Roaming Academy: New York, May 2013 - Marianna Maruyama

Free Books, Free Conversation
Marianna Maruyama

Looking over the photos, I looked happiest when I was greedily grabbing free books on the street outside of some fancy galleries in Chelsea. Getting two brand new Bodum French presses at a sample sale for $1 apiece was a close second, and both were shameless, giddy consumer highs. I'm not proud of the fact that my greedy face was captured so easily.

At least I wasn't wearing a heart-rate monitor, which would have been even more embarrassing.  Of course, I could try to excuse myself and say I'm just a victim of the values imposed on me by the capitalist structures in which I'm hopelessly entrenched. It's true I could also assign the blame to our consumer culture since we all know that pointing a finger at the system is always easier than taking personal responsibility, but I can't do it now (at least not with a good conscience) after what I experienced in New York.

Most inspiring during this trip were the encounters I had with the people who, while they understood the system and their places in it, had some unique understanding of an art world and an economy, and didn't make excuses or blame consumer capitalist structures every step of the way. Aware, critical, and angry yet...generative and generous, and not always wishing to be quoted.  I saw these qualities reflected in the conversations we had with Sal Randolph, who was literally handing out her own cash for strangers to take as part of her practice. Josh MacPhee's demonstrated dedication to the Interference Archive in Brooklyn and Nato Thompson's radiance were both further evidence of the undeniable energy and enthusiasm for art and activism I saw all over the city. During our visit at CreativeTime, Nato spelled out for us the compromises inherent in defending something you love while being part of an economy with corrupted ideas about the value and place of art. His fierce loyalty as a curator to the people he believes in is an example in itself of how the played out trend of "social relations" is actually lived by real people in real life who care about each other.  Even W.A.G.E,'s mission, while not the perfect model for my understanding of how art can work (they are "focused on regulating the payment of artist fees by nonprofit art institutions and establishing a sustainable model for best practices between cultural producers and the institutions that contract their labor") still points to the most basic and underlying concept that we have to remember: we have to help each other.

Also striking to me was the generosity of spirit and time that all of our hosts shared with us.  I was so charmed by Tom Finkelpearl at the Queens Museum of Art that I forgot to take any notes. The vision he has committed himself to about what and how a museum can be is unexpected and unheard of: in the near future, the Queens Museum will have a public library, classrooms, spaces for young people to exhibit, an archive, and yes, a dedicated place for art (and he clearly doesn't mean to keep separate from the roles just mentioned). Quite fittingly, he explained it all to us as we drifted over The Panorama (built for the 1964 World's Fair). Boasting rights aside, being around that thing all day can't help but give a person a sense of perspective. Tom Finkelpearl's vision was just such evidence of this hypothesis.

The roles a museum might play of course depend on the roles we artists might play.  Here in NY, as a guest and visitor in my home country, I experienced a shift in the way I interacted with the city and my own definition of artistic activity.  Not to get too gushy here, I should point out that quite a few moments during the trip really made me think about quitting art - art's everywhere, everyone's an artist, and as Amy Whitaker at Sotheby's Institute tried to convince us "everyone is also a businessperson." We can not deny the over-saturation of artists - not only in terms of the market, but also in daily life.  I have never seen so many hipsters in my life as I saw in Brooklyn (Williamsburg, of course).

Having not been back in NY since 2001, and visiting this time as an MFA student from a European educational institution gave me a different outlook than the one I'd had over 11 years ago when I lived there as an undergraduate on an exchange program, working as an assistant to more successful artists. Now that I've had experience living in other cities (Chicago, Tokyo, Amsterdam) and have found other ways of making a living (teaching, selling books, selling my work), I'm a lot less intimidated by the people around me that I always presumed were smarter, richer and cooler than me. Call it my inferiority complex, but consider it one I've begun to overcome. This time around, I really enjoyed engaging with artists and curator and organizers on my own terms. And, perhaps a little sadistically, I really also enjoyed seeing them face a barrage of questions, expectations, judgments and criticism from the group I was traveling with.

Speaking of complexes, I kept observing how New Yorkers constantly refer to the fact that they live in New York - to visitors, to each other, and most of all (I suspect) to themselves. It's an unending existential dilemma, a position that Woody Allen characterizes to perfection (and Steven Rand of Apex Art comes in at a close second). The stereotype of the neurotic self-questioning, self-obsessed New Yorker, misses one important point: these self-questioning people are at the same time self-defining, and they won't stand for easy definitions of their characters or of their city. They think it means something different to be an artist in NY than it does to be an artist in Dubai.  What matters is not whether or not they are right, but the fact that they will be the only ones to make that judgment call about what it means to be an artist in NY, what it means to be part of the economy in NY, what it means to position yourself in NY, what it means to have a gallery in NY, what it means to have a collective in NY. Is this not the definition of self-determination?

The fact is, that for a self-defining people, impressions and opinions from the outside don't really have much bearing, which betrays both a provincialism and radically self-reliant standpoint at the same time. In a conversation at e-flux, Gregg Bordowitz said that "the only politics that exist are the politics in the room." If the room is not limited to an architectural space, but instead a metaphor for any space where a meeting could happen, the "room" could also be the entire city of New York, then we have to ask, as artist Caroline Woolard asked at Eyebeam, "Who is in the room?"  So many of the people we met have a wont to self-define, but they need to know who's with them, and who they are dealing with.  If the opinions are from just outside the door, they simply don't hold the same weight.  The paradox of this situation, of trying to understand what is happening in New York City is that you have to get outside in order to get inside.

Links

Sal Randolph (artist)
http://salrandolph.com/

Interference Archive
http://interferencearchive.org/

Nato Thompson at CreativeTime
http://creativetime.org/

W.A.G.E.
http://www.wageforwork.com/about/6/faqs

The Panorama at the Queens Museum of Art
http://www.queensmuseum.org/exhibitions/visitpanorama

Amy Whitaker at Sotheby's Institute of Art
http://www.sothebysinstitute.com/Programmes/PNewyork.aspx

Steven Rand at Apex Art
http://www.apexart.org/

Gregg Bordowitz at e-flux
http://www.e-flux.com/program/launch-of-e-flux-journal-44-impractical-impossibilities-guest-edited-by-carlos-motta/

Caroline Woolard at Eyebeam
http://www.eyebeam.org/people/caroline-woolard