Category: dc

The DC Commission on the Arts & Humanities is organizing the 5×5 Project, a temporary public art festival? exhibition? program? that coincides with the National Cherry Blossom Festival. Last night at a panel discussion at the Corcoran, the DCCAH Project Manager and 5×5’s five curators talked about their 25 artist projects. [The curators: Amy Lipton (NY), Justine Topfer (SF), Richard Hollinshead (UK), Laura Roulet (DC), and Steve Rowell (LA)]
Doing any justice to coverage of this whirlwind would just mean cutting and pasting at least 5×5+5 lists and press releases and artist statements, plus all the links and facebook and twitter handles. Instead, here are my 140-char or so-sized notes. Consider it tweet-delayed coverage:
Laura Roulet, “The Local One”
Floating Lab Collective, converted taco truck
Activate participatory, interactive community
Sue Spaid [moderator, dir. Balto Contemp Mus] initiates 1-sentence rule on intros, which only lasts for Topfer.
SS cites Wash Mon, Linc & Jeff Mems as DC’s mode of public art. Maybe one end of the spectrum, also what’ve we done lately?
Oh yeah, that’s right: WWII Memorial, MLK Mess. oy.
Dynamic ephemeral activate contrast monumental
“I think we are all anti-monumentalists” got immediate pushback. So I think not.
Steve Rowell, CLUI not in intro. Stratman/Badget’s pontoon Pentagon, floating protest temporary monument
“my artists” the next most common phrase after “activate space”
Amy Lipton: eco something. “impact native species” as a bullet point
participatory engage
posters on city buses to call a number, leave a wish.
Entertains intimidates
QR codes [?!] on 1,000 vials of Japanese water. Except for the cherry tree-shaped sound sculpture, the only NCBF-linked project
Lize [Mogel] cartographic, maps in libraries. Rowell’s projects feel very CLUI’d into DC.
Some other folks very frank about never visiting b4, their artists responding to the idea of DC.
“we’re mythmakers, not monument builders,” a ref to the temporary project mode vs std DC memorializing
5×5 Festival [?] offering a new way forward.
DCCAH ID’d 40 potential sites over 2 yrs, took 10 curator finalists on daylong busride. hazing-as-winnowing
“this spot of grass, this spot of grass,” “got more & more depressing as we drove around.”
Net: not one pre-selected spot was used. DCCAH did all site nego, permitting, etc. curators: 5x$100k for everything else.
“tried to avoid federal entities” bec of “compressed time frame.” literally 3mos from finalists selection to opening. kind of nuts, imho
Censored? “only by budget” “censored by silence”. Rowell: FBI forced Charles Stankievech s/w radio proj off Pk Svc site by not responding to NPS’ proposed “interpretive text”
Permitting as power, as project. Hollingshead cites Christo, Wrapped Reichstag, 30 yr nego
“Logistics is the future of art,” Spaid, who seems kind of Balto in her provocative-then-dialed-back statements.
Experiments, “you don’t like it? Fine, it’s gone in six weeks.” “you have an out by being temporary.” [Temporary as a mode of power? Or a sign of powerlessness?]
There are no politicos here. Nor students, just the artists, everhopeful DC art crowd, or at least the ones who “made it through traffic” and “could find parking” ahem
Rowell on public art censorship: some Mennonite artist’s swords-into-plowshares permanent public sculpture literally disappeared, found in the dump, no one knows how/what/who? What? This sounds insane. Forensic Archive
Hollingshead, British guy: there were 2 local curators in the final 10, and 2 intl ones. “I knew it was going to be him [the guy from Germany] or me.”
Audience Q&A: some curators seemed surprised that the budget had to be increased from $50k/ea to $100k. Still found it very difficult to execute 5 projects, went with artists they’d all worked with before, who they knew could do *something*
“Double puffing”? like double dipping? where you take artist fees AND curators fees. Hollingshead to Rowell: “Do any of your artists actually exist?”
5x5x2: the recommendation is to do it biennially, not annually.
“the NYT already wrote about it!” Carol Vogel. Spaid: “That was a PREVIEW, they’ll HAVE to cover it again.” Heroes in Newcastle-on-Tyne, UK funding a catalogue & follow-on exhib at home. Front pg of Guardian. Spaid “The art magazines will all be here [for the preview]”
Ah here it is, the obligatory Why not focus on DC artists? We deserve an international forum question. “17% are local,” “Lize worked with local cartographers.” hm. Spaid: In Baltimore, I try to help the good artists get out of Baltimore.
“not as a stunt, but for real” [I forget what this was in rel to, but it doesn’t really matter]
LR: “the public [in public art] is people”

Here is a PBS Newshour Q&A with Steven Tepper, discussing his research into why art–or the arts, really, since he looks at theater, libraries, music, too–triggers protests in some communities at some times and not others. He found that the protests are “always deeply rooted in local concerns.”:

STEVEN TEPPER: I looked at 805 cases of conflict across 71 mid- to large-sized cities in America. When all was said and done, and I looked at all the various things that might correlate with the cities that the highest rates of protest over a four year period in the 1990s, it was the rate of immigration in the decade prior that most strongly determined whether a city was a high city or a low city in terms of its protests levels. Cities that had experienced rapid population changes, in particular if the percent of foreign born had grown significantly, those cities were the most contentious in the late 1990s. And the argument in the book is that when people feel unsettled by the rate of social change, when the things around them are changing fast — economics, demographics, technology — art becomes something that they fight over as a way to reassert their values, reassert a sense of who their community is and where they fit into their community, who’s values still matter, what does a community look like going forward, and art becomes this amazing arena in which people negotiate their differences of opinions around the contours of their expressive lives together.

Great, so now we know? And we don’t have to read Tapper’s new book, Not Here, Not Now, Not That! Protest Over Art and Culture in America? Except that reading the book may be the only way to get a handle on the “social changes” Tapper mentions. Because they frequently seem to involve race, religion, and gay.
And I assume that he sets aside the culture-war-style protests started by organizations or politicians to gin up support or fundraising, which do not always have a local impetus. [Though even as I think about the Smithsonian’s “Hide/Seek” mess, the reality was, it was timed to disrupt the Congressional debate and coverage of the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” so in a way, it was hyperlocal.]
tl;dw, reading the transcript is quicker: Conversation: Why Do Americans Protest Art? [pbs newshour]
Go ahead, buy: Not Here, Not Now, Not That! Protest Over Art and Culture in America [amazon]

There are so many fascinating things about the Gene Davis Giveaway, I almost don’t know where to start. And I’m embarrassed to not have known about it sooner. Gene Davis Giveaway, or Give Away, or as it was called at the time by its creators, The Event, was an amazing art project, part Happening, part Conceptual Art, part ur-Post-Modernist appropriationist market critique, and–yes–part Relational Aesthetics mayhem. And it happened in Washington, DC, in 1969.
The story, as it was fed to Washington Post critic Paul Richards, is that in the spring of 1969, DC sculptor Ed McGowin and art critic/artist Douglas Davis were at a party, trying to figure out how to declare the end of the once-edgy, now “Establishment”-friendly Washington Color School movement. Douglas wanted to “gather [all] the color paintings and destroy them,” and McGowin said no, “let’s give them all away.”
So they approached Gene Davis, who agreed to let McGowin and Davis make 50 replicas of Popsicle, one of his trademark stripe paintings. Davis mixed and supplied the paint, while McGowin and some art students from the Corcoran–including Clark Fox–produced the 6×6-ft paintings. When it was all done, Gene came to silkscreen the three creators’ signatures on the back of each canvas. Sometimes the fabricators signed the works, too.

McGowin and Gene Davis screening Giveaway signatures with Douglas Davis looking on, from Douglas Davis’s The Giveaway Box, via Gene Davis: A Memorial Exhibition, 1987
Meanwhile, Douglas invited 500 local swells to a black-tie party in the ballroom of the Mayflower Hotel, where the 50 “Gene Davis Paintings” would be given away, free, to lucky attendees whose names were pulled from a large bowl. [Actually, I think it was 40 paintings, because 10 had been pre-sold to folks who underwrote the production of “The Event.” I’d bet they were exchanged for around $1,000, an attractive discount from the $3,000 price of an “original” Davis painting at the time.]
And that’s how the Gene Davis Giveaway was positioned at the time, and apparently, for long afterward: Gene Davis paintings by any other name that still looked as sweet. At 0% of the price.

In his uncannily prescient and expansive preview of Gene Davis Giveaway in the Post, Richards likens the project’s collaborative “assembly line production” to “a different sort of event that not so long ago celebrated the dominance of another kind of painting.” Which, obviously, I must quote at length:

That earlier event was performed on a Willem de Kooning drawing by Robert Rauschenberg, a painter then unknown [sic]. The drawing had been made freely, almost automatically, in the abstract manner with soft pencil on fine rag paper. Working freely, almost automatically, in the abstract expressionist manner, Rauschenberg erased it.
Traces of pencil marks remained so that the handwritings of both artists were visible when their work was shown as “Erased de Kooning by Robert Rauschenberg.”
Rauschenberg’s gesture marked a point in the history of art. His erasing did not destroy–but underlined–the premise of the artwork it altered. Freehand erasing is to freehand drawing as mass production is to the tedious production of an “original” Gene Davis stripe.
That’s one way of looking at it. There are others. Some see the Giveaway as a publicity gimmick and others see it as a way to get something nice for nothing and still others regard it as a joke. Douglas Davis feels the Giveaway–with its color, its lottery, its glamor, its suspense–is itself a special work of art.

Wow. Exactly! Except that I think Richards’ actual take was one or more of those unnamed “others,” and that Davis & McGowin fed him the rest. When Douglas looked back on Gene Davis Giveaway in 1987 in a catalogue essay for the recently deceased painters’ memorial exhibition at the Smithsonian American Art Museum that re-examined the project in light of postmodernism’s challenge to originality and authorship, Richards poo-poohed it all as “self-congratulatory hyperbole.”
Which you’d expect if Richards thought the Event was a “publicity gimmick” or a “joke,” but not if it were “a special work of art” which just so happened to align with, if not prefigure, the contemporary art world’s next two decades of conceptual and theoretical developments.

By Douglas Davis’s 1987 account, though, there’s no question that he and his collaborators “were in the midst of artmaking,” and that the art was “The Event” itself:

What I remember most about that evening is the roar. The crowd was enormous, virtually filling the gigantic ballroom [above]…The atmosphere approached that of a ritual, yes, but the ritual of Wall Street or striptease. Very early, the chanting began: “Give it away, give it away.” When we finally drew the names of the winners out of a large silver bowl, the yelps and screams of the victors, and the groans of the losers, were earsplitting. I began to feel ashamed of myself. Barbara Gold of the Baltimore Sun was the only critic who sensed the conceptual edge in “Giveaway.” She claimed that the patrons calmed down toward the end, stunned by their own vulgarity, by the shock of recognizing “how totally monetary value could get in the way of the aesthetic pleasure.” “A vague air of sheepishness became pervasive,” she wrote. I hope her reportage is more accurate than my memory. I recall nothing but loud, overbearing greed to the last. Photographs reveal the winners waving their rolled Popsicles in the air as they left the Mayflower, dancing above a sea of black-tied oglers. At least for the moment, free art, having found its owners, returned to the realm of the precious. No, Walter Benjamin, the aura of Popsicle glowed that night in fifty different directions.

Alright, maybe that is a little hyperbolic.
In any case, I think it’s clear that under the Erased de Kooning analogy, Gene Davis Giveaway is really a work by Douglas Davis and Ed McGowin. But that poses the uncomfortable question, what if you erase a de Kooning, but you don’t become Robert Rauschenberg? For all his DC Happenings and on-point conceptualizing, Douglas Davis is less well known for making art than for his 1970s tenure as the art critic at Newsweek, and for organizing the Open Circuits symposium that brought video art to MoMA in 1974.
And while Gene Davis’s market is pretty sleepy, it’s still more established today than either Douglas’s or McGowin’s. And so it is that most of the Popsicles in public are optimistically/delusionally presented and traded as Gene Davis. Because even in 1987, Douglas didn’t realize his project would also prefigure the eventual acceptance of editioned originals and outsourced painting.
So while you can put on a happy conceptual face and say the piece is still working, on another level, it’s gotta hurt when, as recently as 2010, Douglas Davis’s own copy of Popsicle is being sold–along with his Giveaway Box, the trove of ephemera, documentation, and related materials he’d assiduously collected as part of Gene Davis Giveaway–as a Gene Davis. That’s like the A/P right there, the ur-After Popsicle, and it still only makes $11,000.

[2018 update: in 2016 Clark Fox wrote about his experience making all 50 “Gene Davis” paintings in nine days.]