meaningful solidarity with the Palestinian cause as ISSUE Project Room and the art world in general are removed from political decision-making. Throughout these conversations, the specter of retaliation was present. Speaking up in this context would lead to the destruction of personal and professional relationships, foreclosing certain pathways in the experimental music and art world, a sphere already plagued by precarity.

Underlying these reflections was a deceptively simple question: what does solidarity with the Palestinian people look like? How does a statement to a crowd of rich donors to an art institution effect the material circumstances of the Palestinian people? Artists make work to capture the complexities and horrors of existence. Krzysztof Penderecki’s Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima conjures an overflowing intensity in its string arrangement, echoing how the scale of nuclear death brought by the United States at Hiroshima exists as a shock unable to be tamed by logic.

Yet, Penderecki’s opus is work about mass death. It is not an intervention against. Works that dwell on tragedy are sympathetic to human suffering, but powerless to intervene. As a canonical work within Avant Garde music, “Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima” had resounded in the heads of ISSUE Project Room gala attendees, but could it—or any work—reshape the ethical obligation one feels to another?

Ethics is the magic of art. The artist’s dream is to produce work that fundamentally shifts how people experience the world, the pull they have to certain actions, the investments they make in certain causes. Confronted with censorship, warned against traumatizing gala participants, and uncertain of the civic role of artist institutions, Alice and I took the disenchanting option to refuse to do the land acknowledgement and leave the gala as it began. The spell broken, I could only see ISSUE Project Room for what it is: another money laundering scheme wherein rich people fund works that don’t offend their sensibilities. The cruel alchemy that artists must supplicate themselves to get money from the rich in order to live.

What does it mean to withdraw? The French anarchist collective The Invisible Committee outlines a theory of the politics of withdrawal:

Withdrawal from the institutions is anything but leaving a void, it’s suppressing them in a positive way. To destitute is not primarily to attack the institution, but to attack the need we have of it […] it neutralizes it, empties it of its substance, then steps to the side and watches it expire. It reduces it down to the incoherent ensemble of its practices and makes decisions about them.

In withdrawing from the gala, refusing to make a compromised land acknowledgement, I continue to weigh my principles and my cowardice. I worry I stepped away to avoid the professional and personal fallout of disobeying my orders.

Withdrawal compels me to think differently about the interplay of courage and solidarity. In wanting to be courageous, I would be standing up to Zev for my own sake. I am deeply skeptical my words would have shifted the entrenched opinions of the gala attendees. Instead, the advice I received indicated it would have calcified existing divisions.

Wealthy benefactors would rather wait for a gallery exhibit on atrocities than confront them happening in real time. Others’ suffering is to be consumed as art, not felt as blood and flesh torn apart by bombs.

Withdrawal is not a single act but a lifelong process of making institutions like ISSUE Project Room obsolete. The dream is to build alternatives where artists support one another and can make a life without begging the wealthy for scraps. A different art world would encourage dissent, offering support for dissidents instead of threatening unpopular speech.

Antecedents

Beyond cultivating self-confidence to no longer need recognition, artists must refuse recognition. Refusal cultivates self-reliance. It asserts one’s values are more meaningful in practice than in conversation. Radical art often pantomimes refusal through commenting on politics rather than implementing programs. Political artists must ask themselves: are my aesthetics or my politics radical?

Art theory and practice in New York within the second half of the 20th century has been haunted by this question. Critic Claire Bishop observes a tension within progressive arts movements (social practice, institutional critique, and relational aesthetics) concerning the politicalization of the relationship between the artist and audience. As artists increasingly critique the complacency of art in the face of politics, critique encounters its limit. As with our first program, identifying the possibility of appropriating office spaces for creative practice does not equate to building the relationships necessary to realize the dream. Identifying the problem does not formulate a solution. For Bishop, “the task facing us today is to analyze how contemporary art addresses the viewer and to assess the quality of the audience relations it produces: the subject position that any work presupposes and the democratic notions it upholds, and how these manifested in our experience of the work.”

Did we understand what relations we were immersed in? The desire for recognition leads to entanglements with people, institutions, and value structures that one might not be aware of until they pull at your movement.

Standing in 22 Boerum’s beautiful theater, watching the stream of guests in formal attire, realizing we were a marketing tool for ISSUE Project Room–the relations we’d entered into became too much to bear.

Entanglements are difficult to exit. We were still contracted to present another program with ISSUE Project Room. A cognitive dissonance pervaded: how to work with an institution we felt was in conflict with our values? But this question often left me unsatisfied. I would hear my friends–artists, punks, academics, writers–say, “you can’t trust institutions” “The institution exploits your labor and profits off your creativity” “The institutions make you compromise your values” “The revolution won’t be led by a 501c3”. I nod along, but feel there’s something unsaid. The Invisible Committee expresses a wariness towards criticism: “the first critics of the state are the civil servants themselves; as to the militants, the more they criticize power the more they desire it and the more they refuse to acknowledge their desire.”

I want to criticize, but my criticism masks my desire for power. I want to criticize the art world from within the art world, still lost in the trap of recognition. I want to be recognized as holding a perspective worthy of regard and attention.

What’s unsaid is that my desires have been warped by institutional needs. To disentangle myself from the institution–to free my desire–means identifying what is the institution of ISSUE Project Room: a board of directors, an executive, staff, artists, curators, and 22 Boerum. The Gala connected these parts: the board and executives relying on the labor of the staff to help showcase artists and curators to raise funds to protect 22 Boerum. I found myself thinking, what is this place? How did ISSUE come to own this piece of property? What relations emanate from property ownership?

Contemplating these questions, I came across the conceptual artist Hans Haacke’s work Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, A Real-Time Social System, as of May 1, 1971 (1971). Haacke’s work documented the New York real estate holdings of slumlord Harry Shapolsky through one hundred forty-two photos of building facades in Harlem and the Lower East Side. The photos were paired with factual descriptions of living conditions within the buildings. For critic Rosalyn Deutsche, Haacke’s work refuses to aestheticize. It presents the slum conditions within the structure of Shapolsky’s real estate holdings to comment on the landlord’s coordinated exploitation as social reality, not as material for artistic reflection. As Deutsche argues in her book Evictions: Art and Spatial Politics, “The deadpan, unrelieved factuality of the Shapolsky piece counteracts attempts to convert the concrete specificity of its subject matter into a tribute to the artist’s expression and compassion. The repetitive arrangement militates against the transformation of the social reality the work documents into an elegant aesthetic composition, a supposedly self-contained totality.”

Haacke’s work is an intervention concerning what an artist can be. He embodies the artist as a political activist, using the platform afforded by the Guggenheim Museum to litigate the abuses of the real estate industry. Art institutions, however, are not interested in presenting political advocacy, instead preferring to crystallize political ideas within aesthetic objects. Politics must be subsumed by the work of art such that urgency, complicity, and action are always tangential to the aesthetics of the work itself. Fearful of the political, financial, and legal implications of displaying Haacke’s work, the Guggenheim’s director canceled Haacke’s show featuring Shapolsky six weeks before the opening. The director justified the cancellation through publicly arguing the Haacke’s piece “posed a direct threat to the museum’s functioning within its stake and accepted premises,” continuing:

The museum’s sponsorship would hardly seem defensible even if the legal effects proved to be containable through the presumably unassailable nature of the assembled documentation–a rather large assumption on the part of the artist. A precedent would, in any case, have been set for innumerable analogous presentations with predictably damaging effects upon the museum’s central function. What would, for instance, prevent another artist from launching, again via a work of art, a pictorial documentation of police corruption in a particular precinct?

Haacke’s work is an intervention concerning what the museum can be. The Guggenheim doctor’s anxiety encapsulates the fear of allowing the museum to become an antagonistic agent of social change. Contemporary critics identified the confrontational edge of Haacke’s work, with Jack Burnham writing in the Summer 1971 issue of Artforum:

By connecting physical decay with specific financial transactions Haacke has attacked the holy institution of private property in a capitalist society. If the real estate systems were merely a matter of exposing housing malpractices, they would, indeed, be tame works. But Haacke is producing sacred art in the oldest sense of the word: the revelation of unresolvable contradictions. In essence, the hidden esthetic of the real estate pieces proclaims that the “sacred place” (i.e., the museum or receptacle of esthetic truth) is also responsible for the oppressive ugliness of New York City.</p> The structural principle behind the photographs and their installation is that of analogy. Consequently the Guggenheim Museum is the rich and powerful receptacle for the photographs, just as the group of related businessmen are the rich and powerful owners of the buildings in the photographs. In both instances the museological function of the Guggenheim and the financial documentation act as a collective background for the photographs and their contents.

Haacke’s work is an intervention concerning the relationship between artists, art institutions, and audience. He suggests the structure of private property enabling museum’s to exist (their buildings, their wealthy benefactors, their board) is complicit in the abuse of tenants by slum lords, regardless of if the slumlord ever set foot in the Guggenheim. Haacke’s work refuses the recognition of the art world. He is not concerned with being heralded as a great artist. He recognizes his own worth as a political artist, as someone empowered to highlight abuses and misconduct within society.

Art that revels in its criticism of the institutions from within the institutions is still lost in the trap of recognition. The desire to be an artist is a desire for power, to hold a perspective worthy of regard and attention. Transcendence emerges from affirming the worthiness of one’s artistic perspective regardless of recognition. Haacke taught me this. In trying to understand where to go from this insight, I return to Deutsche’s criticism: “Ultimately, [Shapolsky] highlighted the fact that the museum building, too, is no isolated architectural structure, container of static aesthetic objects, but a social institution existing within a wider system, a product and producer of mutable power relations.”

I had been trying to understand what relations were enfolded in my fellowship with ISSUE Project Room. But I had failed to consider what relations spiraled out from 22 Boerum Place.