Brett Bloom /Temporary Services

Brett Bloom is an artist, writer and publisher based in Copenhagen and currently teaching at Jutland Academy in Aarhus.

Bloom is part of the group Temporary Services. The group makes work together, writes about art, and publishes obsessively. They run Half Letter Press, a publishing imprint. Bloom's most recent essay "Superkilen: Participatory Park Extreme!" (Kriitk, April 2013, Copenhagen) is an investigation of a new park in Copenhagen designed by starchitects Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) and the art group Superflex. It looks at how narratives of democracy and participation are used to gloss over extreme influence peddling and the spatialization of neoliberal values and city planning. http://www.temporaryservices.org

Temporary Services Temporary Services is Brett Bloom, Salem Collo-Julin and Marc Fischer. We are based in Chicago,Copenhagen, and Philadelphia. We have existed, with several changes in membership and structure, since 1998. We produce exhibitions, events, projects, and publications. The distinction between art practice and other creative human endeavors is irrelevant to us. The best way of testing our ideas has been to do them without waiting for permission or invitation. We invent infrastructure or borrow it when necessary. We were not taught this in school. We try different approaches, inspired by others equally frustrated by the systems they inherited, who created their own methods for getting work into the public. Temporary Services started as an experimental exhibition space in a working class neighborhood of Chicago. Our name directly reflects the desire to provide art as a service to others. It is a way for us to pay attention to the social context in which art is produced and received. Having "Temporary Services" displayed on our window helped us to blend in with the cheap restaurants, dollar stores, currency exchanges, and temporary employment agencies on our street. We were not immediately recognizable as an art space. This was partly to stave off the stereotypical role we might have played in the gentrification of our neighborhood. We weren't interested in making art for sale. Within the boundaries of "what sells," artists often carve out tiny aesthetic niches to protect, peddle, and repeat indefinitely, rather than opening themselves up to new possibilities. Experiencing art in the places we inhabit on a daily basis remains a critical concern for us. It helps us move art from a privileged experience to one more directly related to how we live our lives. A variety of people should decide how art is seen and interpreted, rather than continuing to strictly rely on those in power. We move in and out of officially sanctioned spaces for art, keeping one foot in the underground the other in the institution. Staying too long in one or the other isn't healthy. We are interested in art that takes engaging and empowering forms. We collaborate amongst ourselves and with others, even though this may destabilize how people understand our work.

http://www.temporaryservices.org/contact.html

Brett Bloom at the DAI:
Roaming Academy / goes New York