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Gregory Sholette, "Dark Matter, Art and Politics in the Age of Enterprise Culture," Pluto Press, 2011
Gregory Sholette is a New York-based artist, writer, and founding member of Political Art Documentation/Distribution (PAD/D: 1980-1988), and REPOhistory (1989-2000). A graduate of The Cooper Union (BFA 1979), The University of California, San Diego (MFA 1995), and the Whitney Independent Studies Program in Critical Theory, his recent publications include Dark Matter: Art and Politics in an Age of Enterprise Culture (Pluto Press, 2011); Collectivism After Modernism: The Art of Social Imagination after 1945 (with Blake Stimson for University of Minnesota, 2007); and The Interventionists: A Users Manual for the Creative Disruption of Everyday Life (with Nato Thompson for MassMoCA/MIT Press, 2004, 2006, 2008), as well as a special issue of the journal Third Text, co-edited with theorist Gene Ray on the theme Whither Tactical Media.
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Gregory Sholette's books
Contemporary Practice (21) > Alchemy of Inspiration (5) > Art 2.1: Creating on the Social Web (16) > Bedfellows: Art and Visual Culture (15) > BOMB in the Building (19) > Bound: The Printed Object in
Sholette recently completed the installation Mole Light: God Is Truth, Light His Shadow for Platos Cave, Brooklyn, New York, and the collaborative project, Imaginary Archive, at Enjoy Public Art Gallery in Wellington, New Zealand.
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Sholette is Assistant Professor of Sculpture at Queens College, City University of New York (CUNY), a visiting faculty member at Harvard University, and teaches an annual seminar in theory and social practice for the CCC post-graduate research program at Geneva University of Art and Design.
Gregory Sholette, "Mole Light: God Is Truth, Light His Shadow," still, Plato's Cave, Brooklyn, New York, 2010
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Gregory Sholette speaks about God Is Truth and Light His Shadow at Platos Cave, NY, 2010 Being familiar with the angle of Sholettes work, I picked up Dark Matter and read the Preface and Acknowledgments. Yet before I was done with page 1, I got up to sharpen a pencil. You want to give this book the appropriate attention; it will alert your conscious while enlightening you on the structure of our creative universe. Dark Matter is a metaphor for amateur, informal, unofficial, autonomous, activist, non-institutional, self-organized practices all work made and circulated in the shadows of the formal art world, some of which might be said to emulate cultural dark matter by rejecting art world demands of visibility, and much of which has no choice but to be invisible, in Sholettes words. The mechanics, tactics, and power of art activism and politicized practices are unveiled with direct references, drawing out the behindthe-scenes of the art world within todays economic landscape. Its an honor to present Gregory Sholette to you today. Sharpen a pencil and pick up Dark Matter. Georgia Kotretsos: Currently youre involved with the self-declared artists-in-residence for the US government, the Institute for Wishful Thinking (IWT), which believes that the community of artists and designers possesses untapped creative and conceptual resources that could be applied to solving social problems. Please, tell us about your contribution specifically to this project and your latest work. Gregory Sholette: In 2008, the noted Hungarian curator Dora Hegyi was seeking work for the 8th Periferic art biennial in Iasi (pronounced Yash), Romania, that she was organizing around the theme of Art as Gift. Because of my writings on gift economies and informal art, she contacted me. I made her some homemade pizza. I told her about the book I was working on that would focus on the political economy of art, especially that vast amount of invisible labor and imagination that the art world is secretly dependent upon (more on this below). The next day, I contacted the artist Maureen Connor, who is my colleague at Queens College and within no time, Maureen proposed the IWT: an ersatz institute whose primary aim is to provide gifts useful, secret, or fantastic gifts directly to those invisible souls who labor behind the screen that separates the public exhibition from its managerial apparatus. Who are these people? Typically, they are young, recently graduated, or out of work artists, art historians, educators, and cultural administrators. And if we think of the screen or curtain as the legendary fourth wall in the theater, except that here it is a white-on-white sheetrock wall, then we are not supposed to notice that behind this partition lurks a shadowy species of creative dark matter. At one meeting, we compared this other realm to the Freudian libido and wondered what kind of fantasies of generosity it would call out for. In Iasi, our attempted emancipation led to
> Transmission (5) > Turkish and Other Delights (11) > What's Cookin': The Art21ndex (34) > Word is a Virus (7) Week in Review (1) > Flash Points: (421) Compassion: Do artists have a social responsibility? (29) Fantasy: Does art expand our ability to imagine? (26) How are stories and art intertwined? (12) How can art effect political change? (74) How do we experience art? (73) How does art respond to and redefine the natural world? (40) How is art influenced? (35) Must art be ethical? (40) Systems: Can art transcend paradigms? (32) The New Culture Wars: What's at Stake? (9) Transformation: How does art adapt and change over time? (26)
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Gregory Sholette, "I am NOT my Office," "Critical Mass" at the Smart Museum of Art, Chicago, 2002
In many ways, the IWT concept sprang naturally from the mutual interest both Maureen Connor and I share in what might be called the imaginative disruption of everyday life by both artists as well as non-artists. For example, Maureens earlier project, Personnel, investigated the attitudes, needs, and desires of office staff where she was invited to create an artwork. One manifestation of Personnel transformed the so-called personal space of cubicle workers into a boudoir, and another into a campsite. IWT also resonates with my work, in particular the 2002 installation I am NOT my Office, in which workaday fantasies from the practical I want multitasking centipede limbs or arms like Shiva to the maniacal a flying ear that gathers information on office politics [are rendered] into a series of drawings and action figures. But the real evolution of IWT began when we invited several talented MFA students from Queens College to join us and brainstorm about how to satisfy the fantasies of people we had never met on the far eastern side of Romania. The upshot was to create a website where the Periferic 8 biennial staff could log on and type in the kind of gift they wanted us to fulfill. And there were three categories of potential gifts: 1) a practical gift, 2) a fantastic gift, and 3) a secret gift. Ultimately we brought as many fulfilled desires as we could transport to Iasi including: a modest library of books on art and theory; some photographic materials that were difficult to get in Romania; several felt sleep masks stitched together by agent Kirby as a kind of substitute for a work by Joseph Beuys that the Periferic organizers could not afford to borrow for display; an onsite gift of labor performed by agent Mahler that involved spackling and prepping exhibition walls; a song written and performed by agent Rubin which was gifted to a Periferic staff member who was secretly in love with someone; and finally a stuffed Kermit. But for a year, this gift request remained a puzzle to us. On the website someone from Iasi secretly asked for a Kermit. But what did it mean? Was Kermit Romanian slang perhaps? Or was it a reference to a certain green television character as we immediately assumed? Did people in the Eastern Bloc actually grow up watching Sesame Street? Since it was a secret request, we did not have the option of asking more. Instead, we collectively decided that fulfilling certain gifts gave us license to be imaginative, even a bit subversive. In response to the Kermit request, agent De Felice stitched together a batrachian sock puppet, carried it with her to Iasi for the opening, and after walking around the exhibition for about an hour, a Periferic staffer finally came over, accepted the gift, publicly embracing her desire a secret no longer. To be fair, we also encountered a degree of skepticism from some of the artists in Romania. And not all of it was unjustified, at least on the surface. I do think in retrospect the idea of bringing gifts from the wealthy United States to the struggling economy of a former socialist nation seemed a bit cheeky. This was an insight we needed to have more discussion around, as agent Pavlou thoughtfully suggested at a later meeting. At the same time, few in Romania probably realized just how precarious our living circumstances are sometimes in a place like New York City, especially for recently graduated MFA students, like most of the members of IWT. Anyway, [here is a link] for more on this first IWT project in Iasi. IWT produced its most recent project, entitled Artists in Residence for the US Government (selfdeclared) for Momenta Art, a not-for-profit space located in Brooklyn. The mission of this project was to increase understanding of the art making process and how it can contribute to society as well as encourage policy makers and the general public to think of artists as potential partners in a variety of circumstances. I suppose you could say that at a moment when actual governmental and social infrastructure has been decimated after thirty years of privatization, deregulation, and economic contraction at the public level, the IWT seeks to make transparent one of the last remaining sources of untapped collective value: the social imagination of those thousands upon thousands of academically trained artists and art students who constitute an invisible army of precarious, over-educated surplus laborers. Like a redundant missing mass, this shadowy creativity is brimming with the possibility of either radical change or precipitous regression. This ambiguity seems especially striking today in the icy grip of the aptly named jobless recovery. I will discuss this vibrant dark matter more below, but for now you asked me about my role in this latest project, Georgia, so let me finish here by saying that along with brainstorming ideas with IWT and helping with the physical installation at Momenta, I also introduced our group to THEMM.US, a hitherto unknown collective entity. And although politically unpolished and a bit ribald, their odd little sculptures and experimental thrash songs for government agencies were featured on one wall of the exhibition. Funny thing is I am even thinking about collaborating with them on some upcoming project.
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GK: If we were to visualize a pyramid where its tip is occupied by mainstream successful artists, does this mean that whats right beneath the tip could all be dark matter? Do activists, struggling and failed artists, hobbyists, and amateurs all fall under one homogeneous enormous category or since art activism has continued to earn art historical ground, itd be best to place it between mainstream artists and everybody else left in the art world? GS: Thanks Georgia, this is a crucial question and I hope it is acceptable to ask people to read my new book, Dark Matter: Art and Politics in the Age of Enterprise Culture (Pluto Press, 2011), rather than only download my older essays about dark matter from the Internet. Of course I am plugging my own little capitalist endeavor here, but also significantly, the concept of dark matter or missing mass has evolved over the last ten years. Now when I use the term dark matter, it is meant to invoke two different registers at the same time: one abstract, the other very much concrete. But then thinking in contradictions is something I have learned above all from being an artist. Dark matter is merely a metaphor, the best I could find, for describing something that has an effect on the mainstream cultural world, but is largely unseen by it. First, think of the art world as an economy with both symbolic and material dimensions. Within this economy, dark matter is both present and absent, detectable at one level, but lacking its own discourse, and therefore all but unnameable. However, (and here comes the contradictory bit), dark matter also describes something concrete, something that has measurable reality, something like the way an offsite archive of key documents adjudicates meaning from afar. So yes, youre correct: this missing matter does includes the various informal activities you mention like amateur and hobby crafts and so forth. But it also incorporates what art historian Carol Duncan once described as the glut of artists who never reach visibility. This, Duncan insisted, was the natural condition of the art world. What I hope my research and writing begin to do is to intervene in this so-called natural economy by unsettling and possibly re-politicizing the realm of cultural production itself. Ok, that is grandiose. But what I am trying to get at is that like almost everything else today, art is the outcome of social production. And this fact is diametrically opposed to arts mythology that revolves around the isolated artistic genius working alone in her studio. Most of us know this is a fallacy. Still, we allow the economy of the art world to divvy up this socially produced wealth like so much real estate, as if only a handful of gentry grew above an ever-shrinking commons. Whether this other collective productivity is visible or is hidden, or slides in between both those states of light and darkness, is less the point than to recognize that dark matter production runs through all of these institutions and discourses like a multitude of veins in a piece of marble. That is why the image of the pyramid is less useful or accurate for fully describing arts political economy (even though admittedly, the towering needle with its broad base or long tail is still a powerful and intuitive representation of the unequal recognition most artists feel as they contemplate the mainstream cultural landscape and their assigned place within it). Therefore even before one begins to speak about political art, or interventionism, or
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Syntagma Square, Athens, Greece, May 25th 2011: Taking the lead from Spain, thousands of people gathered at Syntagma square on Wednesday to protest against austerity measures, responding to a grassroots Facebook campaign. The crowd sings the Greek National Anthem. GS: For us as artists and cultural workers, it comes down to developing a viable, democratic, counter-narrative that, bit-by-bit, gains descriptive power within the larger public discourse. That said, we first must begin here with us artists, and what we do, and how we create by gaining an
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And thats a wrap! Beginning with artist, writer, and activist Gregory Sholette, the second round of Inside the Artists Studio is commencing. Emphasis will be given to mid-career and established artists in their field who will open their studios and our minds to a world of art that should be protected and supported. The forthcoming posts are addressed to artists of my generation, where I invite them to tune in and listen carefully to their inner art voice. I encourage especially those who primarily concern themselves with production-to-consumption inquiries to follow my column.
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Posted in: > Inside the Artist's Studio, Compassion: Do artists have a social responsibility?, How can art effect political change?, Interviews, Must art be ethical?, New York City, Public Art, Publications, Social, USA Similar posts: 5 Questions for Contemporary Practice With Gregory Sholette , Hello , An Interview with EnjoyBanking, New Yorks $treet Artist$ , Inside the Artists Studio | Nato Thompson , Laylah Ali | Meaning Comments (3)
3 Responses to Inside the Artists Studio | Gregory Sholette anti-est.org on May 28, 2011 2:23 am I enjoyed that bit of audio. Cool site. Stay -AntiReply
5 Questions for Contemporary Practice With Gregory Sholette | Art21 Blog on August 26, 2011 10:44 am [...] vitally into a more collective practice (something he discusses at length below and in a previous Inside the Artists Studio feature). Meeting Sholette in person, I was struck by his interest in subjects ranging from the popular to [...]
5 Questions for Contemporary Practice With Gregory Sholette - 1-954-270-7404 on August 29, 2011 8:32 pm [...] vitally into a more collective practice (something he discusses at length below and in a previous Inside the Artists Studio feature). Meeting Sholette in person, I was struck by his interest in subjects ranging from the popular to [...]
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