nonsite

I’m in Los Angeles for the CAA 2009 the 97th annual conference of the College Art Association. It is an interesting meeting in that it brings together what must be at least a thousand artists, art historians, curators and art administrators, along with many more hundreds of recent art school and university graduates looking for jobs within art schools and academia. It’s been called a meat market and some of those aspects are definitely there, with many schools doing interviews for faculty for the next academic year.

It is also a big part of the academic validation for art historians in particular, where presentations at conferences like this are seen as part of what is required to maintaining your stature within your field. That said this is the event that draws the big names in our field. The CAA is an American organization with all the complexity of what that means and it is clearly a different contemporary world that we are seeing described this year. What’s been interesting for me, in addition to catching up with some old friends who are here, is to see how the topics of what I think are the most interesting panels have changed since I last attended two years ago in Boston. Maybe it’s just LA, with its ongoing interest in social justice, but the most interesting panels have been on topics of cultural production outside or on the fringes of institutions and academia.

I started attending Artist Educator Innovations to hear Sanjit Sethi speaking about the California College of Arts: Center for Art and Public Life as I knew it to be a model in best practices. It was started by Suzanne Lacy in 2000 and is now co-directed by Sanjit Sethi and Anne Wettrich who also spoke.

I shifted sessions to Relocating Art and Its Public to hear Kim Yasuda from UC Santa Barbara talk about the California Institute for Research in the Arts. She draped a towel by David Shrigley over the lectern. Gregory Sholette from Queens College, City University of New York gave an excellent polemical introduction to his theory of artworld Dark Matter, discussing the invisible mass of unrecognized, unsuccessful art educated individuals who continue their practice as artists outside the sanctioned system of social production we call the art world. They form a large, shadow art world and what a huge unregulated effect they have- by being part of the art public- seeing exhibitions, buying art magazines, working in art related jobs.

He argued that as artists we have to embrace our redundancy, that we are part of a surplus economy, and with the larger world economy ‘hitting the skids’ it means it is time for us to embrace and look to artists who have coexisted for so long outside of an institutionalized art space. He ended his presentation by posing two questions- first: What do institutions want? and second given the ‘neo-liberal’ mantra that: we have to be creative, he then finally asked: what would it be to resist creativity?