Really,+Really+Alternative+Spaces

39/notes on alt sp panel 4 06 April 6, 2006 at the Cont’y

“Really, Really Alternative Spaces” at The Contemporary, April 5, 2006

This was too good to miss. The Contemporary put on a panel called “Really Really Alternative Spaces” as part of its Artists Survival Skills series 2006. I arrived too late to hear Tony Riffel of the Octane Coffee House near the Contemporary, and caught only the last part of Susan Bridges of [|Some Call It Art] presentation. But that part was grand. Bridges presented shows she’d done like “Elegies for Heloise” in which an underground parking lot had been made over to resemble a Cistercian monastery. Another, called “Gretch” after its subjcct, a Little Five Points street person of the same name, brought out PETA reps after the Atlanta Journal-Constitution ran a photograph from the show of Gretch “biting her cat.” Bridges assured the indignant that Gretch loved her cat, and besides, she doesn’t have any teeth.

Bridges recently presented a show called “Wreathmaker” in the carriage house on her property – “behind the house and in the park.” The exhibition concerned our losses in the conflict in Iraq, since it was exactly that – the artist Richard Sudden [sp?] set up a wreathmaker’s shop in the “gallery.”

Weston Charles, director of [|Locust Projects] in Miami, founded his space after attending art school in Miami, leaving and returning. Since there wasn’t much interesting going on in the art scene then (some seven years ago) “me and my pals decided to open an art space” and learn as they went along how to run it. “We went to the worst neighborhood and got the biggest space we could afford.” They just wanted to show art that was underrepresented. The neighborhood then was dangerous. After the third or fourth show “people found it hip to come out because of the danger factor.”

Soon the directors of established galleries were coming around, lured by their clients’ reported interest. Within six months, “those galleries were on our block” and the rents have risen so Charles fears Locust Projects will no longer be able to afford their space.

Locust does edgy projects by artists is “not commercially viable.” It’s art “you can’t hang in your house.” Among the works he flashed in his slide show was one in which a painting had ostensibly fallen from its frame, crushing the artist beneath it – he was visible as lump in the back of the canvas.

A recent show in which an artist mailed out books and asked artists to pee on them and send them back for an exhibition caused concerns on Locust’s board of directors about public health…

Certainly their audience is appreciative. A suite of artists’ bills posted on the exterior of Locust, and soon Charles said “they were all stolen.”

Charles relishes that “a lot of things happen in our space that are not planned.” It’s about freedom, he said. “There need to be places where people can really experiment to the limit and they don’t really care about the outcome.”

The environment for Locust has changed. The Miami art scene has grown tremendously since the turn of the century. There are 50 galleries in a 20 block radius, Charles says, and while most don’t sell enough to support themselves, support for the arts in Miami has been growing apace. (The recent successful Art Basel Miami fair in February was evidence of the commercial vitality of this southeastern locus of the arts.)

Joey Orr, whose brainchild was the famous [|Shed Projects], quoted Suzi Gablik and Krzysztof Wodiczko at the outset of his talk, making it clear that his intentions were social when he talked Atlantans into donating the sheds behind their houses to house installations of contemporary art. He wanted to “get away from an institutional environment so that people were interacting with art all over town.”

Orr was inspired by a project room in San Antonio, Texas, an 8X8 foot cinderblock building to which artists were invited to do what they would go for a week’s time. Part way into the week the community was invited, and a keg of beer was opened in the parking lot. The artist had to return the building to its original state after their show.

Over five years Orr did a vest-pocket installation exhibition every Saturday in August, trying to persuade non-art people to give up their sheds for the shows. The crowds? “Fifty people” came to the shows the first year, and in the last year “200 to 300” showed up for the openings.

Orr deliberately chose gentrifying or “transitioning” neighborhoods. In one project he partnered with the [|Mad Housers], a venerable housing activist group out of Georgia Tech for a project in the area near Turner Field. There new $350K condos were being thrown up next to veritable shanties, and the atmosphere was charged as a Shed Space show was put up in a Mad Houser construction. (I’d love to see that video.)

In time local arts institutions backed the Shed Space work – the Contemporary, MOCA GA, and a local brewery [which one?] sponsored the project. More and more Orr concentrated on work that interacted with communities.

Lisa Tuttle’s piece engaged directly with neighborhood history. Her show took place in the shed of a white family moving into a black neighborhood – which had formerly been white. Tuttle and Orr went out to “knock on doors” in soliciting information and community interest in the show.

Susan Sipsik’s piece called “Nibble” engaged her community’s sweet tooth. The installation featured dozens of hanging gingerbread cookies, and hundreds more in jars on the shelf.

Joey Orr is curating a public art component of the annual Atlanta Celebrates Photography festival this year.

-- Alan W. Moore