In November Resident artist and co-founder of Bill+George, Rebecca Conroy trawled through the USA meeting with some interesting artists and spaces. Two big stops were Chicago and Detroit. It seems that Chicagoans are massively into their socially engaged artist practice here and there is much to converse on here. So far Rebecca has met with the Chicago Underground library, Anti Gravity Surprise and Incubate (which closed their space last year). She also visited Links Hall which is a grass rootsy independent arts space with a long history, and the beginnings of a new museum dedicated to tracing and animating the history of public housing. The following post offers some insights from here travels: ....
Ok so Chicago is AWESOME. An ethnically and culturally diverse and dense urban metropolis of arts practices and histories. How do you get your head around this stuff? In less than 10 days? You don't. You simply plan a return trip for 2011. Like all of us, everyone here is grappling with the work/life/art balance and it is comforting (if not a little disconcerting) to hear the same stories about survival here. Arriving at the Chicago Underground Library to join in a meeting of volunteers was interesting, and perversely humorous to realise how closely aligned we are in terms of the internal struggles of a small volunteer run space. The world over we are all balancing the same elements. Conversing with the director Nell Tayor was interesting and useful in further determining the parameters and intentions of our own library here at Bill+George. The CUL has an open source platform, not just online but in the physical workings of its space. This appears to working well, and is a particularly conscious aesthetic in their operation. Their process of cataloguing for example follows a web based approach of tagging key words and entering them into an open source plumi software installed on your laptop. Furthermore this is generated in real time around a table with a group of dedicated aficiandos gathered for "Cataloguing Socials" where food and drink is shared and books/texts/zines in the collection are circulated and commented upon while being inserted into the online catalogue. What a great way to spend a sunday afternoon! CUL is driven by a clear philosophy of inviting and accepting anything in their collection with the intention that it disrupts the normalisng circulatory processes of mainstream culture, whereby only a particular set of texts are available. Concurrently with the live, engaged real time cataloguing it provides and provokes a space for conversation and dialogue about these texts. These texts are then mapped according to where they were published or created, generating a physical sense of where the ideas were generated, place being such an important determinant in content creation.
This is really helping me crystalize some ideas on our own approach to the librarium. Our decision to pursue a select curation of small press which only reached out to a select few artists and practices is all about defining a space for these practices amongst the more dominant and disturbing practices of our culture. We don't have an open community approach like CUL, but who knows this is where may go...
More on Detroit in the next post.
