Featured Listing: Space Other

63 Wareham Street

Boston, MA O2118

www.spaceother.com

t: 617.451.3500

e: info@spaceother.com

On his seminal essay Of Other Spaces (Des espaces autres, 1967) French thinker Michel Foucault pointed out that “our life is still governed by a certain number of oppositions that remain inviolable, that our institutions and practices have not yet dared to break down. These are oppositions that we regard as simple givens: for example, between private space and public space, between family space and social space, between cultural space and useful space, between the space of leisure and that of work.”

There are some spaces where these dichotomies are juxtaposed and may converge, and some even more interesting spaces where these oppositions may be contested or inverted. The art gallery contains a paradoxical mixture of public and private, of proximity and detachment, of work and leisure, of “omnipotence and impotence”. Within the space of the art gallery one retreats into a private place where a personal experience takes place. However, the private, subjective experience elicited by the work of art occurs in public, in the midst of others. The participation of the viewer can be simultaneously alienating and communal.

When I moved back to Boston from New York on 2001, I noticed a vast discrepancy and distance between what I saw in the institutional art spaces and what could be found in the local galleries. It seemed that Boston’s art scene was composed of spaces of cultural confinement and circumscription. Of these spaces, the so-called contemporary art gallery was posed as a problem. Boston and Cambridge prepare and export a substantial number of the great American and international art professionals and audiences of the future in its ivory towers, however, in contemporary art, beyond academia, there appeared to be a limited infrastructure or ecology to keep them interested in staying.

In contrast, the institutional critical discussions seemed predominantly propagated by the curators and directors of the very same institutions, and they were usually far beyond, opting, rather than for or against the local galleries.

The response to a domesticated answer must be an irreducible question. Could an art gallery function as a ‘body without organs’ or desire machine? How could an exhibition or event venue work from the interstices to engage a community and its institutions? What should a 21st century art gallery be? What is an art gallery beyond selling art? To whom is an urban contemporary art gallery addressed? Can a commercial operation be a part of a critical vehicle with theoretical assumptions? Should something be planned without knowing exactly the final result? The panorama seemed like one of opportunity, and there was a personal need to address a nostalgia for autonomy. The Boston gallery was not only a problem, but also could be a solution! The art gallery can function as a node for cultural production by sponsoring, reinforcing and sharing critical attitudes towards the consumption of art, notions of public and private and the viewer and the viewed. Spatial discourses may be employed as rhetorical means to search for insightful connections with the general conditions of aesthetic production, invoke reflection about the status of contemporary art in our community, and stress the importance of meaning on the personal and institutional level.

Gamaliel R. Herrera

A Short List of Questions

The following was originally published in Phonebook 2007/2008, with the title A Short List of Questions Regarding the Possibilities of Alternative Arts Spaces and the Cultural Work They Facilitate. It was written by Mike Wolf.

Introductory Note:

Some of these questions are easy to answer and some are not. Some may seem off the wall and some might seem tired. They are in no particular order, and may be redundant. My hope is that there are provocative moments for the reader and they help people to think about ways of pushing what I see as the important, continuing, collective project of making alternative spaces and doing independent cultural work. I choose the phrase “alternative space” not because I like it but because I like the way it seems to make room for the shedding of the established divisions of labor and boundaries of the art world.

Some Questions:

Isn’t a cultural space a social space? Don’t our social lives tend to revolve around cultural spaces? Isn’t culture more than installations and openings? Isn’t it also, books, posters, movies, furniture, food, the internet, conversation, education, toilets, lodging, cleaning, clothing, drinks, warmth in the winter, and cool in the summer? Don’t we need culture and furthermore don’t we need to feel like we are agents of culture? Don’t we need participatory culture? Who does cultural education and what are their interests? What are the dominant cultural institutions? What institutions do we depend on? Who makes the decisions at those institutions and what are their interests? Why have they defined culture and art as they have? Is an MFA program the best way to answer the cultural needs we face? How can our cultural work transcend deep social divisions, like class and ethnic lines? How can we interrogate the entrenched interests of our own cultural work? Can we do cultural work that experiments with humane economic forms and systems? Can alternative spaces be a place to concentrate and make visible humane economic gestures? Can people of privilege redirect that power to serve cultural needs without simply dominating and exerting power? Do alternative art spaces have to be practiced for the commercial art world? Can alternative art spaces be a part of democracy? Can alternative art spaces facilitate the speech of marginalized voices? Can they facilitate politicized speech that has no other venue? What risks can be taken in alternative art spaces to make them more interesting? How can we question the logic of capitalism if we depend on it? How is our art and cultural work constrained by the logic of capitalism? Can questioning the logic of capitalism in our cultural work broaden the social possibilities it allows? Can alternative spaces be places for education? Can they serve as a nexus to bring people together to learn from one another? Is not-for-profit status the best economic arrangement for an alternative space? What constraints are put on a space that goes not-for-profit? Aren’t our alternative spaces dependent on a network of sharing and mutual support to keep working? How can we push this economy of sharing and support to make it more substantial? Can we establish a strong network of material and information sharing that will allow us to accomplish our work on a larger scale and involve more people? How can we find ways of legitimizing alternative cultural work without falling back on the individualistic art star system? Is it really that important to always maintain well-defined boundaries between artist, curator, and viewer in alternative spaces? Can we use the resources we control to make it easier for more people to speak and participate in culture? Would you like to add to this list of questions? Would you like to help answer these questions? Should we get together and talk about it? Please contact Mike Wolf (mistywoof@gmail.com)or maybe even Caroline Picard or your local alternative space if you want to get together on this.

Featured Listing: Mattress Factory

500 Sampsonia Way

Pittsburgh, PA 15212

www.mattress.org

t: 412.231.3169

f: 412.322.2231

e: info@mattress.org

The Mattress Factory is a museum of contemporary art that exhibits room-sized works called installations. Created on site by artists from across the country and around the world, our unique exhibitions feature a variety of media that engage all of the senses.