Blog – Art in Odd Places

Juliana Driever and Dylan Gauthier, AiOP 2014: FREE co-curators

Tell me about yourselves?

Juliana Driever: Depending on who you ask, I’m: a curator, a writer, a teacher, an administrator, a freelancer, an editor, a mother, a wife, a daughter, a sister, a friend, a vegan, a feminist, a virgo, a facilitator, a misfit, a truth-teller, a participant, a helper, a perfectionist, an opinion-haver, a New Yorker, a rambler. But it’s all the same to me.

Dylan Gauthier:I’m an artist, curator, and educator, working with a particular focus on interactions in common space, digital media, invisible infrastructure, collaboration, and public art. I’m a co-founder of the artist and water activist collective the Free Seas (http://www.thefreeseas.org), and the Sunview Luncheonette (http://www.thesunview.org), and I also collaborate frequently with Sam Gould/Red76 (http://www.red76.org).

JD: Dylan and I have known each other for quite a long time. We worked together at Gigantic ArtSpace [GAS] in the early aughts, with founder/director Lea Rekow. Since then we’ve worked on a few other projects together, including an exhibition at the Boston Center for the Arts last fall. Doing production and exhibitions work can get really intense, but being amongst friends has also made it so much fun.

How did you first get involved with AiOP?

JD: Ed and I met in 2011, and I was immediately drawn to the spirit of the festival. I had done quite a bit of work with site-specific and public art, but had been feeling frustrated with the myopia the art world — and with the culture of permissions that stymies so many of us working to create professional opportunities. He asked me to organize a public program for AiOP 2011: RITUAL in conjunction with the Institute for Urban Design, as a part of the inaugural Urban Design Week festival. That was my first contribution to the AiOP community. The panel that I put together – Rise and Fall: Contemporary Nautical Practice on the Gowanus Canal – included Dylan as a panelist, and Jeff Stark (who is a participating artist in 2014) as moderator. Since then, I’ve involved myself each year in various ways. Last fall, we launched the catalog for AiOP 2011: RITUAL (which I edited) at Residency Unlimited. That night, Ed asked me if I wanted to curate this year’s festival. It was a really nice way to come full circle with AiOP.

DG: I was invited by Juliana to be on a panel a few years back as part of AiOP and Urban Design Week about artists who to reclaim the water as viable public space. That was my first personal involvement with the festival, though I had encountered it once when I lived on 14th Street in the 2000s, but only put it together when I started reviewing the work from past festivals. Over the years I’ve seen a ton of documentation of work that was originally produced for AiOP – it crops up during curatorial reviews and in a public art context – though likewise I don’t think I had consciously made the connection that all these great and very memorable projects were being created for this singular festival, which is, in reality, also an artist project by Ed Woodham. When I put all these threads together, I knew I wanted to be involved, and I was thrilled when Juliana invited me to work with her on putting together this year’s show.

How did you decide on the theme for this year’s festival?

JD: When we began talking about possible directions for this year’ theme, FREE was a concept that had already been at the front of my mind for some time. Ostensibly, getting something for free is great, right? But it didn’t take long for us to see that the idea is also fraught with contradictions, and can be really quite polarizing. Understanding what it means to be free, or to get something for free, or to give something away for free is open to a whole spectrum of interpretations — from the utopic to the dystopic. We liked that.

DG: Juliana had already selected the theme when she invited me to co-curate with her, but I wasn’t sure exactly what it meant to call a festival “free” or to force art to be “free”, or how to connect it to 14th Street, which is both a very free and a very restrictive place. As a concept, FREE is totally demodé. Once a promise and a marketing pitch, it has now taken on the sense of the unwanted – a commodity too plentiful, perhaps, or just unwanted. (For if someone wanted it, the thinking goes, it wouldn’t be free.) But a different conception took shape through our long conversations and e-mail exchanges about what FREE could actually mean –– the promise the word might still hold in its very freedom, the word free as an empty signifier – at that point it seemed like the best idea for a festival about public art which is no less than three kinds of free: free (no admission), free (organized by an all-volunteer staff), and free (in that it doesn’t seek any permission or permits to do what it does, but tries to get artists to share their work freely with the public).

JD: Also, it seemed an interesting concept in relation to AiOP, which is an event that has always been pulled off with no budget, and without official permissions. I think it’s a common misconception that AiOP is a 501 (c)(3) organization, or that there’s some kind of operating budget, or that there’s an infrastructure for operational support — but in actuality, it’s just a group of extremely dedicated core collaborators who all lend their expertise to pull off something incredible.

Have you done much work with public space before?

JD: Yes, I’ve worked in the public context quite a bit. Beyond my involvement with AiOP since 2011, I’ve been involved in a number of curatorial projects organized in response to particular public spaces. I was also the curator for the Queens Borough Public Library for a number of years, where I ran a contemporary art program within the central and community libraries.

DG: Much of what I do as an artist takes place in public spaces or deals with questions about the public sphere, public engagement, or the construction of publics. As a curator I have thought about art in public and wondered (and written about) what the dividing line is between a public work and a private one. So it is what I think about and work with all the time.

JD: I love museums and galleries, too. They’re really important parts of the cultural ecosystem. But working in public space — and continually evolving an idea of what, exactly, that constitutes — is in my view the most direct and accessible way to create cultural experiences.

14^th St. is AiOP’s biggest collaborator, what about the space have you been keeping in mind as you are preparing for the festival?

JD: That the festival isn’t just for an artworld audience. 14th Street is so diverse. It’s such a challenging space to program and organize.

DG: Mainly, that there are many 14th Streets: it is a finite place constantly opening up onto a multiverse. Like a fractal, when you look closely enough at it, the widest street in Manhattan contains all of the possible patterns of the larger city.

JD: How do you get the Union Square shoppers to break stride? How do you figure into the cultural tourism and high-end retail experiences along the west side of 14th Street? How do you excite the interest of local residents on the comparatively quiet eastern end of 14th Street? And, how do you provide a well-rounded visitor experience for the art cognoscenti who come out for the festival? It’s a chaotic set of questions to grapple with.

What kind of dialogues to you hope to see created through this year’s festival?

DG: I’m excited to think that each of the artists making work for the festival will be in dialogue with the site, with the theme, with their medium, and with each other.

JD: There is going to be a lot to respond to, and so many audiences to appeal to for engagement. An issue that I foresee a lot of potential discussion around is: digital space as public space. We’re working to realize multiple opportunities for public programming, and will announce our full schedule of events in September.

DG: Juliana and I, along with Meredith Degyansky, are really pushing the public programming component of the festival this year to be something more multidimensional than a panel discussion – more anarchic, more free. We’re hoping to engage diverse actors from the local communities (both in, around, and beyond 14th Street) on a wide array of topics: from architecture and sculpture, urban planning or unplanning, big data and digital interfaces, gentrification and development, and the changing shape of 14th Street itself. In doing so we hope to create a dialogue around the respective ways that public art and public space are conceived of, instrumentalized, and employed to reinforce a specific form of urbanism. To this end we’ve invited a collaboration with the Free University, which is putting out a separate open call for talks and classes.

How has preparing for the AiOP festival impacted your own artistic practices and professional development?

JD: For me, there is no “practice” to speak of. In terms of professional development, I think it’s really tested my desire to control everything all the time. You can’t control the street.

DG: Right now it’s working with the 73 amazing artists involved in this year’s festival, along with all of the AiOP team – Juliana, Ed, the Claires, Sandra, Meredith, Matt, Carey, Jorge –– that is keeping me challenged and inspired, and I’m super excited to see everything come together this October.

Your name/collaborative or group name

John Craig Freeman

The title of your project

14th & AR, New York City

14th & AR, New York City, John Craig Freeman, Art in Odd Places, Free, 2014. Augmented reality public art, New York City, 2014. Image courtesy of the artist.

What does “FREE” mean to you?

Not unlike our political lives, money corrupts art and culture. Ultimately, the art market determines what kind of art gets made and what kind of art get shown. Art that challenges this crass commodification gets marginalized and ignored by institutions and tastemakers. The resulting art of our time is most often reduced to the banal, political vapid and socially irrelevant.

Public art is free to be experience, but not to be made. So even in the public realm, the concept of free has its limits.

Artists and cultural institutions in the twenty-first century can learn from the tithing ethos of open source hacking culture. Utilizing virtual and augmented reality technology as public art is a new proposition that explores all that we know and experience as the mixture the real and the hyper-real. It is now the artist, not the institutions and tastemakers, who decides which artworks can be placed where. Art world power structures, nation states, the nature of art itself, are all called into question. 14th & AR, New York City asks the question, “who will assert dominion over the virtual space that surrounds us?”

Why is 14th Street a compelling site for creative response?

Since 2002, I have worked on the corner of Tremont and Boylston Streets overlooking the historic Boston Common, the first public park in the United States. As I walk across the park every morning, I often contemplate the role that the town square plays in shaping of political discourse and national identity formation. As the location of the public sphere, the town square is traditionally where we make monuments to our heroes and memorials to those we have lost.

Whereas the public square was once the quintessential place to air grievances, display solidarity, express difference, celebrate similarity, remember, mourn, and reinforce shared values of right and wrong, it is no longer the only anchor for interactions in the public realm. That geography has been relocated to a novel terrain, one that encourages exploration of mobile location-based public art. Moreover, public space is now truly open, as artworks can be placed anywhere in the world, without prior permission from curators, governments or private authorities – with profound implications for art in the public sphere and the discourse that surrounds it.

In the early 1990s, we witnessed the migration of the public sphere from the physical realm, the town square and its print augmentation, to the virtual realm, the placelessness, the everywhere-but-nowhere of the Internet. In effect, the global digital network has facilitated the emergence a new virtual space, one which corresponds to the physical geography around us.

The public sphere is now crashing back down to place in the form of place-based virtual and augmented reality, without losing its distributed character or its connections to the vast resources of the world-wide digital network. Imagine now, the entire mobile Internet, and its physical manifestations’ of place, as a world wide public square.

What reactions are you hoping to draw from the public?

A new reality is being built all around us, as our old reality slips away. It occupies the same space as our physical existence and coincided point for point with it. The map of the empire is now the size of the empire. Although we rarely give it a second thought, we encounter and interact with this reality whenever we try to get a mobile signal or wireless network connection. I hope to make visible the virtual reality that now surrounds us, and encourage people to participate in what it is to become.

Union Square is one of New York’s most historically significant town squares. It is an important crossroads, not only for the city, but for the nation. I am interested in the intersection of the virtual and the physical. I hope to make the boundary between the two porous. The goal is to emphasize our need for a new ontology –how we determine what is real, and a new epistemology –how do we know that what we think is real is indeed real.

AiOP 2014: FREE: Q & A with curators Juliana Driever and Dylan Gauthier

AiOP 2014: FREE Sneak Peek! John Craig Freeman “14th & AR, New York City”