Temporary Services

    Temporary Services is a Chicago based art collective consisting of Brett Bloom, Salem Collo-Julin, and Marc Fisher.  Since 1998, the group has been producing publications, exhibitions, projects and events.  As their name implies, Temporary Services offers art as a service to others in attempt to bring art to everyday lives, often to people who would otherwise not be exposed to art.  Moving away from the idea of art as a privileged experience, this Chicago group believes that everyone should get to decide how and what art is and can be, not just a handful of fortunate who continue to keep standards. Though the art world is often seen as a very competitive market, Temporary Services aims at participating in mutually beneficial relationships in an effort to create and promote art.  Collaboration is key to this art collective.  As stated on their website, “We develop strategies for harnessing ideas and energies of the people who may never have participated in an art project before or who may feel excluded from the art community.”

    Though it is uncommon for the group to produce sellable objects, they continue to record their efforts in their collection of now over 80 books and booklets.  These books present their past projects, collaborations, and interviews.  One of Temporary Services’ most recent books is entitled Temporary Conversations: Susan Gage.   Here, Temporary Services has composed a collection of interviews and illustrations from Gage, an artist and nurse practitioner highly influential to the Women’s Health Movement.  In collaboration with Every Body!, an event was held where Gage discussed her influential medical drawings.  Another project envisioned and realized is Prisoners’ Inventions; a collaboration between Temporary Services and Angelo, an incarcerated artist.  When asked to share how inmates coped with their situation, Angelo responded by illustrating the inventions created by inmates and drew renderings of the their small prison cells.  Temporary Services then recreated these objects and the prison cells from Angelo’s drawing and published several books containing Angelo’s illustrations and interviews.

         Temporary Services continues to strive for experiencing art in the places they inhabit and participating in numerous creative endeavors.

Teddy Cruz (by Chloe Womack)

Teddy Cruz is an American architect based out of San Diego, and Tijuana, Mexico. Born and raised in Guatemala, Cruz continued his education at Cal-Polytech, San Luis Obispo, and later at Harvard University. He now is a professor of visual studies at the University of California, San Diego.

Most noted for drawing his architectural inspiration from Tijuana’s shanty-towns, Cruz tackles urbanization by devoting himself to the development of affordable, mixed use complexes with room for public interaction and community.

In  Border Postcard: 2000, Cruz depicts San Diego and Tijuana’s symbiotic dichotomy through a collection of trash, and  photo fragments explaining how  “the urban infrastructure of San Diego is recycled into the fabric of Tijuana.” Cruz describes his visual works as “mini-manifestos”  for his practice. He stands at the forefront of his industry calling for a realignment of the ideals of architecture with the people the buildings are tied to.

“Building a practice is selecting what you really want to do, it’s about saying no to certain things . This [affordable housing] was an area I wanted to concentrate on… It precisely grew out of  a sense of dissatisfaction.”"The poetics in architecture remain too isolated from the poetics of the city.” “By inserting our practice and research and building to expose the composition of power, we are able to think what our intervention may be.”

Housing Proposal: Hudson, NY

Rick Lowe

In 1991 a student visiting Rick Lowe’s studio commented that his politically-charged paintings were not what their community needed. Why didn’t he use his creativity to come up with solutions to the problems, instead of just pointing them out?

This moment pushed Lowe out of the studio and into one of Houston’s poorest African-American neighborhoods to found Project Row Houses. Influenced in part by artist Joseph Beuys’s concept of “social sculpture,” Lowe’s program turned 22 “shotgun” houses into low-income residencies, galleries, workshop spaces and offices.

Today the PRH “campus” has expanded to 40 properties and covers nearly five city blocks. There are teachers, drummers, Afro-Brazilian dancers and gardeners who provide after-school education for the 55 neighborhood children. Eight of the houses are residencies for visiting artists to do projects involving and relevant to the history and culture of African-American community. With The Young Mothers in Residency Program, single mothers are able to live in communal housing without having to pay rent for two years while they are completing educations.

PRH is considered to be a work of art within which the members themselves are also artists and shapers, a concept that goes back to Beuys’ philosophy of sculpture as a social activity wherein content and form are made up by collective action. 

Lowe he has gone on to collaborate with various other artists on community projects. In 2002 was hired to design the Delray Beach Cultural Loop, a 30-minute walk in a southern Florida town that connects the traditional cultural zones of the area. Documentation of his projects is featured in various exhibits around the country and he has received the American Institute of Architecture Keystone Award (2000), the Heinz Award (2002), and the Brandywine Lifetime Achievement Award (2006).

Peter Fend (by James Hall)

Peter Fend has been involved with science, society, and art for many years. His unique juggling of science and art is a prime example of social practice. Fend’s projects are attempts to bond the seemingly opposite worlds of science and art by creating or repairing environmental problems throughout the world. He started the Ocean Earth Development Corporation in 1980, to help support these sometimes massive projects and also to involve other people in his work. Critic’s views of him vary from seeing him as genius lacking funds or a schemer exploiting the world of art and people’s sensitivity to global environmental problems.

 

His projects vary from rebuilding dams and aqueducts to projects like Giant Algae Systems or G.A.S., which is to install underwater algae-growing rigs as sources of sate energy in the form of methane and hydrogen gases. Many of his projects have fell through, causing considerable doubt of his ideas from both the science and art worlds. But whether his concerns for environmental and social problems is genuine or not, it is obvious that his unique ideas have caused more people to look at alternative ways to fix those problems and how also see how science and art will always be intertwined.

Suzanne Lacy (by Justin Flood)

Suzanne Lacy has been facilitating experiences in social practice art since the 1970’s. Her art is based largely in performance and happenings. Her work has maintained themes of social equality, feminism, and empowerment throughout her career and has gone through several permutations during the last four decades. One of the exciting things about her work (and of social practice art as a whole) is the experimental and shifting nature of the scope of her projects over time. Her early work was poetic and abstract, often without a formal audience. During the eighties she began working with large groups of performers and an audience on site, eventually broadcasting performances on public television. From the 90’s onward her work grew from performance to interventions within the community. She set up workshops and initiated policy change within the Oakland school system, produced installations with women in domestic violence shelters across the country, and engaged in a number of international performances within local communities.

In 1998 she founded the Center for Art and Public Life at the California College of the Arts. In 2007 she started an MFA program in Public Practice at the Otis College of Art and Design.

EARLY WORK

Lacy’s early work included projects such as The Monster Series – performances and interactive experiences commenting on the objectification of women and presumably the meat industry and animal rights. Lacy created performances with lamb carcasses, created an instructional cooking film while symbolically transforming herself into the animal being prepared and explored mapping and individualized art experiences with students and the California Institute of Arts. These early works often expressed Feminist issues of the time; reclaiming traditionally female designated spaces such as that of the kitchen, and exposing objectification and traditional ideals of the female body

WHISPER PROJECTS

In the 1980’s Suzanne’s work took on a larger scale, often involving hundreds of women in front of a live audience. In the Whisper Projects, groups of four women sat at tables arranged in a grid. In Whisper, The Waves, The Wind, an audience observed from cliffs overlooking a beach as the women talked about their lives and relationships. A prerecorded audio score of conversations the women would be having was broadcast to the audience. In mid-performance, the audience was invited to listen to the conversations at a closer range. At the end of the performance, the observers were invited in to take the place of the women at the tables.

A similar project in Minnesota, The Crystal Quilt, became one of Lacy’s most famous works. In the culmination of workshops at the Minnesota College of Art and Design and a series of photographic essays, 430 women over the age of sixty took place in a Whisper Performance broadcast live on public television. The women were arranged in foursomes at a series of tables resembling a quilt. The women engaged in conversation while an audio score played a mix of 75 voices of women talking about aging.

Reverend Billy (by Evan McGuirk)

Reverend Billy is a theatrical character preformed in alternative theater venues by a man named Billy Talen.  Assisting in his performances are various members of the “Church of Stop Shopping”, (other members of a mock church who assist Billy in his cause). 

The aim of the Reverend Billy and his “Church of Stop Shopping”’s performances are to criticize and create public awareness of the detriment that large corporations and mass consumption pose to our society.  Examples of this include events scheduled at Disneyland or in Wal-Mart stores. 

The technique the theater trope utilized to achieve this purpose is to imitate or reenact a service of an evangelical church with reverend Billy at the head screaming proverbs and commands about the necessity for the reduction of consumption to save the soul of America and eliminate the evil caused by extensive corporate greed.  This also serves the purpose of criticizing the over the top practices often utilized by the evangelical churches in a satirical format. 

The art is significant in that it bring to the forefront of the American mind how the consumer choices we as citizens make every day have a larger affect than we anticipate, not only a global scale but on a communal and mental/ideological level as well.

Jacquie Hill: Maria Lind

Maria Lind is a well known and highly respected curator. Currently she is the Director for the Graduate Program in Curatorial Studies at Bard College in New York. She was appointed director in 2008 taking over for Norton Batkin. Prior to her position at Bard College she was the director for IASPIS (International Artist Studio Program in Sweden) in Stockholm. More information about IASPIS can be found here : http://www.iaspis.se/eng/d_frame/frame.html

Lind has worked very closely with artists in conceiving programs and projects. One such project was a retrospective workshop with artist Rirkrit Tiravanija, a social practice artist from Buenos Aires. In this workshop they invited students in from different universities around Germany and Sweden and recreated “Angst essen Seele auf” a project of Rirkrit from 1994 which is a bar and a monitor showing Fassbender’s film “Angst essen Seele auf” from 1973.  So the first day of the workshop they built the bar and a group went out and bought ingredients to cook with. The second day they invited Robert Fischer, a film historian to come in and speak about Fassbender.

This past January Lind was named the fourth recipient of the Walter Hopps award for Curatorial Achievement.  The award recognizes curators in early to mid career who have made significant contributions to the field of contemporary art and carries a stipend of $15000 USD.