galería perdida

kevin micka

musician, sound artist aka animal hospital.

John Cage reputedly didn't own any records; he was said to have enjoyed music by walking down the streets and catching the melodies of songs emanating from apartment windows--ostensibly colliding with the sounds from the streets. At what point does a sound bear the potential to become 'musical'?

Really any sound could be considered to be musical as you have already mentioned. At least to me it is. I personally notice the rhythm and or pattern of different sounds around me alot of the time. Lately I feel that it is influencing the basis for writing new music sometimes. I often catch myself tapping along to the sounds in my van such as the windshield wipers or the clicking of the directionals. I think I am coming through the end of of a long period of not buying any new music and or really seeking out anything new.

Alot of it has to do with simply not having a real stereo set up at home or in my van. I just got the stereo in the car working after having silence in the van for almost a year. Probably all i was really listening to on a regular basis over the past year or two was recordings i was doing of my own and other people's music. I mostly imagine incorporating less conventional sounds into my own music more of a challenge. Which is definitely good as it is sometimes too easy to just play a drum beat and layer stuff on top of it without even thinking about it. Almost kind of a instant gratification kind of thing, which is nice sometimes but helpful to keep in mind that it is often too safe of a place to be.

how do complicated sounds and structures make their differences apparent to the uneducated listener?

That is a good but hard question to answer. I don't think it matters if they are apparent to the listener. I think art and music should be able to say something to someone regardless of their own knowledge and experience. This makes me think of the difference between my brother and I on this subject in relation to art. He is well read in the history and theory of art as I am not. Therefore we both have very different reactions and opinions on works of art when we go to a museum and talk about it. I would like to think that my music can affect someone deeply without them being aware of any of the technical aspects of the piece. Music and art is very succesful in this way as the receiver can get whetever they want out of it. There is no correct way to understand and enjoy it.

andrea liu

a critic, writer, dancer.

why can't we stick to one thing?

the other day i was at a New Museum Reading group, and somebody was talking about their trajectory, and they kept using the idiom "as a painter" or "my identity as a painter." i found this to be very anachronistic, as i think there was a watershed point in the 60's and 70's where no longer did people encapsulate themselves in an encrusted vocational role according to what medium they used (i.e. I'm a painter, I'm a sculptor, etc.). instead, there was a set of inquiries or investigations they were exploring/ conducting, and the medium was the means for that, not an ends or pre-ordained, pre-planned product unto itself. no longer was the goal, "at the end of the day, i am going to churn out a painting/sculpture, etc." it was, "i am thinking about xyz issues, and i am going to traverse various mediums in the service of exploring these issues." Sol Lewitt did sculpture, installation, painting, and eventually artists books. Felix Gonzalez-Torres did photographs, installations, sculptures, etc. Lorna Simpson used photography, video, video installation. none of these people, do you think of them as "Felix Gonzales-Torres is an X (painter, sculptor, etc.)." even Cindy Sherman, who is the most tied to one medium of the people i named so far--i don't think of her as a "photographer." she has a conceptual interrogation at the root of her practice, i.e. the deconstructing of the "naturalness" with which femininity is visually represented--and her photography was a means for that. but i don't go around thinking, "Cindy Sherman is a photographer" the way I DO GO AROUND THINKING Nan Goldin and Ryan McGinley are "photographers." Sherman is deconstructing photography with photography, whereas Goldin and McGinley are capitalizing on its most conservative, manipulative, commercially viable, seductive aspects. it's eye candy. their work is a commodity IN THE DISGUISE OF ART. Stephanie Diamond is a good counter-example--although she uses photography, or snapshots, profusely, with some of her work including over 2000 photographs, she says she is not a photographer. her works are more like installations, recordings, or even conceptual art pieces, using photographs as raw material. the actual photographs she uses are de-skilled, quotidian, divorced from any sanctimonious "authorship" (sometimes the photographs are donated by other people), vulnerable to decay, and completely jettison any photographic "formalist" standards.

if we take the artists in the CORE program (while i was there with you)--almost nobody said, "I am an X" ( i.e. painter, sculptor, photographer, installation artist, etc.) for instance, you have alot of photography in your work, but they are more like anthropological or ethnographic interrogations to me, they are not presented as "I am a photographer." it would be putrid and painful if they were--it would imbue it with a gloss of commercialism, disembowel it of any ideological content or potential for political critique, and even mar any conceptualist bent. because it would ally it with this old school modernist notion of the "autonomy of the artist sphere." the artist is cut off from the "real world"--they're in this rarefied hermetically-sealed vacuum that has completely erased any awareness of the material or political conditions of its production. "I do X (photography, sculpture), and it is my fake fantasy world of formalist conventions (even if they are conventions of iconoclasm, they are conventions nonetheless) cut off from any awareness of the outside world. it's ESCAPISM." as Rosalind Krauss argues in Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition, an ideology of the autonomy of the artist sphere goes hand in hand with capitalist production, because it renders the artist's work discrete products that can be circulated and subsumed by the system of private property.

same with william. can you imagine how laughable it would be if he went around saying, "i am an X (installation artist, photographer, painter, blah blah blah)." it would be so antithetical to the entire geneaology or lineage of what he comes from (which, from what i understand seems to be more dematerialized conceptual art practices, a present day reformulation of minimalist tendencies, and even some vestiges of land art, with the project where he went places and planted stuff). the only exception is Mequitta, who followed a more antiquated model of "I am X" (a painter). she was an anomaly among the group, and came from an ideology of a more backward-looking historical moment (than the rest of the people in the CORE).

even in the CORE exhibition show--nobody but Mequitta stuck to one medium. William had projections, drawings, installation. you had photography, video, installation. kara had video, photography, and something of an installation. nobody "stuck to one thing." even those who did stick to one medium (sergio), that was not indicative of his practice as a whole. he does video, installation, etc. on the other hand, mequitta sticking to one medium WAS indicative of a single medium-ness to her practice. (although it is true, for the exhibition from the year earlier she experimented with installation).

incidentally, IT IS MUCH MORE COMMERCIALLY VIABLE to say "I am X." it's much easier to commodify work that comes from an ideology of "I am X" (painter, sculptor, photographer, etc.) it is much easier to digest, it can be a commodity to be circulated, consumed, it makes it more amenable to the system of private property. the patrician goes on his shopping spree in new york, he buys a few antiques, some fur coats for his hetero-normative trophy wife, then some stuff to decorate his living room by going to the art gallery. well it's much easier to decorate your living room with art that comes from an ideology of "I am X." becuz X is not an idea, it's a set of ossified digestible conventions that support the system of private property.

it's much easier to decorate your living room and not have to think about the work with Mequitta's work than with yours or William's. as Mel Bochner said, "it's the empty soul behind the painting." that's why Mequitta is the only one in the CORE (from my year) represented by a Chelsea gallery. that is the living proof that one's ideology has direct economic consequences. THAT'S NOT TO SAY HER WORK MIGHT NOT HAVE TREMENDOUS CRAFT--clearly it does. but it is craft within the framework of an ideology and a SYSTEM that turns her work easily into a commodity.

i don't consider people who say "I am X" to be "fine artists." they are more or less (socially sanctioned, and even reified) hucksters.

now speaking of photography, people in modern dance HAVE THE OPPOSITE PROBLEM (than the visual arts photographers who sell out by making their work "easily digestible"). because dance is so NON COMMERCIAL, so much less intrinsically commercially viable (than visual art), they have to make dance photography HYPER-COMMERICAL. dance photography is extremely conservative, and DOESN'T HAVE THE LUXURY TO DISPENSE WITH COMMERCIALISM. it always catches the dancers in the prettiest light, doing the highest jumps or with the highest kicks, in the most improbably and acrobatically mind-boggling poses. it's this notion of dancers producing "tricks." they have to produce "tricks" for the audience, like dolphins. DANCE PHOTOGRAPHY IS NOT CONCEPTUAL, political, or anything. it is pure spectacle, marketting, AND A NAIVE MARKETTING AT THAT.

I DON'T BLAME THEM. it's hard enough to get society to attend a dance performance. if i was dancer, i wouldn't want someone practicing conceptual, de-skilled, ontological-inquiring, or quotidian photography when they took a picture of me dancing. you probably would never get any grants. you don't want Sophie Calle or Lorna Simpson doing your dance photography. you wouldn't even be able to tell that it was dance. you want hucksters to do your dance photography: Matthew Barney, Nan Goldin, Ryan McGinley--the Hollywood of the art world. THEY'LL MAKE IT SELL. Goldin will imbue it with a faux bohemian transgressivity (which is really the ruling class' stereotypes of what bohemians are like), while still completely conforming to the most calculated Madison Avenue advertising conventions of lighting, staging, color schemes, McGinley will make it WASP grunge hipster J Crew, and Barney will make it this sumptuous voluptuous empty eye candy with no ethical base. THAT WOULD BE GREAT FOR DANCE, because they need the visual art's money makers to help them out! although i hate those guys in the visual arts, i would love it if they migrated and came to help the dance world. because the dance world is too naive to know how to be that manipulative (i.e. manipulation in the guise of "high art").

THE DANCE WORLD HASN'T EVEN GOTTEN TO THE LEVEL OF PRODUCING "SPECTACLE"!!!!! HA HA HA HA HA!!!! if we take spectacle in the Debordian sense, of being capital in the disguise of cultural production--it hasn't even gotten to that level yet! it is only the visual art world that has the ethical luxury to critique spectacle. dance doesn't have a far-reaching enough system of distribution and commodification of its products the way visual art does, for anything from its world to even get to the level of "spectacle." "spectacle" is something pervasive, that is built into a consumerist society's infrastructure, that you can't escape and changes the terrain of your consciousness. dance has no such infrastructure!

let me take a detour to make my point: in 2006, a renowned modern dancer named Homer Avila, a top dancer in the field, who had danced for Twyla Tharp, Mark Morris, and Bill T. Jones and had his own dance company, died from cancer. it came about from him not having extensive enough health insurance coverage that would make possible the necessary treatments after having a minor hip injury. as a result of not detecting the cancer sooner after a minor hip injury, he had to have his legs amputated due to the cancer, and eventually died. here is an article about it:

http://www.danceinsider.com/f2007/f1018_1.html

it is so astounding that a top choreographer in the field of dance still makes so little money that they can't afford the proper health insurance, and eventually die from it. if this is how bad it is for the privileged in dance who are successful and have their own dance company, i wonder how much worse it is for those who never reach the level of success of Avila.

here is another example: i had a dance choreographer friend who was at he top of her field. she had won the Guggenheim grant, the Puffin grant, the Creative Capital grant, had been written up in Artforum ( very hard for a dancer to do), had performed at Dance Theater Workshop. in her mid-forties, when she was looking for an apartment in Brooklyn, and the realtor required that she prove she made $80,000 a year, which of course she did not. she then had to ask her parents to secure her loan, despite being at the top of her field and age 45. IF THE DANCERS AT THE TOP OF THEIR FIELD, THE ANOINTED FEW GETTING THE GUGGENHEIM, CREATIVE CAPITAL GRANT and being written up in Artforum STILL HAVE TO ASK THEIR PARENTS TO BE A GUARANTOR FOR THEIR LOAN AT AGE 45 to get an apartment WITH A ROOMATE, what about the people WHO DON'T GET THE CREATIVE CAPITAL, GUGGENHEIM grants and don't get written up in Artforum? how much lower can you go?

another example: i once was in a workshop called the Politics of Dancing. it consisted of 6 people or so, and we were supposed to address how dance effected politics. i can't remember how it came out, but in one of our discussions one of the dancers said that they were on food stamps. nobody seemed that surprised.

my point is the DANCE WORLD WILL NOT BE PRODUCING SPECTACLE ANY TIME SOON. SPECTACLE TAKES MONEY. the dance world will be lucky if it can get enough money so its top choreographers don't die from having to amputate their legs because dance makes so little that its "stars" still can't afford real health insurance. the dance world will be lucky if their practitioners who are at the top of their field and have won the Guggenheim, Puffin, and Creative Capital Grant and have been written up in Artforum don't need to still borrow money from their parents at age 45 to put a downpayment on their apartment, WITH A ROOMMATE.

only the visual art world has the money and the infrastructure to create "spectacle" at will, and the ethical luxury to critique and reject it.

Threads of interdisciplinary actions in the arts, 'fine' arts I suppose, in the contemporary sense have dated back to Dadaist and Futurist protocol. Even built into the modern through schools of ideology like the Bauhuas, but they lulled before the second world war and certainly became more prominent not until the 70s with the rise of performance and dance. Ultimately in the 90s, when the cache of relational aesthetics came into play, as did media and the internet, did we see fully formed activity centered around the decentralization of the arts. Do you find that the parallel growth of globalization has had any effect?

this is a important point you bring up, to historically contextualize the issue of interdisciplinarity that i was griping about in the essay. i tend to get over-frustrated with the present, accumulate alot of bile towards things that i think are wrong with the present (of the visual and performing arts world), attributing a kind of fascist over-determinedness to it, as if the way things are now is the only way they can be, or the only way they ever were, or the only way they ever will be. it's like i am always the underdog in my war with the overbearing present, which has this unwieldy club that will always clobber me at the blink of an eye--whereas i should enlist the past (of art history) to help me fight the present (i.e. present situation of hyper-specialization, careerism, and balkanization between different art disciplines).

of course, "art history/history" is not some essentialist static packaged "thing" that is just out there--like i just have to open a closet door and this discrete entity "history" or "art history" will be sitting there, fully formed and sealed, ready for me to apply. history is a constant negotiation in flux, a power play of different forces, power differentials, institution-induced justifying narratives, blah blah blah. history should be seen as a constantly changing kaleidescopic mirage, rather than an artifact-like enshrined "done deal." history should be like the line in the Simon and Garfunkel song, "Slip-Slidin' Away:" "you know the nearer your destination, the more you slip slidin' away." just when you think you have pinned down history to some static determinate thing, it should be contested, diffused, or subverted. the certainty of any one historical interpretation should slip and slide out of your hands.

but yes, you bring up dada and bauhaus as examples of previous historical movements that were interdisciplinary. this is a VERY IMPORTANT POINT, and we can think of many others. if we look at Malevich and the Suprematist movement in 1920's Russia, it had strongly incorporated principles of Zaum poetry and was inextricably intertwined with the activity of Opoyaz (Society of Poetical Language) in Petrograd, the center for Russian formalist literary criticism, with Roman Jakobsen, etc. this is a case where, as i said in the opening paragraph of my essay, "the trajectory of their canons, their notions of form/content, etc. start to intertwine" between two disciplines (in this case, visual art and literature). in my essay i am decrying the rarity of that ever happening, but it happened with malevich and zaum poetry. malevich actually wrote zaum poetry and wanted to create a zaum "brand" of painting. zaum was predicated on this concept of "ostranenie" or defamiliarization--making the familiar strange, making perception less automatic, jolting people out of a roteness, showing communication not to be transparent and self-evident, but constructed.

basically once you move to Eastern European art it makes all my complaints of a lack of interdisciplinarity look silly. it makes me look like just the fact that i am framing the question "why is there not more interdisciplinarity?" to be evidence that i have been bred by and internalized the whole ideology and system that i hate. art in Eastern Europe doesn't go around saying "now i am going to be interdisciplinary--" it just IS--effortlessly, incorporated. the Russian Constructivist movement in 1917 was poised to create social revolution, to be a catalyst for a whole new mode of social organization. you can't get more interdisciplinary than that! but they didn't go around like the Ipod-wielding generation X and Y artists today, labeling what they did "interdisciplinary" so they can have a competitive edge when they apply for the Creative Capital grant. it was not this contrived, product-placement oriented, sterile "interdisciplinary-ism" you see in a capitalist market-oriented art society. i know this artist here from Taiwan who went to Parsons who was with me in Nighstchool, AND EVERYTHING HE DOES IS CALCULATED TO ADVANCE HIS CAREER. he never does anything just because of the idea, it's always to advance his career. when he goes to a party, if someone is 26 and still intern, he doesn't deem that person worthy to talk to, because it won't advance his career. the interdisciplinary-ism back then WAS ORGANIC and it was not this separate isolated feature, like the forward wheel drive and airbag features listed on an advertisement for a BMW--this cynical calculated gesture of self-promotion, "now i am gonna be interdisciplinary so i can have a competitive edge on my Creative Capital MAPFUND application"--it was INCORPORATED INTO THE HEART OF THE IDEA OF THE ART.

yes dada was interdisciplinary, traversing literature, poetry, performance, photography, sculpture, painting, so on so forth. and once again, it didn't go around like the capitalist neoliberal Generation X and Y artists of today, calling themselves
"interdisciplinary" so they have a competitive edge on their Creative Capital Mapfund grant application. i once read somewhere, i can't remember if it was a Hal Foster article, that dada aimed for the "political secularization of art;" that it aimed to take it out of this transcendent, high-religious, immanent realm, and situate it in a real life political context. it also characterized dada as "desublimatory;" rather than trying to reach for some higher ideal or trying to sublimate baser instincts, it was trying to deflate the spiritual pretensions of art. i don't know why this is the case, but it seems to me that art movements that are culturally oppositional, that are in some way opposing the dominant sociocultural or political order, HAVE ALOT EASIER TIME FOSTERING INTER-DISCIPLINARITY.

Fluxus would be the next logical example in the chain (of a culturally oppositional art form that was effortlessly interdisciplinary, without going around announcing or branding and advertising itself as "interdisciplinary," like the artists of today). by the time you get to fluxus i feel like the distinction between frame and work, between the mode of presentation and the work itself, is turned upside down, subverted, if not destroyed. even syntax is being destroyed. fluxus is like a SCRAMBLE. it wants to scramble all the conventions, codes of signification, divisions between literary writing and other types of writing, between high art and low art. i guess that explains why it has no problem being interdisciplinary--it would be against those divisions in the first place.

my last example of interdisciplinarity is butoh, a type of japanese avante garde dance that came about in reaction to the horrors of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki during world war II. it is called the " dance of darkness," began as a rebellion against the Western influence on japanese dance (like noh), which they felt was too superficial, and incorporates grotesque and disturbing imagery or ideas, or extreme and absurd environments. it was strongly influenced by the writings of Yukio Mishima, and in the beginning might be understood as a dance form of the writings of Mishima (as well as being influenced by Artaud, Genet, Sade, etc.). it spawns its own diasporic microcosm, there being butoh musicians, Western more theatrical offshoots of butoh, etc. it changed the building blocks of "concert dance," not consisting of shapes, composition or choreography, but coming about from the transmutation of human into other forms ( often animalistic), its main emphasis being an inducement of a state of mind. this is not the kum bah yah incense candle burning pseudo-mysticism "state of mind" of the North American New Age yoga cult, but something much less muted pastel--something darker, more masochistic, and futile. it can consist of being still on a stage for an hour and performances are often induced by pain, starvation, sleep deprivation. it subverted the terms with which we think of concert dance, it changed the bar of "competence" in dance, or even annulled the impulse to be judging a standardized codification of "forms" to be the point of dance, so riveting were its cultural, social, emotional and political ramifications. in one fell swoop it flung the international center of avante garde dance from the West to Japan. again, like dada or fluxus, it is strongly culturally oppositional, being called a "seditious act" or a "prank." it takes as its starting point a staunch rejection of a vast smorgasboard of cultural conventions of what dance and performance is, and what movement is, and then proliferates that negation into a multiplicity of alternative forms and methods. the fact that 1.its entry point into dance comes from an ideology so far away from any investment in a formalist approach to dance 2.it is so filled with content, so emotional, so fraught, that it has to infiltrate a variety of disciplines and forms--these two factors i believe contribute to it having both the freedom, AND THE NECESSITY, to become interdisciplinary.

so as i write this i am beginning to form a thesis, that if an art form has the following traits or ideologies, it will have more of a chance of having the freedom to be "interdisciplinary:"

1.anti-mimesis (not governed by goals of representation, illusionism, resemblance to some outside "reality," narrative)
2. does not take language to be a transparent act (does not believe language, or art, to be transparent window to the world or some "truth", but rather a socially constructed entity)

now in NY, there is plenty of "celebrity merging." Miguel Guterriez ( a prominent NY downtown dance choreographer) gets Paul Chan to be his be his dramaturg, and Neal Medlyn ( prominent NY performer) to do his music. by getting brand names, these three entities from different disciplines lend cache to each other across disciplines, thereby increasing exponentially the cultural capital of Guterriez' work. but it is only that they are roughly at the same level of acclaim in each of their respective fields that makes this relation operative. THAT'S NOT INTERDISCIPLINARY-ISM, THAT'S CELEBRITY-MERGING. that's not interdisciplinary-ism, the way Malevich and the Russian formalists were interdisciplinary, or the Russian Constructivists, or dada or fluxus, butoh, or even the Gutai group in postwar Japan. that's just generation X padding its resume, which it is so good at doing because there is such a tremendous system to support that. I DON'T BLAME THEM! who do you went to list as your collaborator on your creative capital mapfund application, some no name person, or paul chan? CELEBRITY MERGING GETS YOU GRANTS, BECAUSE THAT'S THE PUTRID WORLD WE LIVE IN TODAY. now let me just draw a distinction here: i don't have a problem with a prominent dance choreographer getting a prominent visual artist to do their scenery or whatever, if there is a reason intrinsic to the work that you need that particular visual artist, if there is something intrinsic to that artist and to the work you are doing that necessitates collaborating with that visual artist. but IF NOT, IT IS JUST CELEBRITY MERGING (which it usually is 90 percent of the time).

to give a counterexample, there is a Brooklyn artist named John Bjerklie, represented by Parker's Box, AND HE IS TRULY INTERDISCIPLINARY. he calls himself a "flaneur" and does these travelling performances from gallery to gallery, in Pied Piper like fashion, combining video, performance, painting, installation. BUT HE DOESN'T CALL HIMSELF "INTER-DISCIPLINARY." nobody who is legitimately interdisciplinary ACTUALLY CALLS THEMSELVES INTER-DISCIPLINARY. because that is a marketing scheme, and betrays that you come from an ideology that sees the divisions between disciplines to be "real" (thereby the need to be "inter-disciplinary"). Bjerklie's use of video COMMENTS on his use of painting, which COMMENTS on his use of performance, which COMMENTS on his use of installations. his installations create a Environment in which to take on a mock TV persona in the backroom of the gallery, the filming of which is then fed through a live video feed to the live audience in the gallery, who then bids on the sale of his works through the TV. it is not some manipulative career advancement ploy, to be interdisciplinary--it is coming naturally, organically, from the content of his works. THAT'S EXACTLY WHY HE DOESN'T HAVE TO CALL HIMSELF "INTERDISCIPLINARY."

another counter-example of someone who i ACTUALLY think has shown glimmers of true "inter-disciplinarity" amidst a sea of phonies is a Serbian-American colleague of mine from New Museum's Nightschool, Bosko Blagojevic, who runs Platform for Pedagogy (www.platformed.org). he gave a series of talks at the Emily Harvey Foundation (a former fluxus space) last fall called "International Pastimes." not only
did his talks sprawl over a vast array of topics and were "interdisciplinary" ( though yet again, not proclaiming himself to be, not screaming out "HEY EVERYBODY I AM AN INTERDISCIPLINARY ARTIST--PLEASE PLEASE GIVE ME THE MAPFUND GRANT!"), ranging from Italian futurism, the communist manifesto, dada, manifestos as an art form, globalization, the notion of "internationalism" in politics. but the thing that really caught my eye was the last day when he asked a playwright to speak, someone who had absolutely nothing to do with visual art in any way, and talked about her use of playwriting as translation (or something). I WAS REALLY SHOCKED, because, once again, the Ipod-wielding average self-involved narcissistic generation X or Y artist JUST HAS NO COMFORT LEVEL WITH ANY DISCIPLINE OTHER THAN THEIR OWN. i was really shocked he had comfort with a discipline other than his own TO EVEN ASK A PLAYWRIGHT TO THE TABLE in a visual art context.

anyways, but before i drone on any longer, i wanted to ask you--what did you mean by "the decentralization of the arts?"

Perhaps what we meant by "decentralization of the arts" is that whatever activities, interdisciplinary or not, was no longer limited to just the 2-3 art capitals of the world. Artistic processes have always been 'available' to be conducted outside a mainstream audience, but seemed only to be validated with its presentation within these capitals. Now with the roving world and the internet there is no need for such validation. The geography for arts application became limitless, as did their approach. Though we've never seen a single image, we know that there is an artist in Manila leading city-wide tours that functions both as a work in and of itself as well as the primary source of funds for the residency he leads. We are/have been having a reverse Hollywood effect where the actresses normally come to the big city to find work, are now leaving it behind.

Art's civil function is also changing. It is filling the role of rejuvenation, specifically I am thinking of the city of New Orleans with not only Prospect 1 but also that of Transformer. Do you think that the directives for art as civil service are misguided or can we avoid from capitalizing on disaster tourism?

it's hard for me to answer such a large question in a general way, so maybe i can take a New Museum Nightschool lecture that addressed this exact issue to try to answer the question in specific terms. it was Paul Chan's lecture about his Waiting for Godot play that he put on in New Orleans (sponsored by Creative Time), which some people credit as being the catalyst for creating the momentum and interst to put on Prospect One. he put on a play, "Waiting for Godot," with New Orleans inhabitants and Katrina survivors, and the play was almost like a pretext for him to weave himself into the politics of New Orleans post-Katrina reconstruction "culture," if you will. he lived there for a few months, taught art (for free) at universities, public schools, used locals (euphemism for non-white upper middle class "educated" people living in ghettoes) in the plays, which in some cases were out in the middle of the street, and he took this rarefied high-modernist existential angst anti-form play of Becket's and resituated it in the context of a highly racialized socio-economic concrete (as opposed to abstract) crisis (Katrina). the performance was free and it was not publicized, except for these cryptic signs that Chan made and posted around the city, and initially was only known to "people in the know." the play actually began with a Disaster Tourism Bus crashing into the stage. the Beckett line "in an instant all will vanish and we'll be alone once more, in the midst of nothingness," which we usually associate with some esoteric abstract existential quandary, suddenly was rounded out with flesh and blood to mean something tangible, immediate, and urgent (the losses incurred in Katrina).

maybe a shorthand way to say what i am trying to say, and i know many will protest this type of essentialism, but the play went from being WHITE (self-indulgent rarefied elitist abstract existential concerns) to BLACK (something with teeth, immediacy, addressing real poverty and destitution, the racialization of disaster vulnerability, the loss of a countercultural iconic city, blah blah blah). i thought the project was amazing. of course these projects, in theory, always run the danger of being paternalistic--carpet-bagging or artists "slumming,"--but i thought this project was as good and done with as much integrity and ingenuity as one can ask for, under the circumstances.

another example i can think of, but this is more in the realm of architecture, is Teddy Cruz, who as far as i can tell seems almost to me like a Marxist architect, or a Marxist incarnation of architecture. he is unambiguously and unequivocally using architecture as a tool for social and economic transformation, to change the rules of urban development, its biases, its impositions, its protection of power, its exclusions, its justifications. he is trying to change infrastructure and its distribution in urban development, not just topical band-aid solutions. he even advocates barter ( as opposed to monetary exchange) in some cases, in terms of methods of changing inequalities in housing and urban development.

we could go on and on. Anton Vidokle's curation of Manifesta 6 in Cyprus had a "civil function." Critical Art Ensemble, etc. but what i want to say actually is that i think is result of being in a capitalist society that we even think this something new or an anomaly, that art might have a civil function. ART ALWAYS HAD A CIVIL FUNCTION. it was used to justify nationalism, glorify war, commemorate the aristocracy, to instruct people in religious teaching; the Russian Constructivists conceived of art at the forefront of building a new society. it's the result of being in a capitalist, market-oriented society that sterilizes and emasculates art, destroys all these organic connections that existed naturally to, instead, alienate it into being a one-dimensional product to be bought and sold (and also perhaps the legacy of the modernist notion of the autonomous isolated art object) that makes it seem novel or alien if art were to have a civil function.