from the 2012 Believer Art issue interview with Paul Chan

AGM: “I want to reflect life or this affirmation of life. You know, this optimism of transcendence in the mundane and in the domestic. That’s the space I like to dwell in, reinvent and play with. There’s a lightness and playfulness in that space.”

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Chad Jones sat down with Susan Medak on her 20 year anniversary as Berkeley Rep’s Managing Director.  This quote resonated strongly with us because we think along the same lines about the work we produce, the context we provide, and the subscribers that provide the support for it to all happen.

Why do you think you and Berkeley Rep have worked so well together?

“If we have been successful, it’s been in part because we produce what we care about, and what we care about turns out to be an aesthetic that is shared by our community.  This formula wouldn’t work in every community.  We’re in Berkeley, in the Bay Area, and that gives us a certain license to do the kind of work we do.  We have taken responsibility for building an audience and bringing that audience along with us.  We’ve taken a lot of responsibility for helping audiences enjoy the work as much as we do.

Context is all- and that’s my philosophy about everything.  The more context we can provide, the richer the audience’s experience.  Our audiences are intelligent and thoughtful, and we have a lot of respect for them. “

from “Personal Economy #11” by Anonymous
included in “Art Work: A National Conversation about Art, Labor, and Economics“

I was listening to the Phases of the Moon interview and heard about your project about the value of art.  Although I don’t know anything about the nature of the project I didn’t want that to stop me from offering a few lines:

One of my favorite novels tells of a man who stopped believing in the world and disappeared.  Art is that vanishing.  A new space testifying to the unseen, and an invitation.

I found this paragraph in Alice Waters’ new book “The Art of Simple Food.” She has such a lovely way of viewing the way she buys food, but I was struck by how she could just as easily be describing art produced through the subscription method. Just replace ‘farmers’ with ‘artists’ and you might not be too far from a vision of a future art world.

“When I started shopping at farmers’ markets, one of the best things about the experience was meeting farmers and learning from them – and influencing them, too, by asking if they could grow vegetables and fruits that has almost disappeared from commerce. After years of this weekly connection, I realized that I had become dependent on a family of friends – and they were dependent on me. By choosing to buy food grown locally and sustainably, in ways that are healthy and humane, I had woven myself into a community that cares about the same things. As a community, we share not only a commitment to protect our natural resources, but an appreciation for the value of food itself, a love for its taste and beauty and the deep pleasure it can bring by connection us to time and place, the seasons, and the cycle of nature.”
-Alice Waters

First off, Happy Thanksgiving! I hope everyone’s was wonderful and looked as good as this. Scrumdillyumptious.

As most of you know, or are finding out any day now, #4 is out!! We are very happy to have ended an eventful year with Brian’s work. Here’s a peak at me doing a late night final edit of our letter to our lovely subscribers.

In our travels and travails around, we have come across a few things that I think are worth sharing.

Guerilla Sculpture spotted in Walnut Creek, CA- Sunday, November 18th

We just happened to come across this at the exact right moment, it’s peak. For a moment we didn’t understand or comprehend what was going on- it almost looked like snow, but it was advancing slowly towards us. For a moment while my brain was adjusting, I had a fleeting fear-unknowing, but then I was sooo happy. The bubbles were just billowing out and the wall of foam (at least a foot and a half tall) was slowly creeping across and covering the street. Pretty soon thereafter cars started whizzing through it, sending up huge blasts of “confetti” into the air, and trailing it all down the street.

This reminded me of an article I had been meaning to read for a while in Art Review Digital (Issue 16), entitled “What is Art for?” Here are a couple of quotes from it:

“[Artworks] help contruct my notions of what is possible, open new vistas of interest and have the potential to change who I am and what I think….What they do share is that there is a consequence to looking and thinking about them – a consequence that generates a possibility that was not there before, or was, at least, not available as a possibility to me…and has the potential to affect our social relations – how we choose to behave and what we choose to value.” -Charles Esche

“Art is the best tool we have when it comes to shattering our environment into an infinite number of imaginary tales, forms and space-times….What does seem clear is that art occupies a specific position in the city, and that this position is thus political: it incites its subjects to become active, to refuse the passive position the world of entertainment tries to foist on them. Entertainment places us in front of images to be looked at, while social formatting provides us with frameworks in which we must live. If artistic activity consists of putting these instruments and products back into play, then the observer’s task is, as in tennis, to knock the ball back into the other court.” – Niclolas Bourriaud

I found it interesting that both authors found the ulitmate purpose of art to be social, political. I’ve always liked art, and considered “good” art, anything that has had an affect, one way or another, on me. It is the challenge. A game. Bourriaud insinuates that it is the viewer that absorbs the new world and boundaries that the artist proposes by using that information to define and restrict that very world with new boundaries. Think of all the advertisements showing things floating in glass cubes floating in liquid years after Damien Hirst showed his first floating shark. So what is art for? It keeps the game going, keeps us moving forward.