Written, but not finished, shortly after the Frieze Art Fair in October:
Over the last 3 days, I have actually been paid by the Frieze Art Fair to hand out flyers with Sharon Hayes' writings on them for half an hour, taking part in an art that is new to me and people watching simultaneously, which at one of the world's best-known art fairs is payment in itself. In addition, I have 4 days free admission to the fair to spend as I see fit. There is the dizzying international kaleidoscope of art to take in of course, but also artist talks, which I went to tonight given by Fritz Haeg.
The description of the talk advertised topics of "populist projects, insular bohemia, activist art, passive entertainment, networked communication, broadcast media, social strategies, systems of isolation and potential roles for today's artist in a fractured society." The authors of this description hit about 98% of my personal buzzwords, so I made time for it at 5pm on a Saturday (despite still recovering from revelries of the previous night...) Having sat through weeks of English lecturers who like enunciating, Fritz was a gay male of the refreshingly West-coast plain-spoken variety.
I found myself concentrating on some of the thoughts I've been having about America, counter-culture, political behavior around art while Fritz reviewed the ideological associations in his own projects and art-making. He opened his lecture with an electoral map of America after the 2004 election (see great swath of red spilled in between blue coasts). Twice he made the remark that it is important for artists to have a forum that is contained within and informed by a certain culture and standards of the discipline, but that acculturation means nothing if the artist doesn't step outside (and in to the "red"...) and work in a larger context.
A little background :
"Like a system of crop rotation, Fritz Haeg works between his architecture and design practice Fritz Haeg Studio (though the currently preferred clients are animals), the happenings and gatherings of Sundown Salon (now schoolhouse), the ecology initiatives of Gardenlab (including Edible Estates), and other various combinations of building, designing, gardening, exhibiting, dancing, organizing and talking." Yeah, of course he can do all of those things successfully. Build a home for beavers in a art gallery on Monday, found a commune in rural Mexico on Tuesday. (
http://www.fritzhaeg.com/studio/projects/planb.html)
At the end of the talk I introduced myself and asked him to what degree he wanted his works to bring about change. He said it was actually more about "telling stories", ie the artistic content than its functional use in society. I enjoyed the stories, but my question came out of wondering if this cross-pollination of disciplines and subject matter was actually intelligible. But it's about how the stories are interwoven, not so much the moral.
After the talk I thought it more significant that I didn't quite know what to make of the advertised description, other than I was intrigued. How can these topics come together coherently? So it's not reality, maybe you can't always answer the question "What's the point?" But that is the great accomplishment of art, connecting ideas & bits of information that could only be linked in an imaginary space.
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